SSPX leader says vaccination can be morally 'prudent'

While denouncing as an "abuse of power" coercive measures to promote vaccination against COVID-19, a leader of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X said getting vaccinated "may sometimes be an eminently prudent act in the moral sense of the term."

Father Arnaud Sélégny, secretary general of the SSPX, also said if hospitals or nursing homes admit only chaplains who are vaccinated, priests should comply.

"If it is impossible to approach the dying to confer on them the sacraments without being oneself vaccinated, we should prefer the salvation of our neighbor to our own health or tranquility," he wrote in an article posted Sept. 24 on the congregation's website, fsspx.news.

"The absolute and categorical positions that are often widespread, such as that which tends to consider the vaccinated as Judas and those who refuse to do so as martyrs, or vice versa, seem at the very least excessive and sometimes mark an obvious lack of charity," wrote Father Sélégny in his article on the most common moral, social and health arguments used for and against vaccination.

For many Catholics, the key moral question with the available COVID-19 vaccines is the fact that in the manufacturing or testing process, several of them used cell lines developed decades ago from the tissue of aborted fetuses.

Responding to the question, "Is the one who benefits from a past sin committing a sin himself?" Father Sélégny quoted St. Thomas Aquinas: "It is one thing to consent or concur with someone in wickedness, another thing to use the wickedness of someone for good."

With the "tainted" COVID-19 vaccines, he said, "it is question not of an evil which one commits oneself, but of a sin committed by another: and this is why it is first necessary to reprove the past sin and not to consent to its malice."