Page 14 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

them immune or which may afford some level of
protection against them. A radically autonomous view
of personal conscience which would reduce the latter
largely to a matter of sentiment, as to how each one
“feels” about this issue, to a question of mere personal
“opinion” or “judgment”, may rest in part upon a
misunderstanding or even a distortion of the Conciliar
teaching that conscience is a sanctuary where man finds
himself alone with God, whose voice echoes in his heart
telling him to do this or to avoid that. Moral autonomy
of this kind, either dislodged from its connection with
the Gospel or only loosely related to it in the sense of
seeking to follow Christ through the pursuit of virtues
guiding intention and motivation, but not entailing
binding norms of moral conduct beyond that, risks a
moral subjectivism, grounded in an anthropological
dualism which effectively separates interior judgments
and external acts. Paradoxically, such tendencies can
easily be associated with social trends of a utilitarian and
technocratic kind, reflected in the media, in a democratic
consensus that would claim as legitimate what is of its
nature immoral, and in popular approval of legislation
and/or of judicial sentences, according it legal
recognition and protection. In such a climate, it is enough
for many people that a vaccine exists which could be
useful; beyond that the question of its possibly immoral
production would be discarded as irrelevant.
Those scientists and technologists who consider the
human being essentially as merely a more complex form
of an animal, as essentially bodily albeit with a more
developed interiority, but not as spiritual, will have less
difficulty about regarding human bodily tissues, organs
or cells, at least in the unborn human being, largely
without effective legal protection in countries which have

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