As I have been one of the most outspoken Catholic voices on the ethics of COVID vaccines, Charlie Camosy of Crux interviewed me on it. I cover multiple related topics in the interview. These include motivations, principles, applying principles to Moderna and Pfizer, other vaccines, and other cooperation in evil. Those topics make up the various questions. In this interview, I elaborated more on the principles than I think I did elsewhere. Most of the other questions are similar to... Read more
This is the third and final post on Fr. Ripperger and vaccines in his podcast interview. The first focused on his problem with failing to identify the object of most vaccination as immunization. The second focused on his bad argument that fetal cell lines are continual theft. Both had issues with bad science and bad sourcing. This last post will bring out moral errors coming from scientific errors even clearer. This piece will focus on bad scientific info about types... Read more
This is the second in a three-part series analyzing Fr. Chad Ripperger on COVID-19 vaccines. If you have not read the first one, it might be good to review it. I base these posts on a podcast interview on Sensus Fidelium where he lays out bad information repeatedly. This post will focus on the argument that vaccines using fetal cell lines in production or testing are committing a “continual theft” and are thus proximate, or barely remote, cooperation in evil. I have... Read more
Yes, you read that right. Fr. Ripperger said only a certain type of vaccines are licit in the object and the vast majority have never had one of those vaccines so he’s saying every vaccine most of us have taken is illicit in its object. After I reviewed the video of Fr. Dave Nix, people kept sending me another podcast. I had initially declined to listen to over an hour when the “expert” made multiple factual errors early in the... Read more
As Pope Francis indicated the year of St. Joseph, I’ve been thinking a bit about how I can better live devotion to him. Every week, my community has an hour for spiritual formation together. This week, someone found a talk on St. Joseph by John C. Cavadini. Cavadini is the director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame. He gave a 1-hour talk titled “St. Joseph, A Father Rich in Mercy.” Although Mercy was in the title he... Read more
Our goal as Catholics is to share Jesus’ message with the whole world. A big part of this message comes down to credibility. We know the faith is true, but that is not the only aspect of persuasion. If we are credible people beyond faith, then others are far more likely to accept our messages. Promoting conspiracy theories harms our credibility. The recent tendency of many in the Catholic online sphere to buy into conspiracy theories, nonsense, or pseudoscience has... Read more
This is an old article of mine about genetic privacy from 2017. You can note my initial interest in the topic of privacy which in the 3.5 years since has become a big part of my doctoral thesis. I had posted it on ZENIT. With ZENIT suspending operations at the end of 2020, I fear it will go offline, so I’m reposting it here in full. In recent days [in 2017], the issue of whether employers and insurers can require... Read more
As you may know, I am currently writing a doctoral degree in moral theology. Another priest-friend of mine, Fr. Louis Melahn, LC, is doing the same, but in Rome. He and a few others have taken up the issue of what to do in the case there are insufficient ventilators in an ICU. As ICUs reach 100% capacity with COVID, this might become an issue that comes up in US hospitals. I think Fr. Louis and the other collaborators make... Read more
A few days before Christmas, I posted a critique of Fr. Dave Nix’s video against COVID vaccines. I had gone line by line pointing out errors. In the time since then, several other things have come to light indicating Fr. Nix is even further confused on vaccines. This is dangerous stuff to be promoting as a Catholic priest and is damaging to the faithful. I will briefly address his response to my video, then cover some other things people found... Read more
There are unfortunately a lot of errors in Catholic circles on COVID vaccines. I have watched the start of several long podcasts and given up when the experts had blatant factual inaccuracies or bad theology more than once. I don’t want to watch 1-3 hours of presenting random misinformation and parse the errors one by one. Fr. Dave Nix had a shorter video that many were sharing. It is fortunately short enough that I can go point by point in... Read more
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