NUCLEAR-POWER AND THE CATHOLIC-CHURCH

The Catholic Church is one of the world's large religious communities. Its religious mission and its worldwide presence entail the obligatio n for the church to observe critically globally relevant social and te chnical developments, and provide ethical yardsticks to those responsi ble in politics, industry, and technology by which to gauge their acti ons. As the Catholic Chui ch takes a positive attitude towards the rep roduction and preservation of life, it is required to assess technical developments especially under this aspect, in particular when these d evelopments can contribute importantly to satisfying the vital needs o f the part of humankind added as a consequence of the the explosive po pulation growth. it is probably due to this share of global responsibi lity that most official comments on nuclear power by the Catholic Chur ch have not been negative. Thus, the speech by the papal Nuncio in Aus tria, Archbishop Donato Squicciarini, to the 37th General Conference o f the the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in the fall of 1993 included a clear approval of the peaceful uses of nuclear power. The radical rejection of nuclear power, even up to and including fanat ical actionism, which can sometimes be found in the Protestant Church has always been the exception in the Catholic Church. A comprehensive survey, which cannot be presented in this article, of all comments by the church on nuclear power is contained in an essay by Stephan Feldha us: Der Fall Kernenergie - ein Glaubensstreit? Kirche und Energieverso rgung. Recent statements by circles close to the Catholic German bisho ps give the impression as if the Catholic Church in Germany were movin g from an attitude based on worldwide responsibility to a ''zeitgeist' ' critical of technology of the type widespread in this country. This is true especially of the treatise ''Zur Bewertung der Kernenergie-Nut zung'', which was published by the Environment Working Group of the Co mmission of German Bishops in April 1996, and which is the object of t he critical review expressed in this article. Although the treatise wa s not adopted by the German bishops, readers will consider it a quasi- official comment by the bishops simply because it was published by the Commission of German Bishops.