ROME (Zenit.org) – Threats to life, especially abortion, euthanasia and the destruction of embryos, have “introduced unheard of challenges for Christian social doctrine and call for adequate answers,” the president of the Vatican’s health care council said.
Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski told an international conference in Rome themed Respect of Life and Development of Peoples that the ethical emergency caused by these threats to life is slowly being transformed into a political emergency.
The lack of respect for human life has “dramatic implications, in certain aspects, because they directly affect the dignity of the life of individuals and peoples,” he said.
According to Archbishop Zimowski, the social doctrine of the Church must respond to the “social phenomena” generated in the wake of the legalisation of abortion and some forms of euthanasia, and the common practice of artificial insemination and the freezing of human embryos.
The Archbishop illustrated the breadth of the issue with a few key statistics: 46 million legal abortions are carried out every year in the world; 50,000 children are born every year in the United States through assisted fertilisation techniques.
Archbishop Zimowski went on to single out three points for analysis. In the first place, he explained that public opinion is influenced by ideological campaigns that lead to perceiving attacks on life as “rights of individual liberty.”
The Vatican official further observed how medical practice socially legitimises these evils.
“The scientific context and the moral authority of the health organisations are largely sufficient, in the eyes of many, to make them acceptable,” he lamented.
In the third place, the Archbishop indicated that “the juridical norm of the state confers on these practices the accrediting of a law approved by the majority, which, hence, dispenses from subsequent scruples of conscience.”
In this context, Archbishop Zimowski affirmed that facing society is a genuine cultural crisis, at whose root is the phenomenon of the tendency to disassociate private conscience and the socio-civil systems.