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Fr. Massimo PampaloniYouTube screenshot/Pontifical Oriental Institute

ROME (LifeSiteNews) – The Pontifical Oriental Institute (POI) reportedly penalized a dean and prominent Jesuit scholar for refusing the COVID-19 injections.

Church Militant reported that the POI’s dean of faculty for Eastern Ecclesiastical Sciences, Fr. Massimo Pampaloni, S.J., was recently sent to Brazil due to his conscience objections to the shots.

Fr. Pampaloni, a consultor to the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and a leading scholar of Syriac Christology, rejected the mandatory jabs in spite of pressure from authorities and his superiors, a Rome-based oriental studies scholar told Church Militant.

Italy earlier this year made the COVID shots compulsory for residents over 50 years old. The mandate is set to expire June 15. The Vatican also issued a jab mandate for all employees in December.

“For a dean and leading scholar at the world’s most prestigious oriental studies pontifical school to be stripped of his position and shunted to another continent by his own Jesuit community despite the Vatican stating that vaccination is voluntary is unprecedented,” Church Militant’s source said. Fr. Pampaloni previously served as vice rector at the POI between 2010 and 2016.

Virtually every other Jesuit in Rome has taken the abortion-tainted injections, the source added.

“For reasons of privacy protection, we do not give any information about it,” the office of POI rector Fr. David Nazar, S.J. told Church Militant about Fr. Pampaloni’s case.

Fr. Pampaloni is now a visiting professor at The Jesuit School of Philosophy and Theology, a Jesuit college in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The POI’s website still includes him on its faculty page.

“The Pontifical Oriental Institute cannot afford to lose such an outstanding academic for too long. Currently, they simply cannot find a replacement for him — which is why they are playing the game by banishing him and will then allow him to return from exile after making an example of him,” the oriental studies scholar said.

At some point of development, all available COVID-19 shots relied on cell-lines derived from aborted babies who were most likely still alive when their tissue was extracted. The jabs have additionally been linked to serious side effects, including the immune disorder Guillain Barré Syndrome and potentially fatal heart issues, like myocarditis.

The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stressed in a note last year that “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.”

The Jesuit order has nevertheless pursued severe COVID jab mandates for priests, as well as for students and employees at Jesuit-run schools across the U.S.

Boston College High School (BCHS), a Jesuit college preparatory school, has faced a wave of criticism for segregating unjabbed students behind plexiglass dividers at lunch. Another Jesuit-run high school, Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix, required the shots last year for extracurricular activities.

Several Jesuit colleges and universities, including Georgetown University, Fordham University, and Boston College, have mandated COVID injections for students, faculty, and staff. The Jesuits West Province in the United States has also ordered Jesuit priests to get jabbed, Church Militant reported.

The POI’s action against Fr. Pampaloni comes after Pope Francis this month dismissed Bishop Daniel Fernández Torres from the Diocese of Arecibo, Puerto Rico after the bishop publicly defended conscience objections to COVID-19 shots and refused to segregate parishioners based on jab status.

Mother General Marilla, Mother Superior of London’s Tyburn convent, was also recently reported to the Vatican over her opposition to the injections. And last week, the Mother Superior of a Benedictine monastery in Perugia, Italy said that her convent is facing closure by the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life because the nuns remain jab-free.

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