Tea at Trianon: Will Children Die So That We May Live?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Will Children Die So That We May Live?

From Crisis:

The problem with all of this, I would argue, is ignorance. (For some, admittedly, malice is also likely in play.) In particular, it is ignorance of Catholic teaching on ethics. The Catholic Church, outsiders may be surprised to learn, has a robust, two-millennia history in regards to medical ethics. Abortion is condemned in the first- or second-century Didache and in second-century Church Fathers like Athenagoras of Athens and Tertullian. Contraception and sterilization are condemned by Saint Clement of Alexandria (c. 197) and Saint Hippolytus of Rome (c. 227). And, in perhaps the earliest Christian condemnation of ends-justify-the-means ethics, Saint Paul writes in Romans 3:8: “And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.”
As it pertains to the particular dilemmas surrounding reception of a vaccine based on the cell line of an aborted little girl, the Pontifical Academy for Life issued a statement in 2005 that offers an excellent summation of Catholic church teaching. In that document, the Church explains the distinctions between formal and material cooperation (the former is when an actor shares in another’s evil intention, the latter when the actor does not); proximate and remote cooperation; and active and passive cooperation. The document further explains that “there are three categories of people who are involved in the cooperation in evil, evil which is obviously represented by the action of a voluntary abortion performed by others: a) those who prepare the vaccines using human cell lines coming from voluntary abortions; b) those who participate in the mass marketing of such vaccines; c) those who need to use them for health reasons.”

The process of the “preparation, distribution and marketing of vaccines produced as a result of the use of biological material whose origin is connected with cells coming from foetuses voluntarily aborted” is morally illicit, because it directly contributes to the encouragement of performing voluntary abortions for the purpose of vaccine production. By contrast, those who require the vaccines for grave health reasons “carry out a form of very remote mediate material cooperation.” When there is no recourse to an alternative vaccine, such Catholics may in good conscience use such a vaccine for the sake of their own health or that of their children, because their cooperation in the original evil act is material, remote, and passive.

Thus, Archbishop Fisher exhorted Australians “not to benefit in any way from the death of the little girl whose cells were taken and cultivated, nor to be trivialising that death, and not to be encouraging the fetal tissue industry.” Nor is he unique—the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops have issued similar cautions. All of them want to avoid normalizing a medical practice that is categorically immoral. (Read more.)