Editor’s note: we welcome all submissions which seek to rationally analyze the COVID crisis and find a way to resist the Marxists. Please see the recently founded Holy Faith Foundation which helps Catholics financially who are resisting the mandate and suffering a loss of income.

“Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” (John 18:37) As a volunteer Catholic catechist, preparing teenagers for the Sacrament of Confirmation, this verse guides me as I teach students about Jesus and their call to be soldiers for Christ.  Especially for the young, living the faith requires tremendous courage which cannot exist without a well-formed conscience built upon solid truth.

In preparation for my class, I recently received an anonymously authored “Statement of understanding for parents, staff, and volunteers regarding COVID-19 protocols for the 2021-22 year.” It contained many of the now standard, largely unscientific rules on protection from COVID-19, with which I comply because of the necessity to teach the young about Catholicism. Particularly disheartening, however, because it is representative of the growing divisiveness between citizens in every country, even in the Catholic Church, was a standalone sentence, found under the title vaccination: “All children… are strongly encouraged, in consultation with their personal physicians, to receive the COVID-19 vaccination.”

With no reference to expert medical or ethical advice, it is inappropriate to “strongly encourage” vaccination, especially for children. And why exactly must my students, most of whom are too poor to afford one, consult with their personal physician? The anonymous, misplaced opinion statement, echoing the dictates of authoritarians in medicine and government, sadly reflects the exclusiveness and lack of courage inherent in Pope Francis’ leadership on COVID, and places an added and unnecessary burden upon young Catholics who have legitimate ethical and medical objections to receiving the vaccine.

Fighting COVID is a spiritual battle involving a medical disease. Common sense dictates that fighting an enemy requires unity, something not surprisingly, the enemy works to prevent. In my country, Americans are purposefully and maliciously being divided by the elite establishment, based on their ethically and medically legitimate decisions to either receive or not receive the vaccine. This destructive division has led to a crisis in trust for Americans as they struggle to learn about COVID. Not knowing whom to trust means not knowing what to believe, which leads to increasing fear, allowing those in authority to seize more power and wealth.

For Catholics of all ranks to join in this dissention rather than unify, is a sad commentary on our Church. As warriors in this battle, we should be able to honestly disagree on certain aspects of the overall strategy, while working closely and charitably together. If the Church truly wished to be inclusive, it would lead the world by using its collective medical and ethical expertise to collect and analyze data and publicly promulgate in a scientific manner, everything known and still unknown about COVID. It would answer questions, host honest debate, and highlight in the strongest possible way the importance of the Sacraments and universal prayer and fasting in fighting COVID. It could say, “The choice to receive or decline the COVID vaccine is an individual medical and ethical matter. Please discuss it with your parish priest and physicians. We recommend those eligible to receive the vaccine who are young and at low risk from COVID 19, those with natural immunity and those who may oppose the vaccine on ethical grounds, be allowed to donate the appropriated vaccine to those in greater need across the world.”

As a physician with 5 children, three still living at home, I have studied with particular interest the effects of COVID and the vaccine on the young. For our many students under age 12, the vaccine has just recently been approved by the FDA. Nonetheless, for all healthy children, it is my opinion that the vaccine risks appear to outweigh those of the disease. Review of the government’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) as it applies to COVID, should be reviewed by all parents before consenting to the vaccine. Heart problems (myocarditis) in teenage boys and unanswered questions about the long-term fertility effects in girls, are enough reason for my wife and I not to allow our younger children to receive the vaccine. Moreover, considering the only approved vaccine (Comirnaty – not available in our area) bypassed the normal protocol for immunization approval, including dissolution of its vaccine control group, the failure to complete proposed long term studies, and refusal to hold customary public hearings, I maintain that this vaccine continues to be experimental.

Those encouraging the immunization should seriously consider their response to the family, who, as a result of this advice, may be affected by a cardiac problem today or a cancer diagnosis in 20 years. The government and enriched pharmaceutical companies have declared themselves protected from liability, which allows them to advertise these vaccines as being completely safe, and then callously deny requests for assistance from those suffering life changing side effects. Will the Church do the same?

Since facts have been difficult to ascertain and experience with COVID 19 remains relatively limited, honest and ethically driven physicians have widely varying opinions on the vaccine. Some physicians in favor of the vaccine (like Dr. Z) dispute the value of VAERS reporting, opining that the findings of harm are more likely coincidental than related to the COVID immunization. Yet others, including the prominent epidemiologist Dr. Peter McCullough and the WHO consulting group (Evidence-Based Medicine Consulting Ltd) maintain that significant risks with the vaccine do exist.[1]

Rather than more expert opinion, clarity could be aided tremendously with two simple actions. First, since money talks, the pharmaceutical companies could voluntarily open themselves to litigation from those who legitimately claim damages from the vaccine. If there are as few side effects as claimed, these companies have minimal financial risk. Second, case reports for each child that has died or suffered serious injury from COVID should be made publicly available in the same format as detailed VAERS data. (Unfortunately, the VAERS data is the best source of unfiltered data currently available to the public.) Not taking these two straightforward steps logically raises serious questions about the publicly reported safety and necessity of these vaccines for children.

For some Catholics, including many in the clergy, the fact that aborted fetal cell lines have been used in bringing each of the vaccines to market is an ethical problem, and their reason for personal refusal of the injection. Bishop Schneider, for example, has steadfastly declined the vaccine as a means to stand against the regime of the unborn holocaust.  This witness to the lives of the unborn deserves praise and respect (see the previous post from OnePeterFive on His Excellency’s defense of religious exemption). Nonetheless the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as the SSPX, have declared these vaccines to be licit. Thus, the decision whether to receive the immunization, based on the use of aborted fetal cell lines, is a matter for a well-formed conscience. To belittle or ignore those who choose not to take the vaccine because of its ties to abortion, as the statement in my catechism class did, is inappropriate, just as it would be for me to strongly discourage anyone from taking the vaccine, suggesting it was a matter of apostasy from the faith.

Nonetheless, above everything else, the most sinister aspect of this “strong encouragement” for the vaccine is its betrayal of our young people, who are being instructed to inappropriately ignore personal medical and ethical concerns, while I teach them that addressing these concerns is integral to the development of a well-formed conscience. COVID and abortion are fruits of the same tree. It is those who benefit politically and financially from abortion who seize every opportunity to instill fear and create hatred directed toward the unvaccinated, demeaning the humanity of the “anti-vaxers” in the same fashion with which they mercilessly persecute the unborn. While Joe Biden, the AMA and Planned Parenthood duplicitously claim that this hatred of the unvaccinated results from concern for human life, they continue to vociferously defend the right of a medical person to rip a baby apart and sell his pieces for experimentation. This bewildering message of intimidation is targeted primarily toward our youth.  As an old guy, my life is of minimal interest to the devil and the authoritarians, through which he wields his power. Ironically those who medically least need the vaccine are the ones who have the most to lose by refusing it.

The blind and zealous acceptance of the vaccine, which Biden demands as a prerequisite to free movement through society, is for me personally, a supplication before COVID –  today’s false god of wealth and power. For this primary reason, and as a firm believer in Jesus Christ and His grace through the Sacraments, I will face COVID without submitting to the current vaccines. With family financial security, good health, and living in South Carolina, it is admittedly easy to stand on principle; I am neither an Afghani Christian nor a young faithful Catholic trying to establish my livelihood in a hostile society.

Over the last month I have become depressingly aware of many young Catholics, who with nowhere to turn for help, understandably succumb to the anti-religious demands of secular society. A 20-year-old athletic and intelligent orthodox Catholic young man, attending the Naval Academy, who is ethically opposed to receiving the vaccine, was forced to sacrifice his Catholic principles and accept immunization in order to receive his commission. He will take an oath to support and defend the constitution against the same domestic enemies, who forced him to take the vaccine. When we celebrated the American Veterans Days (November 11th), I found it especially poignant that in my 30 years of Navy service, never have I witnessed such an immoral transgression of human rights, even against Islamic terrorists. His sister, a brilliant medical student at exclusive Johns Hopkins, who has natural immunity to COVID and is equally fervent in her Catholic faith, was forced to sacrifice her principles and take the vaccine in order to remain in medical school. The explanation given her from the elite of American medicine, demonstrated a flawed high school level knowledge of both natural immunity and basic medical ethics. My two oldest children are similarly being forced to accept this immunization, along with many others. After months of devastatingly limited access to the Sacraments, incessant false god revelations through Chinese handheld conforming circuitry (iPhones), and cowardly faith leadership, our young people, in great numbers, are ready to sacrifice their principles and religious convictions in response to immoral government demands. A religiously neutered and compliant younger generation is the dream of the left and ultimately the purpose of these vaccine mandates. How tragic it is, that rather than assisting these lost sheep, many in the Church are “strongly encouraging” more wolves to attack, by denying the legitimacy of their decision not to receive the vaccine.

It is not the elderly, many of whom have had long happy American lives tragically cut short by a few years, but the young who have suffered the greatest from COVID. Addiction, suicide, loss of education and new careers, failure of new businesses, and now loss of their individual liberty and freedom of religion; these are the largely ignored tremendous sacrifices the young have made to protect older Americans. Rather than suggest, as many Catholics have, that the young now have the additional ethical obligation to help others by risking their health with a vaccine of questionable safety and efficacy, I suggest we older Catholics have the obligation to sacrifice courageously for the young. Tragically, for the American Catholic Church, which treats COVID as a 2020 version of abortion, either fearful of the authoritarians who mandate worship of the evil, or uncaring of those who suffer from the evil, a feckless COVID solution, strongly encouraging acquiescence to the secular world, is the road we are on. It is the road away from Emmaus, upon which no courage or conviction is required and upon which the souls of our youth will wither. Pope Francis and all priests: it is time to walk the other way.

 

Photo provided by the author.

[1] Conan Milner, “Credible Doctor, Incredible Situation,” The Epoch Times (No. 379, October 2021).

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