Ignacio Carrasco de Paula

Styles of Ignacio Carrasco de Paula
Reference style	The Most Reverend
Spoken style	Your Excellency
Religious style	Monsignor
Posthumous style	none

Ignacio Carrasco de Paula (born 25 October 1937) is the current president of the Pontifical Academy for Life since his appointment by Pope Benedict XVI on 30 June 2010.

Carrasco de Paula was born in Barcelona, Spain. He was ordained a priest for the Personal Prelature of Opus Dei on 8 August 1966 at the age of 28. He was director of the Bioethics Institute of the University of the Sacred Heart in Rome and is a member of the ethics committee for experimentation clinic at the Gemelli Policlinic of Rome. He began to work in the academy in 1994, when it was established by John Paul II. Cardinal Fiorenzo Angelini called him and asked me to assist as a consultor of the department.

He served as chancellor of the Pontifical Academy for Life from 3 January 2005 until his appointment as president of the Academy in June 2010 after Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella as President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation on the same day.

He was appointed Titular Bishop of Thapsus on 15 September 2010 and received episcopal ordination on 9 October. Ordained in the same cermoney were Enrico dal Covolo, S.D.B. rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, Archbishop Giorgio Lingua and Archbishop Joseph William Tobin, C.SS.R.

In October 2010 Bishop Carrasco de Paula criticised a decision to award the Nobel Prize for Medicine to IVF pioneer Robert Edwards, a process that brought parenthood to infertile couples. Bishop Carrasco de Paula said that "I find the choice of Robert Edwards completely out of order. Without Edwards, there would not be a market on which millions of ovocytes are sold ... and there would not be a large number of freezers filled with embryos in the world," he told the ANSA news agency. "In the best of cases they are transferred into a uterus, but most probably they will end up abandoned or dead, which is a problem for which the new Nobel Prize winner is responsible."

In August 2011 Bishop Carrasco de Paula said, “The reaction to the news of becoming a mother should return to being what it has always been, a reaction of joy” that leads us to say “congratulations.” He added that the response to a mother should not be “I'm so sorry,' like we say to people who get sick.” He added that the focus in 2011 has been on three areas: post-abortion trauma, umbilical cord banks and treatments for infertility. Regarding post-abortion trauma, he said it is necessary that the condition be “defined as well as whether or not there is a cure.”

On 8 May 2012 Bishop Carrasco de Paula acknowledged that an April 2012 letter, criticising “some pro-life activists” who objected to aspects of a planned Vatican conference on stem cells, “contained unfortunate phrasing which, if misunderstood, could have offended the sensibilities of some persons.” In the letter to academy members, he told them that the offending words were not meant “to show any disrespect, and certainly not to those with whom we have been collaborating closely and gratefully for years in favour of human life and of its defense.” His message came four days after a separate letter addressed to the bishop was made public, in which academy member Professor Josef Seifert sharply criticised the organization's recent decisions about holding a conference in February 2012 on infertility, in which the pontifical academy played a non-organising role. The event drew criticism within the academy, for hosting speakers who appeared to endorse techniques and methods condemned by the Church.