ROME, February 8, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Vatican is concerned about the increasingly anti-life direction of health care ethics, Bishop Jose L. Redrado told journalists at the Vatican while announcing upcoming health care guidelines for Catholic health workers and hospitals.
Around the world Catholic health care workers and facilities are battling “a culture of death,” he said.
Speaking at a press conference on February 3, officials of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry said a new set of ethical guidelines will be published later this year, as well as a separate document on AIDS prevention.
Council secretary Bishop Redrado referred to the abortion conducted in 2009 abortion at a Catholic hospital in Arizona, which doctors claimed was “necessary.” Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted responded by stripping the hospital of its Catholic status and excommunicating its chief ethicist.
Given such incidents, Church teachings must be presented to the world in language understandable in “modern society,” Redrado said.
“The language should be clear,” he said, “explaining what the church says, where the frontiers are, where there is a risk of crossing the line.”
Archbishop Zimowski, prefect of the Council, said that the Church has an interest in ensuring that sick and suffering people receive appropriate health care. A society that refuses to treat the sick with compassion and dignity risks becoming a “cruel and inhuman society,” he said.
He expressed the Church’s concern over legislation in many countries that “applies invasive ideologies in the health sector.”
Another official reminded journalists that the Church has many doctors “committed to research on adult stem cells and with good results,” while experiments on embryonic stem cells have led to no treatments.
Health care ethics guidelines for Catholics were spelled out in a 1995 document, the Charter for Health Care Workers, but these have not been updated in the intervening years, which have seen a huge surge in abortion rates around the world, as well as the rapid development of destructive embryo research and artificial reproduction technologies.
Monsignor Jean-Marie Musivi, undersecretary of the council, said the new charter will reflect Catholic understanding of these issues.
“We have some good nurses, even including our religious sisters, but they don’t have specific preparation on these questions, so this charter could play a role,” Musivi said.