A Catholic understanding
of the Covid19 Vaccine
 
There has been a lot of discussion in the media and in Catholic circles regarding the morality of the Covid-19  vaccines that have been developed.  The main reason for the confusion and concern for Catholics is that some of those who developed the vaccines used stem cell lines that were developed from aborted fetuses back in the 60’s and 70’s. 
 
The Holy Father and Church officials have come out publicly stating it is morally permissible to receive these vaccines.  Why?  Doesn’t this seem like a contradiction in our Catholic beliefs about the sanctity of human life?  What we need to look at is the guiding principles of Catholic morality.  And the main principles are what is called “formal and informal cooperation.”
Cooperation
Humans work together to achieve common goals. But cooperation is not always good, particularly when the goals being pursued or the means used to achieve them are evil. It is tempting to take a strict and rigid position and simply declare that all cooperation with evil is sinful, but further reflection reveals problems with this position.
 
Sometimes our own actions may be entirely innocent, yet they may be part of a chain of events that results in evil. For example, if you work in a bookstore you might sell someone an ink pen, an action innocent in and of itself, and be totally unaware that the person is planning use the pen to harm someone. By selling him the pen, you cooperated with and enabled the action of the attacker. Yet a well-formed conscience would not say that you did something wrong by selling him the pen. Therefore, some forms of cooperation with evil in some circumstances are not sinful.
 
Ignorance of the evil is not the only excuse here. Sometimes force is. Suppose you are in a convenience store when you encounter a man waving a gun. He points the gun at you and tells you to load up a bag with the money from the cash register. Doing so would involve cooperating with evil; the robbery of a convenience store, but is it licit to do so with a gun pointed at your head? Yes. The Catholic Church places a high value on private property, but the Church would never say that a few hundred dollars are worth your life and that you must refuse to put the loot in the bag. This same principle is applied when someone kills someone in self defense. You have a moral right to defend yourself and your family.
 
Formal Cooperation
So with this moral teaching, the Church divides moral cooperation into two categories. Formal and Remote.  Formal cooperation is when we assent to the act with which we are cooperating. For example, going back to the example of robbing a convenience store; If we help the thief, knowing that we will share in the ill gotten gains, then we are formally cooperating with evil. This is also true with abortion, for example. To procure and abortion or assist or encourage someone to get an abortion means we incur the sin, just as if we ourselves had the abortion. We could never morally justify formally cooperating in evil.
 
Remote Material Cooperation
This is when we do something that is not sinful in and of itself and when we do not endorse the evil. This is why the Church says it is permissible to take a vaccine which was developed from a stem cell line back in the 60’s and 70’s in order to create the Covid vaccine. We did not will the abortion, nor did we commit or participate in the crime of abortion to obtain the material used in developing the vaccine. And even though the abortions that created these stem cell lines were wrong and evil, we did not formally cooperate in the death of these unborn children. The connection to the development of the Covid vaccine is “remote.”
 
Traditional Catholic moral theology teaches that remote material cooperation with an evil action may be justifiable in certain circumstances.
 
Some may find this difficult to accept, but traditional Catholic moral theology is firm on the point. Consider a parallel: God permits us to commit sins. He does not will it, however, He gives us life, free will and the ability to act. But we do know that God is justified in all that He does. Catholic Moral teaching is on firm ground in acknowledging that remote material cooperation with an evil can be justified when there are appropriate reasons.
 
How do these principles apply to the Covid-19 vaccine?
The Catholic Church’s teaching says that abortion is a grave sin as we mentioned before. However, the Church states that even though it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses, does not and should not in any way imply that there is a moral endorsement of the use of cell lines proceeding from aborted fetuses. The Vatican also noted that while various vaccines might be distributed in a country, “health authorities do not allow citizens to choose the vaccine with which to be inoculated.”
 
In the United States, the National Catholic Bioethics center states that we should choose ethical vaccines when they are available. The NCBC’s “FAQ on the Use of Vaccines” was most recently updated in 2019, and is frequently cited by U.S. bishops. Hence, Catholics are called to make ethical vaccine brand choices.
 
While it is a personal decision of conscience as to whether or not to accept a vaccine, it is important to be clear that the Church, for her part, does not require us to decline it on such grounds in the face of serious reasons, as in the situation of an elderly person or someone with multiple health issues who faces significant risks if they were to contract COVID-19. This fact, of course, in no way absolves or diminishes the serious wrongdoing of those who used cell lines from abortions to make vaccines in the first place.
 
Any time we decide to receive an unethically produced vaccine, moreover, we should push back. We need to do our part in applying pressure on the manufacturer, perhaps by sending an e-mail indicating our objection to the fact that their vaccine was produced using ethically controversial cell sources, and requesting that they reformulate it using alternative, non-abortion-related cell sources.
 
I hope this has been helpful in allowing you to reflect upon this very difficult situation we find ourselves as Christians in, and to make an informed decision about the Covid-19 vaccine.
 
God bless,
Fr. Dennis

​Dear friends in Christ,
 
We hear in the Gospel these familiar words “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world..”  Of course we recognize these words because they are the words spoken by the priest and the Liturgy just before we receive Holy Communion.
 
A friend of mine, back home in Canada shared with me that when she and her family go to Mass, when the priest elevates the host and proclaims the words:  “Behold the Lamb of God!  Behold Him who takes away the sins of the world;” her 6 year old will snuggle up to her and whisper “Look Mom. It’s your favorite part of Mass.”  She shared with me, “That part of Mass gets me every time.”
 
Those words “Lamb of God” are some of the most succinct and moving summaries of our Catholic Faith. It has so much historical context, and so many radical implications. It’s a culmination and fulfillment of prophecies, and a door opening to wider understanding.  Its proclamation in the Mass is perfectly placed, and its original proclamation in the Bible even more so.
 
Where do we get the notion of a lamb as anything other than sheep that roam and eat and say baa? How did this evolve into a symbol so vital to our faith?
It begins in Old Testament history.  Israel, through a series of circumstances, ends up in Egypt, as slaves. They suffer this oppression for many years, waiting and praying for their deliverer.  And then God sends Moses.  We know the story… God sends a series of plagues, and each time, Pharaoh ignores God’s word and continues to oppress the Hebrews.  Finally, God sends a final judgment on Egypt, He sends the angel of death to strike down the first born of Egypt.  But God provides a special way for his people to be spared from this awful plague. In Exodus chapter 12 you can read the story of the first Passover meal, in which a lamb is slain, prepared, and eaten – and its blood is smeared on the doorway of the houses.  Each house marked with this blood is saved from the death that spreads throughout the land. Pharaoh relents and lets the people go.
 
God commands that His people commemorate this event by celebrating the Passover every year, to sacrifice a lamb and to ritually remember what God has done for them.  And so we come to the Gospel today.  John the Baptist  announces to the people that the Lamb of God, the Savior is here:
 
The Lamb – that saves us from death.
The Lamb – that frees us from slavery.
The Lamb – that takes away our sins.
 
Part of why St. John’s Gospel includes this scene in his Gospel is because, at that time, the early church was facing two heresies. One claimed that the Eucharist was only symbolic, and the other denied Jesus’ divinity.  Sound familiar?
 
John’s Gospel lays the hammer down on these two heresies in the very first chapter.  When John recounts John the Baptist calling Jesus the “Lamb of God,” he’s setting the stage for understanding the institution of the Eucharist. Jesus is the Lamb!  Jesus is the meal. He is the sacrifice. We consume Him, and He frees us from our slavery to sin, He frees us from death.  But He’s not just “the Lamb,” He’s the Lamb of God.
 
Jesus is the one whose coming was prophesied in hundreds of different ways. He’s the fulfillment of all the prophesies.  He lived and died and rose again thousands of years ago. Yet he’s still with us today – in this tiny Host, a great mystery.
 
He is my meal, my food. He feeds and nourishes me through the Eucharist. Through this food, He heals and saves my soul. He forgives my sins.  Yet He is God. Infinite and eternal and beyond my understanding. He’s here. Right here in Mass, in front of me. “Behold Him.”   Raise your eyes and look at Him.
 
He is God. He’s right here in Mass, in front of me. He wants to free me from slavery – slavery to sin. He wants to free me from death. He’s the one who can make me fully alive.  Every time we go to Mass, we can also look upon the same Christ who shrouds the fullness of God’s glory.  When we see Christ in the Eucharist, we have no reason to shield our eyes. Instead, Christ in the Eucharist looks so unassuming that we need faith to believe that such a simple sight could really be God. 
 
Saint Faustina writes in her Diary:
O Blessed Host, enchantment of all heaven, Though Your beauty be veiled and captured in a crumb of bread,  Strong faith tears away that veil.
 
He sacrificed Himself for us so that in the end we might behold Him in the fullness of His glory, and that's more than we could ever ask for. 
 
God bless,  Fr. Dennis
 

​Baptism: The Sacrament
of Christian Identity
 
What Is the Meaning of Jesus’ Baptism? Before we look at what our baptism means, we need to look at Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan.
 
We celebrate the baptism of Jesus in three significant ways: liturgically, we celebrate on Sunday, at the conclusion of the Christmas season, on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. We celebrate it devotionally, as the First Luminous Mystery of the Rosary; and theologically, as the Scriptural event that speaks to us of the meaning of Christian baptism.
 
The baptism of Jesus comes to us in the midst of the baptism of John the Baptist, who was baptizing people as a sign of repentance from sin and a preparation for the coming of the Messiah. It is reasonable to ask: Why did Jesus, as the sinless Son of God, receive baptism?
 
This event, recorded in all four Gospels, marks the inauguration of the Lord’s public ministry. What follows in the Gospel accounts is His preaching, miracles, healings and proclamation of mercy and forgiveness. Jesus steps into the Jordan River and into His mission of redemption through this public religious act. It is also, what we call a Theophany, an event where the Blessed Trinity is revealed .  The Son of God comes up from the waters, the Holy Spirit comes down and anoints Jesus as Messiah and the voice of the Father is heard:  “This is my beloved Son, listen to Him.”
 
Where’s the connection between Jesus’ baptism and ours? One thing we need to see is that,  just as Jesus is revealed as the beloved Son at the Jordan, so, too, we receive a new identity in baptism as adopted children of the Father. The fruit of Christ’s victory over the power of sin and death is the divine invitation for us to share in the very life of the Trinity. Jesus Christ freely shares His very nature with us through the waters of baptism.  Notice what St. Paul says in his epistle 2 Corinthians 5: 17-20:
 
“So whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. And all this is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
 
St. Paul is speaking here about baptism, when we went into the font of baptism, we became a new creation. There is a fundamental change in us when we are baptized. It’s not simply symbolic, it’s real! This is what the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach about baptism. St. Paul describes this new life we receive in baptism in several other passages:
 
"You have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him" (Colossians 3:9-10).
 
"For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ" (Galatians 3:26-27).
 
"I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
 
At the moment of our spiritual rebirth in the font, the Father beholds us with delight, exclaiming, “This is my beloved son, this is my beloved daughter with whom I am well pleased.” Christianity first and foremost is about whom we have become in Christ before it is about what we do or how we act. This saving act of spiritual adoption draws us into the very life of God and His merciful grace.
 
That doesn’t mean that it’s all over, and we have nothing to be concerned about, No…  God plants the seed of salvation in us, but we must nurture it, feed it, so it can grow and produce fruit that will last. Baptism is not just a magical ritual, it is a sacramental reality, and like all sacraments, they are vehicles of God’s grace, given to us freely by God, but they demand a response from us. We must nurture, feed and seek to increase the grace that God has planted as a seed in us. The potential is there, but this potential must be realized, in part, by our responding to His grace. We can lose the grace of salvation if we do not do this.
 
That’s why I encourage families to celebrate, not just their children’s birthdays but also their anniversary of baptism.  Why? Because it’s our Christian identity. Nothing wrong with celebrating our birthdays, but when parents take the time to remind their children of their baptismal anniversary, they are exercising their role as the first teachers of their children in the way of faith. It instills in the children an awareness and gratitude for what God has done for them in Christ. It can be done very simply. On or near their anniversary, place a bowl of water on the dinner table, their candle, their stole and speak about these symbols, reminding them of what happened at the font – they became a new creation in Christ!
 
Pope Francis recently spoke of the importance of remembering the day of our baptism, which he said is more than just a date on the calendar, but is the moment we receive our Christian identity and are immersed in the grace and forgiveness of God. “The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus invites every Christian to remember their own baptism,” the Pope said, explaining that to forget one's baptism “means exposing oneself to the risk of losing the memory of what the Lord has done for us.” In the end, we consider the day “only as a fact that happened in the past,” rather than recognizing as the day on which “we became new creatures and are also capable of forgiving and loving whoever offends us and does us harm.” The Holy Father said that more than just the day that “sociologically marks the parish register,” the day that we were baptized is the day that “constitutes the demanding identity card of the believer.”
 
The great early church father, St. Cyril of Jerusalem took his newly baptized Catholics through a time of what was called “Mystagogy.” Mystagogy was the period between Easter and Pentecost where the newly baptized reflected on the mysteries they had just celebrated and received. He writes that reflecting upon their mysteries of salvation was crucial to their growth in faith. Mystagogy was a breaking open of the mysteries, a time to reflect on what had happened to them – they had just been baptized, confirmed and received their first Eucharist.
 
This is what the Holy Father is speaking of… when we take time to reflect and remember what God has done for us, our faith grows and is strengthened. We are baptized believers in Jesus Christ. It’s not just a title we use, it is our identity from which our life draws meaning. We never want to forget what the Lord has done for us. 
 
God bless,
Fr. Dennis

​Must Catholics refuse  a COVID-19 vaccine made with the cell line from an abortion?
 
With all the buzz lately regarding the newly produced vaccine for the coronavirus, I thought it would be good to give some guidance about what the Church teaches us in these instances.  So I’ve provided a reflection by Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. whom I’ve had the pleasure of hearing him speak.
Father has taught bioethics at St. John’s Seminary in Boston; Pope St. John XXIII Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts; Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut; Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis; St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia; and The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
Fr. Pacholczyk has degrees in philosophy, biochemistry, molecular cell biology, and chemistry. He later earned a PhD in neuroscience from Yale University, where he focused on cloning genes for neurotransmitter transporters which are expressed in the brain. After working several years as a molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Fr. Pacholczyk studied for five years in Rome at both the Gregorian University and the Lateran University, where he did advanced work in dogmatic theology and bioethics, examining delayed ensoulment of the human embryo.
He has testified before state legislatures during deliberations over stem cell research and cloning. He writes a syndicated monthly column on bioethics that appears in more than forty US diocesan newspapers as well as newspapers in England, Poland, and Australia. He has appeared in numerous media outlets, including NBC, ABC, CNN International, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, the Dallas Morning News, and the New York Times.
God bless, Fr. Dennis
 
“In the wake of announcements from multiple pharmaceutical companies about safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, many are expressing ethical doubts about whether it is OK to take these vaccines. Do Catholics have a moral duty to decline an inoculation if it was unethically produced using a cell line that came from an abortion?  The short answer is “no.” This has been discussed and explained in several magisterial church documents in recent years.
In 2008, for example, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reminded us in the Instruction Dignitas Personae that:
“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.”
For a serious reason, therefore, Catholics may receive a COVID-19 vaccine having an association with abortion, and a serious reason could include a threat to one’s health and well being. Those who are elderly or who face co-morbidities like diabetes, obesity or other significant health conditions are among the highest risk groups for adverse outcomes from infection, and would clearly have a serious reason.
Vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer are likely to be among the first to receive emergency approval in the U.S., and do not rely on cell lines from abortions in the manufacturing process. As such, they appear to be good candidates for Catholics to use. There is a problem that a cell line from a 1972 abortion was used to carry out some ancillary testing of those vaccines, but the fact that zero material derived from any cell line from an abortion is present in these vaccines, that is to say, inside the syringe which actually jabs the patient, is sufficient in the minds of most to assuage any concern over using them, even if problematic laboratory testing may have taken place along the way.
If we end up facing a choice among multiple COVID-19 vaccines of similar or equal safety and efficacy, as appears likely, it will clearly be preferable to choose alternatives with a better ethical profile, i.e. those not associated with, or less associated with, material derived from abortions.
Suppose, however, that two new vaccines both appeared to be safe during clinical trials. The first vaccine had no association with abortion, but was only 35% effective at protecting from COVID-19, while the second was more than 90% effective, but was manufactured using a cell line derived from an abortion. In such a case, again, we could choose the significantly more effective version for the serious reason of danger to our health.
Relying on cell lines from abortions to manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine provokes strong moral objections and some can and will refuse the vaccines on these grounds. While it is a personal decision of conscience as to whether or not to accept a vaccine, it is important to be clear that the Church, for her part, does not require us to decline it on such grounds in the face of serious reasons, as in the situation of an elderly person or someone with multiple health issues who faces significant risks if they were to contract COVID-19. This fact, of course, in no way absolves or diminishes the serious wrongdoing of those who used cell lines from abortions to make vaccines in the first place.
Any time we decide to receive an unethically produced vaccine, moreover, we should push back. We need to do our part in applying pressure on the manufacturer, perhaps by sending an e-mail indicating our objection to the fact that their vaccine was produced using ethically controversial cell sources, and requesting that they reformulate it using alternative, non-abortion-related cell sources. Alternatively, we might write a letter to the editor of our local paper pointing out the injustice of being morally coerced to rely on these cell sources, or take other steps to educate and inform others.
Such efforts help expand public awareness of the problem and apply real pressure for change. Such efforts can be more effective (and require more authentic determination on our part) than merely “digging in our heels” or “taking a stand” and refusing to get vaccinated, which has the negative effect of subjecting us, and others around us, to heightened risk from various diseases.
While it is too early to know which COVID-19 vaccines will end up becoming available in the U.S., the pandemic is certain to elevate the profile of abortion-related ethical concerns among the public to a degree not previously seen, offering a unique opportunity to push for the elimination of these cell lines from future biomedical research and pharmaceutical development projects.”
Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk