One-Way Ticket

My devout Catholic friend sat across the table and sighed. She’d recently had a serious disagreement with her daughter, a disagreement that would be impossible to patch up.

The daughter, married and living in California, was attempting in vitro fertilization, thus far without success. My Catholic friend had told her daughter, gently but firmly, that she would “pray for the souls of the other 13”.

I then learned that “in vitro” involves the creation of many sperm-egg conceptions -- embryos -- in this case a total of 14. They are frozen 3 days after conception, when they consist of about 8 cells each, and the unused ones are eventually destroyed.

As the Catholic Church sees it, not only does human life begin at conception; but so does the soul. No reincarnation here -- this is the very creation of an eternal being, quite a feat for upright-walking mammals, whether done the old-fashioned way, or “within the glass” -- the meaning of the Latin “in vitro“.

It struck me that the 13 souls were “innocents”, obviously. Therefore I wondered -- why would they need prayers? Surely they had a one-way ticket to Heaven. They “win the game”, it seemed to me, and I expressed this to my friend in those words, not facetiously, but in a genuine attempt to see the bright side.

An EXTREMELY bright side, in the simple mindset of my Catholic boyhood . Back then, it seemed to me that the whole idea was to save your soul, go to Heaven, avoid Hell, minimize one’s “time” in Purgatory, basically by living morally. A few minutes of recent Googling indicated that the Church has not altered these ideas. If you die with Mortal Sin on your soul, or perhaps “Chronic Mortal Sin”, you still go to The Other Place -- forever. I would hope the Church would not alter their policy on such an ultra-important concept, just to make things easier for people "nowadays".

We’re talking Eternity here, the contemplation of which, by definition, is pretty much impossible, and one winds up very impressed with how brief a human lifetime really is, with ultimately no difference between 90 years and 90 seconds.

So wouldn’t a one-way ticket to Heaven be a great thing? What’s a few seconds of suffering, or an early demise, compared to Eternal Happiness? A believer should HOPE for a well-timed (i.e. “sin-less”) departure from this life, say for instance killed immediately after he steps out of the confessional. The murderer would be doing his victim a priceless favor. Stretching the logic a bit, you could posit that the murderer could then go to confession, get absolved, and hopefully get similarly dispatched to the Pearly Gates.

OK OK, this reasoning quickly starts to look ridiculous when viewed from other angles. Most folks agree that taking someone’s life is wrong, for a number of reasons, regardless of the Afterlife Factor. Any ideas to the contrary are barely arguable, and the world would be considerably more dangerous if people embraced them.

Our discussion of “IVF” ended pretty abruptly. The subject was already upsetting to my devout Catholic friend, and my remarks were certainly no help. She didn’t say it, but she probably thought me a simpleton in serious need of Theological study. Which I just might pursue. But I came away from this chat with a new appreciation of “separation of Church and State”, as specified in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers insisted on it, thank God.