Cardinal Renato Martino and other key Vatican officials seem poised to endorse the use of genetically modified (GM) crops. However, by the end of a seminar, "GMO: threat or hope," convened by the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace in Rome on November 10−11, he and several fellow officials cautiously sidestepped taking a definitive stance, insisting that they are in the preliminary stage of gathering information on this "difficult issue," while also maintaining that this technology "should not be abandoned."
Catholic Cardinal Renato Raffaele Martino is expected to ask the Vatican to bless GM crops.
AFP/Getty Images
"The Vatican is not monolithic...but it plays an enormous role as a moral voice," says Val Giddings, vice president with the Biotechnology Industry Organization (Washington, DC, USA), who met in 2003 with several Vatican officials to discuss the use of GM crops. The council's potential influence over the acceptance of GM crops would be "significant and formidable," wherever there are substantial Catholic populations, such as the Philippines, throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, says Giddings. Already, the positive inclinations of Cardinal Martino and others toward GM crops are having salutary effects in these regions, he adds. "I don't think it's a tidal wave of influence, but a substantial diffusion...and very important."
Unlike other major religions, the Catholic Church's highly centralized, hierarchical authority in the Vatican gives it a unique position to influence a tremendous number of people. "Many religious traditions have decentralized authority structures where policies take a local, regional or national form," says Leigh Turner, an ethicist from McGill University (Montreal) who is currently with the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ, USA). For example, the Indonesian Ulemas Council (Jakarta) endorsed GM crops in July 2003—a ruling that applies only within that nation.
The recent stirrings within the council appear to be triggered in no small part by Cardinal Martino's personal interest in GM organisms following his 16-year tenure as Vatican ambassador to the United Nations. He stated several times that he consumed many GM foods without ill effect during his years in New York, admitting that this evidence of safety is anecdotal. In a more serious tone, he wonders aloud whether this new technology could help to address widespread hunger in developing countries. But views about GM crops are far from uniform within the Catholic Church.
For example, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in a 2001 report declared it a "moral imperative" that the "fruits of all new technologies be made available to all the world's people," says Peter Raven, a director of the Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis) and also a member of that academy. He says efforts to apply biotechnology to global agriculture "should be accelerated and treasured for the value that it promises."
But in November 2003, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB; Washington, DC, USA) issued a report, "For I Was Hungry, and You Gave Me Food," that pointedly recommends a cautious approach regarding GM organisms. "[W]e believe that use of genetically altered products should proceed cautiously with serious and urgent attention to their possible human, health and environmental impacts," according to the USCCB report. The USCCB also calls for efforts to help poor countries develop their own genetic engineering technologies and increase their capacity to address and monitor environmental risk that may arise from growing GM crops.
Other factions within the Catholic Church view these environmental concerns as reasons for rejecting agbiotech, citing comments from Pope John Paul II during the 1990s on ecology, social justice and the precautionary principle to bolster those claims. There are "other more suitable ways [than GM crops] to feed a hungry world," say Peter Henriot of the Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection (Lusaka, Zambia) and Roland Lesseps of the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre (Lusaka, Zambia), also a Jesuit, who spoke during the November meeting in Rome.
There are also disagreements within the church on a moral and spiritual basis. Taking the biblical position that humans should harness the environment, Martino says, "Operating on vegetables is different from cloning humans." But Henriot and Lesseps argue that GM crops disturb "the awesome goodness of God's creation."
Despite lots of conferences and much debate on the topic, the Vatican has yet to make a judgment on agbiotech. But the Vatican's concerns are in the context of whether GM crops might aid the struggle to end hunger and help poorer countries develop their agriculture, and these concerns with justice will underlie their final decision.
