Abstract
The Roman Catholic Church has had a significant impact upon the formulation and application of bioethical values and principles. As the discipline of bioethics has evolved throughout the late twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, broader cultural and intercultural understanding has emerged and a non-sectarian set of principles has been formulated and put into wide practice (Beauchamp and Childress 2013). Meanwhile, Catholic bioethics, while still influential, has become largely understood as a set of proscriptions regarding issues such as abortion, human embryonic stem cell research, and physician-assisted suicide. Both official documents promulgated by the Church’s magisterial authority and various volumes published by Catholic bioethicists have elucidated, and marshalled supportive arguments for, the Church’s defined positions on these and other issues.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
These and other key bioethical teaching documents of the Catholic Church are collected in O’Rourke and Boyle (2011).
- 3.
The Code of Canon Law (1983) is the Church’s set of juridical regulations.
- 4.
For an introduction and overview of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, see Eberl (2015).
- 5.
This topic is treated in Part II of the present volume.
- 6.
This topic is treated in Part V of the present volume.
- 7.
This topic is treated in Part V of the present volume.
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Eberl, J.T. (2017). Introduction. In: Eberl, J. (eds) Contemporary Controversies in Catholic Bioethics. Philosophy and Medicine(), vol 127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55766-3_1
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