Amici,
LifeSiteNews has Bishop Athanasius Schneider's answer to the CDF's miserable "nuanced" double-talk regarind Catholics' use of vaccine that are in come way wither made with, or tested through, the medium of aborted babies.
It's titled, "The blood of murdered unborn children cries to God from abortion-tainted vaccines and medicines" and the subtitle: "Bishop Athanasius Schneider on abortion-tainted vaccines and the culture of death."
This is one of those must-reads if ever there was one.
Over at OnePeterFive, a lively discussion preceded the release of Bishop Schneider's piece, and a lot of commentators made the point that since we're Catholics, we have to recognized the authority of the CDF (the laborously called Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, what used to be the Holy Office and Inquisition). If the CDF says we can use vaccines involved in someway with fetal material, then it is a grave matter and we have to have compelling reasons, etc. To me, that sounds exactly as what the Anglican Church said when they legalized contraception back in 1930. It was a grave matter and had a ton of caveats, and of course in no time all Protestants were contracepting.
In aswer to this line of argument, I wrote the following:
Our being free moral agents doesn't stop at Baptism.
Our own responsibility for salvation doesn't stop at Confirmation, nor does it cease after a good Confession.
Nor is the Catholic Church an institution run on the infamous "Führerprinzip". (Leader principle: whatever the leader says we do, we do, regardless of conscious or morality.)
And on top of all that, Our Lord Himself said there would those who were "wolves in sheep's clothing". (St. Matthew 7:15; and related: St. Mark 13:12 or St. John 10:12; etc.)
The Catholic Faith
In Catholicism, Faith doesn't come in a storm of emotion at a "sawdust trail" tent revival but rather it comes (always, and ever) through the Holy Ghost via one's hearing the good news and then one's rational embrace of the doctrines and dogma of Holy Church. We embrace the dogmas precisely because they are rational, they agree with one's common sense, they "fit" and answer both the world that hates them and the human heart that (only too often) rejects them. We are called to be men, not sheep, still less sheeple. God gave us our rational minds and that is the part of us that touches Eternity. We're embodied rational souls that will survive death, leaving the body behind and being given a new one for good or ill, Heaven or Hell. And we're supposed to use rationality to say yes to God, not make subtle arguments on why we don't have to obey Him.
In the beginning, men could see Joshua of Nazareth "going about doing good" and they knew the Pharisees' argument that He was in league with the Devil couldn't possibly be true. It wasn't rational. It wasn't common sense. Then, after His Resurrection, when He appeared to many of the Apostles, and even to "500 of the Brethren" at one time, it was indeed rational to believe such a collective witness. (And 500 was the number of jurors in an Athenian trial for a man's life.) The Holy Eucharist, among other things, is a Blood Oath sworn on the very Body and Blood of God Himself that that first witness of the Resurrection was true. Generation after generation it has been so sworn, even if many involved in the oath taking had given up believing it. ("Sacrament" ultimately means "oath", to "seven oneself Covenantally.)
All this is to say that when the CDF decides something that doesn't seem right, and indeed is called out on it as Bishop Athanasius Schneider has done, then we have a right to query it.
By himself, Bishop Schneider isn't the Magisterium, but neither was the first Athanasius, the famous bishop of Alexandria who stood up to the Modernists of his day, the Arians.
An Préachán
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