In the prime of their lives, Elizabeth Ann Seton and the geneticist Jerome Lejeune each faced a life-changing question: What to do when following your conscience means losing friends, social position, and in the case of Lejeune, the highest honors for your life’s work?
It’s a choice every Christian faces to some extent, but some are asked to give everything: Martyrs decide to give their lives; Jerome Lejeune and Elizabeth Seton sacrificed their livelihoods and reputations.
Like Mother Seton, Venerable Jerome Lejeune started out living a comfortable life, according to society’s standards.
Elizabeth Ann Bayley was born into a comfortable Episcopalian family in New York City, and married into the affluent Seton family. She and her husband had five children when William Seton passed away.
Soon after, Elizabeth encountered the undeniable truth of the Catholic Church, particularly the Eucharist. She faced a difficult choice.
She could deny her conscience and remain in the Episcopal church, with all the comfort and support of her lifelong friends and community.
Or, she could follow her conscience into a new, uncertain life as a widowed convert to the Catholic faith.
Elizabeth chose her conscience. So did Jérôme Lejeune.
Born in a suburb of Paris in 1926, Lejeune studied medicine and became a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, becoming world-renowned for his work on the effects of atomic radiation in 1952.
Six years later, Lejeune’s major breakthrough occurred.
While studying tissue samples from a child with Down Syndrome, Lejeune made a crucial discovery.
Human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes—46 in total. He and research partner Marthe Gautier discovered that patients suffering from what was then known as “mongolism” had an extra chromosome in the 21st pair.
Lejeune named the condition “Trisomy 21” and sought ways to cure or provide compassionate care for these patients and their families.
Aude Dugast, the postulator for Lejeune’s cause, said, “He loved his patients. There were so many mothers who said they were very moved when they met him the first time and Lejeune looked at their son or daughter, and they saw that he looked at them with so much love in their eyes that they were very surprised, because he was a very famous professor.”
For many, she added, “It was the first time they saw someone who was full of love for the child, and each time it was a new start for the family.”
Honors poured in for Lejeune’s groundbreaking work. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy awarded him the Kennedy Prize. In 1964, the prestigious University of Paris Faculty of Medicine created a special chair for him.
Then, in 1969, his work was recognized with the William Allen Memorial Award from the American Society of Human Genetics, the highest distinction available to a geneticist.
But Lejeune’s acceptance speech for the award would change everything.
Lejeune had seen—to his horror—that his discovery had an unintended tragic consequence.
Now able to identify Trisomy 21 before birth, doctors began testing unborn children for the condition, making it possible to abort those found positive.
Dr. Pilar Calva Mercado, who studied under Lejeune in the 1980s, remarked, “I didn’t go to him because he was very Catholic, but because he was very good at clinical genetics.”
But once she met Lejeune, his ethical convictions profoundly influenced her.
“When he told me why he wouldn’t do prenatal diagnosis, it convinced me,” she told reporter John Burger. “He told me he could not collaborate with a death sentence… When one cannot do anything to cure a sickness, you have to work more to relieve the suffering, but not to kill the patient. That was something that completely changed my mind.”
Lejeune expressed the same viewpoint to the American Genetics Society during his acceptance speech. “Should we capitulate in the face of our own ignorance and propose to eliminate those we cannot help?” he asked in his speech. “Our duty has always been not to inflict the sentence but to try to commute the pain.”
The remarks were not well received. That night, he wrote to wife, “Today I lost my Nobel Prize.”
Lejeune was right. The response to his courageous stance was swift and harsh.
Mark Bradford, the Venerable Jérôme Lejeune Fellow at the Word On Fire Institute, described the fallout:
“The confrontations Lejeune had with the cultural elites of his time were brutal and they severely punished him personally, professionally, and financially,” he said. “Even his young children weren’t unscathed. One day walking home from school they saw spray painted on a wall, ‘Dr. Lejeune and his little monsters must die!’”
Lejeune responded with fortitude and perseverance, dedicating himself even more passionately to his patients, his research, and his faith.
Further discoveries and innovations followed. In the 1980s, Lejeune was elected to the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the French National Academy of Medicine, and received the 1993 Griffuel Prize for decisive work on chromosomal abnormalities in cancer.
As science advanced, Lejeune intensified his defense of human dignity alongside the Catholic Church. Calva recalls that he would “take these mysterious trips” to Rome. In 1974, he became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. 20 years later, in 1994, Lejeune died from cancer, weeks after his nomination as the first President of the Pontifical Academy for Life.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s reaction to opposition offers the same lesson.
Many friends and family members were aghast at the newly widowed mother’s decision to convert to Catholicism.
Elizabeth responded cheerfully and honestly, dedicating her talents wholeheartedly to her vocation, ultimately becoming a religious foundress and a pioneer of America’s parochial school system.
She died with words of devotion on her lips, as did Lejeune.
Lejeune remained devoted to his Down Syndrome patients to the end of his life. “I was the doctor who was supposed to cure them, and now I am leaving,” he lamented. “I feel like I am abandoning them.”
But he wasn’t. He died on Easter Sunday, celebrating the One who gave everything in surrender to the Father, whose Resurrection reveals that God never abandons us.
Lejeune’s life, like Mother Seton’s, teaches the lesson that the honors that ultimately matter come from God.
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
Image courtesy of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation USA
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