The Catholic Church issued recently a cautionary warning on the first synthetic cell, noting that correctly used, it could be a positive development—but only God can create life.

The Vatican issued the warning after an announcement from the United States that researchers had produced a living cell containing manmade DNA.

The scientist, genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter, said this opens a path for designing organisms that may work differently from how nature intended, according to The Herald, Scotland.

The Church warned scientists of the ethical responsibility of scientific progress and said that the manner in which the innovation is applied in the future will be crucial, according to the Associated Press.

“If …it is for the good of all, of the environment and man..we’ll keep the same judgment (that it is a great scientific discovery),” said Monsignor Rino Fisichella.

“If, on the other hand, the use of this discovery should turn against the dignity of and respect for human life, then our judgment would change,” the AP reported.

Fisichella, who heads Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, stressed there is no necessary clash between science and faith.  “But we think above all about the meaning that must be given to life,” Fisichella said.  “We need God, the origin of life,” the AP reported.

Venter’s synthetic cell is actually Mycoplasma mycoides, a type of living bacteria that is commonly associated with mastitis in goats, according to The Herald, Scotland.

Venter’s Mycoplasma mycoides are synthetic because it was made with synthetic chemicals, transplanted and activated into a cell with manmade genetic instructions.  Venter’s team is now considering creating algae that can capture carbon dioxide from the air and produce hydrocarbon fuels, according to SiliconIndia.

Naysayers however doubt that making Mycoplasma mycoides is tantamount to the creation of “artificial life.”

On the other hand, Julian Savulescu, Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford, said “We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research, and protection from military or terrorist misuse and abuse,” according to SiliconIndia.

The Catholic Church teaching holds that human life is God’s gift, created through natural procreation between a man and woman.  The Vatican said the first synthetic cell “must have rules, like all the things that touch on the heart of life,” according to the AP.

U.S. President Barack Obama asked that the commission develop recommendations about any actions the government should take “to ensure that America reaps the benefits of this developing field of science while identifying appropriate ethical boundaries and minimizing identified risks,” SiliconIndia reported.

Meanwhile Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, said “Any form of intelligence and any scientific acquisition must always be measured against the ethical dimension, which has at its heart the true dignity of every person.”

What makes everyone think artist Leonardo Da Vinci uncovered some big Christian secret?

Writers and religious skeptics have always come up with alternative narratives about Jesus’ life and ministry. But author Dan Brown brought it to center stage in a spectacular way, with his blockbuster 2003 fiction, The Da Vinci Code, followed by the movie and all its sequels and franchises.

Brown provoked speculation in both secular and theological circles—all the way to the Vatican:

Did Leonardo Da Vinci write an encrypted code on his famous Vitruvian Man? Was Mary Magdalene married to Jesus? Is there really a Holy Grail?

Seven years later, even Christian magazines are still asking questions like, “Why weren’t there women in Da Vinci’s Last Supper painting?” (Light & Life Magazine, March, April 2010, pp. 10-11).

I’d like some answers from you, Mr. Da Vinci…may I call you Leo?

How is it that you lived from 1452 to 1519—over 14 centuries after Jesus—yet you have all the secrets of his ministry that not even his contemporaries revealed, or the prophets were inspired by God to write?

Surely, a Renaissance man like yourself, jack of many trades, was able to construct a Time Machine. Is that how you went back and did the portrait of Jesus at the Last Supper, and hid at least one woman in the background, as some say?

What about those who claim you purposefully left women out of the picture?

Grid reproduction of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"

Let’s spend some time on this unfounded “women missing from The Last Supper” claim. Before we ask why Da Vinci left them out of his painting, we could ask why they were left out of the Last Supper accounts, when we see women mentioned in many other New Testament scriptures.

All four disciples who wrote the gospels found it important enough to mention that women were the first to see Jesus’ empty tomb (Matthew 28:8-10; Mark 16:9-10; Luke 24:8-11; John 20:10-18). John speaks of the Samaritan woman at the well to whom Jesus offers “living water” (John 4:7-42), and the woman whom Jesus saved from punishment for adultery (John 8:3-11).

Matthew 14:21 specifically mentions women as being present, yet outside of the 5,000-man count at the five loaves and fish miracle. Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, are mentioned in Luke 10:38-41 and John 11:1-40.

Throughout the book of Acts and his later writings, the apostle Paul mentions by name many women who participated in spreading the gospel. In 2 Timothy 1:5, he gives credit to Timothy’s mother and grandmother for how they raised the young disciple.

So why, then, would women be left out of the Last Supper accounts? And why would Da Vinci leave them out of his painting?

Simple answers to these questions:
A Boston Museum of Science website devoted to Da Vinci’s works quotes the artist:
The most praiseworthy form of painting is the one that most resembles what it imitates.

I doubt Da Vinci, having said this, would have put brush to canvas for The Last Supper without first reading the Biblical accounts of its occurrence. Therefore, he imitated what he saw in scripture.

He didn’t read anything between the lines like people love to do with the Bible today in order to discredit the Book itself and its sources. He didn’t add women for one simple reason…they weren’t there.

And, I’m sure Da Vinci would say Jesus wasn’t married either.

But the most important answer comes from a Christian’s own faith: What’s in the Bible was divinely inspired by God through the hands of man, and God knew what books would be canonized.

The New Testament’s writers had a hunch their stories would seem unbelievable and questionable. That’s why Luke 1:1-2 states:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been  fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses.

And 2 Peter 1:16 says:
We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Why should Christians stick with what the Bible says?

As Christians, we must learn to trust the Lord with all our heart rather than leaning on our own human understanding (Proverbs 3:5). Our faith grows through hearing and reading the Word of God (Romans 10:17).

In other words, the greatest faith in knowing that Jesus was who He said He was, and that things went down exactly as they appear in the Bible, comes from believing the book itself…not through the speculations of man.

The people who write these modern-day things can’t prove what they’re saying; neither have they yet proven the Bible is false.

Scriptures quoted in italics within this commentary are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

The recently announced plans by the Vatican to designate a papal envoy to head the Legionaries of Christ renders this powerful, conservative Catholic order directly under Vatican control.

The Vatican made this move after an eight-month inquiry by five Vatican investigators who reported directly back to Pope Benedict XVI about the double life of its late founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Associated Press reported.

The Vatican report said Maciel had been sexually assaulting minor seminarians and fathered at least three children from two different women—a daughter from what was described as a “stable relationship”, and two sons who are now grown, who admitted to being his children with another woman, according to CNN.

However, the Vatican hoped that by appointing a personal delegate to lead the order, they could help them “purify” what good still remains, and at the same time help them to undergo a “profound revision”, the AP said.

Maciel was born in Mexico in March 1920.  In January 1941 he founded the Legion of Christ, a powerful and wealthy order that spans 24 countries including Spain, Rome, Ireland, the United States, and several countries in South America and Central Europe.  Recently it had begun projects in Eastern Europe and the Philippines, according to CNN.

With a membership of over 800 priests and 2,500 seminarians, the Legion also has some 70,000 members in the Regnum Christi movement, which was also founded by Maciel. The Legion runs Catholic news outlets, charities, seminaries for boys, schools, and universities in Italy, Mexico and Spain, among others, The Seattle Times said.

In response to the Vatican announcement the Legionaries issued a statement on its website where they said that they “embrace his provisions with faith and obedience”, the AP said.

Critics and advocates of the victims are dissatisfied with the Vatican’s latest move.  They wanted the order to be dissolved.   Others felt the larger part of the Legion’s leadership should be taken out, noting that Macial could not have lived his double life without the knowledge of some of the order’s top leadership, the Seattle Times said.

The Vatican’s statement said, “Of this side of life, a great part of the Legionaries were in the dark — especially given the system of relationship built by P. Maciel, who very skillfully knew how to create alibis, obtain loyalty, trust and silence from those around him and strengthened his own role as charismatic founder,” the CNN reported.

The Vatican said that Macial “…created around him a defense mechanism that made him unassailable for a long period, making it difficult to know his true life.”

According to the AP, Maciel’s victims had tried in the 1990s to bring a canonical trial against him but were shut down.  The late Pope John Paul II had long championed the Legionaries for their orthodoxy and ability to bring in vocations and money.

In 2006, one year after Benedict became pope, the Vatican ordered Maciel to lead a “reserved life of penance and prayer,” and rendered him a priest in name only. He died in 2008 at age 87, the AP reported.

The Catholic church is also investigating complaints of abuse allegedly committed in Britain, Germany, Ireland and other countries, the CNN reported.

Irish singer Sinead O’Connor says she’d help Jesus destroy the Vatican if she could.

“If Christ was here, he would be burning down the Vatican. And I for one would be helping him,” she said.

O’Connor made the statement via a letter to the Irish Independent in response to Roman Catholic Bishop, Denis Brennan’s recent plea to his congregation for funds.

Brennan oversees the Ferns Diocese in County Wexford, Ireland.

His  plea for funds came in the midst of a recently exposed decades-old sex abuse scandal that has seen the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland receive a publicized rebuke from Pope Benedict XVI and paying out millions to victims of sexual abuse at the hand of priests.

Sinéad_O’Connor says she would help Jesus "burn down the Vatican."

So far, Brennan’s diocese has paid €8 million ($10 million/£7.5 million) to settle 48 civil lawsuits.

According to the London Times, “Dr Brennan is the first bishop to give details on how much compensation has been paid to victims. He said that his official residence had been remortgaged to cover nearly €2 million in legal fees. A request for financial help from parishioners was not about sharing blame, he said, but about ‘asking for help to fulfill a God-given responsibility.’”

O’Connor said, “[Brennan's] statement attempts to dictate to us — in the same way the Inquisition did — how Christians should behave. It says directly that it would be anti-Christian of us to feel that the church should pay its own bills for its own abuse with its own billions that it throttled from our grandparents, whom it also abused, physically, emotionally, psychologically and sexually.”

“How an organisation which has acted, decade after decade, only to protect its business interests above the interests of children can feel it has the right to dictate to us what Christians should do is beyond belief.”

“From the Pope on down, through the Vatican and therefore through the lower echelons, the whole organisation, in my belief, is utterly anti-Christian and evil, as proven by centuries of torture, bloodshed, burnings, terrorism, and coverings-up of “the worst crime” known to man.”

O’Connor is no stranger to criticizing the Roman Catholic Church about sexual abuse.

On the Oct. 3, 1992 airing of Saturday Night Live, during which she appeared as a musical guest,  O’Connor sang  an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s “War,” during which she protested the sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church by changing Marley’s  lyric “racism” to “child abuse.” At the end of her song, she tore up a picture of former pontiff, John Paul II after the song.

O’Connor was heavily criticized for doing so. NBC, which owns Saturday Night Live, has refused to rebroadcast the musical performance.