debate

The Memory of Fatherhood

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

Maybe it was just a providential coincidence that the announcement of the birth of the first cloned human baby was made during the Christmas season. (At this writing, no proof has been offered to back up the claim, and the birth of a second baby has been announced.) Whether these claims are true or not, the celebration of Christmas allows us to grasp the horror of human cloning as an attempt to erase from human experience the memory of the Father.

The Baby born on Christmas had no biological human father. The human experience of fatherhood was transmitted to Jesus through Joseph’s care. St Joseph, of course, received the experience of fatherhood from his own father; all the way back to the Origin “from which all fatherhood in heaven and on earth come.” Joseph’s fatherly care for Jesus translated, into His human experience, something of the relation that as Eternal Son He has with the Father, allowing Him to use the term “Father” to disclose the ultimate secret of the Mystery we call God. Thus, human fatherhood, sustained and nourished by the “memory” of the Mystery, became a vehicle for the Revelation of that Mystery as Father.

The cloned baby (whose name, Eve, points us back to the Origin ) is the first human being other than Jesus to have no biological father. Of course, one hopes that a generous man will someday embrace her with a human fatherly love that will communicate something of the experience of the Eternal Father. Indeed, in many cases it is not the biological father who does this. But in her case there will be something radically different. The transmission of the memory of the Mystery of Father to her will have a wound inflicted on it, the result of a designed human effort to destroy the memory of fatherhood that links her to the common Origin of humanity.

In a recent article in France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, geneticist Axel Kahn claims that the biological or adopting “father” of a non-cloned child is someone whose love has to embrace someone who is not the necessary fruit of his will, and who therefore faces him as fully other, as mystery. A cloned child cannot confront his would-be father as mystery, since he or she would have been totally determined by his “narcissistic” desires. He would genetically lack, so to speak, the memory of fatherhood.

In Pope John Paul II’s play, The Radiation of Fatherhood, a man (Adam) tries to respond to his adopted daughter’s complaint that he has not totally given himself to her as a father. He is terrified by what this means. “I could not bear fatherhood. I could not be equal to it,” he says. “What had been a gift became a burden to me. I threw off fatherhood like a burden.” At the biological level, fatherhood was not such a burden. It is a matter of genetics or legal arrangements. The burden is experienced when the son or daughter confronts him as “another,” demanding his fatherly gift of self. Adam cries out to God: “You could have left me in the sphere of fertility (I would somehow have reconciled myself to nature) without placing me in the depths of a fatherhood to which I am unequal! Why did you plant it in the soil of my soul? Was it not enough that You had it in Yourself?” This is the cry of the one who wishes to extinguish the memory of the Mystery-Father by reducing human fatherhood to the “sphere of fertility.” Cloning embodies this desperation, this rebellion against fatherhood.

In the play, it is the character known as Woman and Mother who can rescue Adam. The reference is clearly to the Virgin Mary. Her motherhood of Christ makes possible his fatherhood, because through Christ Adam becomes an adopted son of the Heavenly Father. Mary’s virginal conception of Christ, the mystery of the Incarnation, rescues human fatherhood and incarnates forever the memory of fatherhood in our history. Where Christ is present, it can never be erased.

That is why the announcement of the birth of a cloned human baby during Christmas was so dramatic. It set before us the depths of our misery, the wound of our alienation from creation, at exactly the same time we were celebrating our redemption through the fruit of Mary’s maternal virginity.

It will be from our experience of this Mystery, the Mystery of Mary’s Virginal Motherhood, that we will derive the wisdom and strength to come to the rescue of Adam’s loneliness today.