![[home]](/prolife/images/usccb_logo.gif){kind=logo}
March 2nd EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
For those who have grown very old
and are burdened by the accumulation of years:
that we might treasure their wisdom
and cherish their presence in our midst;
We pray to the Lord:
March 9th FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
For each expectant mother:
that the stirring of life deep within her womb
might daily remind her
of the infinite goodness and love of God;
We pray to the Lord:
March 16th SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT
For each single father:
that God might give him the strength
to do what is right,
and the wisdom to pray for his child;
We pray to the Lord:
March 23rd THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
For a growing love of the sacred gift of life:
that selfishness and a blind desire for pleasure
might never prevent us
from finding Christ in the least among us;
We pray to the Lord:
March 30th FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
For the gift of repentance:
that in this Holy Season
we might turn from the darkness of death
and embrace the beauty of the Light of the World;
We pray to the Lord:
Bulletin Briefs
The "human cloning" project represents the terrible aberration to which value-free science is driven and is a sign of the profound malaise of our civilization, which looks to science, technology and the "quality of life" as surrogates for the meaning of life and its salvation.—Reflections on Cloning, Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, 1997
In the cloning process the basic relationships of the human person are perverted: filiation, consanguinity, kinship, parenthood. A woman can be the twin sister of her mother, lack a biological father and be the daughter of her grand-father. In vitro fertilization has already led to the confusion of parentage, but cloning will mean the radical rupture of these bonds.
—Reflections on Cloning, Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, 1997
In a democratic, pluralistic system, the first guarantee of each individual's freedom is established by unconditionally respecting human dignity at every phase of life, regardless of the intellectual or physical abilities one possesses or lacks. In human cloning the necessary condition for any society begins to collapse: that of treating man always and everywhere as an end, as a value, and never as a mere means or simple object.—Reflections on Cloning, Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, 1997
[In cloning] the idea is fostered that some individuals can have total dominion over the existence of others, to the point of programming their biological identity—selected according to arbitrary or purely utilitarian criteria...this selective concept of man will have, among other things, a heavy cultural fallout beyond the—numerically limited—practice of cloning, since there will be a growing conviction that the value of man and woman does not depend on their personal identity but only on those biological qualities that can be appraised and therefore selected.—Reflections on Cloning, Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, 1997