Ethical considerations of vaccines

Link to, "MORAL REFLECTIONS ON VACCINES PREPARED FROM CELLS DERIVED FROM ABORTED HUMAN FOETUSES"

Someone sent in this article concerning the moral implications of using vaccines that were developed via unethical methods, such as using a vaccine that used aborted fetuses in some manner.

The article is about rubella (German measles) and the vaccine developed for it in 1964 and 1970. These were developed using fetal tissues obtained from abortions, and Rubella vaccines today are still based off of the vaccine from those early projects. The problem is cooperation in evil. Since abortion is evil, then profiting from an abortion, even one occurring forty years ago, is evil. Discovering who holds the full weight of sin in the issue is complicated, but the article does a good job of laying out the various issues that need to be considered and applying classical moral philosophy to those issues.

Rubella has caused, as recently as the year 2000, spontaneous abortions, neonatal deaths, deafness, blindness, and mental retardation in children born of mothers exposed to rubella. A person can be obviously concerned about preventing rubella, especially if said person is pregnant. Such a person would not be considered as one intending to sin while seeking a vaccine, no? The injustice of forcing a person to make a decision against their conscience is what helps us determine who is committing some evil and to what extent.

To sum up the article, and for the sake of brevity, the medical company developing a vaccine from aborted fetus tissue is intending to profit from abortion, and is cooperating in evil and fully guilty for their actions. However, a pregnant mother, seeking a vaccine to save the life of the baby, a person who has no other options, is cooperating in evil, however, the weight of sin is on the people who developed the vaccine, those who mass produced said vaccine, and doctors who order and administer the vaccine-despite knowing the origins of the vaccine. Every person has a grave duty to demand and develop vaccines that do not use aborted fetal tissue because forcing someone to choose against their conscience is incredibly unjust, especially in the case of expecting mothers.

As for today's relevance, I do not believe that the seasonal or H1N1 flu shots are developed by any morally illicit means, so you don't have to worry about cooperating in evil, as evident in these articles:
(Cornell) Scientists Hurry to Create H1N1 Vaccine
Inside China's H1N1 vaccine laboratories

Peace to you!

Wonderful Quotation from David Foster Wallace

Hi. This is the quotation Father Hugh read in his homily Sunday evening August 23, 2009. Lots of people were interested in getting a copy of it.

David Foster Wallace, Except from Commencement Speech at Kenyon
College, 2005 (He committed suicide in mid-August, 2009).


“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never
feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up- front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

“Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to
be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside
world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

Welcome to another school year.

Chuck

Homosexuality and Catholic Teaching

In thinking about homosexuality and Catholic teaching it is critical to make the distinction between a person’s sexual orientation and a set of activities that two persons of the same sex might engage in.

Sexual orientation refers to which sex one is most strongly sexually attracted to. To the extent that sexual orientation is beyond someone’s control, sexual orientation by itself cannot be sinful. A person can be powerfully attracted to others of the same sex, and still be a good Christian, a thoroughly holy human being.

With respect to activities, marriage is the only context in which any kind of genital sexual relations between individuals can be morally appropriate. To engage in such relations outside of marriage is to commit a grave sin. As such, it endangers one’s relationship with other human beings and with God.

It amazes me how many people resist making the distinction between orientation and activities, but I have been in several conversations in which people have fought hard to ignore or blur it. They insist that to judge acts wrong is to judge other people or even that to call acts sinful is to engage in hate speech. To say that excessive drinking is wrong is not hate speech against alcoholics. To say that speeding through school zones is wrong is not hate speech against distracted people in a hurry. To uphold biblical and traditional Catholic teaching on sexual morality is not judging anyone or hate speech against anyone.

A person who has a homosexual orientation, has a particular kind of temptation toward a particular kind of sin. A part of their Christian walk is to deal with that temptation among the many others that everyone faces. We all pray for God’s help in dealing with temptation, and we all beg for God’s forgiveness should we succumb. We are all called to carry our particular crosses and to unite our sacrifices with that of Jesus.

Under no circumstances is it right to discriminate against someone with a homosexual orientation. Nor does it help to hang labels on people. You could label me "male," "overweight," workaholic," or many other things, but I hope you don’t. I don’t want to be a category. I want to be a person. Everybody has a right to be treated as a person, not a category, not a thing.

I know a number of Catholic people who have a homosexual orientation. Each of the people I know works hard to be a good Christian, struggles with issues of right and wrong, has a life filled with happiness and sorrow, pain and joy. Each deserves to be treated like every other Catholic.

A Priest's "Powers"

A week or two ago I received an e-mail from someone seeking to debunk the idea that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist. It started out by explaining that Catholics believe priests have the "power" to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus.

Such a statement hints at a quite basic misunderstanding of sacraments and of the role of the priest in the Catholic faith. But it's a misunderstanding that some Catholics may share, so it's really worth thinking about carefully.

In Matthew 18:20 Jesus is quoted as saying, "For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them." Does that mean that any two or three of us has the power to force Jesus to be present in a particular place at a particular time? Well, in a sense it does, but that doesn't mean we have power over Jesus. It means that Jesus is faithful, and we can depend on him to do what he has promised. In the sense that we serve a powerful God and have been sent a powerful savior, it might be useful at times to think of ourselves as powerful. Our love can be powerful. Even our suffering can be powerful when we join it with Jesus’ suffering. But it would be a terrible misconception to think of priests or any Christians as having occult powers – powers to do magic, to direct God, etc.

When a priest speaks for us the words of consecration, "This is my body" and "This is my blood," Jesus, who asked us to "do this in memory of me," (Luke 22:19) makes the priest's words true. It is the priest speaking the words, but it is Jesus acting. It is the faithfulness of Jesus, even the power of Jesus, not any "power" the priest has that changes the bread and wine into the body and blood of our Lord.

The ordination of a priest makes him special more in the sense of being given special responsibilities – for example, it is the priest and only the priest who will serve the community by celebrating the Mass and by extending God’s forgiveness for sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation – than in the sense of being given "powers."

Faith that Jesus is really present in the consecrated bread and wine is one of the oldest and most fundamental of Christian beliefs. It is amazing that Jesus gives himself so completely for us and gives himself so completely to us. It is amazing that Jesus gives to the Church, with all our imperfections, the "power" to make him present in the world, but he does just that. In that sense, we are incredibly powerful, but only because we have a God who is so faithful and so wonderful.

Reflection on Manhood for National Man Day

Today has been designated by a group on Facebook, National Man Day. The effort is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and in addition to some intended silliness about blowing things up and slugging each other for no reason, there is some mention about living up to your responsibilities and being a good father. Good job as far as it goes, but it needs to go a lot farther.

The biggest mistake people make when they think about what it means to be a man is to contrast manhood with womanhood. To be a man, one says from this perspective, is not to be a woman.

This whole approach is misguided. To be a man is not to be a boy, especially an adolescent boy. To be a man is to say what you mean, to make commitments and live up to them, to do what is right even when it is inconvenient. To be a man is to have your hormones well enough under control that you can see women as human beings and not as objects. Thus, to be a man is to be beyond pornography, beyond sexism, and beyond exploitation of women because you’ve outgrown immature attitudes and behaviors.

Adolescent boys can be manipulated easily into spending money they don’t have to buy cars, beer, vacations, anything that will make them feel "like a man." Political leaders find it easy to sell war to adolescent boys. What could make you feel more "like a man" than making loud noises and engaging in combat?

Whole industries are at work seeking to keep boys from becoming real men. Anyone who has become a real man has fought to gain that status and has had a lot of help from good men giving manly, adult examples.

Thanks to the men’s groups at St. Mark’s, St. John’s, Our Lady of the Rosary, and others like them who are working so hard to become good, adult men and to provide good examples to others.

Lifting Bishop Williamson's Excommunication

It is very difficult to get all the information one needs on religious matters in the secular press. This has been particularly true when it comes to the Pope's recent lifting of excommunication from a group of men illicitly ordained by a breakaway French Archbishop in 1988. Here's a letter to the editor that appeared in the Friday March 6, 2009 issue of the Idaho Catholic Register that does a good job of clarifying matters. I trust that neither the Register nor the author of the letter will mind my passing it along to you.

Two separate, distinct issues

Editor, the ICR:

I was dismayed to read in the Feb. 20 ICR, under the "From the Vatican" heading, a news report from Catholic News Service that traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson has recently denied some aspects of the Holocaust within days of Pope Benedict XVI remission of Bishop Williamson's excommunication.

Unfortunately, the secular media has linked these two otherwise unrelated stories and the Catholic News Service article you reprinted did little to correct this misrepresentation. Bishop Williamson was identified as a "traditionalist," yet the article should have pointed out that he is a member of the Society of St. Pius X and one of the four bishops ordained without papal authority by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988. For this act of disobedience, Archbishop Lefebvre and his four bishops were excommunicated by the pope. As such, Bishop Williamson has not been in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, a situation that Pope Benedict XVI has recently strived to right by lifting the 1988 excommunication of the four bishops. He trusts this act of forgiveness will be the first step toward reconciliation with the society and facilitate the return of members to communion with Rome. The remission of Bishop Williamson's excommunication had nothing whatsoever to do with his errant views of the Holocaust. Such misreporting was painful to many of our Jewish friends and has caused apologies to be issued by the Pope and Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the society.

I just thought Idaho Catholics should be aware of this.

Richard Smith
Garden Valley

Some Thoughts on the Second Sunday of Lent: The Transfiguration

The readings for this Sunday are dramatic to say the least, and they are many layered as well. There is so much meaning that I can’t hope to unpack very much that is in them. So I’ll just comment on a couple of points that I think are critical.

First, with respect to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: it is a strange story to say the least. Human sacrifice was common in the pagan religions of the Middle East. In fact, a book I read a few years ago asserted that the origins of our practice of capital punishment have little to do with deterrence of crime or punishment of criminals. The practice comes from the pagan notion of a spirit world that becomes seriously out of balance and can only be made right again by an extreme act like a human sacrifice. Our attachment to the practice is the residue of ancient pagan beliefs.

I think at least a part of the significance of this story about Abraham is that it begins as if the God who would establish the Abraham’s descendants as the chosen people, guide them out of Egypt, give them the Law, and establish them in the Promised Land were just the same as the imaginary, anthropomorphic gods that formed the center of pagan worship – bruised, needy, wounded, and sometimes hateful beings. But the story ends with a new kind of relationship between God and humanity, a relationship in which God steps forward and takes the initiative to make things right with us. God puts our world in order; we don’t put God’s world in order.
There is some dispute about where the mountain of Moriah referred to in the story actually was. Some say it was the mountain in Jerusalem where the temple would be built about 1,000 years after Abraham. Others maintain that it was the somewhat higher nearby mountain later called Golgotha. Just as Isaac, a totally innocent victim carried up the hill a heavy burden of wood, the wood on which he was to be sacrificed, Jesus carried up the hill a heavy burden of wood, the wood on which he would be sacrificed. But in Jesus’ case, it wasn’t a human sacrifice to appease an angry god, but God in the second person of the Holy Trinity sacrificing himself to guide us to eternal salvation, taking the initiative, reaching out, loving us more that we could ever imagine.
Walking up that mountain must have been the darkest time ever for Abraham. His son’s life meant more to him than his own. All his hopes and dreams were embodied in that boy. But his willingness to give everything to God led to a new life for him, for his descendants, and ultimately for all of us.

Peter, James, and John were in something like the same position. The events of tonight’s Gospel reading follow by six days Jesus’ first revelation to the Apostles that he would soon suffer and die. Not only that, he had warned his followers that each of them was called to pick up their own cross and follow him. Peter was so upset by Jesus’ words that he actually rebuked Jesus. Jesus had called Peter "Satan" and pushed him away.

We don’t know for sure what Peter and the other Apostles had in mind when they left everything behind to follow Jesus. Some of them apparently thought they would be important in a new a glorious earthly kingdom that they expected Jesus to establish. If they had any such fantasies, they were rudely destroyed now. They had left everything behind to follow Jesus. It turned out that following Jesus meant taking the path to the cross, to crucifixion and death. But they followed him anyway. And the day described in our reading, their sacrifice led to glimpse of the reality that underlay Jesus and his ministry. They saw Moses, their ancestor in faith who had brought the law down from Mount Sinai, and they saw Elijah, the prophet who never died, whom God carried off in a flaming chariot, the prophet whom Jewish legend said would return when God was ready to make everything right in our world. They saw Jesus, not merely as the human they had come to know, but as the shining Son of the Father. And they heard the voice of God.
None of this could have happened if they hadn’t made the sacrifices they had made. They wouldn’t have been there on that mountain. They would have given up and left Jesus long ago. They would still have had minds and hearts so attached to things of this world that they could not have been open to what God wanted to tell them, to what God wanted to do in their lives, to the work of the world’s salvation that God wanted them to take part in.

Lent is supposed to prepare us to experience God. We don’t give things up because we love discomfort or because we think that God wants to see us suffer. We give things up because we have to get them under control. They are blocking our vision. They are smothering our souls. We give things up because we want to go to the mountaintop, and all these bad habits and worldly attachments are weighing us down.

We’re just a week and a half into Lent. We have quite a ways to go, but a week and a half is plenty of time for our resolve to weaken. Let us renew our intention to use this time well, to establish right priorities, to make right what we need to make right in our lives, to be truly ready to greet our Risen Lord on Easter Morning.

The Catholic Church on the Internet

Questions have been slow so far this new semester, but we want to advertise for two amazing resources available on the internet.

First, the Vatican's public television station, CTV, has started posting their news coverage on YouTube. If you can't get over to Vatican City, but want to see the Pope, this is the way to do it! The clips are even in English. http://www.youtube.com/vatican

For those who enjoy listening to podcasts or talk radio, there is a Catholic station that has several shows which are updated frequently. One of them, "Into the Deep," is produced locally, though the authors have been on hiatus. Check it out, http://www.sqpn.com/

Enjoy the new semester!