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Church-state fracas on airwaves
Did Vatican broadcast exceed standards? 

Three Vatican officials face trial in Rome in a case that will test the 72-year-old Lateran Treaty. The three officials of Vatican Radio are facing charges they violated Italy’s very strict standards on electromagnetic field emissions from radio and TV towers. Italy’s rules, passed in 1998, are the strictest in Europe. The trial—which was to open as CWR went to press—involves Father Pasquale Borgomeo, the station’s director-general; Cardinal Roberto Tucci, president of the station’s management committee; and Costantino Pacifici, a layman and top technician.

Vatican Radio’s transmitter antennas are located in Santa Maria di Galeria on the northern outskirts of Rome. When they were built in 1951, the area was sparsely populated, but now about 100,000 people live nearby. The Vatican has argued that the radio station is protected from Italian regulation under the Lateran accords, because of the extraterritorial status granted to the Vatican city-state in 1929.

In recent years, people living near the complex have complained that the transmissions interfere with their home appliances, telephones, and television reception, while environmental groups allege the electromagnetic waves cause cancer. The Vatican has replied that the transmissions, which reach around the world, meet international standards. The Italian Foreign Ministry and Vatican Secretariat of State have begun meetings in an effort to settle the case out of court.

Prepared to clone humans
Italian, American scientists ignore criticism

Italian and American scientists announced on March 9 that they plan to create the first cloned human being, despite criticism from many quarters including religious, pro-life, human rights, and bioethics groups.

Panayiotis Zavos, an American, and Severino Antinori, an Italian, said they plan to clone humans to provide children to infertile couples. The pair had previously made headlines by helping a 62-year-old woman give birth. Zavos and Antinori said they will conduct the cloning experiments in an undisclosed Mediterranean country to avoid the scope of laws which have already been passed to ban human cloning.

“Cloning may be considered as the last frontier to overcome male sterility and give the possibility to infertile males to pass on their genetic pattern,” Antinori told a news conference. “Some people say we are going to clone the world, but this isn’t true. . . . I’m asking all of us in the scientific community to be prudent and calm,” he said. “We’re talking science, we’re not here to create a fuss.”

Bishop Elio Sgreccia, head of the John Paul II Institute for Bioethics at Rome’s Gemelli hospital, said human cloning raised profoundly disturbing ethical issues. “Those who made the atomic bomb went ahead in spite of knowing about its terrible destruction,” he told Reuters. “But this doesn’t mean that it was the best choice for humanity.”

No fear of Human Genome
Prelate points to differences between man, animals

“The Church has no reason to fear discoveries about the human genome.” That was the message of Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the papal vicar for the Rome diocese, in a response to announcements that scientists had decoded the human genetic sequence.

Cardinal Ruini said the latest discoveries should provide new evidence of the ties that link humans to other animals. At the same time, he cautioned, “there is a difference between us.” Specifically the cardinal pointed to “the capacity of man to think and to be free.” 

“Man is a rational animal,” Cardinal Ruini reminded his Roman audience. That fact makes the human race unique among the world’s creatures. 

In a separate address, broadcast on Vatican Radio, Bishop Elio Sgreccia said that scientists have an obligation to inform the public about the ultimate consequences of their research, particularly when it involves genetic manipulation. He called attention to the various forms of experimentation on human subjects which “are written in the sobering pages of recent history.” In some instances, he said, scientists had turned “not only against God but against mankind and society as well.”

Assault on a Christmas tree
Controversy continues to surround Austrian gift

Early in February, arsonists tried to burn down a Christmas tree which had originally been given to the Vatican by the Austrian province of Carinthia and later replanted near Naples.

The tree was controversial because the governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, who has been accused of harboring racist views, was a member of the delegation that presented the Vatican with the tree. The gift of the tree was planned before Haider was elected.

The arsonists attacked the tree at night, setting fire to several branches of the 81-foot tree, then fled before firemen arrived. The tree was only slightly damaged.

During the December 16 ceremony in which the tree was formally presented to the Vatican, left-wing groups and Jewish organizations staged a noisy and occasionally violent demonstration outside St. Peter’s Square. The tree, under constant guard by police in the square during the holidays, was replanted in the town of Acerra on land offered by a local businessman.