The Church and the Cosmos
In 1633, the Catholic Church—under the authority of Pope Urban VIII—brought Galileo Galilei before the Roman Inquisition. His offense was not political or personal. It was scientific. He had written, based on careful astronomical observation, that the Earth revolved around the sun. This simple, demonstrable truth contradicted Church teaching. And for that, he was threatened with torture.
The Church’s position was not only false—it was dogmatically false. It claimed divine authority for a view of the cosmos that was, in fact, wrong. The Bible, the theologians, the popes—on this matter, as on so many others—were not simply misguided. They were incompetent. Worse, they used the machinery of fear and punishment to enforce a lie.
Rather than face torture and death, Galileo did what I consider to be the heroic thing: he knelt before the Inquisition and recanted. He was sentenced to house arrest for life. His work was banned—but he kept his life.
He knew that his science had identified something true about the universe. And he knew that his tormentors not only preached a false doctrine but that they practiced superstition—a superstition based upon and enforced by savagery.
Not to worry—by 1992, as the Church was engulfed in one of the most grotesque sex abuse scandals and coverups in human history—it admitted, at long last, that yes, maybe Galileo had a point. Even after 359 years, the Church still couldn’t bring itself to simply tell the truth.
The Galileo affair, in the Church’s own words, was a “tragic mutual misunderstanding”—as if Galileo had somehow contributed to his own persecution. To this day, the Catholic Church has never acknowledged the fundamental truth: Galileo was right, and it tried to destroy him for it.
That should have been the end of this unimaginably corrupt institution’s credibility on questions of science or technology. It wasn’t. It isn’t.
Galileo knelt before the Church, and his life was spared. Legend has it that as he rose, he muttered under his breath: E pur si muove—And yet it moves. I choose to believe the legend. The Church, through its inquisitors, insisted that the Earth—immobile and at the center of the universe—could not move.
And yet it moves.
A Pattern of Suppression
Galileo lived. Others weren’t so lucky.
- Giordano Bruno, who expanded on Copernican ideas and envisioned an infinite universe filled with countless worlds, was burned at the stake.
- Andreas Vesalius, the father of modern anatomy, was threatened with execution for the crime of dissecting human corpses.
- Edward Jenner, who developed the first smallpox vaccine—a medical achievement that has likely saved more human lives than all the sacraments combined—faced theological resistance. Some Church officials denounced the vaccine as “the mark of the beast.”
- Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was officially condemned and banned. Even Pope John Paul II, who conceded that evolution was “more than a hypothesis,” stopped short of affirming its truth. To this day, the Catholic Church has not accepted the full reality of evolution.
These are not isolated mistakes. They are part of a centuries-long pattern—a demonstration of the Catholic Church’s profound ignorance and its reflexive hostility toward advances in human knowledge, scientific understanding, and the technologies that sustain happy, healthy, meaningful lives.
Fear of Progress’s Hostility to Healing
The Catholic Church’s opposition to technological and scientific advancement isn’t some brief, regrettable episode—it’s a sustained tradition. For centuries, it resisted the use of anesthesia during surgery, arguing that pain was part of God’s design. When chloroform was introduced for women in labor, some clergy denounced it as interfering with the biblical curse of Eve.
The Church objected to lightning rods, on the grounds that they presumed to shield buildings from the wrath of God. Blood transfusions were condemned as unnatural. Organ transplantation raised theological alarms about identity and the soul. In vitro fertilization gets all the headlines now, but even something as mundane as left-handedness was once viewed with suspicion. So was eyeglass use, in certain quarters, as circumventing divine intent.
Modern objections are more philosophical but no less paranoid. The Church has denounced artificial intelligence, transhumanism, cryonics, and life extension research because they unsettle the brutal theological fiction that suffering ennobles, death dignifies, and technological autonomy corrupts.
Nowhere is this clearer—or more grotesque—than in its opposition to end-of-life planning. The Church has fought tooth and nail against Living Wills, as if the simple act of putting one’s wishes in writing—refusing, say, to be kept alive by a machine after irreversible brain damage—constitutes a moral affront to God Himself. They would rather a person linger indefinitely in a vegetative limbo than grant families or patients the dignity of a decision—and closure.
The institution that once condemned public sewer systems as encouraging immodesty now tells the dying they have no right to say enough. And still insists it has something to teach the modern world about human dignity.
Human dignity. As if.
The Elevation of Superstition—Still
It’s not just medieval Popes and long-dead inquisitors. The Church’s reflexive hostility to science and technology lives on in some of its most thoughtful modern defenders. Writers like Liz Wolfe and Madeleine Kearns—both of whom I read and admire—still retreat, reflexively, to the superstitions and prohibitions of Catholic doctrine whenever modern medicine threatens the boundaries of Church teaching. Their religiosity, which so often feels beside the point, comes roaring to the fore, out of place, contextless.
Both women are mothers. Both, in their writing, have celebrated the joys of motherhood and the value of family. And yet both oppose the medical advances that have made motherhood possible for millions of women and hold that promise for millions more.
Kearns has written candidly about her own fertility struggles, choosing NaPro Technology over IVF—not because it worked better, but because the Church approved it. In the same breath, she dismisses IVF—the most successful reproductive technology in human history—as morally suspect and medically “false.” It’s a breathtaking contradiction: gratitude for one’s child coupled with contempt for the method that brings others that same happiness.
Presumably, both women will vaccinate their children for smallpox—grateful for a technology the Church once condemned as heretical. Presumably, their children will attend schools where the heliocentric model is taught as an obvious fact—despite the Church's centuries-long battle against it, and its refusal, even now, to admit it destroyed Galileo for being right.
This is the problem. You can’t build a modern, liberal, democratic society on the foundations of reason and then carve out an exception for an ancient superstition whenever it feels threatened.
Mitochondrial Mutations and Maternal Inheritance
Every cell in the human body contains mitochondria—microscopic organelles often described as the “power plants” of the cell. They generate ATP, the molecule that fuels virtually all biological activity. What makes mitochondria unique is that they contain their own DNA, separate from the nuclear DNA inherited from both parents. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is inherited exclusively from the mother, which means any mutations present in her mitochondria are passed directly to her children—regardless of the father’s genetic contribution.
Some mitochondrial mutations are harmless, but others are devastating. Mutations in mtDNA can impair energy production at the cellular level, leading to a wide range of diseases that affect the body’s most energy-demanding organs: the brain, heart, muscles, and pancreas. These disorders—such as Leigh syndrome, MELAS, and MERRF—can cause early-onset seizures, cognitive impairment, muscle wasting, blindness, heart failure, and death. Many are progressive and fatal in childhood. There are no cures.
The Dilemma for Women Who Carry These Mutations
For decades, women with known mitochondrial mutations have faced an impossible dilemma. If they want to have children, their options are painfully limited. They can conceive naturally, knowing they may be passing on a severe and untreatable disease. They can pursue egg donation, but at the cost of any biological connection to their child. They can choose adoption, which may fulfill the desire to raise a child, but not the longing to conceive, carry, and genetically connect. Or they can forgo motherhood entirely—choosing instead a life of celibacy—another false virtue of Catholicism.
Until recently, there was no way to eliminate the risk—only to roll the dice, change the dream, or walk away entirely.
The Miracle of MRT
Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy (MRT) is a stunning achievement—a true biomedical miracle. For the first time in history, women with inherited mitochondrial DNA mutations have the ability to conceive healthy, genetically related children without passing on devastating disease. What was once an impossible choice—risk the life and health of your child, or forgo biological motherhood altogether—has become, quite suddenly, a preventable tragedy.
The science behind MRT is as elegant as it is revolutionary. Because mitochondrial DNA is passed down only through the mother, scientists have developed a way to replace the faulty mitochondria in a mother’s egg with healthy mitochondria from a donor. This is done before or at the time of fertilization, using one of two techniques—maternal spindle transfer(before fertilization) or pronuclear transfer (shortly after). In both cases, the nuclear DNA from the intended parents is preserved. The only thing replaced is the broken cellular engine.
The result is a child with nuclear DNA from mom and dad, and healthy mitochondria from a donor—what some call a “three-parent baby,” though that phrase is more sensational than accurate. The donor contributes no traits, no personality, no identity. Only function. Only health. Only life.
MRT is new, yes—but no longer theoretical. In 2016, the first baby conceived using MRT was born to a woman who carried genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal neurological disorder. The child was healthy. Since then, MRT has been refined and used in a handful of clinical settings under controlled conditions. It is not yet widely available, but it has moved from lab bench to delivery room. The future is no longer speculative. It’s here.
And it promises something extraordinary: The chance to stop, once and for all, the transmission of cruel and untreatable disease.
And Yet It Opposes
The Catholic Church is, of course, out of its mind. What else can you say about an institution that looks at a scientific breakthrough capable of preventing the suffering and death of children—and condemns it?
Mitochondrial Replacement Therapy allows women who carry these mutations to have healthy, genetically related children without passing on the diseases that once made motherhood a kind of moral gamble. That should be a cause for celebration. But the Church is unmoved. In a 2015 statement, the Pontifical Academy for Life declared that such interventions “represent a threat to the dignity of the human person,” and warned that this technique opens the door to “genetic engineering” and “manipulation.” The fact that the “manipulation” in question prevents a child from being born with a brain disorder that guarantees an early death seems not to trouble them.
Writers like Liz Wolfe and Madeleine Kearns have echoed this line. Wolfe has warned that society should be wary of “humans playing God,” and Kearns, in her broader writing on reproductive ethics, routinely affirms the Church’s claim that such technologies violate human dignity. I don’t question the sincerity of their views. But what could possibly be moral about a doctrine that insists that a woman either bear a child destined to suffer—or to bear no child at all—when a safe, effective alternative exists.
The Catholic Church has no scientific authority on these matters. None.
Throughout its history, the Church has been not only wrong on questions of science and medicine—it has been catastrophically, consistently, willfully wrong. And not just in error, but in defiance. Time and again, when faced with discoveries that offered relief, healing, or human flourishing, it chose—knowingly—suffering, misery, and premature death instead.
It opposed dissection and anatomical study, calling it desecration. It condemned the use of anesthesia in childbirth as an affront to divine punishment. It railed against smallpox inoculation as a blasphemous attempt to thwart God’s will. It delayed acceptance of evolution for over a century and still treats it like a theological inconvenience. The telescope, the lightning rod, the printing press—all viewed, at one point, as dangerous or immoral. Vaccines, blood transfusions, organ transplants, pain relief, end-of-life autonomy: if it saved lives, relieved suffering, or shifted moral authority away from clerical hands, the Church fought it.
And when the truth could no longer be denied, it never led. It never apologized. It mumbled about mystery, wrapped itself in euphemism, and moved quietly on to the next line it would draw in the sand.
This is the institution that now claims moral clarity on reproductive medicine? The one that burned Giordano Bruno alive, silenced Galileo, and buried its own role in the largest child sex abuse scandal in modern history? The record speaks for itself. And what it says, loudly and without ambiguity, is that the Catholic Church has no business whatsoever dictating the boundaries of science, medicine, or moral progress.
Truth is Not a Dogma
It was, Saint Augustine who suggested that the study of the natural world, of the empirical sciences, was an attempt to know the mind of God and was, therefore, sinful.
In Augustine’s view, it is better to contemplate Scripture than to map the stars. Better to kneel than to get up, get out and investigate. Curious minds weren’t to be admired. They were to be condemned—or burned at the stake.
That sentiment—distrust of observation, suspicion of inquiry, fear of human understanding—has never left the Church. The impulse is always the same: truth must come from doctrine, not from data. If it can be discovered through a telescope, a microscope, or a gene sequencer, it must be treated with caution—especially if it calls into question the Church’s power to declare what is good, or true, or human.
Let’s face it: this is all about sex.
To the Catholic Church, sex is not a joy or a connection or even a choice—it’s a duty. And that duty is singular: to produce children. Sex, in this view, is inseparable from reproduction. That’s why the Church opposes contraception, IVF, MRT, and virtually every other medical advancement that allows people to separate pleasure from procreation, autonomy from doctrine. It’s not about science. It never was. It’s about control—of bodies, of families, of desire.
This is absurd. Sex is fun. Sex is good. And when freed from the burden of unwanted pregnancy or doctrinal shame, people should have more of it. Sex is not opposed to life—it’s one of life’s great affirmations. But the Church’s long-standing taboo around sex—its suspicion, its fear, its moral policing—is perhaps the worst of its many anti-life legacies. And it’s a legacy embraced, regrettably, by writers like Liz Wolfe and Madeleine Kearns, who carry its banner into the modern world as if it still deserves our deference.
It doesn’t. It deserves our repudiation. Our disgust. Anyone who loves life—truly, joyfully, freely—should say so.