The College Fix

Other Catholic universities are mandating the vaccine, in direct contradiction to guidance from the Vatican

Unsurprisingly, Catholic universities like DePaul and Loyola University Chicago have misread guidance from the Pope and the Vatican and have mandated all students receive the COVID vaccine, despite clear language saying that vaccination must be “voluntary.”

At least the Catholic University of America read the vaccine guidance correctly.

“Catholic University will not enforce a coronavirus vaccine mandate when it fully reopens classrooms and residence halls this fall, a departure from other colleges in [DC],” The Washington Post reported.

Its Catholic counterpart in the city, Georgetown University, has mandated the vaccine.

But no Catholic should be coerced to get a vaccine, as Catholic leadership has made clear.

“At the same time, practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an office within the Vatican, said in its note on the morality of taking the COVID vaccine that had been developed from aborted fetal tissue or tested from it.

Several bishops have explained this issue as well.

“The vaccines work principally by preventing anyone vaccinated from incurring serious illness, and death,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois wrote in a letter to the editor in the Notre Dame student paper.

“The unvaccinated thus pose no appreciable risk to those students who do choose to get vaccinated, for they (the vaccinated) would be protected by dint of their own choices,” Paprocki wrote, after fellow priest John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, announced a vaccine mandate.

No Catholic student should be forced or coerced to take the vaccine — at any university.

MORE: University of Michigan faculty wants campus-wide vaccine mandate

IMAGE: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock

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