Books: Jérôme Lejeune remembered Tim O’Sullivan

B O O K S : Jérôme Lejeune remembered review by Tim O’Sullivan

Jérôme Lejeune: La Liberté du Savant, Aude Dugast, Artège, 2019

The death earlier this year of Birthe Lejeune, widow of Jérôme, the French pioneer of modern gene�cs, has brought a renewed focus on both their lives. Their daughter’s book on her father (Clara Lejeune-Gaymard, Life is a Blessing, Igna�us Press) is available in English and was reviewed in these pages by Fr Conor Donnelly in 2016. Jérôme Lejeune (1926-1994) should nevertheless be be�er known in the English-speaking world. While two major biographies have been published in French, there are not as yet any transla�ons in English. This fine 2019 publica�on by Aude Dugast, however is due to appear in transla�on in 2021 and follows on an excellent earlier biography in 2004 by Anne Bernet, which included extensive detail, for example, on Lejeune’s early years and family background. Aude Dugast is also the postulator of his cause for canoniza�on, the process for which began in his Paris diocese in 2007 and was completed in 2012, at which point he was given the �tle of Servant of God. The Roman stage of the process began in 2013 and the “Posi�o” document drawing together informa�on about Lejeune’s life, virtues and reputa�on was presented to the relevant Roman congrega�on in 2017 by Dugast. The process will con�nue in the coming years in Rome.

In preparing this biography, Dugast thus had privileged access to his papers as well as extensive contacts with his family, colleagues and friends. As she makes clear, Prof Lejeune is best

known as the man who, with two other researchers, discovered the chromosomal disorder responsible for Down’s Syndrome or Trisomy 21.

Taking as his mo�o the phrase from chapter twenty-five of St Ma�hew’s Gospel – “as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me” – Lejeune had a great love for, and commitment to, his Down’s pa�ents and a strong sense that his voca�on in life was to find a successful therapy for Down’s Syndrome. Whatever his other commitments, he always gave priority to consulta�ons with his Down’s pa�ents and their parents. He was later dismayed to find that his research breakthrough on the cause of Down’s was being used to eliminate unborn babies with this syndrome. Together with his brothers Philippe, an accomplished painter, and Rémy, Jérôme was the son of Pierre Lejeune, a businessman from the Paris region, and his wife Massa. While s�ll a medical student at the Sorbonne, he had a love-at-first-sight encounter with a Danish student of French, Birthe Bringsted, in a Paris library in 1950. They were later to share a very happy family life with their five children – family summers included a marathon annual trip by car from Paris to the Danish seaside!

Jérôme was something of an absent-minded professor and some�mes le� his family on holidays in Denmark to return to work in Paris while carrying the keys of the family car in his pocket on the train – leading to fran�c efforts by his wife and Danish train

Aude Dugast

officials to track him and the keys down at various Danish train sta�ons before he le� the country! A�er the death of Jérôme, Birthe con�nued suppor�ng his work through the Lejeune Founda�on (fonda�onlejeune.org). The biographer presents Lejeune’s life as one of whirlwind ac�vity, balancing his family life, treatment of pa�ents with Down’s Syndrome, scien�fic research, teaching, speaking at interna�onal medical conferences and, in later decades, his defence of the right to life of the unborn, par�cularly the unborn baby with a handicap. Lejeune comes across in the biography as a person of warmth, humour and excep�onal intelligence and also as someone of deep Catholic faith and rare courage. He thus calmly con�nued his work as a university professor, in spite of student opposi�on, during the chao�c student revolt of May 1968 in Paris. The following year, he spoke with remarkable courage against prenatal diagnosis and abor�on of the handicapped at a mee�ng of the world’s leading gene�cists in San Francisco (“To kill or not to kill, that is the ques�on”). Although he was being awarded the pres�gious Allen Memorial prize at the event, his address was met with an icy and eerie silence.

He later campaigned very strongly on TV and in public mee�ngs against the legalisa�on of abor�on in France in 1974. He galvanised French medical opposi�on to the proposed law, with some success at first, but he and his colleagues were ul�mately unable to prevent the introduc�on of the abor�on law and he was himself subjected to considerable abuse and indeed threats during that turbulent period. At the same �me, he never failed to treat his adversaries with courtesy and respect, even at the most difficult moments of the abor�on debate.

Lejeune travelled the world extensively, speaking at both scien�fic and pro-life conferences. I remember his powerful address in a dis�nc�ve French accent at a pro-life conference in Dublin thirty or more years ago, when he reminded his listeners of the words of Ma�hew’s Gospel cited above.

He was first President of the Pon�fical Academy for Life, established by St John Paul II in the 1990s. From 1974, he was a member of the Pon�fical Academy for Sciences. He had a deep involvement in the area of nuclear

disarmament and was an envoy of Pope John Paul to the Soviet authori�es in the early 1980s, se�ng out the grave dangers of a nuclear war.

Dugast’s book begins by recalling that when Pope St John Paul was a�ending World Youth Day in Paris in 1997, he insisted, against some opposi�on, on visi�ng the grave of his “brother Jérôme”, who had died from cancer on Easter Sunday, 1994.

Immediately following Lejeune’s death, the introductory chapter also notes, John Paul had sent to Cardinal Lus�ger of Paris a medita�on on Christ’s words: “I am the resurrec�on and the life. Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, he will live” (Jn 11:25). The Pope called a�en�on to the day of death of this “ardent defender of life”: “If the Father who is in heaven called him from this earth on the very day of the Resurrec�on of Christ, it is difficult not to see in this coincidence a sign.…Enlightened by these words of the Lord, we see the death of every human person as a par�cipa�on in the death of Christ and in his Resurrec�on, especially when a death occurs on the very day of the Resurrec�on.”

Tim O’Sullivan

Tim O’Sullivan has degrees in history and social policy and completed a PhD on the principle of subsidiarity. He is a regular contributor to Posi�on Papers.

Komarock Home for Street Children

In September 2020 I will start work on a home for thirty street children from Nairobi. All I have at the moment is a field in Komarock, to the east of Nairobi! Komarock will be a sister school to Kwetu Home of Peace in Nairobi (see the interview with me on Kwetu inside).

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Thank you for your support! Sr Caroline Ngatia

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