Cardinal launches Brown broadside

Several leading Catholic churchmen used their Easter sermons to have a go at the Government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, but it was the Scotland's most senior Catholic, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, who went for the jugular. He denounced the proposed legislation - which would allow scientists to create hybrid embryos, where human DNA is inserted into an animal cell for research - as a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life".

Cardinal O'Brien did not rely on there being journalists in the congregation at St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh where he delivered his Easter Sunday broadside; he issued his sermon in advance to Scotland's Daily Record.

He said: "One might say that in our country we are about to have a public Government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion - without many people really being aware of what is going on... It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which more comprehensively attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life."

He went on: "If I were preaching this homily in France, Germany, Italy, Canada or Australia, I would be commending the government for rightly banning such grotesque procedures. However, here in Great Britain I am forced to condemn our Government for not only permitting but encouraging such hideous practices.

"In some other European countries, one could be jailed for doing what we intend to make legal."

Not all Scottish Catholics, it seems, are in agreement: among the Labour party members who strongly condemned Cardinal O'Brien for his "completely unacceptable" attack on the Government was MP Jim Devine, a Catholic and a psychiatric nurse.