The Charles E. Rice Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, O. Carter Snead is an internationally recognized expert in the field of law and bioethics and the author of What It Means to be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics. Snead has worked on these issues for more than two decades, including for President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics. Since 2016, he has served as a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life — the principal advisory body for bioethics — and for 12 years served as the director of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

Snead has had more than 10 private meetings with Pope Francis and considers the pontiff an inspiration in his scholarship, teaching and public engagement. Most recently, Snead shared with him a copy of the Spanish translation of his book.

The de Nicola Center also has greatly benefited from an ongoing relationship with the pope.

“During my service as director of the center, the Holy Father sent notes of support and congratulations both for our 2014 Fall Conference and for the 2017 Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal award,” Snead said. “For the past decade, every year an undergraduate Sorin Fellow of the center has served as an intern at the Pontifical Academy for Life and has had the opportunity to meet the Holy Father in private audience. In 2018, de Nicola Center Sorin Fellows were able to attend the Synod on Young People, which included an audience with Pope Francis. And in 2016 during the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy, the de Nicola Center hosted a conference at the Vatican entitled ‘Disability and the Face of Mercy,’ co-sponsored with the Pontifical Council for the New Evangelization and held at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This event included a private audience with the Holy Father.”

In Snead’s field of public bioethics — the governance of science, medicine and biotechnology in the name of ethical goods — Pope Francis has been an unswerving and powerful voice for the weakest and most vulnerable, he said.

“He has been a prophetic voice against dehumanizing biotechnologies, reminding us that such innovations must be harnessed only to serve the health, wholeness and flourishing of the human family,” Snead said. “He has never wavered in his defense of every human being from conception to natural death and has spoken out consistently and resolutely against the injustice of life-destroying practices such as abortion, embryo research, assisted suicide and euthanasia.

“At the same time, he has expressed unconditional love, support and mercy for mothers and families facing difficult and desperate circumstances, bearing witness to the core principle at the heart of a culture of life, namely, that everyone counts, everyone matters, everyone possesses inalienable dignity and infinite worth, no matter how small, weak, dependent, poor or despised.”

Snead said the pope’s warnings about the “throwaway culture” apply with equal force to the domain of public bioethics and said Pope Francis has consistently and coherently shown how an abiding concern for the poor, for people at the peripheries and even for the environment itself naturally and necessarily includes care for those at the margins of life, including the unborn, people with disabilities and the dying.

“We cannot pick and choose among these goods but are bound to pursue them all and leave no one behind,” Snead said. “This coherent and integrated vision of self-emptying love and care for all has been a gift to the Church and much-needed lesson to all of us in these times of polarization.”

Contact: O. Carter Snead, osnead@nd.edu

Originally published by Shannon Roddel at news.nd.edu on April 21, 2025.