EWTN News portal reports on genetic experiments conducted at Columbia University, where researchers have edited the DNA of human embryos with “unprecedented accuracy.” The article presents the views of Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk, a bioethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, who rightly condemns these experiments as unethical. Yet the article itself, and the broader conciliar approach to bioethics it represents, fails to articulate the full gravity of the crime, the theological abomination it constitutes, and the systemic apostasy within the structures that permit and even celebrate such atrocities. The article treats a calculated program of creating and destroying human beings for eugenic purposes as a mere “ethical concern,” when in reality it is a manifestation of the culture of death that is the inevitable fruit of the post-conciliar abandonment of the Social Reign of Christ the King.
The Manufacture of Human Beings as “Raw Materials”
The facts presented in the article are damning in themselves, yet they are delivered with the cautious, bureaucratic language typical of an institution that has lost the supernatural sense of the faith. Columbia University researchers, led by Dieter Egli, have been conducting experiments on human embryos using a technique called base editing to “replace individual genetic letters in sequences of DNA.” The article notes that “the human embryos produced in these experiments were oftentimes intentionally sacrificed to obtain their embryonic stem cells, which were used for additional research.” Father Pacholczyk states plainly: “Creating humans for the purpose of destroying them is invariably unethical and should be illegal.”
This is an understatement of catastrophic proportions. What is being described is not merely an “unethical experiment” — it is the deliberate creation of human beings, made in the image and likeness of God, with the explicit intention of dismembering and killing them for scientific convenience. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that “the soul is infused at the moment of conception,” and from that instant, the being possesses full human dignity and an immortal soul destined for eternity. To create such a being “in glassware” — as Pacholczyk himself phrases it — for the purpose of using it as “raw materials for research and experimentation” is an act of ontological violence against the Creator Himself. It is a direct assault on the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill (Exodus 20:13).
The article further reveals that some embryos were obtained from parents who had “leftover children” from in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. The very phrase “leftover children” should horrify any person of sound mind. These are human beings — conceived not through the conjugal act of their parents in accordance with God’s law, but through a technological procedure that the Church has consistently condemned. Pope Pius XII, in his Address to the Italian Catholic Union of Midwives (October 29, 1951), declared that “the child is not an object to which one has a right, but a gift” and that “the human person must be respected as such from the moment of conception.” The conciliar sect, through its silence and its tacit acceptance of IVF, has opened the floodgates to the commodification of human life, and now we see the logical terminus: children created in laboratories, stored in freezers, and then handed over to scientists to be experimented upon and destroyed.
The Failure of Conciliar Bioethics: Condemning the Act While Legitimizing the System
Father Pacholczyk’s comments, while correct in their moral assessment of the specific experiments, are embedded within a framework that implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the very structures that make such experiments possible. He states: “The Church would allow for gene editing to fix genetic abnormalities, as long as the risks were very low for the embryonic patient, and heritable changes to the DNA of our species were not made.” This statement, while attempting to draw a moral line, actually concedes far too much. It suggests that the problem with the Columbia experiments is primarily one of risk assessment and methodology, rather than one of fundamental moral ontology.
The Church’s teaching is not that gene editing is permissible if the risks are “very low.” The Church’s teaching is that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral (Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 57 — though even this encyclical, issued by an antipope, is compromised by its conciliar context). The experiments described in the article do not merely involve “risk” to the embryo — they involve the certain and deliberate destruction of the embryo. There is no therapeutic intent directed toward the embryo as a patient. The embryo is not a patient; it is prey.
Moreover, Pacholczyk’s warning about Catholics’ acceptance of IVF — “Catholics seem to have largely missed the boat when it came to recognizing and articulating the moral unacceptability of creating children in test tubes” — is a devastating indictment of the conciliar establishment itself. It is precisely the structures occupying the Vatican, the “bishops” and “theologians” who have held sway since 1958, who have failed to teach, clearly and without ambiguity, that IVF is intrinsically evil. The 1987 document Donum Vitae, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under the heretic Ratzinger, condemned IVF in certain respects but left openings for confusion and dissent. The result is exactly what Pacholczyk describes: Catholics participating in IVF “at rates that probably don’t differ much from the general population.” This is the fruit of the conciliar revolution’s abandonment of the Church’s prophetic mission in favor of dialogue with the world.
The Primacy of God’s Law Over Scientific “Progress”
The article frames the debate in terms of “ethical concerns” and “risks” versus the potential to “help cure disease-causing mutations.” This framing itself is a capitulation to the modernist mentality condemned by Saint Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi Dominici gregis. The modernist treats faith and morals as subject to the progress of science, rather than the reverse. Saint Pius X condemned, in proposition 5 of Lamentabili, the error that “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason.” The entire edifice of “Catholic bioethics” as practiced in the conciliar structures is built upon precisely this modernist foundation: the assumption that the Church must adapt her moral teaching to accommodate scientific capabilities, rather than declaring absolutely and without compromise that God’s law is immutable and binds all men at all times.
Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (December 11, 1925), proclaimed with unmistakable clarity that “the Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men” and that “Christ possesses… dominion over all creatures, not by force but by essence and nature.” He declared that “rulers of states… must not refuse public veneration and obedience to the reigning Christ” and that “His royal dignity demands that all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles, both in the issuing of laws and in the administration of justice, as well as in the education and formation of youth.” The experiments at Columbia University are not merely the sins of individual researchers — they are the fruit of a society that has expelled Christ the King from its laws, its universities, and its public life. When the state permits and even funds the creation and destruction of human embryos, it acts in direct defiance of the royal authority of Jesus Christ. Non potestatis ubi non est Dei timor — there is no legitimate authority where there is no fear of God.
The Silence About the Eternal Destiny of the Victims
Perhaps the most grievous omission in the article — and in the conciliar approach to bioethics generally — is the near-total silence about the eternal destiny of the embryonic human beings who are being created and destroyed. The article speaks of “ethical concerns,” “vulnerability,” and “special protections,” but it does not dare to state the full theological reality: that each of these embryos, at the moment of conception, receives an immortal soul; that each is capable of receiving sanctifying grace through baptism; and that each, if destroyed without baptism, is deprived of the beatific vision for all eternity.
The Church has always taught, following the universal tradition of the Fathers, that children who die without baptism are excluded from the vision of God — not as a punishment for personal sin, but as a consequence of the original sin that adheres to human nature. Saint Augustine taught (De peccato originali, 3:12) that “the punishment of original sin is the loss of the beatific vision,” and the Fifth Council of Orange (529 AD) confirmed that “if anyone says that the loss of original sin is only the guilt and not the grace of the Holy Spirit, he is opposed to the Holy Spirit.” When scientists at Columbia University create human embryos and then “intentionally sacrifice” them, they are not merely committing an act of “unethical” research — they are consigning immortal souls to the limbo of children, depriving them of the supernatural end for which they were created. This is a crime of infinite gravity, and it should be named as such.
The article’s failure to address this dimension is symptomatic of the conciliar sect’s broader abandonment of the supernatural. As Saint Pius X warned in Pascendi, the modernist “desires to remain within the bounds of phenomena” and “rejects all that transcends experience.” The conciliar establishment, in its bioethical pronouncements, has reduced the murder of the innocent to a matter of “ethical guidelines” and “informed consent,” stripping it of its theological reality as an offense against God that cries out to Heaven for vengeance (Genesis 4:10: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth to me from the earth”).
The Complicity of the Conciliar Structures
The article’s reference to the “Pontifical Academy for Life” in a related article link is a grim reminder that the conciliar structures themselves are complicit in the culture of death. The Pontifical Academy for Life, under various “presidents,” has consistently issued documents that, while occasionally condemning specific abuses, operate within a framework that accepts the legitimacy of the post-conciliar order and its “dialogue” with secular science. The very existence of a “Pontifical Academy for Life” within an institution that has abandoned the fullness of the faith is an absurdity — a paramasonic structure that uses the language of life while operating within a system that has systematically undermined the conditions necessary for the protection of life.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The conciliar establishment has done precisely this — reconciling itself with the “progress” of genetic science, the “liberalism” of individual autonomy in reproductive choices, and the “modern civilization” that treats human beings as raw material for experimentation. The result is the Columbia University atrocity, and countless others like it, conducted with the tacit approval of a “Church” that has lost the courage to proclaim, with Pius XI, that “the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ” and that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Conclusion: The Only Remedy Is the Restoration of Christ the King
The experiments at Columbia University are not an aberration — they are the logical and inevitable consequence of a civilization that has rejected the Social Kingship of Christ. As long as the state does not recognize the authority of Jesus Christ over all its laws and institutions, as long as the “Church” continues to dialogue with the world rather than condemning it, and as long as Catholics remain ignorant of or indifferent to the fullness of the faith, such atrocities will continue and multiply.
The remedy is not better “bioethics” or more “informed consent” or stricter “regulations.” The remedy is the integral restoration of Catholic civilization, in which the laws of the state conform to the laws of God, in which the creation and destruction of human embryos is recognized as a crime of infinite gravity, and in which the Church, in her fullness and her authority, proclaims without compromise: Thou shalt not kill. Until that restoration comes — and it will come, for “in the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph” — the blood of the innocent will continue to cry out from the earth, and the scientists of this world will continue to play God, usurping His creative power only to use it for destruction. Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus — let justice be done, though the world perish.
Source:
Scientists unethically experiment on the unborn to improve gene editing techniques, bioethicist says (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 08.06.2026