In a ruling reminiscent of medieval speculation over the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans has issued a split decision on the religious acceptability of major COVID-19 vaccines. It has deemed the Pfizer and Moderna versions okay but called the new Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine “morally compromised” because it was derived from cloned stem cells distantly related to tissue from fetuses aborted back in the 1970s.
The archdiocese issued a statement stating that while the decision regarding whether to get a vaccine is an individual choice, “the latest vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson is morally compromised as it uses the abortion-derived cell line in development and production of the vaccine as well as the testing.”
Several COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers used cells originally derived from tissue from an aborted fetus in the 1970s, but the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines used the cell lines only to test their vaccines, making the “connection to abortion … extremely remote,” the statement said.
At least one Catholic leader, Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Diocese of Tyler, has argued that even the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are “produced immorally” because they used the cells and must be rejected as well. Pope Francis, speaking for the Vatican one month before the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was announced, appears to disagree.
What a bunch of ding-a-lings-- only God knows how much blood will end up on their hands because people will start avoiding the vaccine.
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