I am Richard M. Doerflinger, Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. I also serve as Adjunct Fellow in Bioethics and Public Policy at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. On behalf of the bishops’ conference I want to thank this subcommittee for asking us to present our views on cloning and embryonic stem cell (ES...

In 1994, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops revised the "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services." A goal of the Directives is to maintain the moral integrity of Catholic health care institutions and to address controversies in bioethics and health care. The Directives represent a shift to an exclusively principle-based approach to moral reason. This shift th...

PRINCIPLE OF COOPERATION The November-December 2002 issue included several articles on the principle of cooperation. Discussion of the principle contributes to the realization of one measure of success of our current strategic plan: "Our voice has contributed proactively and positively to church positions on one or more key ethical issues." As we know, application of the principle has not alway...

Using personnel data from the Roman Catholic Church, I document the importance of social connections as a determinant of promotions. The data provide information on the careers of about 10,000 bishops appointed between 1930 and 2008. The range of the data, both in time and in space, makes it possible to infer some types of social connections between bishops (based on geography and careers), whi...

n their writings, the Second Vatican Council’s bishops demonstrated that the choice of communication style for handing on Catholic teaching is a significant, perhaps pivotal, pastoral decision. The bishops chose a persuasive style of language to shift the priority of their teaching away from that of winning arguments to that of building common ground. As a result, according to the eminent churc...

A few studies concluded that EASI with oxytocin is a better method of induction than prostaglandin E2 gel whereas a few others observed that EASI efficiency similar to that of prostaglandin compounds. We planned a comparative study of oxytocin and prostaglandin E2 gel in induction of labour in high risk pregnant women from Tamil Nadu from a tertiary care health centre. This study was a prospect...

Fr. James Keenan, S.J. has recently written on the important issue of institutional cooperation and the 1994 Ethical and Religious Directives of the National Catholic Conference of Bishops. He observes that the subject of institutional cooperation has been the cause of substantial discussion among ethicists, bishops, and administrators of Catholic healthcare facilities. In an article for this j...

Recent research has questioned whether the European Black Death of 1347-1351 could possibly have been caused by the bubonic plague bacillus Yersinia pestis, as has been assumed for over a century. Central to the arguments both for and against involvement of Y. pestis has been a comparison of the temporal dynamics observed in confirmed outbreaks of bubonic plague in early-20th-century India, ver...