If you are interested in biological science and faith, you cannot ignore the existence of an ‘Academy for Life’ created on February 11, 1994 by the leader of the largest religious organisation on the planet, the Roman Catholic Church, pope John Paul II. The academy was established in order to promote ‘the study, information and formation on the principal problems of biomedicine and of law, relative to the promotion and defense of life, above all in the direct relation that they have with Christian morality and the directives of the Church’s Magisterium’.
The first president of the Academy was the famous French professor Jérôme Lejeune, pediatrician and geneticist, best known for his discovery of the link of chromosome abnormalities to Down’s syndrome. The academy has some seventy members named by the pope, who represent different branches of biomedical sciences and those that are closely linked with problems concerning the promotion and defense of life, belong to the academy.
‘The Mystery of Life (“Vitae Mysterium”) and of human life in particular’, as pope John Paul II puts in his Motu Proprio, ‘is attracting the increased attention of experts who are drawn by the extraordinary opportunities for investigation that scientific and technological advances offer their research today. While this new situation opens up fascinating horizons for intervention at the sources of life itself, it also gives rise to a variety of new moral questions that man cannot ignore without the risk of taking steps that could prove irreversible. With this awareness, the Church, … “intends to put forward (…) the moral teaching corresponding to the dignity of the person and to his or her integral vocation.” This is a particularly urgent task in our days (…) as a ‘culture of death’ threatens to take control.”
It is clear that in an era in which abortion, human cloning, experimentation on embryonic stem cells and euthanasia have become common goods, a religious institution as the Roman Catholic Church sheds it’s light on these issues, as a service to mankind in finding the right paths to deal with life as it is given to him. Since 1994, the Academy has been publishing about numerous topics that we will try to summarize on this website.
Links
– Pontifical Academy for Life
– Motu Proprio of John Paul II
(A document issued Motu Proprio is from the Pope on his own initiative, and not in response to a request or at the initiative of others. Its legal determinations carry the full force of papal authority, though it does not derogate from existing laws unless specifically stated. It can be any category of document.)
