Rome, Italy, May 21, 2013 / 12:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- According to an Argentine priest, Pope Francis when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires helped save a young mailman from the abyss of drug addiction and became his spiritual father.
Jesuit priest and Vatican Radio commentator Father Guillermo Ortiz recounted to CNA knowing then-Cardinal Jorge Bergolio when he was still provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, as well as his own personal introduction to the young man.
“When I was living in Buenos Aires,” he recalled, “I met this guy. He listened to me on the radio and since he was a mailman, he knew the address of my office and he began seeking me out to talk about spiritual questions. He was getting out of drugs thanks to prayer, and he always asked for spiritual guidance.”
After a while, however, the young man stopped coming to visit, and Fr. Ortiz began to worry, until one day he ran across him on the street and found that he had completely recovered.
“Do you know who I have been with, Father? Cardinal Bergoglio!” the young man said. “I went by the chancery and I left a note with my name and number saying I wanted to speak with him, and the next Saturday I was in my room resting and my father knocked on the door.”
“I said, 'Don’t knock, this is my day off and I want to sleep a little bit more!' But my father said, 'No, you can’t right now, the cardinal is on the phone,'” he remembered.
“The cardinal himself had called to tell him when he could meet,” Fr. Ortiz said. “Without any calendar, he answered him immediately! These things are wonderful and one can only ask, 'How did he find the time?'”
Fr. Ortiz said the young mailman eventually overcame his addition through prayer and spiritual direction from priests and in this case from Cardinal Bergoglio, who helped him “continue his struggle against drugs.”
What he most admired about the cardinal was his “closeness to the people. He didn’t have any boundaries. Even as bishop and as cardinal he didn’t have a secretary and he called people himself and met with everyone that he could,” Fr. Ortiz said.
Fr. Ortiz is currently the director of Vatican Radio's Spanish-language broadcast. Since the election of Pope Francis, he has spoken with the pontiff on several occasions.
Houston, Texas, May 21, 2013 / 12:02 am (CNA).- A Houston doctor is under investigation on charges that he performed illegal late-term abortions after former employees alleged that several babies were born alive and then killed in gruesome ways.
Deborah Edge, a former assistant to Dr. Douglas Karpen, gave her account of Karpen’s abortion work in a video produced by the pro-life group Life Dynamics.
“When he did an abortion, especially an over 20 week abortion, most of the time the fetus would come completely out before he either cut the spinal cord or he introduced one of the instruments into the soft spot of the fetus in order to kill it ... or actually twisting the head off the neck with his own bare hands,” she said.
Edge emphasized that the babies were still alive, moving and breathing. Another former employee in the video, Gigi Aguliar, said one baby opened its eyes and grabbed the abortionist’s finger before he killed it.
One employee said she did not know what Karpen was doing was illegal.
The allegations concern deaths in 2011 at the Aaron Women’s Clinic in Houston. A third former employee appears in the Life Dynamics video, while another anonymous staffer has filed an affidavit Texas Department of State Health Services, the Daily Mail reports.
The former employees took cell phone pictures of babies with gashes in their necks after they were allegedly killed at the clinic, LifeNews.com says. They allege that Karpen killed babies well after 24 weeks into pregnancy, at a cost between $4,000 and $5,000.
Karpen also runs two other abortion clinics in Texas.
Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said he read “with disgust” about the allegations that Dr. Douglas Karpen performed “illegal late-term abortions surrounded by appalling sanitary conditions in his clinic.”
“The Harris County authorities should perform a full-scale investigation and take action against those who broke state law,” he said in a May 15 statement.
Sara Marie Kinney, a spokeswoman for the Harris County District Attorney, said several district attorney employees are looking into the allegations.
Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Houston Chronicle the agency is aware of the allegations and investigating it with “a very high priority.”
Dewhurst invoked the case of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist convicted last week on three charges of first degree murder for killing babies who survived abortions.
The pro-life group Operation Rescue has said it has been investigating Karpen for three years.
“For nearly three years, authorities have ignored our complaints and done nothing while horrific late-term babies continued to be aborted in an apparently illegal and barbaric manner,” group president Troy Newman said May 16.
“Now, thanks to the outpouring of public pressure that has been brought to bear by the pro-life community, the authorities in Texas are finally beginning to act. It’s a big step in the right direction.”
Portland, Ore., May 21, 2013 / 04:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The recent production of stem cells from cloned human embryos has prompted a researcher to consider the need for scientists to take other disciplines into account before engaging their work.
“Scientists...do not consider bio-ethical issues to be issues at all; they don't see the bio-ethical argument, or any philosophical argument,” Massimo Bionaz, assistant professor of animal sciences at Oregon State University, told CNA May 17.
The May issue of the journal “Cell” included a paper from scientists at Oregon Health and Science University announcing they have produced embryonic stem cells by transferring the DNA of a human skin cell into a human egg to produce an embryo.
After the egg's own nucleus was removed, the nucleus from another person's skin cell was added into the egg, and with electricity and caffeine the researchers were able to induce the normal development of an embryo. The embryos were thus genetic copies – clones – of the persons whose DNA was inserted into the eggs.
The harvesting of the embryonic stem cells necessarily included the destruction of the embryos.
“This,” Bionaz reflected, “is the problem. Those scientists, they went ahead and did the cloning; they thought this was absolutely fine and justified because based on their criteria there was no reason not to do that. So, they jump completely the question of what a human is.”
Bionaz, a member of the Euresis Association as well as the Catholic ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, said that scientific researchers often see arguments of philosophy or bioethics as “problems to be overcome.”
He warned of “scientism,” which he called the “presumption that science is the only discipline which can say something true about reality.” This, Bionaz emphasized, is “dangerous.”
For scientism, “any argument outside the utilitarian argument” is seen as being “of no use.” Too many, he said, view that “whenever something is possible to do, I ought to do it.”
While the aim of the research was good: to produce stem cells for therapies to treat diseases which will not be rejected by patients' bodies because they will be genetically identical, it required an evil, the destruction of human beings.
“It's the paradox of the short sight of science. They begin in this way, with the justification of providing tissue, maybe even life-saving tissue, but they don't care about destroying” another human being, said Bionaz.
Aside from lacking “a clear bio-ethical judgement,” he said, “those scientists didn't even ask the question.”
Rather than presuming to do any research which is “possible, technically, to do,” researchers should take the time to ask ontological questions, about the nature of the human being.
“It goes to the point of understanding what a person is, of what is a human being.”
While noting that scientists “are trained very well on the technical side,” they “lack completely the way of thinking of the philosopher, or bio-ethicist, or any other discipline,” Bionaz said.
He emphasized the importance of different fields of study working together to paint a complete picture of existence.
“Reality is very complex, and every aspect of reality requires its own discipline. It's against reason to try to study or assess a reality with a discipline that does not conform to the method of that specific reality.”
“Science can study the material phenomenon, what it is possible to reproduce, to measure.” But, Bionaz added, science cannot address “the ontological significance of a human life...because it's not the proper discipline for that area of reality.”
“That pertains to philosophy, to theology, even to bioethics in some way.”
Without the perspectives of these fields, science will regard the human person as “only a mass of cells to which you can do whatever you want,” which is why respect for the human person “now is falling apart.”
The researchers who produced the cloned human embryos “want to provide tissue to help or to save a human being,” but they “didn't consider the significance of what they were doing.”
Bionaz attributed his thought about the importance of considering philosophy and other disciplines when doing scientific research to Blessed John Henry Newman's “The Idea of a University.”
In those lectures, Newman “described exactly” the follies of using the wrong discipline to study a given segment of existence, and that when this happens “reality can get confused, and we misunderstand it.”
“For instance this one of the human being: to understand what is a human person, you need several disciplines,” Bionaz said. “Science is not enough; it allows you to unravel a part of the human being of course, but not the totality of the human being.”
“For this reason, it is so important as scientists to have the humility to understand our limits, and we should actually have deep discussions with people of other disciplines.”
Dialogue with philosophy, he said, will remind researchers that “the human being has a value, and then we scientists will work for the human being, not against it.”
The manufacture and subsequent destruction of a human embryo for the production of embryonic stem cells, is an instance of “destroying the human being and not helping him.”
“Even though the purpose is to help someone else, because of course the idea is to help human beings, the problem is if the end justifies the means,” Bionaz concluded.
“It's not an issue that scientists can assess. You need a bio-ethicist together with a philosopher.”
