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A Vatican official warned on Tuesday that advances in genetic testing were creating a slow but "relentless" spread of a eugenics mentality — the effort to improve the quality of the human race by controlling heredity.
Monsignor Rino Fisichella made the warning as he outlined the scope of an upcoming Vatican conference, "The New Frontiers of Genetics and the Risk of Eugenics," which starts Friday.
Fisichella acknowledged that the term eugenics harks back to the past, when most famously the Nazis used eugenic theories to justify forced sterilization and other practices in their quest to establish a master race.
"The term 'eugenics' seems to have been relegated to the past, and just saying its name strikes horror," Fisichella told a news conference. But he said the same mentality is growing — "slowly but relentlessly" — albeit under different names and hidden by slick publicity campaigns by well-funded biomedical interests.
"While it would seem that there is no place for it in our democratic societies that respect the principle of the human person, eugenics ... is nevertheless reappearing in practice in...
Monsignor Rino Fisichella made the warning as he outlined the scope of an upcoming Vatican conference, "The New Frontiers of Genetics and the Risk of Eugenics," which starts Friday.
Fisichella acknowledged that the term eugenics harks back to the past, when most famously the Nazis used eugenic theories to justify forced sterilization and other practices in their quest to establish a master race.
"The term 'eugenics' seems to have been relegated to the past, and just saying its name strikes horror," Fisichella told a news conference. But he said the same mentality is growing — "slowly but relentlessly" — albeit under different names and hidden by slick publicity campaigns by well-funded biomedical interests.
"While it would seem that there is no place for it in our democratic societies that respect the principle of the human person, eugenics ... is nevertheless reappearing in practice in...