Cardinal Pell: Human life is the issue at hand

It's all about human life: the real message in the stem cell debate


Cardinal George Pell ... "serious anti-lifers and publicity seekers have been trying to shoot the messenger".
Photo: Rob Homer

MPs may have voted for stem cell research, but it is unethical and a scientific dead end, writes Cardinal George Pell.

IS ALL human life equally precious? We should not be distracted from the elephant in the corner of the room. A huge diversionary tactic has been mounted to focus attention on hypothetical punishments for Catholic politicians by authoritarian bishops, and away from the destruction of human life.

Human life is the issue at hand. Serious anti-lifers and publicity seekers have been trying to shoot the messenger, while they work to bury the message.
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After more than 25 years of experiments with embryonic stem cells in animal models, researchers have yet to develop one successful treatment in mice for any disease that could be used as a model to undertake the first steps for a clinical trial with human patients.
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Certainly a Catholic church without sinners would be like a hospital without patients. That is why the blunt instrument of excommunication has hardly ever been used in Australia, as we are a church of the imperfect, not a sect for the elite. [my emphasis]

But all of us who wish to remain Catholics have to be measured against Catholic teaching.

To be a disciple of Christ means accepting discipline because the Catholic church has never followed today's fashionable notion of the primacy of conscience, which is, of course secular relativism with a religious face. [my emphasis]

Will Cardinal Pell impose interdict on those Catholic politicians who publicly repudiated the the teachings of the Church, the bishops, and of course, Christ?