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President Donald Trump is canceling a contract that provides government funding to the University of California, San Francisco for research that issues fetal tissue harvested from elective abortions. The Trump administration first focused its sights on the contract this past September, with the National Institute of Health (NIH) warning UCSF that its $2 million annual contract for fetal tissue research would be curtailed to 90 days and possibly canceled altogether. Senior administration officials told The Daily Caller that the contract will be officially terminated Wednesday. The cancelation stems from a 9-month U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) review...

ROME — When Stephen K. Bannon was still heading Breitbart News, he went to the Vatican to cover the canonization of John Paul II and make some friends. High on his list of people to meet was an archconservative American cardinal, Raymond Burke, who had openly clashed with Pope Francis.In one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon — who is now President Trump’s anti-establishment eminence — bonded over their shared worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed...

Bannon planned to teach the art of his brand of politics at the school. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s plans for a far-right nationalist school have been halted by Italian authorities. Bannon hoped to run the school out of an ancient monastery near Rome, but officials say they are revoking rights to the grounds for failure to maintain the site and pay fees. In a statement released Friday, Gianluca Vacca, an official with Italy’s cultural ministry, said that it was the government’s “duty” to revoke the rights to the Certosa de Trisulti monastery that the Human Dignity Institute,...

Pope Francis needs to take tougher action against the United States’ most influential Catholic in Rome, Cardinal Raymond “Breitbart” Burke. The renegade cleric is not only undermining Francis’s reformist, compassionate papacy, and gospel teaching as it applies to refugees and Muslims, but the rebel prince of the church is also using his position within the walls of the Vatican to legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy, Stephen K. Bannon-style. Simply put, the Vatican is facing a political war between the modernizing Pope Francis and a conservative wing that wants to reassert white Christian dominance. Burke...

Regarding the Instruction Dignitas PersonaeAim In recent years, biomedical research has made great strides, opening new possibilities for the treatment of disease, but also giving rise to serious questions which had not been directly treated in the Instruction Donum vitae (22 February 1987).  A new Instruction, which is dated 8 September 2008, the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seeks to provide some responses to these new bioethical questions, as these have been the focus of expectations and concerns in large sectors of society.  In this way, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seeks both...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be the perfect feminist hero. In theory, she fits the role on multiple levels: She’s an escapee from an abusive patriarchy. She’s an African immigrant who made her own way in a Western country, the Netherlands. She’s a fierce advocate for women’s rights. She’s a target for deadly violence by angry men who want to shut her up. She left her religion and became a scourge of its repressive practices. Except for the blemish on her record: Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a dissident from the wrong religion. Raised a Muslim in Somalia, subjected to genital mutilation...

Concerns about Cremation: Some Very Strange Practices Are Emerging By: Msgr. Charles PopeSome years ago, the Church gave wider permission for cremation and also lifted traditional restrictions on having cremated remains present in the church for funeral Masses. All of this is pastorally understandable. Very few if any people these days choose cremation for the reasons it had traditionally been forbidden, namely as a denial of the resurrection of the body. Generally the reasons chosen are economic, due to the increasingly high cost of traditional burial and the difficulty, especially in urban areas, of finding room for large cemeteries. The basic norms from the church...

The current polls are indeed pointless useless, she gets better and better on a daily basis, just think how good she'll be by this time next year. She'll kill on interviews, debates and speeches. The best part of it is that she knows it too! http://www.conservatives4palin.com/2010/02/governor-palin-on-oreilly-tonight.html

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

Since the release of this document the Press has been filled with reports on this instruction. Some have accurately described the content and properly affirmed its significance. Others have been based on mistaken caricatures of the Catholic Church and not on the substance of what is presented. Still others demonstrated that the writers did not read the document or, if they did, did not like what it had to say and chose to mislead the public. Finally, some were based on old tired assertions of the Catholic Church as being “out of touch” or “anti-technology” or “anti-sexuality” or any number...

(NEW YORK) — The doctor behind the "Body Worlds" exhibits that show cadavers in different poses says he has stopped using bodies from China for fear that some of them may be executed prisoners, ABC News reported on Friday. Dr. Gunther von Hagens told ABC's "20/20" that he had to destroy some bodies he had received from China because they had injuries that made him suspect they were execution victims. The doctor invented a liquid plastic process that preserves bodies. He has put many of them on display in museum exhibits that show them in poses like playing poker or...

(SACRAMENTO) -- Cars packed the parking lot of a shuttered CompUSA store one recent weekday afternoon as schoolchildren, health professionals and the just plain curious paid $24 apiece to stare at a score of plasticized, dissected human cadavers and roomfuls of preserved body parts. The cadavers are displayed dramatically, with layers of skin and muscle peeled back to reveal internal organs, bones, blood vessels and nerves. The exhibition, with bodies posed as if playing a violin, swinging a golf club or performing other tasks, provoked plenty of hushed comments.   "Where do they come from?" a young woman asked a...

The Danish Council of Ethics has proposed a set of rules to deal with the prospective possibility that human and animal genes will be combined The first hybrid sheep-goat was created some 20 years ago, and science has since used cell and gene research to put a baboon heart into an infant and use other animal organs to save human lives. But where this technology will eventually lead to is of great concern to both the Danish Council of Ethics and the Council for Animal Ethics, who Tuesday presented their proposals for dealing with the unnerving prospect of combining human...

Young Pastor's Powerful Sermon Encourages Parishioners to Take Part in Life Chain By Steve Jalsevac MANOTICK, Ontario, October 5, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On Sunday, Sept. 23, a week before Canada's Life Chain Sunday, Fr. Geoff Kerslake gave what was seen as a powerful sermon encouraging his parishioners to take part in the local Life Chain the following Sunday. Fr. Geoff is the young pastor of St. Leonard's parish in Manotick, Ontario, located on the fringe of Canada's capital city of Ottawa. Fr. Geoff's sermon so encouraged one couple who heard it that they had the text re-printed in the bulletin...

Pope Rules Patients in Permanent Vegetative State May Not be Denied Artificial Nutrition and Hydration Response to certain questions raised by US Conference of Catholic Bishops concerning artificial nutrition and hydration By John-Henry Westen VATICAN CITY, September 14, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In most hospitals in North America, families of patients in permanent vegetative state are asked if they wish their family member to have their artificial feeding tube removed. According to a definitive ruling by the Vatican made public today, the withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration from such patients is immoral. The ruling from the Vatican's Congregation for the...

Michael Cook | Saturday, 8 September 2007 A new challenge for human dignity Britain's fertility regulator has just approved the creation of human-animal embryos for research. What's next? The creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for medical research, which has just been approved by the British government's fertility watchdog, pushes the needle on the "yuck factor" meter far into the red. But even more "yuck" is the deception and manipulation used to justify the decision. In the United Kingdom, experiments with embryos are closely regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. So when scientists began to lobby for the...

Bioethics: President Bush's veto of expanded funding of embryonic stem cell research will be condemned. But while others make it a campaign issue, Bush embraces research that gives the sick and disabled genuine hope. Despite the portrayal in the media and Democratic Party of Republicans as the only ones standing in the way of miracle cures from embryonic stem cell research, it is Democrats who are wearing ideological blinders and ignoring scientific facts. Bush's second veto of expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is grounded, yes, in his moral belief that it's wrong to destroy some human lives...

Ideas can be dangerous. I have learnt that the hard way. But I know that when it comes to freedom and human rights these precious ideas, so valued in the West, are worth fighting for. As a young Muslim woman, born in Somalia, I abandoned my family to avoid an arranged marriage to a distant cousin and fled to Holland. I was just 23 and I had no idea back then that my refusal to submit to a traditional Muslim woman’s life would come to dominate my whole career. So for me, the debate that is raging about the veil,...

WARSAW, Poland - Pope John Paul II's longtime private secretary said Saturday he did not burn the late pontiff's notes as his will demanded, arguing that the papers contain "great riches" and should instead be preserved. Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, who worked with the pope from 1966 until his death earlier this year, told Polish state radio there are "quite a lot of manuscripts on various issues," but he offered no details. "Nothing has been burned," Dziwisz said. "Nothing is fit for burning, everything should be preserved and kept for history, for the future generations — every single sentence." "These are...

The Pope as Monarch: Reflections on Politics by Dr. Jeff Mirus As I ponder the life and death of John Paul II, I am reminded that there is something about a pope that is very much like a king. This analogy with the social order is far from perfect, for the Church and the body politic are very different things. But there is much to be gained from wondering about the sheer greatness of this fallen leader. For both the Church and the world, some of these gains may be political. The Ideal Form of GovernmentThe Church has never taught...