Pope Video March 2022: For a Christian Response to Bioethical Challenges

The progress of bioethics presents us with challenges, and we Christians, Pope Francis tells us, “must respond” with “an even more profound and subtle discernment,” without “hiding our head like an ostrich.”

This Christian response has an essential starting point: “Applications of biotechnological must always be used based on respect for human dignity.”

It’s no use to oppose inevitable progress; we must seek to protect “both human dignity and progress,” fight against “the throw-away culture,” and avoid “allowing financial gain to condition biomedical research.”

It is evident that science has progressed, and today the field of bioethics presents us with a series of problems to which we must respond, not hiding our head like an ostrich.

Let us pray that we may give a Christian response to bioethical challenges.

Applications of biotechnological must always be used based on respect for human dignity. For example, human embryos cannot be treated as disposable material, to be discarded. This throw-away culture is also applied to them; no, that can’t be done.

Extending that culture this way does so much harm. Or allowing financial gain to condition biomedical research. We need to understand the profound changes that are taking place with an even more profound and subtle discernment.

It’s not a matter of curbing technological advances. No, we must accompany them. It’s about protecting both human dignity and progress.

That is to say, we cannot pay the price of human dignity for progress, no. Both go together, in harmony.

We pray for Christians facing new bioethical challenges; may they continue to defend the dignity of all human life with prayer and action.