The Church in France has provoked uproar by urging Catholics not to fund a much loved medical charity it accuses of supporting eugenics by helping to fund the screening of human embryos for hereditary diseases.
Pierre-Olivier Arduin, the head of the bioethics committee in the Diocese of Fréjus-Toulon, said a month ago that it was "no longer possible" for ethical reasons for Catholics to donate to the Téléthon, a gigantic medical fundraiser. This year's Téléthon - its twentieth annual edition- ends tonight. It is organised by the French Association against Myopathy (AFM), and last year raised 104 million euros for research into muscle-wasting diseases through a variety of sponsored events. But Mr Arduin published an article on 9 November in which he denounced the Téléthon - short for Television marathon - as part of a "great eugenic strategy", accusing the AFM of having pushed France to legalise the selective screening of human embryos through a procedure called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).
The Church opposes PGD, which allows parents with hereditary illnesses to choose an embryo that does not carry the disease, because it involves destroying the remaining embryos. The Archbishop of Paris, André Vingt-Trois, said that he was worried that Catholic funds were being used for unethical purposes.
"What concerns me is that donations made for research could be used for work that instrumentalises the human embryo or that borders on eugenics," he said on French radio.
"Who sets the criteria? Who decides that a person doesn't have the right to live? If we move towards this kind of society, it will be worse than Orwell's world," he warned. "Because the Téléthon is a charitable organisation, that does not mean we should be writing it a blank cheque."
And, in a riposte to the AFM's insistence that the screening procedures respect French law on bioethics, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the Archbishop of Lyons, remarked: "Just because it's legal doesn't make it moral."
Although the Church stopped short of calling for a boycott of the event, its comments set off a barrage of protest from French ethics experts, the Government and the charity itself. President Jacques Chirac himself appealed for dialogue on Monday in an attempt to calm the situation. But he also made clear his unreserved support for the genetic research financed by the Téléthon, which operated "in the strict respect for the law" of 2004 on the research into embryonic cells.
"This only concerns those embryos which, according to the law, and lacking any parental project, would have been destroyed," he said.
The AFM issued a statement saying it did not finance PGDs - which it said were covered by the national health system - but defended them as a vital medical procedure. Out of 440 research programmes backed by the AFM last year, it says just one involved embryonic stem cells - accounting for 1.3 per cent of donations.
The AFM also rejected Catholic calls for donors to be able to choose what their money paid for, saying that this could lead to some illnesses being neglected. Around 100 PGDs are thought to be carried out in France each year, resulting in between 10 and 20 births.