ASHBURTON, England, December 18, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A Catholic bishop in England has invited the National Health Service (NHS) to use diocesan property to administer the morally compromised Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
In a statement given yesterday, Bishop Mark O’Toole, of the Diocese of Plymouth, said: “I warmly welcome the NHS to St. Boniface House, our Diocesan Offices, so that they can be used as a base to administer the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Continuing, the bishop added that the “Church is very happy to cooperate with the Government in this endeavour, as a service to local communities.” The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) confirmed that the diocesan offices will be used from December 16 “until at least April 2021,” where they have already started to vaccinate up to 200 people per day. The CBCEW also said that they viewed their part in the vaccination program, although “demanding,” as “an important act of service for the common good of all.”
O’Toole echoed these sentiments in his own address, invoking “Jesus Our Lord” as the motivation behind the move. “This is an extension of the work that has been carried out in our churches … to our neighbours and to ensure their wellbeing,” the bishop stated, adding that “[t]his next step with the vaccine is a sign of hope for us all.”
The CBCEW has been at the forefront of the debate over the moral liceity of the COVID-19 vaccines currently in development. The conference released a statement earlier this year in which they purport to have the “Catholic position on vaccination.”
The intention to cooperate with the government’s vaccine rollout, regardless of any connection of vaccines with abortion, was pre-emptively offered in the July statement. “We support the Pontifical Academy for Life’s belief,” the letter reads, “that ‘all clinically recommended vaccinations can be used with a clear conscience.’”
The bishops’ conference went a step farther, claiming that Catholics are bound by “a prima facie duty to be vaccinated.” They consolidated their position, stating that they believe there is a “moral obligation” to take the vaccine, as an act of charity “to guarantee the vaccination coverage necessary for the safety of others.”
The document does admit that “[t]he Church is opposed to the production of vaccines using tissue derived from aborted foetuses” before immediately undermining the teaching in the next paragraph: “[n]evertheless, the Church teaches that the paramount importance of the health of a child and other vulnerable persons could permit parents to use a vaccine which was in the past developed using these diploid cell lines.”
Deacon Nick Donnelly, a popular English Catholic clergyman and writer, summed up the confusing logic of the CBCEW thus: “[a] selective morality about the sanctity of life is no morality at all, but just the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless.”
More recently, following the approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, the CBCEW have renewed and redoubled their previous endorsement of abortion-tainted vaccines, this time announcing that “one does not sin by receiving the vaccine” based on their judgement that “grave reason exists.”
In a joint statement released earlier this month, five Catholic prelates commented on the “growing chorus of churchmen (bishops’ conferences, individual bishops, and priests)” who have touted that there are certain conditions under which one might receive an abortion-linked vaccine and remain in good moral standing.
In no uncertain words, the group of bishops state that “[in] the case of vaccines made from the cell lines of aborted human fetuses, we see a clear contradiction between the Catholic doctrine … and the practice of regarding vaccines derived from aborted fetal cell lines as morally acceptable in exceptional cases of ‘urgent need.’”
“Any link to the abortion process, even the most remote and implicit, will cast a shadow over the Church’s duty to bear unwavering witness to the truth that abortion must be utterly rejected. The ends cannot justify the means.”
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