The always-interesting John Allen has some insight and context in today’s New York Times regarding the Vatican’s new document Dignitas Personae:

The roughly 67 million Catholics in the United States make up nearly one-quarter of the American population, but just 6 percent of the global Catholic total of 1.1 billion. Ninety-four percent of the Catholics in the world, in other words, are not Americans, which may help explain why the pope and his lieutenants are not always think American thoughts when they get out of bed in the morning.

That’s a useful bit of context to bear in mind in light of a tough new Vatican document on bioethics, released one week ago, that ratchets up the church’s condemnations of embryonic stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, the “morning-after pill” and a host of other techniques it regards as violations of human dignity.

In the United States, the tendency may be to see the document, titled “Dignitas Personae,” or “Dignity of the Person,” as a battle plan for resistance to the incoming Obama administration. In reality, that amounts to trying to shove a square peg into the round hole of American politics.

For one thing, the document has been in the works for years, so it is hardly a rapid response to the American elections. Moreover, the Vatican doesn’t want to be at loggerheads with Barack Obama, because it sees a range of matters where it’s more in sync with him than it has been with President Bush. On Dec. 3, for example, the Vatican simultaneously signed and ratified a new international treaty banning cluster bombs, a measure President Bush opposed — a reminder that Catholic social teaching and Republican politics are not always a match made in heaven.

What the Vatican may not fully appreciate, however, is that putting out a hard-nosed pro-life document right now, at least in the United States, may be the political equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

There’s much more, so visit the link.