One of the great ironies of the stem cell debates of the last few years has been that some of the most serious attention to scientific detail and reality has come from Catholic circles, while some of the most wide-eyed messianic faith-healing talk has come from liberal political (and sometimes even scientific) circles.With that Levin, no Catholic, introduces the Vatican's latest document on reproductive technologies, Dignitatis Personae. Read up.
Levin makes a further remark about the document:
The view of many of us who have argued against the destruction of embryos for research is that we ought not understand ourselves to be faced with a choice between science and ethics, but with the challenge of championing both, which is a challenge both to scientific ingenuity and to ethical reflection and argument (a case I take up, among other issues, in my recent book on science and democracy).
This observation seems not unrelated to a jacket summary of Fr. Schall's latest,The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays
. A summary: The "Catholic mind" seeks to recognize a consistent and coherent relation between the solid things of reason and the definite facts of revelation. Its thought aims to understand how they belong together in a fruitful manner, each profiting from the other; each being what it is. The Catholic mind is not a confusion of disparate sources. It respects and makes distinctions. It sees where things separate. It is in fact delighted by what is.
Delighted by what is. Not suppressing what is, not denying what is, delighting in it. That's the Catholic mind and that's the culture of life.
P.S. Fr. Schall says this relatively new work
of Fr. Sokolowski's is so good you can throw away every other philosophical text. Just read this and you'll get it. He also says he makes the points so lucidly you have to be an idiot not to get it. That's some high praise!
