Page 44 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

foetuses. The further criteria noted there are that a just
cause or a proportionately grave reason which might
justify merely material cooperation in another’s wrong-
doing are that:
1. immediate or direct material cooperation is not
permissible because it is necessarily a very proxi-
mate cooperation needed for the sin of the other to
be effected, whereas mediate or indirect material
cooperation may be justifiable at times. This point
was made very strongly in John Paul II’s major
encyclical, Evangelium vitae, an indispensable point
of reference for these questions.2⁴
2. active or positive material cooperation requires a
much more serious reason to justify it than a
passive cooperation which is negative; the latter
can be legitimate where someone abstains from
acting against the sin of the other or from denounc-
ing it to the authorities, especially if they have no
duty to do this2⁵ and/or, we might add, if they or
their loved ones are under serious threat from the
perpetrators of the wrong with which they are
being pressurised to cooperate. The Declaration
gives instances of such active or direct material
cooperation, including the “preparation, distribu-
tion and commercialisation of vaccines produced
thanks to the employment of biological material,
whose origins are linked to cells deriving from
deliberately aborted (human) foetuses”, such coop-
eration being “in principle morally illicit”.2⁶ All the
more gravely immoral would be such cooperation,

2⁴ Cf. John Paul II, Evangelium vitae, n. 74, cf. also n. 89.
2⁵ Cf. Pontifical Academy for Life, Declaration: Moral reflections on
vaccine.
2⁶ Ibid.

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