In his Poetics, Aristotle commended tragedies to the polis as a means of educating citizens in the realities of the human condition—frailty, folly, and mortality. Contemplating the human condition through art, citizens could experience catharsis and learn how to live in a cosmos they could never fully control. Having decided not to get vaccinated against the COVID19 virus, I have taken comfort and courage from Sophocles’ 5th century tragedy Antigone. The apparent clash of justices and goods between the individual and the State, between the claims of family and country, and ultimately between divine and secular law, are arguably playing out in real life 21st century pandemic America. Like Antigone, I feel compelled from a particular theo-logic—in my case, that of Catholicism—not to yield to government and cultural calls to take any of the commercially available COVID19 vaccines because each have either been produced by or tested on cell lines that were derived from an aborted child.[i] Following the Church’s ancient tradition of “despoiling Egypt of its treasures,” i.e., turning pagan wisdom to Christian use,[ii] I offer below insights I’ve gleaned from Sophocles’ drama to deal with the contemporary tragic response to the COVID pandemic.
In the play, the crux of Antigone’s conflict with the king of Thebes, (her uncle Creon), and the elders of the city, is her understanding of divine justice and its limitations of the polis’ legal and ethical claims upon citizens. Sophocles’ tragedy begins at the end of a failed fratricidal insurrection against Creon led by one of his nephews, Antigone’s brother Polynices. Antigone’s other brother Eteocles killed Polynices defending the city, but in the process was mortally wounded by Polynices. After peace was restored to Thebes, Creon decreed that Eteocles be buried with full funerary honors, while Polynices’ corpse was to be left in the open to be ravaged by wild animals. Anyone caught trying to bury the traitor’s body would be executed. By forbidding a proper burial for Polynices, Creon imposed the most damning punishment—a “second death”[iii]—for the most serious public crime—insurrection. Despite the justice of Polynices’ condemnation as a traitor to his city and family, Antigone cannot abide the injustice of the desecration of his corpse and secretly covers his body with dust and offers ceremonial libations over him.
This apparent conflict of Rights—Creon’s righteous punishment of an evil-doer to State sovereignty and the common good, and Antigone’s righteous moral intuition that desecration of a corpse, even a criminal’s, is a grievous injustice—has been called the essence of tragedy.[iv] A similar conflict of rights has resulted from the U. S. government’s attempts to prevent the spread of the COVID19 virus by facilitating the mass vaccination of the population, and the refusal of the vaccine by some Catholics and other Christians because of its link to the mortal sin of abortion. And as in Sophocles’ play, the clash between moral goods in pandemic America is un-happily irresolvable because the contesting moral visions of the Good are rooted in core beliefs about reality, the divine, and the possibility of divine justice in the world.
Sophocles demonstrates the irreconcilability of competing theological and moral visions through the dialogue between Creon and Antigone after she is caught trying to bury Polynices. After ascertaining that Antigone knew of his royal decree forbidding her brother’s burial, Creon asks if she truly dared to transgress his law.[v] Through Antigone’s reply, Sophocles hoped to teach contemporary Athenian society Aretē (moral excellence) and Sophia (wisdom) in order to discern the right order of justices, divine and human, and to act accordingly:
CREON: . . .you dared to transgress these laws?
ANTIGONE: Yes, for it was not Zeus who made this proclamation, nor was it Justice [Dike] who lives with the gods below that established such laws among men, nor did I think your proclamations strong enough to have power to overrule, mortal as they were, the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of the gods. For these have life, not simply today and yesterday, but for ever, and no one knows how long ago they were revealed. For this I did not intend to pay the penalty among the gods for fear of any man’s pride.[vi]
To the increasingly decadent, “secular” post-imperial society[vii] of contemporary Athens, Sophocles has Antigone’s testimony condemned by the Chorus of city elders and Creon. The elders judge her as “savage,” having the same depraved nature as her father Oedipus.[viii] Creon dismisses Antigone as full of hubris and insolence, and, for what he judges as her foolish impiousness, condemns her to imprisonment in a cavern with just enough food to escape his own judgment by the gods for starving her to death.[ix] “And there,” he says, “she can pray to Hades, the only one among the gods whom she respects, and perhaps be spared from death; or else she will learn, at that late stage, that it is wasted effort to show regard for things in Hades.[x]
Antigone’s fate is tragic in two main ways. First, she is punished for “having shown reverence for reverence.”[xi] Second, her unjust punishment from Creon results from his inability to distinguish appearances from reality. Antigone’s actions appear impious and obstinate because she defies the ruling classes’ “common sense” of ethical norms. However, Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s betrothed husband, underscores the true reality when he tells his father that the people of Thebes do not consider Antigone an evildoer for attempting to bury her brother.[xii] Today, Catholics who refuse to take the COVID19 vaccines also appear irrational and anti-social to the current archons of the U. S. “Scientific-Political Establishment.” I think this is because our intransigence challenges the scientism (faith in progressive science) which serves as the foundation of the “bio-politics” that secular society itself is based upon.
The atheist French philosopher Michel Foucault famously identified and critiqued the shift in Western political philosophy that led to the rise of bio-politics as the central concern of European governments from the 17th century onwards. According to Foucault, prior to the 17th century, the basis of the State’s power was believed to reside in the power of the sovereign/state to take its citizens’ lives—“the right to take life or let live.”[xiii] In his attempt to kill Polynices twice by refusing his burial, Creon attempted to exercise this right even over-against Hades. Beginning in the 1600s, however, political power was increasingly reconceived as the state’s ability to “make live” and let die. The power of the state, Foucault wrote in the mid-1970s, “. . . now presents itself as . . . a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”[xiv] In terms that seem particularly apropos of the current “war on COVID19,” Foucault continued, “Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone.”[xv] Foucault also chronicled the origins of the first instruments of “public health”: the emergence of demographics, birth, death, and migration statistics; an apparatus of “regulatory controls” deployed in a “biopolitics of the population” through various disciplinary institutions—“universities, secondary schools, barracks,” and “workshops.”[xvi] All this Catholics who refuse to take the COVID19 vaccination(s) call into question in much the same way that Antigone threatened the supremacy of the polis over the individual by (ultimately) revealing Creon’s blind, tragic impiousness.[xvii]
I should clarify at this point that my decision not to get vaccinated does not originate from any animus against “public health,” immunizations, or science per se. Rather, as with the fictive Antigone and the philosopher Foucault, my action stems from a concern with the moral and ethical authority ceded to modern scientism in our culture. Foucault’s critique of the rise of bio-politics in modern political philosophy essentially focuses on the latter: Western intellectuals’ faith in the scientific method and mathematical/instrumental rationality to know and solve all juridical, economic, political, biological, cultural, philosophical and moral questions in society.[xviii] Revealing the hubris of investing such power in post Cartesian-Baconian conceptions of science—a science that restricts itself to only certain, measurable knowledge—may be seen as the major purpose of Foucault’s entire philosophical project. Rather than liberating modern societies from the limits of the human condition (folly, sickness, and death), the “power-knowledge” (pouvoir-savoir) of scientism had managed, in Foucault’s analysis, only a terrible sophism masquerading as freedom: the imprisonment of the body by the mind.[xix] Similar to Foucault, but for Catholic reasons, I do not accept the implicit claim permeating today’s culture that Science’s “can” unquestioningly equates to Morality’s “should.”
The question of the moral authority of science as posited by scientism resurrects Sophocles’ contest of Rights in Antigone. Antigone’s tenacious obedience to higher principalities in the face of Creon’s apparent political and moral authority is rooted in her ability to discern the difference between authority and power in both morality and law. As a king, Creon has power (potestas): the always limited force of mortal coercive power used to protect and conserve the polis. Antigone recognizes this; but she also understands that he lacks authority (auctoritas): the divine authorial power to inaugurate, innovate, and eternally sustain.[xx] So too, I reject the implicit claims of science’s auctorial powers over disease, public morals, and ethics. Logically speaking, science can only ever be understood as having a kind of empirical and epistemological potestas, for it only ever deals with already created and inaugurated realities. Science’s potestas is limited even more from the perspective of Christian theology, given that its “field of vision” is confined to only measurable things.
Since the beginning of the Pandemic, no one within the scientific establishment has gone as far as Israeli philosopher and historian Yuval N. Harari. He claims in Homo Deus (2017) that over the course of the 21st century, scientists and bioengineers through their “power-knowledge” will be able to create a new god-like species of humanity—Homo deus.[xxi] According to Harari, this fortunate new species will acquire through scientific means awesome new “powers of creation and destruction,” all in the service of escaping “old age, death and misery.”[xxii] However, the dominant media’s incessant talk of the war against the COVID19 virus and the “hand-to-hand combat” to get “reluctant Americans vaccinated” seems to come from the same wells of fantastical optimism or hubris as Harari’s predictions.[xxiii] Perhaps what best illuminates Harari’s and the subliminal sentiments of current public health culture is Foucault’s analysis of the ultimate limit of bio-politics and secular power: “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private’.”[xxiv] As revealed by Harari and Foucault, it appears that Creon’s false charge against Antigone is true concerning secular bio-politics: death is the only god it respects.[xxv]
Yet for Christians, death can never have the auctoritas or potestas that secular bio-politics fearfully gives it. Momento mori must be equivocal for us. On the one hand, because of our belief in the resurrection of the dead, we can look to the example of the courageous Hebrew mother who encouraged her seven sons not to undergo the pagan “vaccination” of eating pig flesh, though ordered under order of pain of death by the Syro-Greek king, Antiochus IV (r. 175-164 B.C.). As she watched her sons be tortured to death one-by-one for their refusal, Second Maccabees records her words to her sons thus:
She said to them: ‘I know not how you were formed in my womb: for I neither gave you breath, nor soul, nor life, neither did I frame the limbs of every one of you. But the Creator of the world, that formed the nativity of man, and that found out the origin of all, he will restore to you again in his mercy, both breath and life, as now you despise yourselves for the sake of his laws. (2 Macc. 7:22-23, D-RV)[xxvi]
This ancient mother “. . .worthy to be remembered by good men” (2 Macc. 7:20) pre-figured the faithful who believe in the one King who does have power over death:
Qui mortem nostrum moriendo destruxit, et vitam resurgendo reparavit.
Who by dying hath destroyed our death: and by rising again hath restored us to life.[xxvii]
On the other hand, in the doctrine of “the second death” and Final Judgement (Apoc. 20:13-14) Christianity posits a warranted fear of human mortality un-matched in pagan or secular culture, as Jesus taught his disciples:
And fear ye not them that kill the body, and are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him that can destroy both soul and body in the place of final judgement [Gehenna]. (Matt. 10:28, D-RV, modification mine[xxviii])
My refusal to take the COVID19 vaccines therefore doesn’t come from “laws among men, . . . mortal as they [are],” nor still less from the nothingness of partisan political concerns. Rather, my decision stems from awe of the auctorial commands and judgments of the eternal, Triune God who will raise the dead and judge “everyone according to their works” (Apoc. 20:13). Similarly, my and other Christians’ ethical concerns with abortion are not a product of America’s intensifying culture war since Roe vs. Wade. From the beginning of the Church, Christians distinguished themselves from their pagan neighbors in condemning abortion and infanticide.
The Church’s earliest written teaching concerning abortion comes from the Didache (“Teaching”), a manual for preparing adult catechumens for baptism and entrance into the Church. Composed sometime in the 60s A.D., it linked the 5th Commandment of the decalogue to the “second commandment” of the “way of life” taught by Jesus’ twelve apostles:
The second commandment of the teaching is: ‘You shall not murder;. . .you shall not corrupt children; . . .you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill one being born.[xxix]
(Didache 2:1-2, modified trans. mine[xxx])
Using almost exactly the same language, the Epistle of Barnabas some time between 70 and 135 A.D. identified the Christian rejection of abortion and infanticide with “the way of light”:
You shall not murder a child by abortion, nor furthermore, kill one being born. (Ep. Barn. 19:5, trans. mod. mine[xxxi])
Hence by the time Tertullian wrote his Apology in defense of Christianity in the late 2nd or early 3rd century A.D., Christians’ “pro-life” stance was already well established. In his contrast between the pagans’ practices of child sacrifices, infanticide and abortion and the lack of these practices among Christians, Tertullian expressed the logic of why killing a fetus is murder:
In our case, murder being once for all forbidden [i.e, through the 5th Commandment], we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed. (Apology 9, emphasis mine[xxxii])
These ancient, universal and perennial prohibitions of abortion are ultimately rooted in the Church’s belief in the supernatural origins and ends of all human life. However, the regime of bio-politics banished supernatural anthropology from its realm long ago. It is a permanent exile. Since in bio-politics all human life is merely physical, merely emotional (chemico-hormonal), and merely psychiatric (neuro-chemical), a decision not to take the COVID19 vaccines because of even its “remote” link to abortion’s violation of supernatural laws of creation and ends must be unintelligible. Likewise, for Christians who believe that from conception every human being is a mysterious new imago dei created by God through the lives of a man and a woman—
Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee: and before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee. . . (Jer. 1:5, D-RV)
—abortion must be the gravest form of iconoclasm from which ultimately no good can come for individuals or society.
Yet concern for the common good of society has given me some pause in deciding not to get vaccinated. My decision could potentially lead to my own infection, and to others’ as well. Added to this is the remarkable situation Catholics find themselves in: the Church has declared that it is both licit to take the COVID19 vaccines or conscientiously refuse to do so.[xxxiii] Here two goods of Catholic moral theology—the inviolability of rightly ordered personal conscience and concern for the common good—appear tragically set against one another, just as in Antigone. But I am no longer troubled by thoughts that such an “upper cleavage” of Rights might exist within the Church’s traditional moral theology. Rather, I think the supposed conflict between the rights of conscientious objection to getting vaccinated and concern for the common good only derives from the rejection of the Church’s supernatural anthropology and divinely hierarchal justice.
The reason the Church defends the “inviolable right to life of every innocent human individual. . .” as a “constitutive” element of “civil society” is because She believes that each human life is a supernatural gift of God.[xxxiv] Hence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s statement in Donum Vitae (1987) that “human rights depend neither on single individuals nor on parents; nor do they represent a concession made by society and the State. . .”[xxxv] Unlike the Enlightenment political theology expressed in modern constitutions, orthodox Catholic theology grounds human rights in the sovereignty and Being of the Triune God, not in the fragile and contingent existence of mortal humans themselves, nor the even more ephemeral political contracts they make. In traditional Catholicism only the Creator has absolute rights and the power to make “categorical imperatives”:
See ye that I alone am, and there is no other God besides me: I will kill and I will make to to live: I will strike, and I will heal, and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. (Deut. 32:39, D-RV, my emphasis)
And it is out of God’s absolute goodness, His absolute justice that He gives the 5th Commandment:
I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. . .Thou shalt not murder. (Ex. 20:2, 13, D-RV, mod. with my emphasis)
Yet if “the right to life” does not derive from a supernatural, super-political origin, but only emanates from individuals themselves, then a clash of rights—e.g. the mother’s absolute right to “let live and make die,” the sexual production of her body versus the fetus’ right to exist—is inevitable in all secular constitutions. The establishment by the U. S. Supreme Court of a federal “right to abortion” perhaps lends support to Marx’s insight that “Between equal rights force decides”[xxxvi] and betrays the Constitution’s tragic antinomies. It also arguably betrays a latent pagan notion of a world of multiple, independent antagonistic gods which must be restrained by “checks and balances” as much as a Christian conception of sin as a hindrance to governance.
It is not surprising then that the dominant culture of Pandemic America has rejected the insight of Donum Vitae that “When the State does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a State based on law are undermined.”[xxxvii] Still, the COVID19 pandemic is not the first time the people of God have been tempted to follow the practices of the world. As seen above, in antiquity the faithful rejected the pagan logic and practice of sacrificing their children to gods (daimonia) for prosperity and protection of the common good. Today, Christians are not confronted with child sacrifice to Moloch, Baal, or Saturn,[xxxviii] but rather a more subtle, though still perilous, logic and practice now offered by the gods of Bio-Politics and Scientism: the literal instrumentalization of aborted fetal tissue to protect and preserve the common good of society.[xxxix] Can utilization of a “socially indicated abortus—abortus provocatus. . . simply because the woman wanted to get rid of the fetus”[xl] really benefit society as a whole? What role has the other hidden god of Secular Bio-Politics, Mammon, played in encouraging pharmaceutical companies to use aborted fetal tissue in research and development of the COVID19 vaccines as opposed to other alternatives, (e.g. adult bone marrow stem cells, donated postnatal placental tissue)?[xli]
“What shall we say, then? shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?”
(Rom. 6:1, D-RV)
Our legal framework cannot answer such moral and ethical questions because our secular Constitution is not only post-Christian, but post-pagan, for by design it considers neither God nor virtue. Like Antigone, Catholics will have to look beyond the polis and scientists to higher laws to live justly in these perilous times. We must follow Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, and the highest Authority, the One whose Kingdom does not work like Caesar’s, Who is “the way, truth, and life.” (John 14:6[xlii])
Thus there can be no (theo)logical compromise between secular bio-politics and orthodox Catholic moral theology. There can only be conversion from one side to the other. Like Antigone, I cannot yield to the moral suasion of merely mortal power, and like the estimable Mother of Second Maccabees, I cannot convert. In this I know I am being intransigent. But Christians have been called “stubborn and obstinate” before, (Cf. Pliny’s letter 97 to Emperor Trajan). I pray I am worthy of that company.
***
I thank Mrs. Sarah Smith, (Μητηρ), for her careful editing of a draft of this essay, and Angel Cordero Collins for his edits and suggestions. All infelicities are mine.
Footnotes:
[i] See Children of God for Life, https://cogforlife.org/ and its listing of all vaccines made by or tested with aborted fetal cell lines: https://cogforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/vaccineListOrigFormat.pdf which includes a listing of all COVID19 vaccines available or in research stages as of 21 January 2021: https://cogforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/CovidCompareMoralImmoral.pdf. See also “You Asked, We Answered: Do the COVID19 Vaccines Contain Aborted Fetal Cells?” at https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/you-asked-we-answered-do-the-covid-19-vaccines-contain-aborted-fetal-cells, which offers a rather sophistical answer of “no” before admitting that the Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson vaccines all utilized at some stage of production cell lines derived from aborted fetuses. Alvin Wong’s “The Ethics of HEK293” of 2006 from The National Catholic Bioethics Center provides an excellent assessment of the use of embryonic stem cell line research its many problems from a Catholic perspective. See https://www.pdcnet.org/ncbq/content/ncbq_2006_0006_0003_0473_0495.
[ii] Cf. St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, II.40.60-61.
[iii] Sophocles, Antigone, Loeb Classical Library, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994; reprinted 2002), 97.
[iv] See Georg Wilhelm Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. and ed. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §463-476. I thank Michael C. Behrent for alerting me to Hegel’s consideration of Antigone.
[v] Sophocles, Antigone, 43.
[vi] Sophocles, Antigone, 43, 45, emphasis mine.
[vii] Sophocles, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus, Loeb Classical Library, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 9, 11-12.
[viii] Sophocles, Antigone, 45.
[ix] See H. Lloyd-Jones’ commentary, Sophocles, Antigone, 77, f.n. “a”.
[x] Sophocles, Antigone, 77, emphasis mine.
[xi] Sophocles, Antigone, 91.
[xii] Sophocles, Antigone, 71.
[xiii] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 136, emphasis in original.
[xiv] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 137, emphasis mine.
[xv] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 137. For the “war on COVID19,” see the representative titles: “The War on COVID-19 Pandemic: Role of Rehabilitation Professionals and Hospitals,” (July 2020, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32371624/); “Why the U.S. Is Losing the War on COVID-19” (13 August 2020, https://time.com/5879086/us-covid-19/); “UN chief says world at ‘war’ against COVID-19,” with the accompanying by-line: “Antonio Guterres calls for countries to apply ‘wartime logic’ to fight the virus that has killed 3.4 million people,” (24 May 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/24/un-chief-says-world-at-war-against-covid-19).
[xvi] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139-40.
[xvii] I thank Angel Julian Cordero-Collins for alerting me to this connection.
[xviii] The original French title of volume 1 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality was La Volenté de savoir—“the will to know.”
[xix] Cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1991),
[xx] Massimo Cacciari, The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology, trans. Edi Pucci (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 5.
[xxi] Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2017), 44.
[xxii] Harari, Homo Deus, 47.
[xxiii] See for instance, “Nation Faces ‘Hand-to-Hand Combat’ to Get Reluctant Americans Vaccinated,” 21 April 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/politics/coronavirus-vaccine-rates.html.
[xxiv] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.
[xxv] St. Pope John Paul II spoke of the “veritable culture of death” (EV, §12) of secular bio-politics in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae as early as 1995. See https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html.
[xxvi] Cf. Children of God For Life (https://cogforlife.org/), “Statement of Conscience: To Awaken Conscience,” (https://mailchi.mp/7742dd12483f/statement-of-conscience-to-awaken-conscience).
[xxvii] Praefatio I de Pascha, 2nd Sunday of Easter, (Divine Mercy Sunday).
[xxviii] I have modified the translation to render more clearly the meaning of γεενη from the Jewish-Greco culture of Jesus’ day.
[xxix] I have translated the italic clause literally from the Greek: οὐ φονευσεις τεκνον ἐν φθορα οὐδε γεννηθεν ἀποκτενεις.
[xxx] The Didache in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed., ed. and trans., Michael W. Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007).
[xxxi] “Epistle of Barnabas” in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. Cf. the Greek: οὐ φονευσεις τεκνον ἐν φθορα, οὐδε παλιν γεννηθεν ἀποκτενεις.
[xxxii] Text obtained from https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm.
[xxxiii] See “Note on the Morality of Using Some Covid-19 Vaccines,” (Rome: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 21 December 2020). Obtained at: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20201221_nota-vaccini-anticovid_en.html.
[xxxiv] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation Replies to Certain Questions of the Day” (Donum Vitae), (Rome: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 1987), III. Obtained at: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html.
[xxxv] Donum Vitae, III.
[xxxvi] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 344.
[xxxvii] Donum Vitae, III, with my emphasis.
[xxxviii] Cf. Psalm 105/106:37-38; I Kings 11; Hosea 11:2; Tertullian, Apology 9, and St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, VII.26.
[xxxix] See Wong’s “The Ethics of HEK293” and CDF, “Note on the Morality of Using Some Covid-19 Vaccines.”
[xl] A quote from the testimony of Dr. Alex van der Eb, one of the developers of the HEK293 stem cell line before the U. S. FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meeting of May 2001, quoted by Wong, f.n. 5, “The Ethics of HEK293,” with my emphasis added.
[xli] See https://cogforlife.org/wp-content/uploads/CovidCompareMoralImmoral.pdf and Wong, “The Ethics of HEK293,” 475-476, f.n. 6.
[xlii] I have modified the translation; the articles in Greek can be omitted.
