Is the Vatican Taking Concrete Steps to Help Campaigns Against Abortion-Tainted Vaccines?

By Edward Pentin

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican has urged the laity to pressure pharmaceutical companies and government health agencies to produce ethical alternatives to abortion-tainted COVID-19 vaccines while at the same time declaring their use “morally licit” due to the remote cooperation with the evil of the abortions that took place decades ago.

But how seriously does it take its own exhortation to exert such pressure?

In frequent Vatican and papal pronouncements, the vaccines, which are steadily being rolled out worldwide, have been considered a “good” that should be accessible to all and fairly distributed, especially to the poorest.

The Pope who, along with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, received his first dose of the Pfizer-manufactured vaccine in January, has been unremittingly supportive of inoculation, going so far as to call taking the vaccine an “ethical duty” and to assert that opposition to immunization is not only inexplicable but a form of “suicidal denial.”

In keeping with the Pope’s insistence on taking the vaccine, Vatican City State issued a decree on Feb. 8 going further than many governments and businesses by seeming to imply that Vatican employees would be liable to lose their job if they refused inoculation for reasons other than health grounds (the Vatican appeared to walk back the decree 10 days later after it attracted a wave of negative publicity when it was made public).

The Pope has addressed the ethics of the vaccines, but the focus has generally been in terms of equal availability and condemnations against “commercial exploitation” or “vaccine nationalism” — attempts by some nations to own the vaccine and give their own peoples preferential access.

By contrast, he hasn’t explicitly mentioned the ethical problems related to the production and testing of the vaccines, many of which have been produced or tested using fetal cell lines from elective abortions in 1964 and 1970. Instead, such concerns have been left to the Vatican to address.

In a doctrinal note issued in December, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith referred to previous magisterial teachings and stated that the use of the vaccines was “morally licit” primarily because cooperation in evil in the procured abortion was “remote.”

But in a mostly ignored passage in the same document, the CDF stressed that use of such vaccines did not equate to a moral endorsement of using cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses and that both “pharmaceutical companies and governmental health agencies are therefore encouraged to produce, approve, distribute and offer ethically acceptable vaccines that do not create problems of conscience for either health care providers or the people to be vaccinated.”

That teaching is in line with a 2005 statement from the Pontifical Academy for Life, which stated that, although in some cases these vaccines can be used, “it is up to the faithful and citizens of upright conscience” to oppose, also through conscientious objection, the “culture of death” that underlies such vaccines. These faithful, it added, “have a duty to take recourse to alternative vaccines” if they exist, “putting pressure on the political authorities and health systems so that other vaccines without moral problems become available.”

  

Rights to Access Above Abortion Concerns

On Dec. 21, the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Vatican’s COVID-19 Commission, which the Pope set up last year to draw from the crisis new approaches to global inequalities, issued a joint statement that also mentioned this call on pharmaceutical companies to find alternatives to using scientific advances derived from aborted fetuses. Referring to Francis’ introduction to a 2020 book on the crisis, To Heal the World, in which he mentioned the importance of human dignity, the statement said the Pope’s comments — although they had no reference to the ethics of fetal cell lines — were a “reminder” to pharmaceutical companies that the “entire ‘life cycle’” must be considered “from the very beginning.”

But the statement, after repeating the CDF’s 2020 doctrinal note on the vaccines and citing two documents from the Pontifical Academy for Life (one published in 2005 and the other in 2017) which asserted, using a variety of arguments, that such vaccines can be used “with a clear conscience,” then went on to argue more extensively about other ethical issues: access rights, the need for collaboration, fair distribution, and the “moral responsibility of undergoing vaccination.”

Similarly, during a Feb. 19 webinar hosted by the Vatican’s COVID-19 Commission, Jesuit Father Carlo Casalone, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Life, stressed that all must have access to vaccines, avoiding “pharmaceutical marginality” that the “Holy Father has mentioned several times” (in other words, drug companies mustn’t deprive the poorest of the vaccines). As for the issue of aborted fetal cell lines, Sister Carol Keehan, former CEO of the U.S. Catholic Health Association, said the local Church should have access to a “guide on ethical issues regarding vaccines.” Father Casalone, however, simply referred to them as “morally acceptable” in view of the CDF note, and then returned to other ethical concerns such as “commercial exploitation” in the field of medicine and health (Father Casalone also wrote a Feb. 19 article in the influential Jesuit periodical La Civilta Cattolica, whose articles are cleared by the Vatican Secretariat of State, in which he made a moral case for receiving abortion-tainted vaccines).

The overall Vatican approach to the ethics of the vaccines, therefore, is to view them within the context of a wider ethical debate primarily focused on fair access and availability and “universal solidarity.” This became even clearer in comments from bioethicist Therese Lysaught, who was appointed a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life in December.

In a Feb. 17 webinar hosted by the Center for Spirituality at Saint. Mary’s College at the University of Notre Dame, Lysaught said she saw the connection between the vaccine and abortion as a “solved issue,” according to the student newspaper The Observer, adding that Catholic commentators should be focusing instead on the issue from the point of view of those on the margins of society and in the context of racial discrimination.

“If Catholic Bioethics is pro-life, we must consider that this vaccine apartheid is not only unjust, it is deadly,” said Lysaught, who teaches bioethics at Loyola University in Chicago.

In a March 5 article for the National Catholic Reporter, Lysaught noted that the Church “remains committed to advocacy efforts” aimed at ensuring that no vaccine preparation is connected to an abortion, but she gave no more details and mostly stressed in the article that the Vatican considers all COVID vaccines “morally acceptable” and so should be taken.

On the same day as the article was published, eight pro-life Catholic scholars issued a statement similarly arguing that the four major COVID vaccines are not only acceptable to use, but also morally equivalent. In the statement, released by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the scholars made no mention of the need to resist such practices involving abortion and vaccines and pressure pharmaceutical companies not to produce them, but rather stressed that people have a strong moral reason to receive the vaccines.

 

Vatican Response

Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, when I asked various Vatican dicasteries in February what concrete steps the Vatican was taking to encourage pharmaceutical companies not to develop these vaccines, or whether it was working with pharmaceutical companies to develop non-abortion tainted vaccines in medical research, the question was either avoided or not responded to.

The office of Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, simply pointed to their Dec. 21 joint statement with the Vatican COVID-19 Commission. The Holy See Press Office similarly responded by highlighting the same document as well as the CDF note of last December, saying these documents “address the issue.” Cardinal Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life did not respond to the questions.

Debi Vinnedge, founder of Children of God for Life, a pro-life charity campaigning for ethical biomedical research and commerce that preserves the dignity of human life, said “it would seem prudent to me that the Vatican ought to be following its own admonition that was given to the world in 2005” — a reference to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s statement that urged the faithful to put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to produce ethical alternative vaccines.

Vinnedge, whose letter to the academy led to its 2005 statement which would become a reference point for the morality of vaccines derived or produced involving fetal cell lines, said by contrast, the U.S. bishops’ conference has been taking action.

She pointed, in particular, to an April 17 letter signed by two bishops, one of whom was Archbishop Joseph Naumann, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and 22 others including Vinnedge, in which they “strongly urge” the federal government to ensure “moral principles are followed in the development of such vaccines,” especially the principle that “human life is sacred and should never be exploited.”

The signatories stressed it was “critically important” that Americans have access to vaccines “produced ethically,” and that there is “no need to use ethically problematic cell lines to produce a COVID vaccine.” The U.S. bishops also produced sample letters that the faithful could send to pharmaceutical companies using cell lines derived from aborted humans to produce or test vaccines.

Vinnedge was also one of 86 women doctors, bioethicists and pro-life activists who signed a statement March 8 calling on all people of goodwill to resist the use of the remains of abortions in vaccine preparation and no longer “cooperate in this immense infanticidal cult.” The signatories wrote that they could not “sit back” while the use of aborted children is “gradually normalized as an ‘unfortunate’ part of modern-day medicine.

“It is time for clergy and laity to boldly confront this horror and defend the right to life for the most vulnerable with ‘maximum determination,’” they said, adding that this “evil offshoot of abortion” must be ended.

Another statement was released March 10, signed by Bishop Joseph Strickland and a group of bioethicists, appealing for the right of conscience to be upheld regarding the vaccines. They described as “troubling” some statements “clearly defended by the Church” which “seem to run afoul of our rights of conscience to refuse such vaccines.” They also said they were “puzzled and pained by the lack of reasonable skepticism which pro-life persons ought to show for the scientific-industrial complex.”

Father Tad Pacholczyk, director of education at the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, noted that one of the “few positive” consequences of the coronavirus has been the “expanding public understanding and distress over the widespread use of abortion-derived cell lines in research.

“We have a unique opportunity to apply pressure for change in the way scientific research and development are being conducted at our universities and in industry,” he said.

Father Pacholczyk added that “although some might suggest that the Vatican hasn’t done enough in this regard, it seems to me it actually has contributed a great deal” by issuing the documents already mentioned, as well as the CDF’s 2008 instruction Dignitas Personae that also addressed the issue.

But he said that, during those years, “it seemed as though virtually nobody had ‘ears to hear,’ that is, until we suddenly faced a pandemic that convulsed the globe and triggered a massive rush to develop new vaccines.”

Father Pacholczyk said he was “sure the Vatican would like to see the faithful take this ball and finally run with it,” and added that “we can use heightened public awareness about the ethical concerns to pressure researchers to reject the use of problematic cell sources in their scientific work.

“It’s an important opportunity to start disentangling the biomedical research culture from abortion-derived materials,” Father Pacholczyk said.