Catholic Clergy Attack French Telethon Over Stem Cell Aid

For two decades, the country’s Muscular Dystrophy Association has run a wildly popular annual telethon to raise money for medical research ... But this year, the Roman Catholic Church here has sullied the reputation of the telethon, with some church officials calling its financing of research on embryonic stem cells immoral. “For us, these embryos are not things, but human beings,” Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, told journalists on Tuesday. “And from the depths of our faith, we cannot accept that they are selected, destroyed, the objects of experiments.”