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Q-117 - Dr dear Dr: Why on earth would a reigning and serving Pope urge Christians and Seculars to take vaccines that are tainted with human material from aborted foetuses? Is he not committing a very grave, the gravest of apostasies, as the legal philosopher Bro Paul of Rutland of Nottingham diocese explains so well, whatever the assurances on material and formal agency offered by the new pope and his teams at the CDF under the new Jesuit superior of that Inquisition? Am I correct?

This Question comes from a Francophone Island in the South Sea Bubble Zone, and like that bubble it can sometimes inflate a specific issue until the whole planura bursts. But a good and timely question that is found on the lips of the inexperienced young people in this time-frame especially among sincere but mistaken Canadian anti-vaxers keen to up-end a sincere but maybe slightly over-zealous Prime Minister Trudeau for annoying everybody’s civil liberties over there in the blue yonder. A Wonder Woman to have so put this question at this critical time when the Canadian premier has publicly gone on airtime to decry the poor fearful peoples of the Innuit tribes as racists and misogynists and anti-staters just for refusing to take what is good for the generality and commonality of the population, for being too fearful and worrisome to take it. Times of great confusion maybe produces such questions, and some faulty exegesis too. Some general remarks only on this one, general remarks on the nature of Christian orthodoxy maybe: Either way, yeah or nay, Apostasy is not the right word even if this were all true - since apostasy does not mean the denial of a specific individual doctrine but rather technically means the denial ex toto of the entire corpus and every dogma and doctrine of the Christian religion. As Bro P above himself says, caveat emptor - not everyone who calls themselves Christian is a fully paid up Christian. All younger Christians after 1968 will often assume that rigid catholic orthodoxy can be identified with the Gospel of Life desumed from on high from interpretations of a political kind of the modern popes since John Paul II launched the genre, backed by wily but scheming younger generation Jesuits with little background in the history of dogma, a political lot, namely that the Gospel of Life and the Gospel in the Bible are one and the same thing by an easy and obvious process of osmosis. How so? That a mere penalty of merely ecclesiastical law has somehow quite invisibly and imperceptibly been elevated above and beyond all doctrines and thus in our time become the highest of all dogmas in the Hierarchy of Truths, but alas poor Yorick I knew him Horatio, the truth is not so simple or so obvious or so pleasant for simple appropriations and interpreters of official schemas for modern orthodoxy especially those basing their assertions on only one half of the human race. There is a clue there - truth must always be comprehensive in its range. So it is one thing to affirm a penalty for others and for such sins when freely chosen, it is quite another to elevate that penalty into a litmus test for Christian orthodoxy - the two acts are quite distinct and wholly different in their range, apart from one belonging to mere canon law and the other belonging to Christian theology. Two disciplines, two different institutes. Truth is also very complex, especially the higher truths of the Hierarchy of Truths. So the assumptions of the Question, despite the evident brilliance of the young philosopher in question, and he is quite competent at the old style manualist formats, are not entirely kosher. Go back to the books. Spiritually it is enough to read the Bible on such matters. Jesus often corrects the pharisees on similar non sequiturs, especially for identifying the particulars of the washing of pots and pans with general Jewish orthodoxy.  As in Jesus’s day, so also in our own day - truths are not nearly so accessible nor so simple, and definitely not so political. Christianity can never be reduced down to a pot pourri of political partyism. Religious truth does not work that way. Sorry to disappoint. Spiritual dogmas are helps to salvation not hindrances.