Religion

Your son or daughter’s school calls you and says they’re not welcome back. No there aren’t disciplinary issues. Yes, the grades are fine. Oh, what’s wrong? Your child has a religious exemption to vaccines, and unless you vaccinate, the doors are closed.

Catholic schools in the US have been making these calls and sending these letters more and more over the last couple of years. Schools are turning away students who provided valid exemptions for years. Is it legal? And if not, is there anyone who will enforce the laws?

Aborted fetal cells in vaccines?

Catholics are pro-life. Surprises no one.

The Vatican OK’s use of vaccines derived from aborted fetal cell lines. Surprises many. Many Catholics feel betrayed and confused, and the congregation is divided. But is this position really surprising?

Are there pieces of aborted fetus cells in vaccines? It depends on who you ask. Nine out of ten doctors agree (while smoking their Camels) the answer is no, with the caveat, if any material made it to the end product, it is generations removed from the source, and extremely negligible in amount. But trace amounts are important, and even if there is nothing at all, some still take issue with products directly utilizing aborted fetal cells. That’s logical. It’s the same logic that leads some people to veganism or to stop buying leather. In a free market economy, dollars speak. The message when rejecting products using morally questionable sources in any capacity is, we will not tolerate commerce derived from these sources. Find another way.

The Vatican has acknowledged the sources of two of the most oft used fetal cell lines for “tainted” vaccines, WI-38-and MRC-5, originated from voluntary abortions. WI-38 was derived from an abortion due to the family already having “too many kids,” and the MRC-5 came from a mother who had an abortion for “psychiatric reasons.”

The Vatican Speaks: Official Policy
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The official Vatican policy on vaccinations created from aborted fetal cell lines is lawful cooperation in evil. Okay, I’m paraphrasing. The Vatican called their policy “passive material cooperation.” They acknowledge abortion is evil, and hint at the idea that those deriving profit from research using products from the same is evil, but those purchasing those products are far enough removed from evil to get a pass. “Proportional reason,” which amounts to choosing the lesser of two evils, justifies passive support of abortion through vaccinating, over the possibility of proliferation of infectious disease by abstaining.

Once Upon A Time In a Galaxy Far Far Away

In 2003, Mrs. Debra L. Vinnedge, wrote to His Eminence Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, asking for clarification on church policy for Catholics objecting to vaccinations created from aborted fetal cell lines. Catholics around the country were being hassled and challenged when asserting religious exemptions to vaccines grown using products of abortion. Ms. Vinnedge waited two years for a reply, but the answer did not create the clarity she was seeking.

The City State and Political Machine called the Vatican

The Vatican is a fascinating and highly organized socio-political entity. It is a City State with its own police, courts and flag. The “Holy See” is the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, under which you find the Roman Curia-the governance of the church. This includes the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith. The Sacred Congregation is a propaganda machine that promulgates and defends “official” Church policy. It was founded in 1542 to “spread sound catholic doctrine and defend those parts of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines.” Clearly this was the authority to tackle Ms. Vinnedge’s question about the new technologies of immunization.

The Vatican Speaks

The Sacred Congregation released their official policy statement on “tainted” vaccines on June 9, 2005. Recommended reading if you’re looking for an exercise in logic (I drew a diagram to follow it), and a vocabulary lesson (I love that the Church used the word “licety” in 2005). The argument supporting the Vatican position to not oppose “tainted” vaccines boils down to this: Some things are evil, like abortion. In relationship to an identified evil, people can share evil intent, which is formal cooperation, or not share evil intent, which is material cooperation. Material cooperation can be direct or indirect (active or passive). If active, the aid can be proximate or remote. If you’re still with me, the sum is, accepting “tainted” vaccinations is deemed passive material cooperation because end users do not intend to have abortion or profit from them. Clear as mud, as my Irish Catholic grandmother used to say.

In an interpretation of the Vatican’s 2005 Policy, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia clarifies, in their new “Immunization Policy Rationale” of 2013: since the intention of vaccination is not to procure an abortion, there is no formal cooperation in evil. The user’s intent is to “benefit from something derived from the aborted fetuses,” so “their use would be morally permissible on a provisional basis.” In other words, it is okay to suspend your moral code and cooperate with identified evil there is a specific reason the Church has deemed less evil than something else. In this case, it is less evil to support abortion than it is to get the chicken pox or measles.

“May” becomes “Mandate”

The 2005 Pontifical Academy statement is extremely controversial amongst congregants in the Catholic Church. Some believe it is being used to justify compulsory vaccination, where the document was only meant to say parents had a choice to vaccinate or not, and vaccination would not be considered an offense to their faith. So how did the position that a Catholic may vaccinate without offending their faith turn into a mandate?

Welcome to America.

Until recent years, Catholic school diocese in the US were accepting religious exemptions in states where they were provided by law. In 2010, all the Florida diocese jointly requested an opinion on diocesan vaccine policy from the US National Catholic Bioethics Center. This culminated in a stated opinion as well as a meeting with the NCBC president, Dr. John M. Haas. He interpreted that religious exemptions should not be allowed because the “use of vaccines [is] licit if no others are available.” A logical leap from Vatican policy, to say the least. The US Conference of Bishops, Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities agreed also with the National Catholics Bioethics Center and Catholic Medical Association positions.

The US Catholic interpretation of Vatican policy seems unconcerned with the U.S. Constitution. Under the Constitution, a person does not have to agree with rhetoric or doctrine of their subscribed faith to exercise a valid exemption. In states where that exemption is provided, it is Constitutionally protected. American government was structured on ideals of protecting independent thought and minority opinion (even if nowadays that kind of thing is discouraged).

Interestingly, the National Catholic Bioethics Center goes on to say “Parents would, therefore, have to obtain a conscience exemption rather than a religious one.” I interpret this to be a direct assault on Constitutional law, because it is essentially saying a parent can object but their reasons can’t be religious because the Archdiocese has forbidden it. So in theory, a Catholic School in America would be in line with Catholic doctrine by refusing religious exemptions but granting philosophical. Less than half of U.S. states provide for a conscious exemption, and even if they do it is not considered constitutionally protected so a school could very comfortably choose not to acknowledge such a law without fear of challenge. According to the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, some school districts are allowing a “conscious exemption.” Googling archdiocese policies reveals that many school districts are not.

The sound logic of the NCBC continues in a scathing judgment of a theoretical parent who chooses not to subject their child to the MMR. The MMR is is the only way to get the Rubella vaccine, and unavailable in the US without use of a fetal cell line. The NCBC identifies Rubella as a “considerable danger” if a pregnant woman has contact with an unvaccinated child, even briefly, because they [the unvaccinated child] could be carriers of the virus, which could cause “grave congenital malformations in the fetus….In this case, the parents who did not accept the vaccination of their own children become responsible for the malformations in question, and for the subsequent abortion of fetuses when they have been discovered to be malformed.” So the US Catholic Church position is to hold a parent morally responsible for causing abortions undertaken by third parties if they choose to avoid injecting their child with a product developed using products of abortion. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

I’m Calling Bull Sh*t

The Pontifical Academy claims parents are being forced to inoculate with “morally unacceptable sources” and pharmaceutical companies are engaging in “moral coercion of the parents, who are forced to act against their conscience or otherwise to put the health of their children and of the population as a whole at risk.” Shame on them, right? The Vatican is saying “our hands are tied!” What are we going to do? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?

So the Vatican is victim to BigPharma, just like the rest of us? Sure. One of the largest and wealthiest institutions on the planet, which has fought wars on behalf of its doctrine, conquered and converted empires for centuries, is victim to some scientists who can’t come up with another way to do things? Sounds legit.
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The 2005 document explains that Catholics have a “duty” to put pressure on pharmaceutical manufacturers to create less evil products. I’m calling bullsh*t. If the Church truly wanted to put pressure on pharmaceutical manufacturers, they would have used their massive stores of wealth and 1.2 billion congregants to boycott the products utilizing fetal cell lines. They would have funded research for new vaccines, which they could have even done in-house by electing vaccine research scientists to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which boasts dozens of Nobel Laureates. That would have been pressure. How quickly would the wheels of science have turned then?

The Vatican doesn’t want change. The Vatican is one of the only institutions on this planet with more wealth than the pharmaceutical industry. If anyone could have tried to address this unacceptable moral coercion of Catholics, it would have been the Vatican. You can’t tell me they didn’t see that. You can’t tell me the Sacred Congregation didn’t consider this: Gee, what happens if we say the Vatican is opposed? What would happen if we said vaccines derived from aborted fetal cell lines are reprehensible to Catholic Doctrine?

The 2005 response to Ms. Vinnedege’s question mentions the church took “some time”-two years-to answer her question as they conducted a “careful examination of  ‘tainted’ vaccines…with the help of a group of experts.” Who were they? Who did they rely upon to create their official policy, which affects the decision of over a billion people worldwide on whether to accept many vaccines? Would influencing one-seventh of the world’s population have been pressure? The Vatican would consult with only the best, and to my understanding, the only people on this planet that are recognized as “experts” in vaccination by those who have the authority to say so, are people that directly profit from vaccine production.

The Vatican cries that their Catholic parents are being forced into “moral coercion.” This is classic misdirection. The Vatican is using moral coercion to promote vaccines as they are. If a parent wants to protect their pro-life position, they no longer have the support of the church, and their children are not welcome in Catholic schools. I’d say that’s direct and proximate material cooperation in evil, but that’s just my two cents.

Conclusion

My favorite part of the 2013 Philly Archdiocese letter to parents sums it up: “The Church is not trying to force parents to change their well-formed consciences on vaccinations…However they must accept the consequences. One such consequence is that their child cannot enrolled (sic) in a catholic school.” In other words, it is more important to the American Archdiocese to push vaccines than it is to adhere to US laws, or to educate children in Catholic values and doctrine, logic, morality, or human rights.