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Bishop Athanasius Schneider speaks at the Rome Life Forum in May 2018.

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February 19, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – An outspokenly pro-life Catholic bishop is calling for the formation of a “new pro-life movement” that refuses to have anything to do with medicines or vaccines derived in one way or another from aborted babies.

“We have to make a new pro-life movement,” said Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, during his February 19 presentation at an online conference hosted by LifeSiteNews titled “Unmasking COVID-19: Vaccines, Mandates, and Global Health.”

Bishop Schneider said that until now, the pro-life movement has been “very meritorious” in raising a united voice against abortion. “But I think there now comes a new time, a new phase, a new period of all pro-life movements to protest, clearly and unambiguously, against abortion-tainted medicines, against the abuse of the body parts of the unborn.”

“This is a new phase, and we have to be courageous,” he added.

Schneider’s call to action comes in the wake of revelations about how researchers procure cell lines used in the development of numerous vaccines — including a number of COVID vaccines — from babies who were aborted alive in order to have usable tissue.

The Catholic Church’s 2020 guidelines permit Catholics to receive abortion-tainted vaccines, emphasizing that Catholics who receive a COVID vaccine connected in some way to abortion can do so in “good conscience” with “the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion” (italics in original).

While Schneider would certainly acknowledge that there is no formal cooperation (that is, a willing participation) on the part of a vaccine recipient in an abortion from which was procured a cell line to make vaccines, he also holds that Christians cannot “simply resign” themselves to the fact that the production of various medicines is tied to the slaughter of preborn babies who are utilized for their body parts.

“The voice of the unborn children’s blood is crying to God from the abortion-tainted vaccines, from the abortion-tainted medicines,” he said. “This voice is crying all over the world, and we have to awaken.”

“No one who is really deeply concerned about the defense of life and the moral law can be silent or can be quiet and can resign to this situation,” he added.

The bishop lamented Church leaders, especially those connected to the Holy See, “who, unfortunately, do not see the grievousness” of the matter.

Schneider pointed out that there is an “accumulation of crimes” involved in the creation of abortion-tainted medicines.

“The first crime is the murder, the assassination, of the unborn child. Then there is the extraction of the cells – it’s a crime, it’s horrible. And then there is the recycling of these body parts. And then there is the commercialization, and so on. And then there is the fabrication of medicines and the fabrication of the vaccines.”

“These are all connected. You cannot separate them,” he said. “When you take this medicine in your body or this vaccine, you cannot say, ‘Oh, all these evils disappear, and I am very far away [from them all].’ This is not true. You are entering this chain.”

“The hour has now come that all people of goodwill, especially believing Catholics, all pro-life organizations have to stand up and make a fiery protest with one voice and say, ‘We will never agree [with], we will never admit [into our lives] these evils.’”

Schneider quoted from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, citing the Russian author’s warning about the moral cost of creating a utopia of “peace and rest” that was, however, founded on the torture, death and “unavenged tears” of “only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist.”

“So, we have to protest against this and start a new movement in pharmaceutics, in medicine, with no connection, not the remotest, to these crimes,” the Bishop said.

Schneider said that Christians in this new movement should be willing to face “prison” and even “death” rather than receive health benefits derived from the murder of unborn babies.

“How can you use for your temporal health benefit the murdering, and all these horrible crimes, of the most weak and innocent unborn children? The end never justifies the means. You cannot enter into this chain.”

He pointed to the example of the first Christians who, when facing times of persecution, chose martyrdom rather than save their lives, their families, their children by putting a pinch of incense in front of a statue of an idol.

“They refused any act of ambiguity or cooperation against the first command of God,” he said.

“I think we are approaching a time where the true Christians will approach a kind of time of persecution. The signs are already there. But we have not to be fearful because God is with us […] If Christ is living in us, we don’t have to be fearful,” he added.

“We have to be convinced that we belong to the winners. And, we have to look at eternity. What is a Christian? I would say a person of eternity. And because we are looking beyond only this temporal life, we are looking on the eternal, we are looking for God’s will. And when we do this, God will always give us Jesus’ strength, his consolation even, and his blessings.”

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