Hinder Them Not

As most of you are probably aware, this week the CDC & FDA issued a joint statement regarding a small number of cases in which recipients of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID vaccine experienced symptoms of serious blood clotting/thrombosis. The U.S., Australia and others have called for a pause in its usage.

Clotting or side effects aside, the real concern with J&J’s vaccine all along has been an ethical rather than a medical one.

As the USCCB Chairmen for Doctrine ( Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend ) & Pro-life Activities (Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas ) made clear back at the start of March, J&J used aborted fetal cells not only in research and testing, but in the actual production of their vaccine, making it more ethically concerning than other COVID vaccines available in the U.S.:

“The approval of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in the United States again raises questions about the moral permissibility of using vaccines developed, tested, and/or produced with the help of abortion-derived cell lines.

“Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines raised concerns because an abortion-derived cell line was used for testing them, but not in their production.  The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, however, was developed, tested and is produced with abortion-derived cell lines raising additional moral concerns. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has judged that ‘when ethically irreproachable Covid-19 vaccines are not available … it is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.’[1] However, if one can choose among equally safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the vaccine with the least connection to abortion-derived cell lines should be chosen. Therefore, if one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson’s.  

(emphasis added)

In other words, the very least we can do morally is to avoid those vaccines carrying the gravest moral issues, and, as has been repeated in many such statements before: “We should continue to insist that pharmaceutical companies stop using abortion-derived cell lines.”

(You can use this graph from The Charlotte Lozier Institute to see how fetal cells were or were not used in various stages of vaccine research and production in each of the main pharmaceutical companies. With thanks to the folks over at CUP for the resource.)

You likely won’t have heard a great deal about this from the pulpit as clergy in our diocese have been discouraged from discussing it. As our bishop told diocesan clergy:

I know that there are those who want a “final word,” and this in the midst of a global moment with all sorts of vaccines and technologies. My experience in bioethics is that by the time we reach certainty about particular medical/pharmacological interventions, the science and treatments will have moved on.

To paraphrase a solid Catholic physician/surgeon who spoke to me once concerning my moral misgivings about one of his treatment options, he said, “Father, when you have stood by the table treating damaged and dying patients as often as I have, then you can have a right to an opinion.” Let’s be temperate in our opinions and how (if) we express them.

Apart from keeping mum, there is not a great deal of evidence available that Catholic leaders are, in any meaningful way, applying pressure on companies to cease using the cells of aborted children as a COVID remedy, and certainly not the pressure of a boycott or deliberate abstention. (Let us know in the comments if you’ve heard otherwise.)

Sadly, at least one clinic in our own diocese and with diocesan approval has been making free use of the J&J vaccine: the most problematic one of them all, the one that we are ostensibly to avoid in favor of others, and the exact sort that we’re supposed to be insisting that the industry cease producing.

But why would researchers or pharmaceutical companies bother to listen to such a plea, when they effectively have the support and endorsement of our leaders already? Answer: They wouldn’t. Our actions, or the lack thereof, will undercut our words, making them meaningless, pushing the hope of more ethically-derived vaccines for this or future diseases further away, and depriving unborn children of the protection and advocacy that we owe to them.

The present reality is that abortion providers are incentivized to meet abortion quotas and have passed off the harvested tissues to biomedical research companies in exchange for monies entitled “reimbursement.” (How, exactly, is one “reimbursed” for the act of obtaining another person’s body for experimentation by force? )

How–and again why–would such a grisly trade ever be brought to a stop if people, Catholic leaders especially, are perfectly willing to participate in or benefit from it?

Let’s acknowledge that the ethics around some vaccines can require a complex path of reasoning. Yet, when all is said and done, using stolen lives to save other lives is a hopeless contradiction about the value of the human person.

As ethicist Christopher Tollefson writes:

The truth is that abortion is an ugly business, the purpose of which is the killing of unborn human beings; we should not varnish that truth with the patina of respectability that comes with saving life.

A second concern involves fairness. Every human being should reasonably be able to expect that incentives for his or her death will not be created, and that the motivation for contributing to his or her survival will not be diminished. But were a class of human beings to be designated as available not just to be killed at will for individual benefit, but then to have their physical remains used, without their consent, for the benefit of society, this would surely be contrary to that reasonable expectation, and thus to fairness. It is bad enough that unborn human beings are killed at will; we should not worsen the offense by creating a social benefit from it….

The use of fetal tissue from aborted human beings … predicates the health of some on the deliberate destruction of the lives and health of others. That predication is incompatible with the fundamental commitments of medicine….

We here decide what sort of society we want ours to be—we are constituting ourselves as a certain kind of people. We must emerge from this death-filled crisis committed more firmly as a society to life, not least in the person of those youngest and most vulnerable members of our human family.

In the same way, the Church itself must emerge from this crisis not having compromised her identity and mission but rather, having lived it more fully.

Are we doing so?

Bishop Doherty’s Easter message on the April 4 edition of The Catholic Moment addresses the Church’s COVID response. He writes:

Our national landscape reflects tensions between self-will and social cooperation, between educated medical prognosis and political posturing. During the past year, how many people repeated Pontius Pilate’s sarcastic question to Jesus, “What is truth?” (John18:38) as a put down?

Well, zero, in our hearing. What we noticed from people with differing opinions was anxiety to get to the core of the truth, while a cloud of panic far more threatening than any germ hung in the air. The need to balance competing thoughts on what is appropriate, to practice prudence in matters of one’s own & one’s neighbor’s health without compromising the prudence that is demanded if a healthy and sane polis is to exist. The need to reject propositions and “solutions” that are immoral, or that would introduce greater evils than those they seek to address.

Perhaps we misunderstand the bishop’s point here, but in our reading, it seems to be that questioning the orthodoxy of the “experts” constitutes an offense comparable to Pilate’s–a disregard for truth, rather than a reaching for it. So knock it off, you self-willed hayseeds.

The article continues:

Last year we could not imagine the suffering caused by suspending public celebrations of Mass and sacraments. The common good seemed to demand this, although newer information helped relax some restrictions.

Two thoughts. Firstly, if Church leaders are not able to imagine how much suffering would be caused by taking away the sacraments, then all one can say is that they need better imaginations.

And lo: we also see that all this suffering, both for people and their priests–which was at least in part the result of failing to question the politically-driven narrative–turned out not to have been quite so necessary as originally feared. “The common good seemed to demand this …” but didn’t, actually, in many cases, as we now know.

Maybe we could, after all, while still helping the vulnerable, have baptized our babies, confessed our sins, received Communion, buried our dead. Maybe we should all have been asking “What is the truth?”

But no. Because if Holy Week taught us anything, it is that people crowding about the Lord is disastrous:

Our liturgies throughout Holy Week can only remind us that crowds around Jesus produced good, then horrific outcomes. And of how some people who loved Jesus gathered or scattered between Holy Thursday and Resurrection Day.

This leaves one at a loss for words.

The scattering was then and is now the problem. Judas’ betrayal, a gross failure to discern the value of the Lord before other things. Peter’s denial, rooted in his human panic and the need to save his skin. The hiding, cowering, and paralysis that subdued human hearts and kept them from venturing nearer the Lord, or their blind need to follow (wrong) human authority figures like Pilate or Caiaphas through whatever grim dance they commanded. And, literally in this case, to wash one’s hands of the matter.

If it is true that people crowding about, seeking Christ’s presence were a danger, a disaster in the making, then they were a danger that He invited. To them, just as to the innocent children who were always foremost in His mind, He might have said: “Let them come to me; hinder them not.”

On the facing page of the bishop’s column, Deacon Mescall offers thoughts on “Uniting in Heart,” reprinting the saga of the consultants and processes used to move us to where we are today. He notes that:

We have seen, and watch even today, as the Body of Christ journeys through what looks like a “winter” of Catholics falling away from the Church. Our youth are being pulled from their faith by the temptations of our culture, and souls floundering who have not yet encountered the love of Jesus Christ.

This statement by the deacon is of course perfectly correct. And one is tempted to draw a large red line from it to the statement opposite that “crowds around Jesus produced good, then horrific outcomes.”

If we teach people not to desire, not to pursue, not to prioritize God’s presence, ought we to be surprised when they do not do so? Can we cover up the sun and regret the winter?

In the end, we all live as we believe.

Romans 8: 5-6 gives us something to bear in mind as we move forward and make decisions in the present environment. These things are true, come COVID or anything else.

For those who live according to the flesh are concerned with the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit with the things of the spirit. The concern of the flesh is death, but the concern of the spirit is life and peace.

Let’s pray that we each do our part to live this fully.