The Catholic Church’s stand on medical ethics has come under attack in the US in recent weeks after American bishops backed the Vatican ban on IVF for fertility treatment and the necessity of providing nutrition and hydration for comatose patients. “It will be a sorry day if American patients seeking the best medical care are forced to avoid Catholic hospitals for fear of having their living wills ignored or their doctors' counsel dictated from Rome. The Church would be wise to focus its energies on theology and to leave the practice of medicine to the professionals,” wrote free lance bioethicist Jacob M. Appel in the Huffington Post.

However, instead of knuckling under, Pope Benedict XVI has been firing up the troops. In a major speech in Rome, he stressed the importance of bioethics as “a particularly crucial battleground in today's cultural struggle between the absolutism of technology and human moral responsibility”. He placed the controversial notion of “human dignity” at the centre of Catholic bioethics:

“Without the foundational principle of human dignity it would be difficult to find a source for the rights of the person and the impossible to arrive at an ethical judgment if the face of the conquests of science that intervene directly in human life. It is thus necessary to repeat with firmness that an understanding of human dignity does not depend on scientific progress, the gradual formation of human life or facile pietism before exceptional situations. When respect for the dignity of the person is invoked it is fundamental that it be complete, total and with no strings attached, except for those of understanding oneself to be before a human life.”

However, he does not ground his bioethics upon Catholic theology but upon the natural moral law which “belongs to the great heritage of human wisdom”. Without an objective standard for forming moral judgements, he stated, human life could become “an object subjugated to the will of the strongest”. ~ Zenit, Feb 14