Rael the Pope and the battle over cloning

“Wacky”, “offbeat”, “loopy” and looking like a “barber on Star Trek” are all ways a journalist described the Raelians and their spiritual leader Rael in a front page article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail. The story described the Raelian’s current pamphleting campaign at Quebec colleges and high schools encouraging Catholics to get “de-baptized”. While it’s tempting to simply discount and condemn this distinctive anti-Catholic proselytizing as absurd and offensive, there’s a more complex theological story at play, one with Canadian roots.

The immediate genesis of the current spiritual grudge match between Rael and the Holy Sea was set this past August when the Pope led Catholic World Youth Day events in Toronto. Which is why it’s no surprise that the Raelian’s have targeted the faith of Quebec students with their latest efforts.

As thousands of youthful pilgrims from around the globe descended on Toronto to see and hear the Pope lead World Youth Day celebrations, a few hundred Canadians and Americans gathered at UFOland, an hour-and-a-half drive north of Montreal, to commune with their spiritual leader Rael. The Raelians met in the world’s largest hay-bale structure as part of the sect’s annual North American symposium.

For several days, Canada hosted a new kind of two solitudes. And the dividing line between these two religious cultures is firmly drawn around one of the major scientific and ethical issues of the early 21st century: Cloning.

John Paul II was here to preach about his “human project”, one rooted in an application of Catholic values to daily life. At the same time, Rael was talking about another kind of people project—human cloning. And he wasn’t just talking. As the Pope landed at Pearson airport, a Raelian associate in South Korea announced that a woman in that country was two months pregnant with a cloned embryo. According to the spokesperson for BioFusion, a South Korean affiliate of the Raelian’s spin-off company Clonaid, the embryo had been cloned using the company’s latest cell fusion technology.

It wasn’t a claim to be simply dismissed as New Age bumph. Korean Health officials urgently investigated the claim and threatened prosecution. There have been no further reports which is characteristic of the Raelian’s “press conference-and-hide” publicity technique on cloning. Clonaid has already gone underground in the U.S. since being investigated by the Food and Drug Administration after a similar cloning claim.

Yet, Clonaid has the technology to create mammalian clones; there are undoubtedly willing mothers; and in Rael there is the tenacious will of a messiah, with a purported 55, 000 devotees, wanting to show the world the truth of his ways.

For John Paul, human cloning represents the pinnacle of what the pontiff has called a “culture of death”. Along with abortion, genetic engineering and eugenics, human cloning is viewed as a procedure that if not murderous (abortion), diminishes and commodifies humanity.

While Catholic theology embraces immaculate conception as the only form of solo reproduction, for Raelians, genetic engineering and cloning are at the core of their creation story. In 1973, a young French journalist named Claude Vorilhon—now known as Rael—says he was contacted by an extraterrestrial who told him that life on Earth was created in a lab on another planet by geneticists and artists. Thus, for the Raelians cloning is a kind of holy extension of their creation story.

What’s notable in this David and Goliath battle of views is that there’s a real chance that the little guy will win, at least in the short term. In an August interview, Clonaid VP Marketing Thomas Kaenzig wouldn’t confirm or deny the Korean report. So who’s to say that Clonaid’s claims aren’t just a lot of hot air? “Just wait and see,” he said. The proof will be in the pudding, or at least in a diaper, perhaps within the next year.

In the international cat and mouse game that human cloning has become, the first cloned human might well be presented to the world in a kind of McLuhan-esque nativity scene: A massive press conference that would bring together journalists from around the globe to witness a modern technological miracle.

In the Raelian view this child will make us all see that a clone is only another human being, no more, no less. Those in the Catholic Church and many other spiritual and secular leaders will decry the process as anti-life. But then, as with labelling upstart religious movements as “wacky”, there’s a long-standing precedent for established religious powers opposing a strangely conceived baby, worshipped by a small, tenacious sect of believers.