A corrective to the Schneider statement on the COVID vaccines

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 18, 2020

I wish to address the statement promulgated a week ago by five bishops insisting that it is in all cases immoral to allow oneself to be vaccinated with any vaccine which has been tainted by the use of fetal cell lines. This statement was apparently written by the very articulate Athanasius Schneider, an auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, and promulgated jointly by Bishop Schneider; Jan Pawel Lenga, the retired bishop of Karaganda, Kazakhstan; Archbishop Tomash Peta of Astana, Kazakhstan; Cardinal Janis Pujats, the 90-year-old former Archbishop of Riga in Latvia; and Joseph Strickland, bishop of Tyler, Texas.

The statement was released on the Crisis Magazine website. It had been added to our library also, for a few days, but I have removed it because, while it raises important questions, it also deliberately and directly contradicts what the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church has taught on the subject.

Catholics must understand that there are two aspects or levels to the debate over whether to make use of a vaccine that has been, in one respect or another, unethically derived. Moreover, these two aspects or levels are necessarily in tension with each other. I don’t want to write a book on this subject, but let me just make ten points, each brief enough in itself to prevent overload.

First, the two aspects or levels are these: (1) The question of whether one may receive such a vaccine; and (2) The question of how, if one does accept such a vaccine, one must make known one’s opposition to the immoral elements in the history of the vaccine’s development.

Second, unfortunately, these two aspects or levels of the discussion naturally impinge on each other. Obviously, at the level of the effectiveness of the witness given (which is a prudential question), it is a more effective witness to protest while refusing the vaccine than to protest while receiving it. This concern is the best aspect of the statement in question—the legitimate observation that acceptance of the vaccine will, practically-speaking in the minds of most observers, weaken the witness against it.

Third, but as a matter of moral reasoning, this prudential concern does not outweigh the strict moral considerations which determine whether or not one can make use of such a vaccine. This is a difficult question which primarily involves the distinctions between proximate and remote cooperation with evil on the one hand, and formal and material cooperation with evil on the other. In a very small nutshell, we may not engage in proximate (near) cooperation with evil, which would mean playing some sort of direct role in making the evil possible; and we may not engage in formal cooperation with evil, which would mean approving of the evil in question.

Fourth, I hope it is obvious that that there are gray areas between proximate and remote cooperation with evil, since the lines between playing some sort of direct role and not playing any direct role can be blurry. But it is also important to note that it is completely impossible to avoid remote material cooperation with evil in this life. We engage in remote material cooperation with evil every time we pay our electric bill, use the Internet, shop at a drug store (which, analogously to the present case, may well sell abortifacient drugs), patronize a company whose directors or shareholders use their profits to promote anything evil, and pay our taxes.

Fifth, to identify (as the statement does) abortion as an evil which is in a horrendous class all its own, a class that excludes the normal rules of moral reasoning, is more a function of the politicization of this evil over the past two generations than of sound analysis. We cannot suspend the long-established rules of Catholic moral reasoning just because of our revulsion at a particular form of evil. There are a great many grave evils that we can commit, and which of these seems “the worst” is largely a matter of (a) our own emotional response; (b) our conditioning or sensitization; and (c) the range of evils which we ourselves have experienced or had to deal with.

Sixth, an analogous situation may help to see the kind of things moral reasoning is supposed to take into account, though no two situations are exactly alike. But suppose, for the moment, that you come across the body of a murdered man just after he was murdered. Suppose his kidneys are still fresh enough to be used in a transplant to save someone else’s life. Would this be moral? As a particular example of a similar kind, this at least bears reflection.

Seventh, and critically important, the most obvious and most fundamental problem with the aggressive statement I am discussing is not that it offers arguments of various kinds against the use of the questionable vaccines, but that it presumes to settle the fundamental moral question definitively—including a direct contradiction and condemnation of Dignitatis Personae, an instruction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith approved and ordered to be promulgated by Pope Benedict XVI. In the relevant section, this statement of the Ordinary Magisterium, states:

Of course, within this general picture there exist differing degrees of responsibility. Grave reasons may be morally proportionate to justify the use of such “biological material”. Thus, for example, danger to the health of children could permit parents to use a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin, while keeping in mind that everyone has the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available. Moreover, in organizations where cell lines of illicit origin are being utilized, the responsibility of those who make the decision to use them is not the same as that of those who have no voice in such a decision. [no. 35]

Eighth, let me repeat that it is not wrong for a theologian to argue respectfully that a statement of the Ordinary Magisterium may be imperfect and that the matter should be given more thought and clarified further. But it is wrong to dismiss the Ordinary Magisterium as wrong, and to counsel people to ignore its statements. Done publicly, this is what we call giving scandal. The statement expressly states that the teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium is “in itself contradictory and cannot be acceptable to Catholics”.

Ninth, I want to emphasize that any Catholic is absolutely free to take a “harder line” in his personal decisions. It is unquestionably a legitimate moral choice (and almost certainly a superior form of witness) for someone to refuse to be treated with a morally-tainted vaccine and, at least in most foreseeable cases, to refuse to allow his or her children to be so vaccinated. Expressing the moral possibilities of using a particular vaccine is not the same as denying the morality of refusing to use it.

Tenth, and finally, it is time to put the “traveling episcopal genie” back in the bottle. By this I mean that bishops have no teaching authority outside their own dioceses, and it is an abuse of their office to make individual or joint statements pretending to answer critical moral questions for the whole Church. This sort of freelancing, however sound spiritually and morally any particular statement may be, is actually a usurpation of the office of the Pope. Even in the worst of pontificates, this can only create unhealthy partisanship and more confusion. This sort of episcopal freelancing needs to stop. It only makes things worse.

I like to joke that it is not a bishop’s job to set the whole Church straight: That, obviously, is the job of the writers for CatholicCulture.org. But there is an important truth in this humorous statement. When I speak or write, I neither explicitly nor implicitly claim an authority I do not possess, because nobody in his right mind would think I have any ecclesiastical authority whatsoever. That’s not true when bishops abuse their office. Let each bishop, in union with the Pope, instruct the faithful in his own diocese, advise his brother bishops, and bring critical questions to the attention of the Holy Father. Done well, that is actually pretty much what the Church needs most.