The Vatican has issued a decree that no Catholic organisation anywhere in the world should participate in the trial of a legal supervised heroin injecting room, ruling that this would involve cooperation with `grave evil'.

The document implies that Rome also strongly opposes any Catholic involvement in existing harm-minimisation programs such as needle exchanges.

`The good intention and the hoped-for benefits are not sufficient to outweigh the fact of its constituting an extremely proximate material cooperation in the grave evil of drug abuse and its foreseeable bad side effects,' the document says.

The formal ruling was prepared by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Catholic Church's most powerful doctrinal tribunal in Rome. Melbourne Archbishop George Pell is the only Australian member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He is a regular visitor to the Vatican, and was known to have been in Rome last year around the time that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith initially vetoed the Sisters of Charity plan to set up a legal injecting room in Sydney. Dr Pell was not available to comment last night.

The six-page moral evaluation was provided to the Sisters of Charity last week, more than a year after the Vatican's unprecedented order that the sisters abandon their pledge to help the New South Wales Government conduct an 18-month trial of the nation's first medically supervised injecting service in Kings Cross.

According to the ruling, a copy of which has been obtained by The Age, the Vatican is particularly anxious about the potential for scandal should a Catholic organisation involve itself in such drug harm-minimisation programs.

`One of the most important bad side effects to this proposed service is scandal, which the Sisters of Charity are aware of and would take serious measures to address,' the document notes.

`Nevertheless, precisely because of the extreme proximity of the cooperation of a Catholic institution in a serious evil, some people will still be scandalised; it will seem to them to be formal cooperation.'

The document concedes that the medially supervised injecting service is not a case of `explicit or implicit' formal cooperation in evil, but insists that it is `beyond question' that it does involve `some degree of material cooperation in the evil of drug abuse'.

While cooperation in evil may not be formal, this does not mean that it is `morally neutral', and it is therefore `in itself undesirable' and should be avoided.

`The harm minimised through this service is accidental to the act of injecting illicit drugs (such as infection), but not that which is essential and necessarily connected to the evil of drug abuse: the loss of the status as free and responsible moral agents, proper to man, and the progressive destruction of life and health,' the document concludes.

The Sydney trial, scheduled to begin this year, is a clinical experiment with an 18-month lifespan. Plans for similar trials in Melbourne appear to be doomed, with the Liberal Party using its Legislative Council majority to block the government's proposal.

Sister Annette Cunliffe, Congregational Leader of the Sisters of Charity, said she was `pleased to note that there is no disagreement in moral principle' between the sisters and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, although there were `differences in emphasis and a different final conclusion'.

Meanwhile, the Uniting Church is overseeing renovation work on Sydney's supervised injecting room site.

A reply . . .

Catholics and Heroin Tony Trimingham

Parents of young people who die from heroin overdoses have three burdens to carry. Firstly, they face the most unnatural grief of having their children pre-decease them. Then they suffer the knowledge that these deaths were preventable - nobody need ever die from heroin injection. My son's post-mortem showed that he was totally healthy with not a thing wrong with any of his internal organs.

We also suffer the stigma of knowing that they die as criminals in the eyes of the law and most of our society.

With the latest edict from the Vatican, we now find another burden being imposed - that of `cooperating with grave evil'. Presumably this means that my son, a confirmed Catholic, died in a state of sin. It also means that those parents fighting to keep their loved ones alive by encouraging safe use, clean needles and supervision are also guilty of sin.

Jesus was a man who was totally in touch with the social problems of his time. He did not condemn or issue edicts and his work was with the marginalised. His church is showing, once again, how out of touch it is with his teachings and in particular, the drugs issue.