VATICAN CITY—Describing the groundbreaking work as a major step forward for theological research, a team of Vatican geneticists held a press conference Tuesday at the Apostolic Palace to announce they had successfully cloned God.
The team of ordained scientists from the Catholic Church’s Order of Holy Genomics confirmed they had, after decades of concerted effort and numerous failed attempts, finally succeeded in creating a genetically identical copy of the Almighty. The newborn God clone #8RR19, which the team has nicknamed “Marvin,” has reportedly survived for over seven weeks since emerging from an incubation vat in the basement laboratory of St. Peter’s Basilica.
“By artificially producing a fully functional God who possesses all of the divine traits of the original, we now have the ability to conduct hands-on research on the Lord,” said Father Giancarlo Bertinotti, who first conceived of fertilizing a Supreme Being embryo by extracting sublime DNA from a skin cell of the Hand of God and injecting the holy genetic material into a donor egg cell. “It may now be possible to answer some of our greatest questions about our Creator, such as whether there are any observable boundaries of His love, if He is incapable of forgiving certain sins, and how exactly He comes to dwell inside all of us.”
“This breakthrough marks a new chapter in our quest to quantify precisely how great and good God is,” Bertinotti continued.
According to team leaders, the experimental project to recreate God first achieved success in 1995, when researchers cloned a cherub, the least complex of all Heavenly forms. During the winter of 2004, the team is said to have finally succeeded in growing a cluster of divinely radiant cells in a petri dish, a research milestone that helped secure the additional Vatican funding required to proceed to the final stage of bringing a cloned God to life.
The newborn Marvin, who has reportedly only grown to one one-hundredth the size of a fully adult God, is the 31st fertilized embryo created by the lab, but just the first clone to survive past the first week of infancy. Recalling the long and frustrating period of trial and error involved in the cloning process, the scientists noted that the initial Gods that were created suffered from a variety of health and developmental problems, such as an inability to see all things, difficulty passing divine judgment, full-body hairlessness, and fallibility.
The scientists reported they were especially pleased to see Marvin had developed infinite benevolence unlike His predecessor from 2009, Tom III, whose excessive wrath threatened to destroy the entire universe until the geneticists resorted to euthanization.
“Based on our medical evaluations, we believe Marvin can expect to enjoy a healthy, holy life for all of eternity,” said Bertinotti, who added that the exact genetic copy of God was currently being monitored in a secured habitat enclosure designed to replicate the natural, blissful conditions of His Divine Kingdom. “Early performance tests suggest that He possesses complete omniscience, and even at this early age, we have observed Him beginning to transcend space and time, something none of our previous specimens came close to achieving.”
“Furthermore, repeated testing suggests that His ability to create something where there was once nothing matches the performance benchmarks of our original God of Heaven,” Bertinotti continued.
Despite numerous clinical trials, scientists conceded that Marvin has yet to successfully impregnate a virgin woman, leaving open the possibility that the clone specimen is sterile.
“Now that we have successfully cloned God, the possibilities are truly endless,” said Bertinotti, suggesting the Church may choose to grow a supply of usable divine internal organs as potential replacements should God’s ever begin to fail. “Our new technique also provides us with the power to recreate God should the naturally occurring population of our Heavenly Father ever go extinct.”
“I can also say that going forward, we hope to explore whether gene therapy could inhibit God’s intense feelings of jealousy and finally control his urges to smite,” Bertinotti continued.
