The hypothesis that man is gradually endowed with a living soul appears to me to be a disastrous mistake in logic. It is therefore incomprehensible for the leading and most influential theologian of the German-speaking world, Professor Karl Rahner SJ to endorse this viewpoint. (Rahner supported it in his essay “The Problem of Hominization” published in Quaestiones Disputata 12/13, 1965, and again in Naturwissenschaft and Theologie 11, 1970.) German theologians who defend the Pill refer to Rahner’s incorrect theses; they believe that the human soul is not endowned at fertilization but at a later time-in any case, not before implantation. Fortunately, Romano Guardini saved the honor and reputation of German theology as early as 1947, six years before the discovery of the genetic code, writing in the Frankfurter Hefte (Frankfurt booklets): “It was said that in the early time period of the embryo, approximately up to day 100, the embryo did not yet have a soul of its own, but was a being which belongs completely to the maternal organism. … [But] the cycle of his human transition begins with the uniting of parental cells, culminates in the morphologic completion, and continues until death. Therefore he is a human being from the moment of conception.” It is admirable that Romano Guardini could write these sentences before the work was done on the genetic code. That so many German theologians continue to believe in Rahner’s hypotheses, even after the discovery of the genetic code, is impossible to understand.
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