"I am the Good Shepherd and I know my sheep". This week on our TV's we had the opportunity to gaze on one sheep who takes a little more getting to know than most. This gentle woolly creature is Dolly (now 7 months). Dolly is not a 'normal' sheep. She is a clone, an exact copy, of her mother. To produce her, cell material from her mother was placed in the egg of another sheep and brought to birth in the womb of a third. She is her mother's spitting image.

As Dolly's tender eyes looked into the camera she couldn't have had a clue what the fuss was about, but in fact there are disturbing possibilities behind all this. If with a sheep now, when with a human? Experts pooh-poohed the idea, but ...? Remember science goes striding into the jungle with ethics hobbling behind. The science fiction of 40 years ago (Nazis creating a clone of Hitler in a South American hideout) now didn't seem so absurd after all, One woman had asked if she could clone her recently dead father, bringing him back to life as a baby.

Help! What do we make of this? St. Pau1's words come to mind: "Everything is permissible', but not everything is beneficial" (I Cor 10:23). Or to go back to the Garden of Eden: 'We could reach out and touch the fruit of that tree, but it would be better if we did not!'

As Christians, we should be worried that, however well intentioned, this is an attempt to replace the mystery of God by a set of human certainties. The mystery of God may seem to us very ill-balanced and unfair. Some prosper, some don't. Some live to great age, some, alas, die before they are born. To lose parents, children, spouse, friend, is sad - we mustn't play that down. But we believe that all is dear to God in Christ. As today's 2nd Reading says: "To the pagans it is madness, to us it is Christ, who is the power and the wisdom of God". DS