Our Politics Must Arise From a Counter-Cultural Christianity, by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture, Feb 21, 2025

Vice President Vance offered an impressive profession of faith at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC on February 20th. At the same time, he is a key part of President Donald Trump’s push to increase access to in vitro fertilization. You would think that after sparring with Pope Francis over the concept of ordo amoris (properly ordered love), Vance could do a better job of sorting out his moral priorities. (For a further discussion of ordo amoris, see Phil Lawler’s post, The ‘ordo amoris’ and the bottom line.)

In vitro fertilization¹ is a laboratory process of creating a human embryo by using male sperm to fertilize female ova completely independently of the marital act. The marital act is by both nature and grace ordered to procreation through the marital embrace of husband and wife. Children are to be conceived, born and raised in familial love. The purpose and meaning of the marital act is a mutual spousal self-giving that begins in love and develops through the nurturing of sons and daughters, in families characterized by a fuller form of this same initial sacrificial love. In contrast, the process of in vitro fertilization bypasses the marital act, divorces procreation from love in favor of selective “design criteria”, reduces everything to a technological process, and leads to freezing, experimentation and murder for the untold millions of human persons “conceived” by this process who are never implanted in a womb. …

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