Page 46 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

formal cooperation, and is always immoral. The 2005 text
of the Pontifical Academy for Life is cautious and just in
noting that some of the persons involved in the different
stages of the production of a vaccine may not be aware
of its origin in a deliberately procured abortion and,
unless they should have had reason to suspect its origins,
would have a lesser moral responsibility. What the
Academy’s text concludes is that those who eventually
may decide to be vaccinated or to have their children
vaccinated with a vaccine derived in such an immoral
way may do this legitimately, if there is no other effective
vaccine available which does not derive from such a
source, this on the basis that the merely material cooper-
ation involved would be remote, passive material coop-
eration. It seems to me important to underline, in this
context, the fact that this would be a case also of (merely
material) subsequent cooperation, subsequent to the
immoral act and not a prelude and much less a necessary
prelude to it. The fact that cooperation is subsequent and
not antecedent does not render it automatically morally
licit, since cooperation can always be formal and since
the various qualifications listed here must be examined
and applied carefully in order to exclude either formal
cooperation or direct, immediate material cooperation.
It is perfectly true that, with reference to these various
distinctions, it is not enough to speak of proximate and
remote cooperation in merely temporal or spatial terms,
since, as Dignitas personae explains,2⁷ it is the causal
connection which is the critical factor in these evaluations.
If the research centre for a vaccine or its production centres
are at some distance from the clinics where a vaccine,
immorally originated, is employed to try to protect

2⁷ Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas personae,
n. 31.

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