Dilexi Te: Moving the Goalposts

Delixi Te is a study in how to mis-represent reality so that you can force it into the cherry-picked version of the Gospel you've decided to preach today. Pope Leo XIV has inadvertently highlighted exactly why it is increasingly difficult to take Catholic teaching seriously. Not only does he fundamentally alter the teaching, he points out why terms must be continuously redefined in order to keep the Church relevant.

13. Looking beyond the data — which is sometimes “interpreted” to convince us that the situation of the poor is not so serious — the overall reality is quite evident: “Some economic rules have proved effective for growth, but not for integral human development. Wealth has increased, but together with inequality, with the result that ‘new forms of poverty are emerging.’ The claim that the modern world has reduced poverty is made by measuring poverty with criteria from the past that do not correspond to present-day realities. [emphasis added] In other times, for example, lack of access to electric energy was not considered a sign of poverty, nor was it a source of hardship. Poverty must always be understood and gauged in the context of the actual opportunities available in each concrete historical period.” [10]

~Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te

TLDR: The Church must continuously redefine the meaning of the word "poverty" so as to make sure someone, somewhere, is always in poverty. 

Poverty Is Not Socially Defined, Part I

Why the constant redefinition? Because the Pope doesn't understand basic economics. Lack of access to energy is not a "sign" of poverty, it is the cause of poverty. Cheap energy is the gateway to wealth. If you do not have access to cheap energy, you will never be wealthy. Period. Mic drop. 

Leo, if you want to get rid of poverty - if you seriously want that - then you should be fighting tooth and nail to get small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) into every impoverished country in the world.

Nuclear power is now a corporal work of mercy. But Leo is as the babes, he knows nothing of how poverty actually works or how it is actually remediated.

Poverty Is Not Socially Defined, Part II

Because Leo doesn't undertand this, he doesn't realize that his assertion - poverty is socially defined - is fundamentally absurd. The most severe form of poverty, the deprivation of life itself, is the baseline for poverty. That baseline perdures regardless of century or social culture. A person needs a basic amount of food (2100 calories, plus vitamin and mineral micronutrients) and water to live, period. That minimum amount of food and water is an  unchanging constant around the globe and across all the endless centuries. Food, water, life - this isn't hard. It isn't complicated. The criteria match across past, present and future.

So, let us use that baseline as the starting point for comparison. Life expectancy in the 1st century AD Middle East was generally low, averaging between 20 and 35 years at birth. 90% of the population died before they turned 55 or 60. Today, life expectancy in the same geographic region of the world is 77 to 80. 

Wow. That doesn't help Leo's case at all.

Well, let's take a different tack. Let's look at how much labor it takes to avoid starvation. A first-century Middle Eastern peasant engaged in subsistence farming, that is, engaged in enough labor to avoid starving to death, would need to work approximately 8 hours a day, at least 250 days per year: roughly 2000 hours per year. Today, to achieve that same goal (i.e., not starving to death), the Middle Eastern laborer would have to put in roughly 22 hours per week, or 1144 hours per year. 

Huh. 

Apparently, poverty ain't what it used to be. (link)

And that forms the basis for Leo's dilemma. He MUST insist that poverty is socially defined, because if he doesn't, he would have to admit the truth: by first century standards, no one in the world today is poor. Even the poorest person today works only half as hard for survival-level rations. Worse, there is no more smallpox, rinderpest or polio. Leprosy is essentially unknown and easily treated when it does pop up. Malnutrition and famine are now created by malevolent or inept politicians, not by plague, locust or bad weather. We have become so wealthy around the globe, that poverty is now really just something politicians choose to inflict on populations by enforcing inept governmental policies.

Jesus was wrong about the mustard seed being "the smallest of all seeds." Similarly, if we judged physical poverty according to the standards of the world Jesus lived and preached in, then Jesus was also wrong about the poor always being with us. The poor, by His definition, are literally gone, disappeared, poof! no longer available for scrutiny. We don't have any Jesus-level poor with us anywhere and we haven't had for centuries. Obviously, that is decidedly not an acceptable conclusion.  

Works of Mercy vs. Work of Politicians

Keep in mind, India and China together have a population greater than the rest of the world combined, so when the Indian and Chinese politicians substantially eliminated extreme poverty in their own nations, that was a near-miraculous change. Literally billions of people no longer live on the edge of starvation (link to maps).

But, this enormous, earth-shattering leap goes completely unremarked in Leo's exhortation. Instead, we get this:

27. For this reason, works of mercy are recommended as a sign of the authenticity of worship,

Sure. But what are these works of mercy? "Literally half of the work of the Church [the corporal works of mercy] is either already irrelevant or on the verge of being rendered irrelevant." Given that the Chinese atheist citizens and the pagan Hindus were the ones who wiped out extreme poverty for billions of their own fellow citizens, does that mean the people who participate in Hindu pagan rituals or Communist party jamborees are engaged in authentic worship? After all, how can bringing billions of people out of poverty not be a work of mercy?

Ignoring Other Causes of Poverty

But it gets worse. Seriously worse. In first-world populations, poverty is overwhelmingly generated by single mothers: women who have chosen to divorce their husbands (80% of the time) or who never bothered to marry their baby-daddy. [1,2,3] And just as politicians are now the major creators of general poverty, this single-mother poverty has largely been created by the Church itself. After all, as Pope Leo inadvertently points out, the Church has actively worked to destroy the very families She claims to desire:

71. Many female congregations were protagonists of this pedagogical revolution. Founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ursulines, the Sisters of the Company of Mary Our Lady, the Maestre Pie and many others, stepped into the spaces where the state was absent. They created schools in small villages, suburbs and working-class neighborhoods. In particular, the education of girls became a priority. [emphasis added, barely]

Apparently, the Popes do not realize that educating women destroys total fertility rates and family formation. [cf., for instance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] The very thing the Pope celebrates in his first apostolic exhortation, female education, delays the formation, or destroys the stability, of the family, the "original cell of social life" (CCC 2207), thereby creating the very poverty that very same Pope excoriates. 

Higher female education correlates with later marriage. Educated women have higher divorce rates. Educated women tend to have fewer children. Why? Well, because educated women improve child health/education outcomes. Fewer children die in infancy, so infant mortality falls. High infant mortality encourages high fertility rates, while low infant mortality removes the woman's felt need to have multiple children. [1, 2, 3, 4]

TLDR: if you want lots of large families with low divorce rates, you should not be educating women. These are two contradictory goals.**

And this problem is not limited to first-world countries. Oddly enough, though the UN recognizes single mothers as a cause of global poverty, stating:

Single mothers are particularly vulnerable in this respect and are over-represented in poverty statistics.

the Pope says nothing. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest poverty rate in the world, with 19 of the 20 poorest countries found in that region. It is essentially the last major area in the world that still suffers from extreme poverty. According to UNICEF (2022), and Gallup,about 32% of the children in sub-Saharan Africa live with a single mother, the highest rate in the world. The children of Africa's single mothers are 1.7–1.8 times more likely to experience stunting and 1.3 to 2.6 times more likely to die before the reach five years of age. Between 25% and 35% of Sub-Saharan poverty incidence is correlated with single-mother household structures. 

Yet, despite the lived testimony of literally every nation on earth concerning this major source of poverty, Pope Leo is completely silent on the subject of single-mother families.  Not even a hint of this can be found in his apostolic exhortation. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Instead, Pope Leo moves on from these early logical contradictions and an absolutely stunning silence about the problem of single motherhood, and turns instead to spouting outright fabrications: 

90. The bishops stated forcefully that the Church, to be fully faithful to her vocation, must not only share the condition of the poor, but also stand at their side and work actively for their integral development. Faced with a situation of worsening poverty in Latin America, [emphasis added] the Puebla Conference confirmed the Medellín decision in favor of a frank and prophetic option for the poor and described structures of injustice as a “social sin.”

The Puebla Conference was held in 1979, over 45 years ago. While poverty may have been worsening in 1979, during a world-wide economic crisis, that crisis is also long-since past. Invoking it now, as if it were a real present danger, is simply a bald-faced lie. This is how poverty has changed since 1980. Maybe the Pope hasn't heard.

Now, you might argue that the Pope was just bringing forward an older example of a "structure of sin" created by injustice. But, for that to be true, he would have to demonstrate that the 1979 global economic crisis was intentional. That case is not made. 1979 was not a good year for anyone. Exactly what "structure of sin" did the Pope or the bishops claim to have discovered? We never find out.

Nor does he mention how this whole social "structure" thing works. If those same people were later brought out of poverty, did they emerge due to a "structure of virtue"? If so, none of the bishops or Popes mention it. Which is strange, given the advances made against global poverty in the last 50 years. If poverty has decreased, doesn't that speak to increasing "structures of virtue" around the world? Shouldn't Pope Leo be lauding the good where it can be found? 

You would think there would be room to praise the economic decisions and systems which have cut poverty to the bone. Instead, we get this: 

92. We must continue, then, to denounce the “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and to recognize that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap [emphasis added] separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation...

95. As it is, “the current model, with its emphasis on success and self-reliance, does not appear to favor an investment in efforts to help the slow, the weak or the less talented to find opportunities in life.” [100]

One might ask if educating women necessarily teaches women an "emphasis on success and self-reliance", but let us pass by this question and address the new point Pope Leo has raised. The Pope complains of a growing gap between the rich and the poor. He seems  completely oblivious to the growing gap between his "poverty porn" fantasy and the actual world his increasingly un-impoverished people inhabit: 

What caused this extraordinary drop in the number of people experiencing extreme poverty? Hint: it wasn't the Catholic Church. Yet the Pope seems not only completely oblivious to this obliteration of extreme poverty, he actively denies the processes we know do help the poor:

114.  At times, pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty.

Notice: the papal claim lacks any footnote supporting his bald assertion. But how could he support his claim? What Pope Leo asserts is simply false. Poverty has dropped dramatically, that is simply beyond question. It was and is capitalism, and the legal structures which favor the protection of private property, which lifted the poor from their poverty. World Bank data estimates that land titling programs in Latin America increased household incomes by 20-50% for participants. [cf., 1, 2, 3, 4] : 

"Without land tenure systems that work, economies risk missing the foundation for sustainable growth, threatening the livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable the most. It is simply not possible to end poverty and boost shared prosperity without making serious progress on land and property rights."

And keep in mind, not only is the Pope denying lived reality, he is arguably and actively contradicting Scripture, the Divine Word itself. After all, even the Apostles recognized the right to private property:

While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not under your control? Why is it that you have conceived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God. (Acts 5:4) 

Notice, Peter did not take the line Leo takes. Peter did not chastise Ananias and Sapphira for having private property. Peter did not chastise either of them for refusing to share their private property with the community's poor. 

Instead, Peter, the first Pope, expressly recognized  and affirmed their right to do with their own property whatever they chose. At no point did he say that they sinned by refusing to share their wealth. Rather, Peter insisted their sin lay in pretense: they shared only a small portion of their wealth while pretending to have given everything. Their sin was in lying, not in refusing to give what they had to the poor.

How is it that neither Popes Leo nor Francis, nor even St. John Chrysostom, references this very telling passage when they discuss the plight of the poor and the duties of the wealthy?  

Now, is poverty a problem? Certainly. Roughly 9% of the world still lives in extreme poverty, defined as a significant risk of starving to death. We must continue to work to end this. But this extreme poverty is largely the result of legal structures which do not protect private property, economies which are not built around capitalism, women who refuse to stay married to the father of their children, and government officials who do not enforce laws on private ownership, thus preventing the poor from protecting anything that they may manage to accumulate. Where private property laws are strong, poverty disappears. Where laws are weak, or weakly enforced, poverty grows. The Pope has no memory of these things. To whom can he appeal for succor?

Of all the saints who understand the need to protect the poor, and the importance of staying married to her husband, certainly the Blessed Virgin figures most prominently. Why then, does this Pope, alone among all the popes in the last several centuries, refrain from referencing the Blessed Virgin Mary in his closing panegyric on the poor? 

You will search in vain through the apostolic exhortations and encyclicals of the previous several centuries for a papal document that closes without referencing or invoking the Blessed Virgin. The only such document that comes to mind is Mit Brennende Sorge. Pope Leo has now added his very first apostolic exhortation to this very short list of papal documents with BVM-free closings.

Which is sad. After all, doesn't that reflect in him a certain.... shall we say... poverty?

**And the goals are contradictory in part because the Church absolutely refuses to teach 1 Timothy 2:15. When discussing marriage, poverty and parents, Christianity calls on men to die for their wives. Men mostly do. Christianity says "a woman will be saved by the bearing of children", but Christ apparently does not demand that women die for their husbands or children, so women mostly don't. And absolutely nobody invokes 1 Timothy 2:15. Both the Council of Trent's Catechism and the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church studiously avoid mentioning that women are saved through the bearing of children (although both catechisms take pains to point out to men that men need to die). Similarly, John Paul II's badly mis-named "Theology of the Body" discusses Ephesians 5:25 extensively while remaining totally, conspicuously, even suspiciously silent on 1 Timothy 2:15. You would think a theology of the body would somehow find time to mention how Scripture says a human body producing another human body has bearing on women's eternal salvation and everlasting communion with God, but you would be wrong.

Well, what about Mulieris Dignitatem, on the Role and Dignity of Women? No.... no... try again...

How about the Second Vatican Council, especially its section on the Laity? Ahhh.... no, we're fresh out.

Absolutely no one... and I mean NO ONE... since Augustine and Chrysostom talks about 1 Timothy 2:15.

But the Catholic Church is the finest Scripture shop in the district.

 

Why Global Fertility Rates Have Fallen

The "demographic transition" has been observed for two centuries, but the reasons behind it are not clear. Simply put, as a society becomes wealthy due to industrialization and economic development, fertility rates fall. The trend was first noticed over two centuries ago. It has replicated in every country around the world since then. As countries become rich, they stop having children

The problem is, no one knows precisely why this happens. There are some clear correlations: a drop in infant mortality rates and a rise in female education certainly cause fertility to drop. If you can make sure pre-teen and teenage women attend school, fertility rates drop. If you can make sure children do not die in their first year of life, fertility rates also drop.

People who try to explain this don't understand how long this has been going on. They talk about the introduction of the Pill, the 1960s Sexual Revolution, or the laws on car seats. But none of those things explain the two-century drop in America's fertility rate.

This theory does. It has to do with vision. As my son pointed out, technology is just the material instantiation of ideas. As the number of ideas you interact with proliferates (via tech and education), the number of possible futures available to you proliferates.

In order to become parents, a man and a woman have to share a common vision for the future, a vision that includes common agreement on when to have children. But, the more ideas, the more possibilities, the more technology, available to both the man and the woman, the less likely the visions of both will be common. If they don't start with the common vision, they have to discuss, which takes time. They may never actually agree, so they never both choose that single vision: children.

If women aren't educated, they are exposed to ideas primarily through their parents and their husband, thus the vision the woman has for the future is much more likely to be in common with her husband's vision. Female education destroys fertility not just because every minute spent in the classroom is not a minute spent in the bedroom. Education is the beginning of a divorce from the common social vision.

In this sense, female education is a variation on homeschooling. Parents homeschool children to make sure the children share a vision that is common with their parents. Because of homeschooling, the family has a common vision.

If you hand your children, or your spouse, to other people to be educated, they won't have your vision. People who attend college together have common instructors, thus more likely to get married, more likely to have children. People who have common religion have common instructor and a common vision.

Notice the Baby Boom after World War II. World War I saw only 4.5% of the male population under arms, and the nation at war for only nineteen months.

In contrast, World War II saw 12.1% of the male population under arms, the entire nation intensively trained together in a common vision for over five years. The Baby Boom was the result of that common, national vision. But the 1956 Orphans Educational Assistance Act destroyed the common vision. This act expanded eligibility for college education to include education benefits for spouses and widows of veterans. Not coincidentally, the Baby Boom peaked in 1960, just four years later. It was essentially over by 1963. College education of women had shattered the common national vision, destroyed family formation and total fertility rates.

The presence or absence of a common vision explains everything.... the steadily falling fertility from 1800 through now, the Baby Boom, forged by WW II into a common vision for most Americans, which fell apart as female education and even more technology, even more ideas, were introduced, shattering the common vision into a thousand pieces.

Global fertility decline was kicked off almost entirely by normative and cultural processes, not strictly economic ones. The effect of income on fertility is not even remotely consistent across cultures or even across times. When whole societies become richer, they do not necessarily have fewer children.

Without a vision, the people perish (Proverbs 29:18). If nations wish to restore their total fertility rates, they have to find a way to rebuild a common national vision, a self-perception shared across a significant section of society. Given internet access and technological advances, that is nearly an impossible ask.

Charlie Kirk Was Stupid

"When people stop talking, that's when you get violence, that's when civil war happens."

Charlie Kirk was not only stupid, he was dangerously wrong.

He suffered under the delusion, a feminist delusion, that if we all just sat around a campfire and talked things out, then everything would work out and violence could be avoided.

This is nonsense. Once you have made your position absolutely crystal clear, once your opposition has absolutely no illusions about where you stand, then to the extent that your position contravenes his on a position of central importance, he has no choice. One of you will be fired, be removed. One of you will die. 

The Socratic dialogues is the story of a man who spent a lot of time trying to be as crystal clear as possible. The state executed him. President John Kennedy publicly pleaded, quoting Isaiah, "Come, let us reason together!" Isaiah was sawn in half, Kennedy was shot in the head. Charlie Kirk insisted on repeating his arguments over and over until his positions were crystal clear. He wouldn't stop, so he was shot. 

Poor communications permit compromise. The refusal to define terms, the willingness to engage in equivocations, allows your opponent wiggle room. As Sun Tzu says, "When you surround an army, leave an outlet free." Always give your enemy the means to escape, so he doesn't decide to die on his feet instead of on his knees. 

Crystal clear communications removes the enemy's ability to escape. Unclear communications allows the opponent to think he may have misunderstood, that perhaps you do share common ground and he can eventually bring you around to his way of thinking. But clarity... clarity is the death of this hope.

This is why bureaucracies engage in obfuscation. They are designed to make sure no one knows exactly what the government means or wants. Entire decades of foreign policy are built around deliberately refusing to clarify what America's position is on Taiwan or Korea. Israel won't say whether it does or doesn't have nukes. The examples could be easily multiplied.

This is the female mode of communication. Women are weaker than men, they will consistently lose in direct confrontations, so they obfuscate. They hint, they misdirect, they play mind games, redefine language, do whatever is necessary to avoid clarity, to give themselves wiggle room in front of a superior foe.

This is not the way men communicate. This is also why Ephesians commands men to die in the marriage. Women aren't capable of the direct, clear communications necessary to carry on a marriage. The Scriptures specifically deny that women are good at any of this. Women are described as honey tongued, smoother than oil, but more bitter than wormwood. According to Scripture, women are the source of infidelity and sin, not men.

According to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, the person closest to a task should bear the most responsibility and direction for that task. Men have headship precisely because Scripture sees men as closer to the absolute heart of marriage, of personal relationships, the master of communications and interpersonal connections. Women don't have headship in a marriage because women aren't very good at being married. Women are not at the heart of marriage.

The traditional three purposes of marriage are: 

1. improving the sanctity of the spouses, 
2. the procreation of children
3. remedy for concupiscence

But procreation, which is the specialty of women, is not at the heart of marriage. If it were, Josephite marriages could not be a real thing. Yet the Church teaches that Josephite marriage, which shuns all sexual intercourse, is actually superior to a procreative marriage. 

If women were really better than men at communications, personal relationships, or marriage itself, then women would have headship. Women don't have headship precisely because they aren't good at any of these things. Women initiate 80% of the divorces because in general, women are lousy at communications, lousy at interpersonal relations, lousy at marriage. That is Scripture. That is why Scripture says men must die in marriage, but women must only submit.

In Holy Orders, the parishioner is required to submit to the priest, the priest required to submit to the bishop. The grace of the sacrament means the bishop is better at carrying authority than the priest, the priest better than the lay person. Marriage is also an ordo. So, similarly, in the ordo of marriage, the grace of the sacrament makes the man better than the woman at all these things.

But now I am communicating Church doctrine far too clearly. Yet, the heart of the Christian message is simply this: 

The minute Charlie Kirk insisted on clearly communicating his position, clearly repeating his position, clearly removing all possible doubt about what his position might be, he had to die. 

If you teach your children that they can "talk it out" without resorting to violence, you are either lying to them, or you are teaching them how to lie. If they really, truly, talk it out, someone is going to die.

Heddy Lamar Did Not Invent Frequency Hopping

 I'm just a little tired of seeing this trope on various social media platforms.

Heddy was a beautiful women, she ran naked through the woods and was filmed doing it, which was the basis for her later success, but she really did not have a head for engineering. She mostly just stole stuff from the men around her and acted as a marketing girl. 

It is true that Lamarr and her unlikely partner, the radical modernist composer George Antheil, hold a patent for an important radio-transmission method that finds its way into several modern communications technologies, including Bluetooth. But it is equally true that their patent was hardly the first in this area. It is further true that the earliest operational systems employing this technique were created after World War II independently of their patent, and the essential idea can be traced back nearly to the birth of radio itself.

And more:

Now incontestable evidence shows that the U.S. Patent Office itself dismissed the idea that Lamarr and Antheil were first to propose frequency hopping. David R. Irvin, a patent agent and engineer with 44 patents to his credit, has examined the original documents related to the invention, which are preserved by the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History

And still more:

Abstract: Analysis of primary-source documents archived by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the U.S. Patent Office refutes the widely accepted legend that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil invented frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) communication.

Polytheism Guards Against Divorce

 According to Pew Research, Hindus have the highest rate of marriage and the lowest rate of divorce.

When the survey breaks down the various religious groups by marital status, the findings show that Hindus (78%) and Mormons (71%) are the most likely to be married. These two traditions, along with members of evangelical churches, also have the lowest rates of never-married members. Hindus also have the lowest divorce rate of any group; only 5% have been divorced.

So, apparently converting to Hinduism is a great way of assuring you have a long and happy marriage.

Also, if you want children, Christianity may not be the way to go. Again, Hinduism and Islam are apparently more "pro-life" than any Christian group.

The more ya' know, huh? 

Bacchanal and the Olympics

What does the Bacchanal have to do with the Olympics?

According to Livy, the Bacchanal was a murderous cultic instrument of conspiracy against the Roman state. Livy points out that seven thousand cult leaders and followers were arrested, and that most were executed. He considered the Bacchanalia scandal to be one of several indications of Rome's inexorable moral decay. The earliest version of the Bacchanalia was open to women only. The cult held particular appeal to those of uneducated and fickle mind (levitas animi), such as the young, plebeians, women and "men most like women". It was confined to the Italian peninsula.

The Olympics, on the other hand, were officially sponsored and recognized by all participating GREEK city-states with a universal peace treaty. Greek athletes modelled themselves on the physical competitions of the gods themselves. It was restricted to an all-male audience, and only the strong were permitted to compete and attend. The point of the games was to win prizes by displaying the highest ideals of masculine honor and courage.

In short, Bacchanal, a privately-funded Roman festival, has absolutely nothing to do with the Olympics, a multiple state-sponsored Panhellenic Greek festival.

Persons are Products and Always Have Been

The pro-life position is that human persons are not products, and should not be turned into a commodity. While that may be true in a theological sense, it has almost never been true in a practical sense. Humanity has commodified persons for all of history.

That's what slavery is, and slavery appeared in every culture on every continent for all of recorded history, universally.

Out of the entirety of history, there has been a period of only about a century when people were not commodifying other people. Between the English-American anti-slavery movement of the early 1800s through roughly the mid-1900s, cultures were forced to back away from slavery by European military fiat. During that same period, we were unable to widely implement abortion due to medical risks.

But that's all done with now. As Islam surges, slavery resurges, and as tech grows, abortion predominates. That golden century has passed. Persons are, again, products.

The Soul of the Matter: A Theological Problem

This is a problem for Catholic theology.

In 2002, Lydia Fairchild, a mother from Washington State, faced a baffling and distressing situation when DNA tests required for public assistance showed she was not the biological mother of her two children—despite having physically given birth to them. The results raised suspicion of fraud or surrogacy, and authorities even considered removing her children from her custody. When she gave birth to her third child in a hospital under supervision, the same outcome occurred: DNA tests again claimed she was not the mother.

Fairchild’s legal battle intensified, and she stood on the verge of losing her children based on genetic evidence alone. Her attorney, Alan Tindell, began researching unusual biological conditions and came across a similar case involving a woman named Karen Keegan. This led to the discovery that Lydia was a chimera—a person with two sets of DNA. In her case, it was caused by absorbing a fraternal twin in the womb.

A cervical DNA test finally matched her children's DNA, confirming her biological relationship to them. This critical breakthrough not only saved Lydia’s family but also raised important concerns about the reliability of DNA evidence in legal settings. Her case became a landmark example of how rare genetic conditions like chimerism can challenge long-standing scientific and legal assumptions.

Lydia absorbed her twin. The first and most obvious theological question: what happens to the soul infused at conception? 

Different reproductive tract vs somatic DNA raises the question of whose DNA she is transmitting when she has children. Is the different DNA considered hers by right of conquest, for having essentially eaten her twin in the womb? This is not an isolated problem. About 8% of fraternal twins could end up with blood chimerism. In the case of triplets, the chance for blood chimerism rises up to 21%. True tetragametic chimerism (such as Lydia's case) is believed to be rare, with only 100 documented cases in the medical literature, but it may be more common than once believed. It is possible that up to 10% of singleton births may have started as twin pregnancies.

Lydia's case is a less obvious form of the even more pressing problem presented by Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins who share a common torso and common reproductive tract. Abby Hensel, one of the conjoined twins, married Josh Bowling. Now, the only difference between Lydia Fairchild and the Hensels is the latter has two fully developed brains. But, as noted, the Hensels do share a common reproductive tract.

So, if it was licit for Lydia to conceive, carry and give birth to children that do not share her DNA, then why would it not be licit for the Hensels to have children, especially since Abby and Brittany have the same DNA? In what sense is the Hensels' marriage valid, given that the two were already conjoined into one body, so that both women are having sex with one man, but only one of those women is married to that man? Is the other woman always committing adultery? Or is Josh actually married to both women? 

But if the Hensel's marriage is invalid, then in what sense is Lydia Fairchild's marriage valid? Unlike the Hensels, Lydia's reproductive tract is actually someone else's body. Now, true, the other body belongs to someone who is not ensouled and alive, as far as we know, but her reproductive tract is certainly not "hers" in the same way her somatic cells are "hers", are they? If we argue that a baby in the womb is someone else's body because of DNA, then Lydia's reproductive tract is also someone else's body because of DNA. If we argue that her reproductive tract belongs to her, then the baby in the womb also belongs to her in very much the same way, and the somatic argument against abortion collapses.

But, if we try to keep the pro-life somatic argument alive, and insist her reproductive tract is not hers because of its different DNA, then is having sex and conceiving with Lydia a form of necrophilia? The organs are alive, but the soul that animates the DNA is not the original infused soul, again, as far as we know. When a person dies (that is, when a person's soul separates from the body), individual organs within the corpse can stay alive for hours or even days. This is what allows for organ transplant. If we argue that the soul of Lydia's twin has departed, then Lydia's body has just kept her deceased twin's body on "life support" for Lydia's entire life. Thus, a strong argument can be made that having sex with Lydia really is really just necrophilia with her dead twin. The Catholic Church does not permit necrophilia. 

So, can marriage with a true tetragametic chimera be valid? Under what circumstances? And how would you know that you married a chimera if no DNA testing has been done? Is that grounds for an annulment? 

The Catholic Church isn't equipped to deal with this. 

Silicon-Based Persons

Jimmy Akins is not the brightest bulb on the tree. He is of the opinion that AI cannot be a person, cannot be ensouled by God. He's got absolutely no theological reason to hold this position.

Remember when the fake Bayside apparition claimed IVF children had no immortal souls, because the IVF embryos were created outside the human body? Condemned by the Church.

Consider that sperm and egg cells can now be created by manipulating normal somatic cells. It's called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), and it works: 

"Japanese scientists describe how they've already perfected IVG in mice. The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They've even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups."

Would a human being created this way NOT have a soul? Obviously, that's absurd. Any human being created this way would have a soul.

The question is, would God create and infuse a soul, create a person, in something made of silicon instead of something made of carbon? There's nothing in Scripture that says He won't. And if we can manipulate carbon-based materials to create a new human life, then what's so holy and sacred about carbon?

Alien life forms are not beyond the ability of God to create, and we participate in God's creation of new human persons, so why would He deny us the ability to participate in the creation of silicon based persons? Perhaps we are meant to participate in the creation of every new person, human or alien, so God is just waiting for us to figure out how to build the silicon soma so that He can create and infuse the necessary rational soul. 

Akins is just making up shit because he needs clicks, and he's more likely to get clicks from stupid and ignorant people than he is from others, so he's playing to his audience.