THE ARTIFICIAL FAMILY

[NOTE: This article is an excerpt from “The Family’s Threat   to Utopia” by Solange Hertz.]

Keep in mind this article was written in 1994 when the United Nations declared that year the “Year of the Family.”

         This year of our Lord 1994 the United Nations has set aside as “The Year of the Family”, and here again, we have reason to believe that the family in question is not the traditional one, for it was referred to officially as “the smallest democracy at the heart of society “.  Last December U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali declared, “There is no single definition of the family nor any one model. We celebrate the family under all its social and cultural forms”.  A preparatory document stated, “The image of the ideal family varies considerably from one country to another as it does within one country. Family political policies should endeavor to avoid favoring either implicitly or explicitly one single ideal image of the family.”
        So much for God’s little trinity on earth.  In America in 1776 the forces of Utopia proclaimed a new order of the ages, designed to replace God’s government by one of those “social arrangements” Strobe Talbott called “artificial and temporary.”  With these now proliferating all over the world, why not artificial families?  As Leon Trotsky put it, “The family can’t be abolished it must be replaced. “  Soon any transitory association of individuals can be expected to qualify as a family under the law.  As one Catholic authority commented, ‘According to the document nothing prevents a homosexual couple from being considered as a family.  Even now homosexual couples, as individuals, are legally automatically permitted to adopt children.
        According to a couple of sociologists, the time has come to acknowledge that the traditional family is obsolete and can no longer justify its existence. “The family was once a state. “ they argue, “...sometimes a workshop. The family is still a hotel but it is fast losing this function...as it has already lost its pedagogical function.  The family is no longer a school hardly still a nursery.”  All the needs it might fulfill being now satisfied by outside society all its members should leave.”
        Until now biological necessity protected the family from total extinction, the state having no other way of producing citizens, but with the development of biogenetic, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and all the other techniques of human engineering, the family is being attacked not only at the theological root it shares with God in heaven, but even at the biological root it shares with the animals on earth.  The horrors of artificial Contraception are now matched by the horrors of artificial Conception. 
        Couples experiencing difficulty with natural procreation may routinely resort to medically assisted conception through implantation, a kind of biological adultery to which the doctor becomes an active third party.  As for those free and equal individuals eager to produce offspring “born ... of blood the will of the flesh and the will of man” (John 1: 13 ), the laboratory promised “designer children” hatched from genetically modified, frozen embryos to suit every taste. In an economy of artificial nations and artificial families, why not artificial people? Is the alchemist’s age-old dream of the man made homunculus about to come true?
        A curious detail occurs in St. Hildegarde of Bingen’s prophecies of the Antichrist. She says that his mother will be “an impious woman who from her infancy will have been initiated in profane sciences and all the artifices of the devil and that “she will conceive this son of perdition without knowing who is his father.”  It is possible the Antichrist will originate as an embryo produced in the laboratory with the help of Satan?  Could godless genetic research actually be ordered to some satanic pseudo-Incarnation?
        Whatever God permits, to dream of creating a new family in its own image is Utopian madness by definition, for it means manufacturing an entirely new order of reality.  By the very nature of God’s creation, the family poses the ultimate political threat to Utopia. As Benedict XV said, “As the family constitutes the foundation of the human race” to revitalize it would result not only in the correction of private morals, but in “the restoration of public and civil institutions,” Christ’s enemies know this.
        The family has little to fear from anarchy or chaos, in the course of which natural structures reassert themselves  automatically with a vengeance. What is reducing the family to its present straits is not confusion, but the calcu­lated cunning of those who will not acknowledge Jesus  Christ. They can reduce it to near extinction, but the gates  of hell will never prevail against it, for like the Church, the  family is of divine institution. Due proportion kept, even in the natural order it is one universal and apostolic. Where the Christian family is concerned, these marks are so evident that St. John Chrysostom actually called it the ecclessia, the Church in miniature. What affects the one affects the other, for they are one, and their enemies are the same.