Page 48 - Vaccines

Vaccines and Catholic morality

sources, as the Declaration of the Pontifical Academy for
Life makes clear, this is not so for all vaccines. Even for
a particularly dangerous and highly contagious disease,
often lethal for their children, when contracted by
women during pregnancy, namely rubella or German
measles, where a morally unproblematic vaccine existed,
it is far from clear that such is effectively available in
many places in more recent years; since the production
in the early 1990s of the combined measles, mumps and
rubella vaccine (MMR) from the cells of deliberately
aborted foetuses in 1973. In the case of the current
coronavirus pandemic, the vaccines in existence seem to
have different degrees of efficacy, depending upon age,
mutations of the virus and other variables, and their
safety for use with certain patients or groups is not
always clear. However, the major moral compromises
with directly procured abortion in the production or in
the testing of a number of the vaccines presently available
have provoked the objective doubt of conscience,
namely, whether the use of vaccines derived from the
cells of deliberately aborted human foetuses constitutes
either formal cooperation or, if not, a morally illicit form
of material cooperation with directly procured abortion.
The axiom of Bartholomew of Medina for confronting
doubts of conscience, qui probabiliter agit prudenter agit,
locates the question of such doubts correctly under the
virtue of prudence, but indicates that, when an objective
doubt cannot be put aside by discovering the truth about
the facts or the accurate demands of the (moral) law, then
a person would not sin if they followed the well-argued
opinion (opinionem probabilem) of expert, reliable moral
theologians (auctores probati)—not the mere opinions of
(dissenting) “theologians”, but positions sustained by
solid arguments from those theologians writing in

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