There is justifiably much concern about the latest innovation in the “life sciences”, the biological sciences dealing with human life. The latest innovation announced last week is motherless babies.
It’s being envisaged that quite soon two men may be able to beget a child together without involving a female partner in the conception. The conceiving cells could come from the skin grafts of two males – the skin cells being genetically “tricked” into acting like sperm and egg fusion. Thus a new life is conceived without the biological input of the female egg. Once conceived the embryo would need to be implanted in a surrogate (or hired) woman’s womb for development.
The experiment has been performed successfully with mice, and what is achieved with laboratory animals can very often be transferred to the human species. Ethical? Surely most moral philosophers would say it is wrong to deliberately bring a child into the world who has no biological mother. Even leave aside the ethics, the emotional and psychological impact would surely be anguishing.
And yet, ghastly and inadvisable though the prospect is, in a perverse way it does show that the conception of human life is so enormously valued that the boffins’ greatest desire is to replicate it. If science is going to such lengths to demonstrate that life can be procreated artificially, that obliterates the argument – still put forward by the likes of Planned Parenthood – that human life in the womb is merely “waste foetal matter”.
It cannot surely be ethical that a child should be conceived via skin grafts of two men (or, possibly in the future, skin grafts of two females – that experiment has not yet been done). And yet all the energy now being dedicated to such “life sciences” highlights the miracle of human life from conception, as evidenced by everyday natural procreation.
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In my schooldays, we collected money for “the black babies”. It might sound patronising now, but the purpose was to evangelise and educate children in Africa. You put threepence in a box, and a little statuette of Blessed (now Saint) Martin de Porres nodded his thanks.
Now, many decades later, it is not unusual in Ireland to attend a country Mass and observe that the priest celebrating it is African. It almost seems that Africans are returning the spiritual investment and ministering to the Irish people who once put coins in a tiny African mission box.
And this reverse spiritual service can bring added rewards. I attended a Mass in the midlands of Ireland last weekend where the priest was, indeed, an African. When he stood up to give the homily, he started by singing – in a faultless tenor voice – two verses of Amazing Grace. It was tremendously uplifting, especially being so well performed.
As Irish Catholics are often very weak at singing in church – the Irish associate singing with the profane rather than the sacred – it brought a new element of harmony to the service.
I almost wish every priest would begin his Sunday homily with a couple of versions of a tuneful hymn. But then I suppose not every cleric has perfect pitch and is a melodious tenor …
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It’s an oft-cited quotation: when told of the pope’s concerns about world problems, Joseph Stalin famously replied, with contempt: “And how many divisions has the Pope?”
An interesting version of these sentiments appears in the fascinating The Maisky Diaries – journals kept by the USSR’s ambassador to Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. On June 19, 1935, Maisky reported that Pierre Laval, then French foreign minister, had a meeting with Stalin, and “referring in the course of their conversation to the power and influence of the Catholic Church, L asked S whether reconciliation could not be sought between the USSR and the pope, perhaps by concluding a pact with the Vatican …
“S smiled and said, ‘A pact? A pact with the pope? No, that won’t happen! We conclude pacts only with those who have armies, and the Roman pope, as far as I know, does not have an army.’ ”
The Soviet dictator had not been told about “soft power”, of which we are now much more aware: that power and influence can be exerted without guns. And often is.
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