The British license for human cloning in embryonic stem cell research which was issued on 11th August has shocked the whole of Europe all the way to the Vatican City - the world centre for Catholics.

On Sunday 22th August, Pope John Paul II commented on the issue of cloning for the second time after his visit a week ago to the French shrine of Lourdes where he urged for life to be “respected from conception to its natural end.”

Speaking to around 700,000 people on the Church-organised event called “Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples” in Rimini, the Pope warned that the speedy progress in science and technology had tempted people to become arrogant, thus they tend to overlook moral values.

“The results achieved in various fields of science and technology are considered and defended by many as acceptable,” he said. “In this way, one ends up expecting that what is technically possible is in itself also ethically good.”

“No one can fail to see the dramatic and desolating consequences of such pragmatism, which conceives truth and justice as something that can be shaped by the work of man himself,” he stressed.

The Pope commented that human cloning is an example of “the violence with which man tries to appropriate the truth and the just, reducing them to values that he can dispose of freely, that is, without recognising limits of any kind if not those fixed and continually overcome by technological possibility.”

He preached the Christian message, “the way taught by Christ is another: It is that of respect for the human being, which every method of research must first look at in order to know him in his truth, to then serve him, not manipulating him according to a plan considered at times with arrogance as better than that of the Creator himself.”

Concluding his speech, the Pope said that he “invites one to look with wonder at the Creator because of the beauty and rationality of that which He has placed and keeps in existence. Only this humility before the grandeur and mystery of creation can save man from the ill-fated consequences of his own arrogance.”