Did St. Joseph contribute to Jesus' conception?

[afthomercy]

I read about the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, that she contributed 100% of Jesus’ genes. This is a genetic impossibility, since she, being a woman, could not contribute the Y-chromosome to Jesus. The Y-chromosome is not part of the genetic makeup of a woman, ever. A male gets his Y-chromosome from his biological father and his X-chromosome from his biological mother.

So this raises the question as to who contributed the Y-chromosome to Jesus. I would prefer to think that God picked up a sperm of St. Joseph and fertilized an ovum of Mary’s miraculously, without there being any sexual contact between them. If we said that no male contributed the Y-chromosome, but rather it was miraculously supplied by God, it would make Jesus’ descent from Adam less than perfect or his humanity suspect.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

What you are, in fact, suggesting is that the conception of Christ was a kind of divinely-engineered artificial insemination process, in which Jesus Christ was not miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, nor even given the dignity of natural human conception through marital relations, but was instead “manufactured” by the Divine Scientist who plucked a sperm from St. Joseph and inseminated the Virgin Mary. Given that the Church condemns artificial insemination as gravely immoral, it follows that God himself did not engage in the very act that the Church which teaches on his own authority insists is a moral evil.

The Blessed Virgin Mary contributed to Jesus’ conception all that a mother contributes to the conception of her child. That which she could not contribute, God provided for in some mysterious way that has not been revealed to us and may very well be outside our ability to comprehend. The Incarnation of God the Son is, by its very nature, a sublime mystery that cannot be fully fathomed by finite human minds. All that we can do is to know what has been revealed:

• The Incarnation occurred by the power of the Holy Spirit within the womb of the Virgin Mary.
• Christ is fully God and fully man.
• St. Joseph was Christ’s human father by adoption, not by any biological relationship.