Commentary: Fatherless Children, the Raelians, and the British Parliament

Single women and lesbian partners will soon stand in the legal same place as fathers in English law.

LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - The news out of England is discouraging.

Single women and lesbian partners will soon stand in the legal same place as fathers with the deletion of four words from British legislation called "The Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill".

The Bill had language in it which had been applied at fertility clinics to encourage two- parent, opposite sex families. Putting aside all of the vitally important moral issues of anyone ever even using a "fertility" clinic, and the horrid truth of the killing of the "spare" "embryos" which are "manufactured" in the IVF process, I write this commentary to address just how far down the road of the culture of death and use we have actually walked in the West.

The need for a father was always understood to be integral to helping fashion the most stable environment within which to raise a healthy and happy child. With this modification in British law, that understanding has now been eliminated. The language will become generic and neuter, essentially making any configuration of persons a "supportive" family.

The "Brave New World" of "choice" is destroying the family and innocent children will be the ones who suffer the most.

As someone who has spent my entire life dedicated to building a new culture of life and civilization of love, I read this news out of England with great alarm. I thought back to an event only a few years ago. An event that most folks thought was bizarre and irrelevant back then, the claims of a seemingly strange sect called the Raelians.

On the day after Christmas, 2003, the world watched in shock as "Brigitte" an alleged "Bishop" of the "Raelian" movement, announced that "Clonaid", a for profit outreach of the same movement, had "successfully" cloned a baby girl whom they had named "Eve".

On that day I was reminded of a phrase used by an editorialist I read years ago. This writer warned of a coming new "Clone Age."

Amidst the cries of "hoax" and the justified international uproar against the "ethics' of this claim there was a bigger struggle unfolding. It was, and still is, a struggle for the heart, mind and soul of the human race in the Third Millennium.

In years past I would have thought that this obscure, esoteric sect was only one of many examples of the timeless truth of the maxim of the great Catholic writer, G.K. Chesterton, "When men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!"

I had read about these people, their philosophy, their claims, their plans and their founder. I wrote back then, and I am convinced of it now, that the ideas behind their actions point to the greatest struggle in the continuing battle for the future and the soul of human civilization, especially if we do not open our eyes.

The alleged woman "Bishop" who made the claim was a follower of Claude Vorhilon. This Pied Piper of the U.F.O. jet set claimed to have been given both a revelation and a new name by a visiting space alien named "Yahweh Elohim" (two of the names given to God in the Hebrew Scriptures) on a volcano in 1973. In that encounter he claimed to have been given a mission to prepare this manufactured race for the return of their masters in 2035.

In their "new" teaching the manufacturers of the human race were not "gods" at all but simply a master race of aliens. The technology they used was now being revealed and by harnessing it we could become like them. We could create our own future and "make" new humans.

The group had an open hatred for Catholics in particular. They regularly disturbed Catholic schools in Canada by handing out condoms to children in order that they could begin to adopt the way of the Raelian definition of "freedom".

Their hatred of Catholic Christianity was actually quite understandable. If, as I do, one believes that Catholic faith is the fullness of Christianity and that what the Catholic Church teaches about human sexuality, dignity and destiny are true, it is the opposite of what they taught.

No wonder the Catholic Church was their great enemy! No wonder it is also the great enemy of the growing move toward building a new culture of death and use.

The Raelians had a new method of "creation" of a future enlightened "human" race, cloning, which was the scientific "manufacture" of new beings with no real mother or father, no family. In their account of the beginnings of our race, they maintained that we were "manufactured" by a race of aliens - not created out of love by a loving God.

The continuation of creation would not come about through the mutual gift of self, a free expression and exchange of committed love between a married man and a woman who give themselves to the other, always open to life, as is the claim of the Jewish and Christian Revelation.

Both the propagation and the perpetuation of this race were to be brought about through manufacture. Humans could be re-made by genetic manipulation. In a sense, in a profane reverse of the Christian creed, they claimed that we are made and not begotten.

The two parent marriage bound family was no longer necessary.

The recent news out of the British Parliament shows that at least the philosophical underpinnings of the Raelians have actually become a framework for legislation which could destroy the family.

Behind the bizarre lifestyle and science fiction/ pseudo-religious claims of the Raelians was a mistaken notion that human sexuality was simply a matter of manufacturing life which could be replaced through technology and that the family was an outdated institution.

In a culture that has turned persons into objects, separated sexual acts from conjugal love and sought to "liberate" itself from both nature and the God who created it , the elimination of any recognition of the value of a father is one more expression of the "culture of death" and the utilitarian narcissism of the age.

The technology the Raelians claimed to have perfected may actually soon exist. It could be used to open the proverbial "Pandora's box" of our own demise if we do not act quickly. We are now "manufacturing" human persons and we are jettisoning the relational framework within which they can truly flourish, the two parent marriage bound family.

We live in an age of scientism and utilitarianism wherein we are losing the sense of any respect for human dignity, a holy and healthy view of human sexuality, the sanctity of the human body and the primacy of relationships within the family. We have also lost our sense of the true deeper meaning to human existence and the higher destiny of every human person.

The Raelian ideas were not really all that unusual in a world where the dignity of the sexual act has been completely undermined by the separation of the "unitive" and the "procreative" dimensions of the conjugal act.

Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical letter, "On Human Life" (Humanae Vitae), whose promulgation we just commemorated, warned of the trajectory that would follow the acceptance of abortion, contraception and the rejection of the fundamental Christian teaching concerning human life and dignity.

This post "Humanae Vitae" world has devolved into accepting a view of the body as an object to be used. The fractured relationships that always accompany the breakdown of the family, have led to the real loss of the beauty of faithful married love as the only proper environment for sexual activity.

It has always been the Christian claim that the complete gift of self sexually belongs within the marriage relationship. It is in the "marriage bed", that the couple participates in the full beauty of the nuptial mystery.

Marriage is where their love unites and, in their gift of self to the other, they participate in a wonderful way in the nuptial mystery of God's love. It is that marital embrace where pro-creation is to occur, where mere mortals are invited to participate with the God who created us in the continuing work of His creation.

It is in that sacred relationship that the wonderful mystery of the fruit of love, a child, is, in a sense "begotten not made" when conceived. There also, in the beauty and stability of a family, is where a child learns to live and to love in the first society, the domestic church.

Rather than being 'antiquated", these are the truths that have liberated barbarians throughout the ages and they are the only path to a future of authentic freedom.

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