Page 30 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

principles and norms of Catholic moral theology will be
examined in order to offer a careful response.
The question of whether or not it may be morally
legitimate to make use of at least some of the vaccines
against Covid-19, depending upon specific circum-
stances, brings up a number of principles from Catholic
moral theology pertaining to scandal, doubts of con-
science, cooperation in the wrong-doing of others, but
also and very clearly those norms concerning absolute
duties in regard to basic human goods, especially those
of the life and health of the human being, precluding the
perpetration of what is intrinsically morally wrong.

a. The duty never deliberately to kill an
innocent human being

The fifth precept of the Decalogue is properly stated as
“You shall not murder” rather than the more common
rendering of “You shall not kill”, since the Old Testament
uses a specific word both in Exodus and in Deuteronomy
in that precept, which is different from the word used
when it acknowledges that it can sometimes be legitimate
to kill an opponent in a just war or a person guilty of a
crime through capital punishment or an unjust aggressor
in the absence of the effective power of the authorities to
intervene to protect the victim.1 The extensive limitations
insisted upon by St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and St.
Thomas Aquinas before a war could be considered just
and before it might be guiltless to kill an enemy in such
a war and especially the evident reluctance of St. Thomas
to sanction capital punishment or legitimate defence,
except under stringent conditions, demonstrates that this

1 Cf. E. Hamel, Lex dix paroles: perspectives bibliques (Béllarmin,
Montréal, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruxelles, Paris, 1969), pp. 77–79.

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