This is something that you have to be pretty attuned, I think, to the Catholic world to pick up on, and to appreciate. There's been some questioning in Catholic circles on whether its morally permissible to take the Coronavirus vaccines.
Before I get any further, let me state that at least in the Diocese of Cheyenne, where I live, it is. Our Bishop has so declared.
Okay, how does this all come up?
Well, not the way that you might suppose, at least if you are an American. There isn't a raging debate in the Catholic World about the efficacy of vaccinations. While that debate might exist in American society at large, where there's an anti Science tradition that's very long in standing, and which has been reamplified in recent years due to a decrease in science funding in education which was sufficiently pronounced such the standards of education could fall so low that a twit like Jenny McCarthy, who is only qualified as a big boob model, is actually taken seriously on a scientific matter (who would listen to McCarthy on anything is beyond me). No, this topic comes up due to a long standing Catholic moral principle holding that life can only be taken by a person in self defense.
Catholics are extremely serious about this. Much more so than other non pacifist. Catholics aren't overall pacifists, but the Church's view on when life can be taken is quite strict. It's often highly misunderstood, in part because the majority of Christians in the world are Catholic and lots of people in every religion will fail to follow the tenants of their faith.* And its also a standard that has evolved a bit as society and technology has evolved, while the wider facet of that being ignored has also tended to be ignored in some quarters. Perhaps the most dramatic examples of that might be the bombing campaigns of World War Two, a war for which the Allied cause is often cited as being about as close to a "just war" as a war can be. Be that as it may, it's nearly impossible to reconcile some of the Allied bombing efforts of the Second World War with justly fighting a war, and the use of the Atomic Bombs at the wars end almost certainly cannot be. Be that as it may, there were plenty of Catholic aircrewmen on bombers during the war.
And what isn't at issue is a religion based disagreement with science. Indeed, in spite of the intrusion of Protestant beliefs into the pews of Catholic Americans to some extent, the Catholic Church as a whole is hugely supportive of and a supporter of science. Indeed, ironically, at least one of the common scientific beliefs that some fundamentalist Protestants really have trouble with is one that a Catholic cleric came up with, that being the Big Bang Theory. Catholics generally love science.
So what's the problem here?
Well stem cells.
If you read the entry above you'll see that at least one of the vaccines was developed using stem cells at some point, but at the same time neither of the current ones used stem cells from a directly aborted baby. Given this, the Bishop of Cheyenne has given them a pass.
But the fact that this letter was issued also means that somebody had a question about it and it had to be addressed.
This isn't a majority of Catholic Bishops, we'd note. Whatever happened (the Jesuit magazine America claims it was due to misinformation regarding the vaccines) at least two American Bishops issued statements that condemned at least one of the vaccines. This lead to a corrective memo being issued by the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops which addressed that issue, which reads much the letter that is set out above. The vaccines are okay. The memo also apparently cited to a pro life organization that termed the vaccines as ethically uncontroversial.
The British Catholic Bishops went further and urged their flock to get the vaccines, noting that getting them was "not a sin".
In contrast, Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan declared the vaccines morally impermissible. And this is what makes this sort of peculiarly interesting.
Bishop Schneider is a traditionalist and is well known in traditionalist circles. He's an opponent of much of what was derived from Vatican II and is very outspoken.
Now, Catholics in the Diocese of Cheyenne are not obligated to follow the pronouncements of Bishop Schneider that are contrary to those of Bishop Biegler. The Bishop in your diocese, in the Catholic order of things, is the one that you need to pay attention to on certain things and can rely upon in others. Catholics owe their diocesan Bishop a degree of loyalty. If you are in a diocese in which the Bishop has said its morally impermissible to receive the vaccine, you can't simply just ignore that.
But in the current Internet Fueled Age considering the views of our local Bishop has become less common in areas in which people want to pick and choose their beliefs. Trad or Rad Trad Catholics latch on to statements like those from Bishop Schneider that fit their views and will reject them over their own Bishop.
Indeed, this has the odd impact of distorting the Catholic order pretty significantly. Even well into the mid 20th Century Catholics were much more in tune with what their own Bishops had to say than what the Pope might be doing. The Pope was far away and the Bishop was fairly near. This reflected the order of the Church. On day to day matters in the Catholic world, the Bishop was likely to be the one that Catholics heard from.
But now many Catholics tend to follow the Pope almost as if he was present in the local parish. In reality, what the parish Priest is doing tends to be immediately important to Catholics real lives more than what the Pope may be doing, on a daily basis. But if you read Catholic commentary now, particularly that of Trads and Rad Trads, you'd get the other view.
And not completely without reason. This Pope has been upsetting to orthodox Catholics. But that in turn as fueled a sort of hyper orthodoxy that predated Pope Francis.
I'm expecting that to develop here.
As for what I'm doing, vaccination wise, I'm receiving it as soon as I conceivably can, and I'm an orthodox Catholic.
And I think there may be another moral issue afloat here. In this day and age there's a massive amount of scientific bogosity that's circulating in society and many Americans, at least, have come down to believing things that are absolutely false. Indeed, on this issue, the irony is that there will be some Trads that will abstain from receiving the vaccine due to having views that are supported by pronouncement of Bishops like Bishop Schneider, who have a bit of a fan following, while other rank and file Protestant and non religious Americans will abstain as they've bought off on the blatherings of anti vaxer boob model Jenny McCarthy and her fellow travelers.
We'll deal with the strange era of anti scientific thought elsewhere on one of our companion blogs, but on an issue like this, for sincere Catholics, the issue thus becomes this. If it takes 70% of the population to become immune from a virus to achieve "herd immunity", and if we now that the virus kills, if we refuse to participate in achieving herd immunity, are we morally complicit to some degree in unnecessary deaths?
*One of my favorite examples was one of Cromwell's lieutenants who fought to prosecute the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church but who asked for, and received, permission for his mistress to be in prison with him rather than his wife. Granted, Crowwell's people were generally very serious Calvinist who believed in double predestination, something most who claim to be Calvinist today do not, but that's really taking that a bit far.
