THINGS TO COME: I’M NOT JESUS MOMMY

Well, there seems to be quite a few somewhat Christian themed movies coming out this Summer. There’s Priest on May 13 (Which reminds me, have I pooped on Legion this month?) and Suing The Devil on August 26, but before you can see them, you’ll have to make it through this…

Hey, at least they’re not opening it on Good Friday.

Here’s the official synopsis: The film centers around a human cloning project which takes a turn for the worse with only one cloned pregnancy making it to term, a boy named David. Seven years after David's birth, wars, famine and natural disasters of every kind plague the Earth. As Kimberly struggles to survive, her biggest challenge is raising her son. Strange occurrences surrounding the young boy are only becoming worse and more mysterious. Roger, the head researcher of the cloning project returns to reveal that David was cloned from DNA taken from the Shroud of Turin... from the blood of Christ.

Dom dom dommmmm!

Well, this is hardly the first Jesus cloning movie to come down the pike. Revelation (2001) has the clone being produced from blood taken from the nails used in the crucifixion. Of course, they couldn’t just clone Jesus, they also had to splice his cells together with some DNA from a really eeevil billionaire, thereby creating the antichrist. Oh, and the baby is given to the Vatican who presents it to the world as the second coming. Stupid Catholics.

Oh well, we’ll have to wait and see how the Church fares in this one. Of course, it looks like they’re cribbing notes about the end times from the book of Revelation, so it’s more likely the movie will crap all over Left Behind reading evangelicals if it goes the anti-religious route. But maybe it’ll surprise me and not take that well worn path. And really, there could actually be a benefit from all of these books and movies about cloning Jesus. Maybe they’ll finally convince all of the atheists out there that cloning is a bad idea.

The Church, of course, is against cloning no matter where the cells come from. For one thing, as Sr. Terese Auer points out, “The actual cloning process of dividing the embryo so as to produce a new human being is immoral because it opposes the dignity both of human procreation and of the conjugal union.” Any technique, the Catechism explains, which dissociates the sexual act from the procreative act “is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that "entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person."

And that kind of domination can only lead to trouble. The simple truth is, cloning would be just another step towards the commoditization of the human person. “A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift.” the Catechism reminds us. “The "supreme gift of marriage" is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged "right to a child" would lead. In this area, only the child possesses genuine rights: the right "to be the fruit of the specific act of the conjugal love of his parents," and "the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception."

It’d be great if I’m Not Jesus, Mommy managed to slip these issues into the narrative somehow, but I’m not holding my breath. At this point, I’d settle for just about any movie that didn’t depict Christians as raving lunatics. Well except for another one like Legion, which bypassed any depiction of Christians as nutballs and just made God into a homicidal maniac. I poop on Legion yet again.