VATICAN REJECTS SUPERVISED INJECTING ROOMS

The Vatican has issued a decree that no Catholic organisation anywhere in
the world should participate in the trial of a legal supervised heroin
injecting room, ruling that this would involve cooperation with "grave
evil".

The document implies that Rome also strongly opposes any Catholic
involvement in existing harm-minimisation programs such as needle exchanges.

"The good intention and the hoped-for benefits are not sufficient to
outweigh the fact of its constituting an extremely proximate material
cooperation in the grave evil of drug abuse and its foreseeable bad side
effects," the document says.

The formal ruling was prepared by the Vatican's Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, the Catholic Church's most powerful doctrinal
tribunal in Rome. Melbourne Archbishop George Pell is the only Australian
member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He is a regular
visitor to the Vatican, and was known to have been in Rome last year around
the time that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith initially
vetoed the Sisters of Charity plan to set up a legal injecting room in
Sydney. Dr Pell was not available to comment last night.

The six-page moral evaluation was provided to the Sisters of Charity last
week, more than a year after the Vatican's unprecedented order that the
sisters abandon their pledge to help the New South Wales Government conduct
an 18-month trial of the nation's first medically supervised injecting
service in Kings Cross.

According to the ruling, a copy of which has been obtained by The Age, the
Vatican is particularly anxious about the potential for scandal should a
Catholic organisation involve itself in such drug harm-minimisation
programs.

"One of the most important bad side effects to this proposed service is
scandal, which the Sisters of Charity are aware of and would take serious
measures to address," the document notes.

"Nevertheless, precisely because of the extreme proximity of the cooperation
of a Catholic institution in a serious evil, some people will still be
scandalised; it will seem to them to be formal cooperation."

The document concedes that the medically supervised injecting service is not
a case of "explicit or implicit" formal cooperation in evil, but insists
that it is "beyond question" that it does involve "some degree of material
cooper-ation in the evil of drug abuse".

While cooperation in evil may not be formal, this does not mean that it is
"morally neutral", and it is therefore "in itself undesirable" and should be
avoided.

"The harm minimised through this service is accidental to the act of
injecting illicit drugs (such as infection), but not that which is essential
and necessarily connected to the evil of drug abuse: the loss of the status
as free and responsible moral agents, proper to man, and the progressive
destruction of life and health," the document concludes.

The Sydney trial, scheduled to begin this year, is a clinical experiment
with an 18-month lifespan. Plans for similar trials in Melbourne appear to
be doomed, with the Liberal Party using its Legislative Council majority to
block the government's proposal.

Sister Annette Cunliffe, Congregational Leader of the Sisters of Charity,
said she was "pleased to note that there is no disagreement in moral
principle" between the sisters and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, although there were "differences in emphasis and a different final
conclusion".

Meanwhile, the Uniting Church is overseeing renovation work on Sydney's
supervised injecting room site.