Vatican City may be the smallest sovereign nation in the world but sometimes it seems like its residents couldn't be further apart from each other. From John Allen:

Despite widespread suggestions in the press, and even last April from a Vatican cardinal, that Rome might be on the brink of allowing married couples to use condoms to block HIV/AIDS, a forthcoming document on bioethics from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will not treat this question, that office's number two official has revealed.

The congregation is also working on a project on the subject of natural law, said Archbishop Angelo Amato, the congregation’s secretary.

Amato said that any reconsideration on condoms would have to come from the doctrinal office, and therefore, “Opinions on these issues coming from other institutions or ecclesiastical personalities, however respectable, cannot have the authority that sometimes the mass media seems to want to suggest.”

In part, that appeared to be an indirect reference to comments from April 2006 by Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, President of the Pontifical Council for Health, who told reporters that his office had been asked by Pope Benedict XVI to study the use of condoms by a married couple when one spouse is HIV-positive and the other is not. Barragan made clear that he would be favorable to allowing condoms in that context, though he stressed that a final decision is up to the pope.

While church teaching bans artificial contraception, some bishops and theologians have argued that in the situation described above, the intent of condom use is not to block pregnancy but to block disease, and therefore condoms should be acceptable. The Vatican has never ruled on that question, and Amato’s comments indicate that it will not do so in the forthcoming document.

Several other cardinals, including Jean-Marie Lustiger, the former archbishop of Paris; Italian Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former archbishop of Milan; Swiss Cardinal George Cottier, theologian of the Papal Household under John Paul II; Cardinal Godfriend Danneels of Belgium; and Cardinal Cormac Muphy-O’Connor of Westminster, England, have all supported condoms in the context of AIDS in one fashion or another.

Amato described the document currently under preparation as a way to address new bioethical dilemmas, not to revisit the morality of birth control.

Labels: bioethics, moral issues, Vatican

Dare to hope this will make a difference:

Scientists reported Sunday they had found a plentiful source of stem cells in the fluid that cushions babies in the womb and produced a variety of tissue types from these cells -- sidestepping the controversy over destroying embryos for research.

Researchers at Wake Forest University and Harvard University reported the stem cells they drew from amniotic fluid donated by pregnant women hold much the same promise as embryonic stem cells. They reported they were able to extract the stem cells without harm to mother or fetus and turn their discovery into several different tissue cell types, including brain, liver and bone.

"Our hope is that these cells will provide a valuable resource for tissue repair and for engineered organs as well," said Dr. Anthony Atala, head of Wake Forest's regenerative medicine institute and senior researcher on the project.

It took Atala's team some seven years of research to determine the cells they found were truly stem cells that "can be used to produce a broad range of cells that may be valuable for therapy."

However, the scientists noted they still don't know exactly how many different cell types can be made from the stem cells found in amniotic fluid. They also said that even preliminary tests in patients are years away.

Labels: bioethics