Rights & Barriers

To geneticists attending an international congress in Rome, Pope Pius XII last week reasserted the Christian priority of the individual above the group.

"The fundamental tendency of genetics and eugenics," he said, "is to influence the transmission of hereditary factors to promote that which is good and eliminate that which is bad. This ... is irreproachable from the moral point of view, but certain methods used to obtain this aim . . . are morally contestable." In other words, the good of society alone is not enough to deprive the individual of his fundamental rights. Even in cases where one or both of the partners are suffering from a hereditary disease, it is wrong to prohibit them from marrying unless one is clearly "incapable of acting as a human being"--i.e., insane.

"Certainly one is justified, and in many cases is duty bound, to make persons suffering serious hereditary diseases consider what grave responsibilities they are assuming toward themselves, toward the spouse and toward their offspring. This responsibility may perhaps become intolerable. But to advise against doing something is not to forbid it. There may be other motives, above all of a moral or personal character, that have such weight as to authorize people to contract and use matrimony even in circumstances that we have indicated."

In the same speech, the Pope urged scientists to follow where the search for truth led them. "Neither from the side of reason nor from the side of thought oriented in a Christian sense are any barriers raised to research, to knowledge, to affirmation of truth," he said. "There are some barriers, but they do not serve to imprison truth. Their purpose is to prevent hypotheses that have not been proved from being taken for established facts, and to keep people from forgetting the necessity for checking one source against another ... It is to avoid these causes of error that there are barriers, but there are none for truth."

Many of the geneticists who listened to the Pope noticed that his right arm seemed to be lame. The explanation: he had wrenched his right arm trying to help a hefty pilgrim from his knees. Temporarily, the Pope had switched his ring to his left hand.

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