THE TOO-LONG papacy of John Paul II continues to blight the Catholic Church and through it and the billionaire-millionaire enemies of democracy and reality, the United States and countries around the world.
One of the latest of those is the campaign of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops to thwart the Covid vaccination efforts of the Biden administration through two of JPII's appointees, who are in direct opposition to what good Pope Francis and more rational members of the hierarchy have said about the available Covid-19 vaccines. I will mention, in case anyone is in doubt, the neo-Integralist billionaire-millionaire conference of Bishops really hates Pope Francis and seldom loses a chance to attack him, in fact though maintaining a transparent and dishonest smokescreen of support.
The fine journalist Michael Sean Winters tells it far more moderately than I'm going to:
Last week, the Gospel reading for Tuesday of the second week of Lent began:
Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying,
"The scribes and the Pharisees
have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.
Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you,
but do not follow their example.
For they preach but they do not practice.
They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry
and lay them on people's shoulders,
but they will not lift a finger to move them.
-Matthew 23:1-4
Apparently, some of our bishops lost their lectionary that day and did not get to read that Gospel or, if they read it, could not comprehend how it applied to themselves. Because that same day, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, chair of the Pro-Life Activities Committee at the U.S. bishops' conference, and Bishop Kevin Rhoades, chair of the Doctrine Committee, issued a joint statement stating, "Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines raised concerns because an abortion-derived cell line was used for testing them, but not in their production. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, however, was developed, tested and is produced with abortion-derived cell lines raising additional moral concerns." After quoting the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's explicit judgment that it is "morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses" they applied their moral analysis to a situation that does not exist and in a manner so skewed it is difficult to comprehend:
However, if one can choose among equally safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the vaccine with the least connection to abortion-derived cell lines should be chosen. Therefore, if one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna's vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson's.
Call me silly, but you would think the chair of a pro-life committee would be a little bit more fulsome about encouraging people to get vaccinated from a virus that has killed more than half a million of his fellow Americans and a like number of people in other countries. The best these two committee chairs could manage was to say that "given the world-wide suffering that this pandemic is causing, we affirm again that being vaccinated can be an act of charity that serves the common good." Can be?
The bishops' conference statement followed statements from the New Orleans Archdiocese and a few other dioceses, including one from Bismarck, North Dakota, that said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was "morally compromised" and that Catholics should not receive nor dispense it. The conference and these individual bishops were raising a scruple in people's minds where none existed. They were tying up a heavy burden and laying it on the people's shoulders. It was a moral version of the Benedict Option, and it was crazy.
Crazy, but not too difficult to understand. If you think abortion is really the only moral issue that matters in public life, you might not notice that a statement about taking a vaccine to help guard against a deadly pandemic is a little light on encouraging people to get vaccinated. If you turn to LifeSiteNews for some sense of what concerns the faithful, you would think this issue of the vaccines being morally compromised was a burning one. If you think abortion is the only important moral issue, you split hairs that need not be split and do not think twice about sowing confusion where it is helpful to eradicate confusion.
Bishop Rhoades followed up his joint statement with Naumann with a video in which he stated, "The Vatican has made it clear that all the COVID vaccines, recognized as clinically safe and effective, can be used in good conscience. There is no moral need to turn down a vaccine." That was all that had to be said. I wanted to shout "Punto!" or "Be done with it!"
You could not help thinking that the bishop's video looked like a hostage video: Rhoades was sitting in a dark room, appeared like he was under duress, and he was reading from a script. And I could not help but wonder why Archbishop Naumann has not made a similar video statement.
Over at EWTN, Raymond Arroyo gave one of his most despicable performances to date. He interviewed Fr. Tad Pacholczyk from the National Catholic Bioethics Center and they both seemed relatively uninterested in the principal moral question — what does the vaccine accomplish? — because they really just wanted to focus on the link to abortion.
Oddly, I don't remember any of these assholes saying things like this when it was the Trump regime who were trying to take credit for the vaccines, I have every faith that if he were president they wouldn't have discovered these moral qualms concerning them.
With this the Raymond Burke wing of the USCCB hasn't just jumped the shark, they've jumped the entire class of chondrichthyes
This is such a morally irresponsible atrocity that whatever credibility they may have not already lost through the decades of scandal in the wake of the scandal ridden JPII papacy should be declared forever lost to them.
It's time for Catholics to stop giving their support to Bishops and Archbishops and their diocese until these evil old men are replaced with people who aren't liars, hypocrites, bearers of false witness and the servants of neo-fascist billionaires and millionaires of the type that JPII installed. He may have had some control over their worst inclinations since he installed them to be yes-men to him and his chosen successor, the almost as disastrous Benedict XVI. With them feeling free to do whatever they want, taking advantage of the Vatican II collegiality that Pope Francis has tried to revive to attack the Pope who set them free of the Wojtyla style dictatorship of the end of the 20th century, the American bishops installed during those decades are with few exceptions worse than ever. The antics of Raymond Burke and so many other sitting bishops and cardinals may be something that Pope Francis is willing to tolerate but We The People are under no obligation to give them money and support or to withhold our criticism and condemnation. With this attack on something that might, if it is done widely, effectively save hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions, not inconceivably most of the human species, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops has abdicated their moral authority definitively and completely and, in so far as the current majority of it is concerned, permanently.
It's time for Catholics to impress on the media that those scum-buckets in miters don't speak with any moral authority we accept.
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