Papal document on bioethics being planned?
July 13, 2022
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CWN Editor's Note: The Pontifical Academy for Life recently published Theological Ethics of Life: Scripture, Tradition, Practical Challenges (CWN coverage), which Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, the Academy’s president, discussed in an interview.
In his Italian-language review of the text in the influential Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, Father Jorge José Ferrer, SJ, wrote that the Pontifical Academy’s book could lead to “the synodal preparation of a future magisterial intervention that makes the Church’s teaching on the ethics of life ever more profound and adequate ... a new encyclical or apostolic exhortation on bioethics, which he [Pope Francis] might perhaps title Gaudium vitae” [The Joy of Life].
Father Ferrer is the director of the School of Theology of the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto. In 2019, Pope Francis named him a corresponding academician of the Pontifical Academy for Life; in 2021, Pope Francis appointed Father Ferrer a member of the International Theological Commission.
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
Jul. 15, 2022 1:23 PM ET USA
Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope St. John Paul II wrote somewhat exhaustively about all the major issues facing the Church in the field of bioethics. They built on Humanae Vitae and provided the theological basis for both the Church's teaching through the centuries and the new problems that surfaced because of new and future technologies. Given the definitiveness and accuracy of their instructions, it is difficult to imagine how they could be improved upon. I am expecting another theological disaster
