The Future Is Being Manufactured (EWTN pt. 2)
Discussing what Catholics need to know about biotech on “At Home with Jim and Joy”
In my last post, I shared my expanded answers for the first episode of “At Home with Jim and Joy,” which you can watch here.
Today, I am sharing further thoughts on part two. If you’d like to watch the replay, it is available here:
Below are my expanded answers with links and citations included.
What Catholics Need to Know about Biotechnologies
1. You write about biotechnologies in your newsletter, Choosing Human, and interview a wide variety of guests on these topics on your podcast Brave New Us.
Why biotechnologies? Why is this an important topic for Catholics?
Catholics and all Christians need to say on top of these emerging technologies and get ahead of the conversation. For so long, abortion has been enshrined in American culture. We can and should praise God for the Dobbs Decision, but we still have so much work to do especially around changing the culture and changing conscience. We will always have to live with the knowledge of the staggering number of abortions that have taken place in the last 50 years.
We need to be informed and stay of top of the ongoing medical research because the dehumanization inherent to many of these technologies is just going to skyrocket. Christians need to be informed, education, equipped for dialogue and forming legislation around the research and implementation of these procedures.
These technologies are also a back door to evangelization. They bring up the question of who we are as human beings and why we exist in ways that invite people to think about questions of meaning that they might otherwise not consider. Those topics are a great way to introduce them to the timeless wisdom of the Church, and if we can capitalize on that curiosity, I believe we will gain more souls for Christ.
2. What are some of the technologies you’re keeping your eye on?
Not all of the technologies on the horizon are unilaterally bad. There are some, but a lot of them are ambiguous. They belong to that neutral category of tools that could be used for great good or great evil. Genetic editing is one of these. They put a 13-year-old girl with end-stage leukemia into remission using CRISPR gene editing, which is just incredible. We need to celebrate that. That is exactly the kind of therapeutic use that St. Pope John Paul II lauded during his pontificate when of course it was theoretical. We are there now.
At the same time, we spoke in the last episode about the pronatalist eugenics startups in Silicon Valley that are seeking or will seek to use genetic editing to design future generations, and some are even making the argument that natural conception will be considered unethical, that the genetic makeup of our children is too important to leave to chance. So genetic editing is a big one.
I’m also keeping my eye on neurotech: these brain implants that potentially allow the lame to walk, the dumb to speak, the blind to see, the deaf to hear. That would be amazing. I can’t imagine having my senses stolen from me, but to have communication restored, relationship restored—that is not something we should trivialize or put a stop to merely out of fear of other potential uses. Still, putting brain-computer interfaces into people’s minds could very well go deeply wrong, especially as researchers and corporations begin to develop and market other use cases for this that might invade people’s minds for profit.
There are always lots of brave new world type things going on in the world of reproduction. Artificial wombs—as far fetched as they sound—are among the least bizarre developments. I’ll briefly list some examples:
3-parent children, whose mitochondrial DNA has been replaced in an effort to avoid genetic disease. That is still illegal here but has been done several times in the UK.
Postmortem conception: using sperm of deceased men to fertilize the eggs of widows has been done multiple times here in New York and in Europe.
So-called “synthetic embryos” made by manipulating stem cells into cells that self-combine into a blastocyst. They’ve even implanted these into monkey uteruses to see if they can get them to grow. Not human ones yet thankfully.
Human-pig chimeras, “bodyoids” and “mini-brains” are these sort of part human bodies made from stem cells for experimentation.
They just used a human cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer to fertilize a human embryo using an egg made out of skin cells, a technique that could theoretically lead to an embryos becoming the genetic product of two males. They have used other techniques (at least in mice) to create an embryo that was the progeny of two males.
Much of this is what C.S. Lewis predicted in The Abolition of Man: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
3. These can seem a little far-fetched or removed. Aside from simply abstaining from illicit treatments, what can we as everyday Catholics do in the face of this avalanche of technologies that are threatening to reshape humanity as we know it?
The tagline on my website reads: “Prayerful homes, faithful futures.” Fathers, take your families to church. Lead them in prayer. Pray the family rosary. We know from you taking your children to Mass is the number one predictor of their continued faith life into adulthood. Mothers, Titus 2 instructs us to become oikourous, “guardians of the home.” Satan wants your territory. We need to be on guard. Phones are already a biotechnology, effecting our brains, nervous systems, reward pathways. We don’t need a brain implant for this; it is already happening at a neurochemical level. Devices steal our attention and presence. The only place we can encounter God and one other is in the present moment. So we need to be on guard.
Second, we can listen to the experts on the Brave New Us podcast to be informed. Stay updated by subscribing to Choosing Human. Share these resources. We need to be shouting from the rooftops on these issues.
Third, read fiction. C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength, depicts the spiritual battle that we are in when we see these sorts of dystopian projects encroaching on our reality. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is more relevant than ever. 100 years later, we see that he was incredibly prophetic. For teens, series like The Hunger Games, Uglies, Feed (Shout out to Catholic author O McCarthy and her middle grade dystopian novel Reach!)—these can shape our imagination so that we have a glimpse of how a certain technology might unfold in the future. Fiction has a way of forming us by getting past preconceived notions and making the stakes come alive. It can penetrate our defenses (which is why I loved using Lewis’s Screwtape format as I wrote The Bellbind Letters).
No one can do everything. We were not made to. But everyone can do something.
4. How do you teach your kids about these topics?
My kids are a little young currently to dive into the specifics of these technologies, but it is never too early to start forming them. We are instructing them in the teachings of Church, giving them a Catholic imagination steeped in truth and goodness and beauty. We are immersing them in the witness of the saints. We try to give them a solid foundation in prayer and Scripture. Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. Again, fiction that is appropriate to their developmental level to form their taste for what is good, true, and beautiful about human life.
We can’t anticipate everything that’s to come. But we can give them timeless wisdom that forms their foundation for every age, and help them develop the virtue of prudence that they will need to apply it.
5. What can you say to those of us who find this all a little overwhelming?
It is overwhelming. This wave of biotechnologies and change breaking over us can feel really heavy and dark. When we are distracted by those waves, we need to fix our eyes on Jesus. The task before us is impossible for us alone, but that isn’t what He is asking of us. He is asking us, like Peter, to do the impossible, to walk across these waves—but not by our own power. We do this by keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus. Without Him, we will sink. But remember: we were made for such a time as this. This is our fiat. This is the work. We are the Church Militant; this is our battle. The Church Triumphant is praying and interceding as we do. They had their own battlefield; the present is ours.
I have a lot of grandmothers at conferences and things pick up my book and they will put it down and say, “This isn’t for me. My time is over,” (I think because it deals largely with the reproductive years). But that is a lie from the Enemy. He wants us to think there is nothing we can do, because then the fight is over before it even starts. Even if “all you can do” is pray—that is the single most important job we have as Christians is prayer. All the cloistered saints and hermits throughout history—prayer was their vocation. This is not a small thing.
My husband’s grandmother in her final years couldn’t “do” much of anything. We would have dinner there once a week. We’d get takeout and just be together. Her presence, her acceptance, the joy she took in our kids—she was home to us. When you are baptized, you are anointed. There is no such thing as a Christian without a call. We might look at ourselves and say, “I am not enough,” and that’s right. He makes us enough. He supplies the grace. All He needs is our “yes.”
If this reflection stirred your curiosity, please share it so others can join the journey. Together, we’re learning how to live our faith thoughtfully and uphold the dignity of every person in an age of advancing technology.
Find more at www.snstephenson.com or on my podcast, Brave New Us.
Thank you for sharing about this. You got me pondering and honestly with a deep need of praying for our future as a society. Not that I wasn’t praying before, but these “new technologies” can truly change the way people will turn around and look at us Catholics. Even more so than how it’s happening right now.