Recent articles in The B.C. Catholic have quoted the Vatican’s “Note on the morality of using some anti-COVID-19 vaccines,” issued in December 2020 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The statement affirms our conscience rights in relation to vaccination, as well as certain moral duties to be considered in the formation of conscience.
Paul Schratz’s Aug. 30 column “Conscience vs. vaccination passports” considers the threat to conscience rights posed by the B.C. government requiring: (1) mandatory vaccination of some health-care workers and (2) vaccine passports for anyone to attend restaurants, movie theatres, fitness centres, and certain non-essential events.
Alan Yoshioka’s Sept. 6 article “Conscience rights don’t stand alone,” emphasizes our moral duty to pursue the common good, particularly in light of public health concerns. “Conscience rights concerning vaccine hesitancy must not be considered in isolation from our broader moral obligations,” says Yoshioka.
Let’s take a deeper look at the moral duties and obligations affirmed by the CDF statement and how they relate to conscience rights. I propose that a serious consideration of those moral duties, together with examination of the findings of science, may, at least for some persons, give rise to a moral obligation to refuse vaccination, and hence to a right of conscience to refuse vaccination. Other persons may, in good conscience, come to the opposite conclusion.
Paragraph 3 of the CDF note affirms a moral duty to avoid the remote and passive material co-operation in evil associated with using COVID-19 vaccines that were developed using cell lines derived from aborted fetuses. This duty is not obligatory “if there is a grave danger, such as the otherwise uncontainable spread of a serious pathological agent.”
Paragraph 5 states that vaccination as a rule is not a moral obligation and must be voluntary, but then affirms two more duties: to protect one’s own health and to pursue the common good.
“In the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic, the common good may recommend vaccination, especially to protect the weakest and most exposed,” says the CDF.
There are thus certain prerequisites for the suspension of the first moral duty of avoiding use of morally tainted vaccines: there must be grave danger as well as clinically safe and effective vaccines. There is also a prerequisite for “the common good to recommend vaccination,” which is “the absence of other means to stop or even prevent the epidemic.”
Let’s concede that the pandemic constitutes a grave danger to life and health for many people, even if most people will not become seriously ill or die. The other conditions must still be met for the common good to recommend vaccination in the interest of public health.
Not all experts agree that those conditions have been met. For example, in June 2021, a panel of seven Canadian physicians and scientists, including professors in the medical faculties of the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, joined by Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of epidemiology at Yale University School of Public Health, met in a webinar to discuss a path forward for Canadians. They claimed to represent hundreds of other Canadian doctors and scientists. Their consensus, summed up by Dr. Bonnie Mallard, professor of immunogenetics at the University of Guelph, was that the vaccine rollout in Canada should be paused because of safety concerns, especially in the case of children. They further expressed the opinion that there are alternative treatments that can be successfully used to prevent and treat COVID-19 pending further study of the vaccines.
For those who, after carefully looking at the science, conclude that there is available to them a safer and comparably effective way to avoid serious cases of COVID-19 and to avoid transmitting the disease to others, the common good no longer recommends vaccination. In that case, the consciences of such persons may oblige them to avoid vaccination to fulfill the moral duty of preserving one’s own health from the risks of vaccination, in addition to the moral duty to avoid passive material co-operation in the evil of abortion. They will, of course, still be subject to the duty stated in Par. 3 of CDF note, to “do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”
Other persons may, in looking at the science, reach the conclusion there is no effective way to prevent serious cases of COVID-19 except by vaccination. They may find the risks of vaccination to be minimal, or at least much smaller than the risks of not getting vaccinated. In that case, their consciences may oblige them to be vaccinated in order to preserve their own health and to help prevent transmission to others. It would also seem reasonable to suggest that since the vaccines have not been shown to entirely prevent transmission of the disease, even the vaccinated ought to “do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”
Each group should be able to respect the conscience of the other in their personal and prudential judgments as to the type of medical treatment they take.
Finally, let’s again consider the common good, which certainly includes the great good of public health in human communities; but there is more to it than that. It includes respect for the right to life of the weakest and most vulnerable, including unborn children. It also means that we live in a society that respects human rights such as freedom of conscience, subject only to reasonable and demonstrably justified limitations, as stated in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In addition to those temporal goods, The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 170, teaches that “God is the ultimate end of his creatures and for no reason may the common good be deprived of its transcendent dimension.”
Church teachings, such as those contained in CDF note, the Catechism, and the Compendium, are invaluable guides to the formation of conscience. In particular circumstances, however, it is up to individual persons to seek the truth, including the truth about the common good, having regard to all the facts, and to make their own prudential judgments of conscience guided by Church teachings.
Saint John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, 34, says, “Although each individual has a right to be respected in his own journey in search of the truth, there exists a prior moral obligation, and a grave one at that, to seek the truth and to adhere to it once it is known. As Cardinal John Henry Newman, that outstanding defender of the rights of conscience, forcefully put it: ‘Conscience has rights because it has duties’.”
This is an argument for respect for each person in his or her journey to truth, for the grave moral obligation to seek the fullness of truth in the formation of conscience, and for the obligation to act accordingly.
Although there is objective truth, not everyone will come to the same decision, since each of us is unique, and the long-term consequences of vaccination and answers to other disputed medical and scientific questions are complex and not fully known to any of us.
Let us all respect one another and the conscience rights of others, having regard to the common good in all of its transcendent fullness.
The original long version of this article can be read here.
