Presidential order imposes immorality on science, priest says

Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, director of education at the Philadelphia-based National Catholic Bioethics Center, speaks on stem cell research and cloning to a standing-room only crowd of nearly 350 people on March 11 at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish in Indianapolis. The presentation took place two days after President Barack Obama issued an executive order that allows federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. (Photo by Sean Gallagher)

By Sean Gallagher

Two days after President Barack Obama signed an executive order allowing the federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk spoke on March 11 on this and related topics to a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 350 people at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish in Indianapolis as part of its Lenten “Spaghetti and Spirituality” speaker series.

“I’m amazed by the turnout. I guess I owe a lot of thanks to our president,” said Father Pacholczyk with a laugh.

The priest is the director of education at the Philadelphia-based National Catholic Bioethics Center.

Father Pacholczyk said that in his executive order, the president “blew the door open” to the destruction of many embryos in order to create new lines of embryonic stem cells.

In signing the executive order, President Obama said that he would “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” Harold Varmus, one of his science advisers, said that the order means that the president would make decisions regarding such research according to the “responsible practice of science and evidence, instead of dogma … ”

Father Pacholczyk characterized such comments as “radically false,” and said that the order imposes “immorality onto the scientific enterprise itself.”

“It is the direct imposition of a flawed ideology onto the rest of us,” Father Pacholczyk said. “And it’s unacceptable.

“He’s using these kinds of loaded terms, like ideology, to make us think somehow he is freeing up science, when he is doing the exact opposite. He is now enslaving science into a radically disordered form.”

Father Pacholczyk spent much of his hour-long presentation showing how nearly every form of stem cell research is morally acceptable and has produced successful treatments for scores of diseases.

He gave special attention to how hundreds of scientists quickly re-directed their research in the direction taken by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese scientist who, late last year, discovered a way to reprogram ordinary skin cells to become pluripotent stem cells, essentially the same as embryonic stem cells, a procedure to which the Church has no moral objections.

“He has pioneered this way,” Father Pacholczyk said. “And I can tell you that this development has just shifted the whole paradigm and made a decision like the president made two days ago even more difficult to understand.”

In the ceremony in which he signed the executive order, President Obama strongly expressed his rejection of reproductive cloning, but said nothing about therapeutic cloning.

Father Pacholczyk noted that therapeutic cloning, in which an embryo is produced through a cloning technique and then destroyed in order to extract its stem cells, will be encouraged through federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. The practice would potentially allow patients to receive treatment from stem-cells gathered from the patient’s embryonic clone that had been destroyed.

While he said that all cloning is fundamentally wrong, Father Pacholczyk said that reproductive cloning is less offensive than therapeutic cloning since, in the former, the embryo is at least given the chance to be born. In therapeutic cloning, the embryo is created with the express purpose of it being destroyed.

“President Obama strongly supports this kind of cloning, even though the day before yesterday when he signed the executive order he said he was opposed to cloning,” Father Pacholczyk said. “He’s only opposed to cloning if the embryo that is cloned is given the protection of a woman’s uterus. That he opposes. He wants it mandatory that that embryo is destroyed.”

Father Pacholczyk also gave suggestions to those in the crowded Priori Hall how they might communicate the Church’s message about stem cell research to the broader public where, he said, many myths about stem cells and the Church rule the day.

“I think everybody has to look at that from their own set of gifts and skills,” he said. “If you’re good at writing editorials or letters to the editor, op ed pieces, do that. Send a few things into your local paper. Just keep the pressure on.”

Father Pacholczyk also noted the important role that the laity—in many cases exclusively—can play in this task.

“There are tons of people that you guys will talk to who I, as a priest, will never have access to in your workplaces [or] in other places of business,” he said. “I just will never meet those people. And so it’s important that all of us become evangelizers where we are.”

(To learn more about the National Catholic Bioethics Center, log on to www.ncbcenter.org.) †