Catholicism and Genetic Science from Acta Apolosticae, Pope Pius XII (1952)

Genetic testing, screening, genetic counselling, and gene patenting are emerging practices that are laying the groundwork for genetic therapies and, as such, they place enormous responsibilities on the shoulders of policy makers.

They are chiefly concerned about what ethical guidelines need exist to ensure how genetic “enhancements” are practiced. Forinstance, protocols have to be established concerning the disclosure of genetic information gathered through testing, which is particularly onerous,since possession of such information by insurance companies can resultin discrimination by employers or insurance companies themselves.

Thisbecomes more complex if, for instance, a child needs to be tested. If thetest is for a childhood disease, this is straightforward, but if the test is for a “late-onset” disease, Deane-Drummond suggests that it is just to disallow such tests to be conducted on children since disclosure (intentional or accidental) of the test results might result in discrimination against that child later in life.

Of course, such a policy is a curb on the freedom of that child and her parents in the meantime. This is coercive on the part of the state or the justice system if such a ruling is backed up by judicial rulingand depending on whether one has a positive or negative assessment ofthe role of the state in society, one’s tolerance for curbs on genetic testing will be affected.The role of virtues is particularly relevant for dealing with the arrivalof genetic information banks and the counseling and possible therapies for various conditions currently being researched and developed. For in-stance, Deane-Drummond sees prudence as a virtue that encourages stillness and silent contemplation over the “impulsive reaction to perceived threat.”

For families living with disabled children or devastated by genetic disease, many come to see the “face of wisdom” while others believe that “the virtue of wisdom is insufficient” so that “the virtue of charity comes into its own, for no family or individual is an island; and the task of Christian community is one of solidarity” (Deane-Drummond, 2005: 123).The themes of love and solidarity are prominent in the social teaching ofthe Catholic Church. Deane-Drummond’s recourse to such virtues as pro-viding approaches to issues in what is termed “genethics” can be seen asa characteristically Catholic response. Positing a virtue ethics for dealing with genetics is thus consistent to a large extent with the traditional nat-ural law framework for understanding moral issues, even though virtues by themselves are less constrictive on the range of possible alternatives available.

The other impact of genetic science is properly theological. Since Saint Augustine, the Catholic Church has held to a concept of original sin in which Adam’s personal choice to sin against God has affected all ofhumanity through a biological transmission of sin from generation to generation. The objective of the doctrine of original sin is to explain how it is possible that sin is, in the language of the Catechism of the Church“an offense against reason,truth, and right conscience.”It goes on to agree with Augustine that sin is a deprivation that is manifest in “an utterance,a deed, or a desire contrary to eternal law” (CCC, 1849). T

he dilemma for the Church is that God created the world as good yet sinfulness is pervasive. Sin is so pervasive that the twentieth-century theologian ReinholdNiebuhr has called it one of the most empirically verified facts of humanexistence. Based on Paul’s development of a contrast between Adam and Christ in Romans(chapters 5and8), the Christian tradition has understood redemption in Christ as healing the sin that passed down from Adam, aform of defect that even affects the rest of creation.The Christian Church was not predisposed toward this view universally from the beginning however. For example, Theodore of Mopsuestia, a third-century church father, believed that “it is only nature which can be inherited, not sin, which is the disobedience of the free and uncon-strained will” (Pelikan, 1971: 285). This disagreement over how Adam’s sin is transmitted to the rest of humanity has been the source of a number of related controversies, among which is a distinction between theEastern Orthodox and the Catholic Church on the identity of the hu-man imago dei.

For the Orthodox, the human person, body and soul is an icon, the image and likeness of God, not the soul alone, which is what they allege Augustine says (Ware, 1997:220). For Augustine, it seems that Adam’s sin casts a darker shadow owing to his own conception of the perfection and harmony in which Adam and Eve enjoyed in their originalbliss.Perhaps the tension between East and West is best characterized inlight of how one Orthodox theologian regards Adam:

“[he] fell, not from agreat height of knowledge and perfection,but from a state of undeveloped simplicity” (Ware, 1997:223).

To some extent, the “eastern” interpretationof original sin, which also involves no personal sense of inherited guilt forwhat Adam did, may be regarded as more evolutionary than “static.” Tosome extent then, this interpretation may be more conducive to science.Nevertheless, it is widely acknowledged that Augustine’s thought wasretrojected onto him by post-Reformation theologies that possessed a dimview of human potential while drawing inspiration from Augustine.Original sin is meant to be a doctrine that explains Adam’s (and Eve’s)sin as a form of disobedience that brought humanity out from an original state of holiness into a state of failure. Some contemporary theologians such as Lutheran Philip Hefner prefer to think of original sin as a discrep-ancy between the information arising from our genes and the demandsof our cultural and social contexts. Sinfulness, in Hefner’s view, is betterunderstood as finitude or learning by trial and error. Catholic theologianDenis Edwards, responding to the opposition between the Augustinian tradition and Hefner’s rejection of sinfulness, sees both finitude and sin-fulness as essential categories for understanding the human person. As he says:
"the discrepancy and fallibility described by Hefner are real, but they are not of themselves sin".

As Edwards emphasizes,it is important not to react to the overly simplistic Augustinian notion of genetic inheritance of sinfulness with equally simplistic concepts of human biology that would divorce genes from sinfulbehavior or simply redefine sin as the limited capacities of genes. Again, like Deane-Drummond, while Edwards is developing his own systematicand conceptual frameworks, his response to the problem of genetics in the context of original sin is both coherent with the tradition while being a revision ofthat framework inlight ofrecent scientific advances.In Edwards’revision of Augustine, through the genetic inheritance of the tendency to sin, or concupiscence, there is no simple cause and effect transmission, but rather an inheritance of ranges of possible behavior patterns that canbe improved upon or worsened, depending on the culturally influenced choices that mark a person’s life.