c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) I guess only the French can understand the French Catholic bishops. For reasons known only to God, the French bishops’ conference seems 98 percent opposed to embryonic stem cell research.

Consider the recent muscular dystrophy telethon hurricane that huffed across the country. The French Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual 34-hour telethon on two major television channels raises money for its programs. This year’s telethon raised about $134 million and counting.

Several weeks before the telethon began on Dec. 8, Pierre-Oliver Arduin, who sits on a bioethics commission for the Diocese of Frejus-Toulon, threw down the gauntlet. “It is no longer possible to cooperate in the telethon,” he wrote on the diocesan Web site. “Christians cannot cooperate with evil.”

The problem? Some of the telethon proceeds go directly to embryonic stem cell research, which is forbidden by the Catholic Church.

The association and its supporters say it acts strictly within the newest French bioethics legislation, which allows “embryo selection” to eliminate disease _ selectively killing embryos either in the petri dish or in the womb, while letting genetically “healthy” embryos survive _ as well as embryonic stem cell research and so-called therapeutic cloning.

The association finances embryonic stem cell research to combat muscular dystrophy. But some French Catholics weren’t having any of it. Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of Lyon explained that Catholics must respect embryos, and they “cannot accept that they are selected, destroyed, the objects of experiments.”

Politicians and anything-goes activists decried the Catholic Church’s “interference” in affairs of state. The head of France’s National Consultative Bioethics Committee, Didier Sicard, called the church’s interest “misconstrued and extraordinarily disruptive.”

The bishops themselves seemed confused. Cardinal Barbarin praised French President Jacques Chirac’s support of the telethon. Then Archbishop Andre Vingt-Trois of Paris said the telethon funds should not be treated like a blank check for any and all research.

Then Bishop Dominique Rey of Frejus-Toulon, proprietor of the originally offending Web site, said, “We can promote donations to campaigns only if they offer all necessary ethical guarantees on the experiments that they support.”

Confused? So am I.

Then more politicians. Then more bishops. The comments whirled closer and closer to the Dec. 8 start of the two-day telethon.

Finally, the president of the French bishops’ conference, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard of Bordeaux, released a statement the day the telethon began. The Catholic Church, he said, was not calling for a boycott of the telethon.

While it disagrees with embryonic stem cell research, Ricard pointed out that less than 2 percent of the telethon receipts go to embryonic stem cell research. Somehow that made it all OK. Call it the 2 percent solution.

So the telethon went on, the people of France pledged, and the muscular dystrophy association found another year’s funding for embryonic stem cell research.

Cardinal Ricard doesn’t seem to mind. In other words, the president of the French bishops’ conference figures that less than 2 percent of the proceeds spent for research explicitly forbidden by Catholic teachings does not matter, because the remaining funds support other research. He asked for dialogue with the association, but he lost the national dialogue on behalf of the church.

The French bishops have more than confused the matter. Yes, just a small percentage of the telethon money goes for embryonic stem cell research. Just 2 percent.

A small amount, no doubt, until you figure that 2 percent of what they raised works out to $2.6 million. Perhaps not so small after all.

KRE END ZAGANO

(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. She is the author of hundreds of articles in Catholic Studies. Her newest book is “The Dominican Tradition,” co-authored with Thomas McGonigle of Providence College.)

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