Here are the articles:
* Covid Vaccines: ‘The Ends Cannot Justify the Means’ by Bishop Athanasius Schneider
* Refusing vaccines made from cells derived from aborted fetuses: Let us seek our Mother’s response
* Bishop Schneider explains why Christians must never take abortion-tainted COVID vaccine

The first two articles above speak as if every Covid-19 vaccine were the same: “abortion-tainted”. They show no knowledge for how vaccines are made, and whether or not, as well as how, aborted fetal cell lines (AFCLs) might be related to the vaccine. Bishop Athanasius Schneider demonstrates complete ignorance in this regard. He shows no understanding whatsoever of how vaccines are made and of how AFCLs are used.

In the third of the articles linked above, John-Henry Westen points out to the Bishop that there are different uses of AFCLs in vaccine development and production. Some vaccines use AFCLs to actually produce the vaccine itself. Other vaccines use AFCLs in the testing only. Bishop Athanasius Schneider discounts this difference saying that it is nevertheless a horrible crime, no matter how remote the connection between the vaccine and the aborted fetal cell line.

So according to Schneider, use of AFCLs in vaccine testing or production has a moral distinction, with the latter being more grave than the former. But he, in any case, classifies both as horrible crimes with which one cannot cooperate under any circumstance. This type of moral analysis is heretical and schismatic, as I will explain below.

But first, everyone should know that there are types of Covid-19 vaccines that do not use AFCLs in the testing or production. They offer to the world a vaccine that is not abortion tainted. This is not mentioned by Schneider or Westen. They are both ignorant on this subject. They both know that, for vaccines that are not related to Covid-19, there are types that do not involve AFCLs. But it doesn’t dawn on them that such vaccine types also apply to Covid-19. My article clarifying which vaccines use AFCLs and which do not.

And then the distinction between using AFCLs for testing and using them for production is significant. Suppose a product is made in a moral manner, and the product is sold to many Catholics. No one, in this hypothetical, thinks the product or its manner of development or production to be immoral. Then some persons come along and test the product in an immoral manner. Does the product then change to become immoral? I’ll give you a real world example of this situation.

Zinc is sometimes given to children in a once a week dosing to support the immune system and, especially in the developing world, reduce risk of death from certain diseases. This supplement was already known to be helpful and was already in use when a group of researchers decided to do a more definitive test for the use of zinc supplements in young children in the developing world. They divided the children into two groups of about 800 young kids in each. One group received the zinc and the other group received the placebo. The placebo group had ten more deaths than the zinc group had. Ten children who died unnecessarily because researchers decided that an RCT (randomized controlled trial) was needed to “prove” the usefulness of the zinc supplement. Does that immoral testing now make the supplement immoral? Of course not. The person who takes the supplement or who gives it to children is committing a moral act. The immoral act committed by some researchers with that same medicine is morally remote from the act of giving a supplement to children to reduce their risk of death.

And now we have a deadly pandemic which has killed many children as well as many more adults, for a total of over 2.2 million persons dead so far, as well as many persons who suffer from debilitating symptoms subsequent to a course of the disease. And do Bishop Athanasius Schneider or John-Henry Westen care about the children who will die from Covid-19? No. They are like holocaust-deniers, who either claim that the pandemic is a hoax and is really no worse than the flu Or, they are like those who deny the severity of the holocaust, claiming that only few died.

And because these two leaders of a conservative Catholic sect have decided to reject the teaching of the Church on morality, some parents will not take the vaccine and will not give it to their children, and some of those persons, adults and children included, will die. The abortions that originated the aborted fetal cell lines (AFCLs) would have occurred regardless of their use in the cell lines and their use, decades later, in testing or production of a Covid-19 vaccine. But the children who will die because they were not vaccinated — due to the false teaching on morality of Bishop Athanasius Schneider and due to the promotion by the ironically-named LifeSiteNews of anti-vaxx article — only die because of deliberate knowing actions by Schneider and Westen.

The hypocrisy is exceedingly stark and wicked. It is a horrible crime against humanity for these two ignorant, heretical, schismatic leaders to tell their followers to risk their own lives and the lives of their children by refusing a life-protecting Covid-19 vaccine, for the sake of the leaders’ ignorance on medicine, on the pandemic, and on Catholic moral teaching. Children will die because their parents listened to Schneider and to LifeSiteNews — which as published many of these anti-vaccine pieces — instead of listening to Holy Mother Church. And why must these children die? Bishop Athanasius Schneider explains it this way:

Athanasius Schneider: “Of course, this is already a distinction, and it is, of course, objectively less than grave, grievous the direct…Cells which are directly used. It’s much more grave than only in testing, but also in testing, we cannot in not in the slightest and most remote, cooperate with these horrible crimes, even to use cells of aborted children for testing, it’s already immoral. It’s a horrible crime. So there are an accumulation of horrible crimes.” [Weston interview of Schneider]

That’s not even a coherent explanation. And if you read the rest of what Schneider says, he thinks that the Covid-19 vaccine is possibly the Mark of the Beast from the Apocalypse. Then Westen objects saying that maybe the vaccine is just “similar to the Mark of the Beast”. And Schneider says, No, it is entirely possible that these are the End Times and the vaccine is the Mark of the Beast: “Because without the first act of death, of murdering of this child, they would not have been this mark on your body with this vaccine. So this is a connection to death. And the Beast is death.”

Yes, parents, Bishop Athanasius Schneider is asking you to risk the lives of yourselves and your children, by rejecting the Covid-19 vaccine, because this idiot Bishop from Kazakhstan thinks the vaccine is the Mark of the Beast from the book of the Bible called Apocalypse.

Now, if the “Beast is death”, why doesn’t Schneider support a vaccine which all physicians and researchers agree can end the pandemic once herd immunity threshold is reached. (Once about 2/3rds of the population is vaccinated, Covid-19 ceases to spread and the number of cases is reduced to zero.) Instead, Schneider and Westen oppose the vaccine, guaranteeing that the pandemic will continue possibly indefinitely (as it has the ability to mutate and produce new strains). The vaccine opposes death, while Schneider and Westen oppose the vaccine. It’s quite simple. Schneider and Westen are on the side of death.

First, There is no Antichrist in the World Today. So the vaccine cannot be the Mark of the Beast. Why would Schneider make such a claim? He wants to condemn Pope Francis as being either the False Prophet associated with the Antichrist, or a foreshadowing of the same. It helps Schneider is his schism against the Pope to use apocalyptic fear-mongering to undermine Papal authority. And the Pope has approved of all the Covid-19 vaccines, regardless of whether AFCLs are used in testing or production, by applying traditional moral teaching on remote material cooperation.

So, parents, you can console your children, as they lay dying in a hospital ICU with a mechanical ventilation tube shoved down their throats, while the Covid-19 virus rips through their lungs and other organs, including sometimes the brain, by telling them it was all worth it, because you are opposing the evil Pope Francis, who is somehow associated with the Antichrist, and and opposing the Mark of the Beast, which is somehow a life-protecting vaccine. That is the scenario resulting from the work of Bishop Athanasius Schneider and John-Henry Westen at LifeSiteNews opposing a vaccine which protects against a worldwide deadly pandemic.

Yes, that’s right. LifeSiteNews has made it their mission in Life to oppose a vaccine that saves the lives of children because decades ago an abortion occurred, and it is very distantly related to the testing of these vaccines. They don’t bother to tell you that some Covid-19 vaccines are neither produced nor tested with aborted fetal cell lines. So, after their children die for lack of the vaccine, and the parents realize that some vaccines do not use aborted fetal cell lines at all, they should ask LifeSiteNews and Bishop Athanasius Schneider which this fact was never told to them. Again, here is my article clarifying which vaccines use AFCLs and which do not.

Sorry, kids, but you have to die from Covid-19 because Bishop Athanasius Schneider and John-Henry Westen have decided to convince your parents that Covid-19 is a hoax and Covid-19 vaccines are the Mark of the Beast.

All Covid-19 Vaccines Are Moral

Some Covid-19 vaccines don’t even use AFCLs. Other Covid-19 vaccines use them only in testing. And some Covid-19 vaccines use AFCLs in production. Even so, here is my longer explanation for why every Covid-19 vaccine is moral to receive.

In brief, the ordinary universal Magisterium of the Church infallibly teaches that some acts are intrinsically evil and always immoral; while other acts are not intrinsically evil and therefore depend for their morality on intention and circumstances. For acts that have some good and some bad consequences, in the circumstances of the act, the principle of double effect applies. And when an act is cooperative, when it is related by cooperation to another person’s grave sin, the cooperative act can sometimes be moral. These teachings of the Magisterium are infallible. They have been the constant teaching of the Church, the constant teaching of the successive Roman Pontiffs and the body of Bishops, for many centuries. This teaching had its beginnings in the early Church, with St. Augustine (and others, of course), and had substantial development with the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. So it is not some new idea in theology.

Abortion is intrinsically evil and always gravely immoral. However, the use of AFCLs in testing or producing a vaccine is remote to the act of abortion that began the cell line. It is remote for a number of reasons:
* the abortion would have occurred in any case
* the cells from the fetus multiply by division about once every two days, meaning that the current cells are thousands of cell-divisions, i.e. thousands of cell-generations, subsequent to the fetus. None of the cells or molecules in AFCLs were ever in a fetus.
* the use of these cell lines in medical research in no way promotes abortion; new cell lines can now be produced without using cells from an aborted fetus.
* the use of these cell lines is not intrinsically evil; the moral object of this use is to test or to produce a vaccine aimed at protecting life, including the lives of children.

The use of AFCLs to produce a vaccine is therefore a case of very remote material cooperation. And the Church teaches that when material cooperation is remote, we need only a proportionate reason to justify the act. What is the proportionate reason? To protect the lives of millions of persons and to end the pandemic. These good consequences include protecting and saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of children up to, eventually, millions of children. So the remote relationship to an abortion in the distant past has little moral weight, and the protection of the lives of millions has very grave moral weight.

So, in a proper application of the Church’s teaching on morality, the use of AFCLs, even in the production of vaccines, is easily justified as moral. The intention is to save lives and to save millions more from suffering. A large percentage of persons who recover from Covid-19 have lingering symptoms of varying degrees of severity. At least 10% have LongCovid, which can be severely debilitating. These facts weigh in the font of circumstances, which weighs the good and bad consequences. The bad consequences of using AFCLs in a Covid-19 vaccine are what? Is it that other aborted fetuses might be used for other cell lines? Probably not, as there are now new ways to make cell lines without aborted fetal cells (induced pluripotent stem cells made from cell from an adult human person). Those new ways cannot be used for Covid-19 vaccines, as they lack the many years of establishing their usefulness and their validity as a stand-in for the cells of the persons given a vaccine (when used for testing). So what are the bad consequences of using AFCLs in a vaccine? Is it that people will be more likely to get an abortion? No. Getting an abortion does not produce a new cell line. In my view, there are no bad consequences to using AFCLs. These cells are thousands of cell-generations subsequent to the cells taken from a fetus (the cells divide every day or two). There are no cell from the original fetus in the vaccine or in the petri dish.

In the traditional analysis, the intention is good (first font); the act has as its moral object the saving and protecting of life and the relief of suffering (second font); the good consequences very greatly outweigh the bad consequences, if there are any. The choice by the researchers to use these AFCLs is moral for the same reasons. Although their act is somewhat less remote, it is still remote, not proximate, as their actions in no way cause or assist in the original abortion.

I wonder whether the use of these cell lines may be so remote that it does not qualify as a cooperative act. But if it does, it is entirely moral, even when the AFCLs are used to produce the vaccine. And none of the opponents of these vaccines have given any explanation of what the bad consequences are to using cell lines? Does this qualify as a case of principle of double effect? Only if there were substantial bad consequences. When an act with a good intention, and good moral objects, and very weighty good consequences and only very minor bad consequences, if any, that is not double effect. All good acts have some very minor bad consequences in this sinful world.

The preaching of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, made the sins of the Pharisees worse. For if He never arrived and preached, their sins would have been less. But when He arrived and preached, their sins increased to the extent of rejecting the Messiah directly and putting him to death. And, yes, some few among the Jewish leaders knew that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, and they put him to death anyway.

Athanasius Schneider’s Moral Errors

BE advised that Bishop Athanasius Schneider is a heretic and schismatic. He rejects the indefectibility of the Church, the teaching of Vatican I that each Pope has the charism of truth and of never-failing faith, the teaching that the Apostolic See is unblemished by any (grave) error, and he rejects the Second Vatican Council. What happens when a Bishops rejects the authority of Popes and Councils over himself and over all the faithful? The branch which breaks away from the vine withers in the sun. Schismatics lose the guidance of the Magisterium; for in rejecting a single Pope or Council, they put themselves above the Church. And being above the Church, they accept nothing She teaches on Faith. Left only to their own understanding, the understanding of a fallen sinner who is also a schismatic, they quickly fall into many more errors.

Athanasius Schneider admits that the principles of cooperation are a correct teaching of the Magisterium.

Schneider: “As I already said…that the basic error is that it’s not the theory of material or passive and distant or remote cooperation. This is a valid theological principle in moral theology. But the problem is that you cannot apply this principle to these exceptional, horrible crime[s] of abortion.” [Source]

But he then claims that this teaching does not apply to abortion. To the contrary, the ordinary universal Magisterium teaches that the eternal moral law always applies. There are no exceptional cases where an intrinsically evil act would become moral, or, conversely, where an act that is not intrinsically evil and is justifiable under the eternal moral law should be treated as if it were intrinsically evil and gravely immoral. And this is the very error of the Pharisees whom Jesus rebuked, that they consider moral acts to be gravely immoral, and consider gravely immoral acts to be moral. Schneider considers the use of a vaccine to protect the lives of millions of adults and children to be a horrible gravely immoral crime; thus, a very moral praise-worthy act of making, distributing, and receiving vaccines becomes misrepresented as if it were evil. Then the evil acts of heresy, schism, and scandal become treated as if moral.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider: Catholics “have to be witnesses without any shadow of even the slightest collaboration with abortion in the case of the vaccines.” [Weston interview]

So this expression, the shadow of the slightest cooperation with abortion, admits that Covid-19 vaccines are remote material cooperation. And the error he proposes is to treat the slightest most distant cooperation with abortion as if it were a new act of abortion itself. The way he describes this shadow of the slightest cooperation is the way that one ought to describe the act of direct abortion. But no unborn children are aborted to make these vaccines. The single act of abortion that began the cell line would have occurred in any case, and that was decades ago. The cells available today are thousands of cell-divisions subsequent to that fetus.

This use of AFCLs is like taking the body of a man who was murdered, and, because he had bequeathed his body to a particular medical school, using the body for a course in gross anatomy. The medical students did not commit the murder. The murder was not committed to provide the body for the class. The man who died would have had no objection to the use of his body to save lives. Similarly, the few aborted children whose cells have been used to produce cell lines, their souls are certainly in Heaven. And do they mind, in
Heaven, that a cell line made from their cells be used to make a vaccine that saves the lives of many children as well as adults? No, they do not mind. Why would they? They mind that so many persons callously support abortion. They mind that so many adults today would rather see tens of thousands of children die because they or their parents were not vaccinated. They don’t even mind that these cells are used in this manner.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider is treating a good act of making a vaccine as if it were intrinsically evil. He is making an exception to the eternal moral law as taught by the Church. And he does this because he has put himself above the Magisterium. His excuse is that the rulings of the Holy See and the statements of the Holy Father in favor of Covid-19 vaccines (or any vaccines that do much good and are made from AFCLs) are non-infallible. Okay. But Schneider’s words on this topic are not infallible either.

In fact, Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s decisions and assertions on this matter are lower than a non-infallible exercise of the Magisterium. For all the Church fathers have taught that manifest heretics lose their authority. As a manifest heretic and schismatic, Bishop Athanasius Schneider has no authority as a Bishop. His claims on morality are not an act of the Magisterium. And the teachings of the Pope and the CDF on this subject are acts of the magisterial.

In addition, the teachings of the Magisterium on the basic principles of ethics are infallible. And Bishop Athanasius Schneider rejects these teachings, setting them aside arbitrarily, based on his own judgment that the eternal moral law should not apply, and substituting instead his own judgment. Similarly, he judges that Pope Francis has taught grave error and that Vatican II’s teaching also errs gravely. Bishop Athanasius Schneider is not protecting the unborn. No unborn lives are saved by refusing this vaccine.

Mark of the Beast

Bishop Athanasius Schneider: “Vaccines derived from the cells of cruelly murdered unborn children are clearly apocalyptic in character and may possibly foreshadow the mark of the beast (see Rev. 13:16).” [Crisis Magazine]

Wrong. There is no Antichrist in the World Today. Also, here is what the Bible says about the Mark of the Beast:

[Revelation]
{13:16} And she will cause everyone, small and great, wealthy and poor, free and servant, to have a character on their right hand or on their foreheads,
{13:17} so that no one may buy or sell, unless he has the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
{13:18} Here is wisdom. Whoever has intelligence, let him determine the number of the beast. For it is the number of a man, and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.

So the false prophet, whom I believe will be a woman, she will cause everyone to have a character placed on their right hand or forehead. Vaccines are not characters or marks on the hand or forehead. And people can still buy or sell without the vaccine. Also, the character or mark is clearly described as either the name of the beast or the number of his name (666). Vaccines do not cause a name or number to appear on the hand or forehead. Also, the mark is “the number of a man”. A vaccine is not a man.

The book of Revelation speaks the truth. And it contradicts the idiotic gravely-harmful rants of Bishop Athanasius Schneider. He clearly lacks wisdom and intelligence. A vaccine cannot be the mark of the beast, you heretical schismatic ignorant person. Many persons will literally die because they follow the advice of Bishop Athanasius Schneider to not receive the vaccine. And some of those who die will be children, who die either because their parents did not receive the vaccine, and when the parents became ill with Covid-19, the children caught it from them and died, or because the children were not vaccinated, and they caught it from other children or other adults.

Hypocrisy

LSN used to be a website that defended the lives of unborn children. Now it is a website that is guilty of proximate material cooperation in the deaths of children, who die because LSN and its articles and interviewees convinced them not to get a vaccine. They don’t kill the children; but they cooperate in their deaths by convincing persons not to get the vaccine. So while the website incorrectly applies (or rather refuses to apply) the principle of material cooperation to the vaccine, they themselves are guilty under that same principle.

As for Bishop Athanasius Schneider, has he ever received a vaccine tested or produced using aborted fetal cell lines? I would bet he has. For in order to travel internationally, you have to have received vaccines against a list of diseases, and some of those vaccines are made or tested using AFCLs. Hypocrite. He would accept vaccines in order to travel, but he tells everyone else not to get vaccines even if it will save their lives and the lives of their children.

Ronald L. Conte Jr.