The Catholic Church's opposition to research on human embryos presented Gordon Brown with the threat of resignation by three Catholic Cabinet ministers, who opposed key clauses of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill now before Parliament. The Prime Minister has now relented under pressure and allowed a free "conscience" vote. But easing the consciences of Cabinet ministers, good though that may be, was never the heart of the matter. The Church's ultimate objective has to be the winning of the argument itself. The recent Catholic tendency to resolve difficult ethical issues by resorting to authoritative rulings may be a source of strength in other respects. In this context it is a source of weakness.

Take the case described in our pages today by Mary Seller, a distinguished geneticist and an Anglican priest and theologian. If it became law, the embryology bill would allow - or continue to allow, given that such research is going on - an entity known as a "cybrid" to be produced by inserting a nucleus from an adult human skin cell into an animal ovum. This would undergo development for four to five days until the inner cell mass arises, from which stem cells will be harvested and later used for research into the treatment of serious diseases. It calls into question the naming of this entity a human embryo and the Church's condemnation of embryonic research on that basis. How has that skin cell become a human being, with human rights? Neither a human ovum nor sperm was involved in its creation.

Faced with an analogous uncertainty concerning the moral status of the early embryo itself, Pope John Paul II ruled in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae of 1995 that human life, so to speak, had to be given the benefit of the doubt. If it was wrong to destroy something that was human, it was equally wrong to destroy something that might be. But the uncertainty here is philosophical or even semantic rather than factual. That makes his conclusion ...

Stem cells have the remarkable capacity to grow into any part of the body. That is why research using stem cells offers the prospect of treatment for a wide range of serious and painful diseases. But when it involves the use, and then destruction, of fertilised human eggs, the Catholic Church says that this is tampering with human life, and unacceptable. Nor is it alone in saying so. If faith-based objections to this ...

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis recalled the steady, unrelenting approach of God. His approach at first was not wanted. Then Lewis began to read the gospels and attend church services. God was after him, he felt, to acknowledge his Son. One day he set out to drive to Whipsnade. On the way there he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. But, he recalled, "when we reached the zoo ...

Catholic MPs on the Government side have demanded a free vote - without party whips - so that they can vote against certain clauses of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill now before Parliament. Three Catholic members of the Cabinet have indicated that they may even resign over the issue, and are said to have rejected the offer to be allowed to abstain on what they have said is a matter of conscience ...

There are few areas of public debate so contaminated by prejudice and misrepresentation as the issue of faith schools, essentially church schools, Anglican and Catholic. The week in which anxious parents discovered the allocation of school places was a neuralgic one, therefore, for The Observer to leak some research purporting to show that church schools were creaming off more middle-class pupils than they were entitled ...