The Pope and the Incredible Shrinking Man
BY Dr. Donald DeMarco

Hollywood, despite its commitment to entertainment and its fear of violating the canons of political correctness, occasionally offers us insights into life that are surprisingly profound. And though the cinematic diamond-in-the-rough may be the exception rather than the rule, it is well worth the time it takes to give it our thoughtful attention.
Universal Studios' The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) is one of the best science fiction movies of the 1950s and has become a cult classic. The storyline, like many of its ilk, is utterly implausible. Yet the far-fetched scenario it concocts sets the stage for some remarkably profound insights.
Scott Carey, played by Grant Williams, passes through a strange radioactive mist while boating. There is no discernible immediate effect, but in time, he slowly begins to shrink. His wife notices that his clothes are unexplainably too large for him. His wedding ring slides off his finger. Medical tests show that radiation from the mist is reacting with an insecticide on his skin causing an anti-cancerous condition in his body that produces progressive shrinking.
At the close of the movie, Scott finds himself on a basement windowsill looking out at a starry night. He wonders whether someone as small as he is still a human being. Existential screenwriter Richard Matheson is equal to the occasion:
So close--the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet--like the closing of a gigantic circle . . . . And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fear melted away. And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero.
I still exist!
The great gap, as philosophers have often pointed out, is between nothing and something. But the gap between something large and something small, between something old and something young, is simply a matter of space and time. To be a day or a week or a year older pales in comparison with the eons of time that preceded our coming into being. "Existence is the perfection of perfections," as Aquinas noted. If there "is no zero" to God, there should be no zero to us either.
In the movie Fantastic Voyage (1966), a surgical team is microminiaturized and injected with a hypodermic needle into a patient. This Lilliputian team endures a truly harrowing odyssey as it maneuvers to the location of the pathology where it applies the therapy. These stouthearted medical missionaries, "micro-biologists," finally make their exit from the patient, appropriately enough, through a tear.
There never was any suggestion in this motion picture that a person loses his humanity once he is shrunk to a certain lowly size. Nor does this suggestion arise in the more recent, 1989 movie, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (titled The Micro-children in its Japanese version).
Existence, nature, and intrinsic value are not controlled by size. In 1968, Cardinal Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity appeared. Here, the future Benedict XVI returns to the familiar question that Scott Carey once again raised: "What is man! (". . . that little speck of dust") that God is mindful of him?" He answers by pointing out that "The boundless spirit who bears in himself the totality of Being reaches beyond the 'greatest,' so that to him it is small and he reaches into the smallest, because to him nothing is too small."
In the area of stem cell research, as was the case with abortion, the discrimination persists that a human being is not a human being until it attains a certain size. Physicists tell us that we are a mid-point in the vast cosmos. We are to the universe what an atom is to us. There are worlds within us that we have not yet fathomed or explored. The amount of zygote DNA needed to specify the genetic characteristics of all the people in the world is approximately one-seventeenth the weight of a postage stamp. A single one-cell zygote, the earliest stage of a human being, has an information content equivalent to 1,000 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and is unique for each human being.
Indeed, to God there is no zero. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably large meet as the closing of a vast circle, one that bears the loving and intelligent imprint of a providential and all-embracing God.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is adjunct philosophy professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and professor emeritus at St. Jerome's University.