The international line-up of new Pontifical Academy of Life appointments include clergy and lay advisors from countries as diverse as Australia, Ukraine, Congo, Japan and Sweden.
The 45 mainly male appointees include several former members as well as new ones.
Experts chosen by Pope Francis for the Academy (which is his bioethics advisory board) include:
The Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher; an Indian Missionary Society priest and former director-general of the Catholic Health Association of India; a Japanese Nobel Prize-winning stem cell researcher; two prominent U.S. ethicists; a neurologist in pain and palliative care; Muslim and a Jewish scholars and well as world authorities on paediatrics, genetics, bioethics and pharmaceutical law.
Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus is included in the new team, as is an appointee many of the world’s media have been focusing on – Professor Nigel Biggar.
Biggar is an Anglican professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, who has in the past supported legalised abortion up to 18 weeks and has expressed qualified support for euthanasia.
Last year, the pope reaffirmed the church’s commitment to defend human life “from conception to natural death,” which usually refers to the church’s opposition to contraception, abortion and euthanasia.
He also condemned what he has described as the “culture of waste” in the medical sector, referring to human embryos, the sick, and the elderly as disposable material.
The Crux website says past members absent from the new list include Christine de Marcellus Vollmer, president of the Alliance for Family and of the Latin American Alliance for Family; Monsignor Michel Schooyans, a Belgian and professor emeritus of the Catholic University of Louvain; and Luke Gormally, a former research professor at Ave Maria School of Law.
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