Brave nun warns people away from COVID jab, cites numerous deaths, severe injuries
‘Since January, I’ve been asked to pray for 50 people who have died,’ following the COVID injection. ‘In the end, what this crisis is about, is the battle between good and evil and what is at stake are souls.’
LONDON, June 2, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Last weekend, anti-lockdown protestors in London, U.K., were welcomed by Catholic nuns from the historic Tyburn convent, one of whom revealed that she had been asked to pray for “50 people who have died” following the reception of COVID-19 experimental vaccines. The brave nun later gave a powerful email interview to LifeSiteNews, providing shocking details of the incidents which had been entrusted to the convent’s prayers, urging people to have hope, and to strengthen their prayer life in the face of a what is ultimately a “battle between good and evil.”
“You were made in the image and likeness of God. You were born free,” she said. “Don’t let them take your freedoms away from you.”
She also warned against the much-hyped experimental coronavirus injections. “Protect the children, and under no conditions let them have that vaccine, it kills people,” she stated.
“Since January, I’ve been asked to pray for 50 people who have died. I’ve been a nun for 28 years, and all my life I’ve never been asked for anybody, to pray for anybody who’s died or even been injured by a vaccine. Only once in 2015, a young girl, but since January this year, 2021, 50 people we’ve been asked to pray for who have died from the vaccine.”
Her warning is not without supporting data. In the U.S., data show that “between Dec. 14, 2020 and May 21, a total of 262,521 total adverse events were reported to Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including 4,406 deaths — an increase of 205 over the previous week — and 21,537 serious injuries, up 3,009 since last week.”
The Defender noted that of those deaths, “23% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination, 16% occurred within 24 hours and 38% occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being vaccinated.”
There were also “527 reports of miscarriage or premature birth,” out of the 1,641 pregnant mothers who voluntarily reported adverse reactions to the injection to VAERS.
Meanwhile, weekly data released by the government in the U.K. records over 851,000 adverse reactions following the coronavirus injections, including 1,213 deaths.
147 mothers have reported miscarriages or stillbirths following the injection, and despite this, the U.K.’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JVCI) advised that pregnant mothers can take the COVID injections. Both the U.K. and the U.S. data is collated based on voluntary reports, and is estimated by the official bodies themselves, to account for between 1% to 10% of the actual adverse effects.
Mother Marilla revealed in the video that people had contacted the convent asking for prayers for those who had died, not only in London and England, but in Ireland, and further overseas also.
The marchers, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, up to a million, greeted the nuns warmly, with many hugging and thanking the religious sisters for their encouragement and prayers.
“Have courage, we’re praying for you. Have courage,” said Mother.
The nuns are from London’s Tyburn convent, and are part of the Benedictine Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre, an order which has been based in Tyburn since 1901. Their life is centered around Eucharistic adoration, and as such, there is always at least one nun praying in the chapel before the exposed Blessed Sacrament. The day is further punctuated with communal chanting of the Divine Office seven times a day, and daily Mass.
Tyburn itself is the site of infamous Tyburn Tree, the gallows on which criminals were hung. During the era of Catholic persecution, many Catholic martyrs were hung, drawn, and quartered at the site – the penalty given for committing treason by being a Catholic.
In the crypt of the convent are many relics of some of the more well-known martyrs of the persecution, including Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, St. Oliver Plunkett, who was the last Tyburn martyr.
Mother Marilla speaks to LifeSite
LifeSiteNews contacted the convent and spoke with Mother Marilla via email, who generously shed further light on the brief comments she made to protestors at the weekend. She stated first of all that she could not allow herself to remain silent on the issue of the COVID-19 injections: “This is a subject that my conscience will not allow me to remain silent about.”
Before proceeding, Mother asked for prayers for the convent, anticipating backlash after her public witness, especially given that footage of her discussions with the protestors has already been rapidly spread across social media channels worldwide.
“I ask your prayers that our congregation may be protected,” she wrote. “The sisters are with me and are encouraging me to give this witness. We are desperate to save lives.”
I am very concerned that Catholics have now surrendered the ability to guide ethical decisions at the national or global level, not just for the single vaccine issue, but beyond it to any ethical stand.
The COVID-19 Pfizer-BioNTec vaccine is seen in this illustration photo amid the pandemic. (CNS photo/Kamil Krzaczynski, Reuters)
So far, all the COVID-19 vaccines depend on the use of fetal cell lines that originated with abortion. Lots of discussion about the morality of vaccines followed Moderna’s announcement last November that its phase III human trials were successful. It is a good time to slow down, climb up high, and survey our moment in history so we can better see the way forward.
Not again!
At first mention of a COVID-19 vaccine, I thought, “Oh no, not again!” Previously, the issue was mostly relegated to childhood vaccinations. Vaccines that use aborted fetal cell lines elicit strong reactions from pro-life parents because governing authorities at varying levels require them. To vaccinate or not? For fifteen years I have read and re-read Church guidance. We choose to vaccinate our children. We also dutifully voiced objections to doctors and wrote letters to companies and lawmakers. We were heartbroken knowing we were benefiting from abortion. Like anyone concerned about this issue, we just wanted to do the right thing.
The 2005 guidance from the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL), “Moral Reflections on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses,” calls this ethical dilemma a “moral coercion of conscience.” Moral theologians termed our use of these vaccines “licit, passive, remote, material cooperation in evil,” but the terminology is unhelpful. The very remoteness that might ease our conscience also makes us powerless to demand ethical alternatives. Our protests fell flat on pediatricians’ floors.
With COVID-19, we are all backed into the same corner. The mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer were tested in HEK-293 cells, a line that originated with a child aborted in the 1970s. The AstraZeneca vaccine is an adenovirus-vector-based vaccine, which encodes the spike protein. The company uses the HEK-293 cell line to both test and grow the genetically engineered vaccine. The new Johnson & Johnson vaccine is an adenoviral vector grown in the PER.C6 cell line that originated from a healthy 18-week-old aborted child. (See the Children of God for Life website for specifics.)
A hard truth
An alarming number of people, 2.5+ million, have died from COVID-19 worldwide. Economies are crippled, liberties eroded. Mandates will probably be enforced. The stress parents felt for decades is now palpable globally, and a hard truth is emerging.
The 2005 PAL guidance told us to demand ethical alternatives, but that has proven ineffective. To accept the vaccines without accepting them? To wag a finger while getting a jab? To benefit from abortion while opposing it? It is a contradiction, like sporting a seal skin jacket while opposing the killing of baby seals.
The Church is clear that receiving the injection is a matter of informed conscience, and that will not change. But there is a bigger question for Catholics to face, one that goes beyond vaccines. How do we effectively oppose abortion if we are telling the world it is moral to benefit from abortion? It is useful to review our message.
Confirmatory testing
Controversy began abruptly last November when vaccine availability was imminent. The Charlotte Lozier Institute had reported the Moderna vaccine as “ethically uncontroversial,” claiming that researchers did not use fetal cell lines. The National Catholic Bioethics Center and Catholic News Agency, among others, repeated this claim. (See the timeline here).
But there wascontroversy. Months earlier, both companies had already disclosed the in vitrotesting of mRNA candidates in HEK-293 fetal cells, a critical step in development. The Charlotte Lozier Institute later added the term “confirmatory testing” to describe the in vitro tests, but they continued to call the vaccine uncontroversial. Moral theologians and Church authorities, including those at the Vatican, repeated this phrase and portrayed the testing as a one-time, ethically insignificant, event (examples here and here).
There was no discussion about whether the same in vitro test would be used in ongoing quality control during manufacturing. This information would likely be found in the FDA-approved manufacturing process, but Operation Warp Speed does not require FDA approval.
Most recently, Moderna announced a plan for pre-clinical trials on new mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 variants at its manufacturing facility in Norwood, MA, a $130M investment employing 230+ employees. The new mRNA vaccines can quickly be adapted for an evolving virus, which is good. The in vitro test, however, is the first step in the pre-clinical trials for vaccine variants before animal and then human testing. If they use the same in vitrotesting described in their scientific reports, then this testing is also critical to ongoing development.
From the start, the message was confusing as Catholics were scrambling to figure out what to do. Beyond Catholic circles, I am concerned that the message collectively sent to lawmakers and pharmaceutical companies is that we are not serious about opposing unethical practices.
Licit cooperation in evil
The guidance from the PAL back in 2005 was followed in 2008 with more formal instructions from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). “Instruction Dignitas personae on Certain Bioethical Questions” clarified that the exploitation of aborted human bodies is morally illicit, but the use of the vaccine is morally licit in certain situations. “Licit, passive, remote, mediate cooperation in evil” is only permitted if: 1) the need to protect individuals and populations is grave, 2) there is no alternative, 3) one continues to reject the evil of abortion and the use of aborted children in research.
In December of last year, Dr. Janet Smith insightfully argued that the word “cooperation” is an imprecise misapplication. “How can I,” she says, “contribute to something that has already happened?” She recommended the word “appropriation” (benefiting from ill-gotten gains) instead.
Dr. Smith also noted that Bishops Athanasius Schneider and Joseph Strickland et alii see the remoteness of the cooperation as irrelevant. They argued that “the crime of abortion is so monstrous that any kind of concatenation with this crime, even a very remote one, is immoral and cannot be accepted under any circumstances by a Catholic once he has become fully aware of it.”
Although this statement is more extreme than the guidance in the PAL and CDF documents, it essentially repeats the instructions to “reject” the vaccines – if rejection is taken in a general sense. Catholics could unite and voice an outcry in rejection of the vaccines, even as individuals receive it under moral duress. This interpretation, if accurate, does not resolve the contradiction problem completely, but at least it moves toward a stronger response.
Scandal
Dignities personae mentions scandal alongside cooperation in evil, stating that the “risk of scandal be avoided” (35). The document refers here to the choices of researchers.
When the illicit action is endorsed by the laws which regulate healthcare and scientific research, it is necessary to distance oneself from the evil aspects of that system in order not to give the impression of a certain toleration or tacit acceptance of actions which are gravely unjust. Any appearance of acceptance would in fact contribute to the growing indifference to, if not the approval of, such actions in certain medical and political circles.
The problem with remote cooperation in evil, as Dr. Smith points out, is that it only considers the past. When we are making decisions about using vaccines in the present, the focus is on how they were developed and produced in the past. Scandal deals with how our choices influence the future, but it has hardly been part of the conversation.
On December 17, the CDF issued a “Note on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines,” reaffirming the language in the 2008 Instruction Dignitas personae and the earlier PAL guidance. The note states that “it is morally acceptable to receive COVID-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process,” but only if ethically irreproachable vaccines are not available and one opposes the practice of abortion. The short note did not mention scandal, but it is worth considering whether our words and choices give “tacit acceptance” to the evil of abortion.
No moral qualms
In January of 2021, Dr. Melissa Moschella at Catholic University of America wrote an opinion published by the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse. She holds that the COVID-19 vaccines are not “morally compromised” at all and assertsthat “pro-lifers should not have any moral qualms about taking any of the available vaccines,” contrary to the guidance from the PAL and CDF.
Fr. Matthew Schneider, also at Public Discourseand on his blog at Patheos, argues that if we are going to reject any drug tested with HEK-293, or any other fetal cell line, then we should reject almost every aspect of modern medicine, including a long list of over-the-counter drugs. He says that unless we reject all of it and “say goodbye to modern medicine,” the argument that we shouldreject them fails.
These arguments are controversial; for over fifteen years, the Vatican has asked Catholics to advocate against the use of fetal cell lines in vaccines. Dr. Moschella and Fr. Schneider are right, however, to point out that the focus on vaccines took our attention off the use of fetal cell lines in other medications. The use of fetal cell lines has become ubiquitous. If we can’t beat them, however, the solution is not to join them.
Surrender
Try to imagine the decision-makers (executives, scientists, lawmakers, investors) sitting down with Catholic leaders after all that has happened since November 2020. Catholics ask them to stop using aborted children in research. Catholics demand ethical alternatives for vaccines. But the other side already knows we find it morally permissible to benefit from abortion. Why should they take our moralizing seriously? They will likely assume we do it just to make ourselves feel better.
I am very concerned that Catholics have now surrendered the ability to guide ethical decisions at the national or global level, not just for the single vaccine issue, but beyond it to any ethical stand.
Aborted children in research
Vaccine and fetal cell lines are part of a larger problem. Late in 2020, scientific reports of fetal tissue research populated scientific literature, but with hardly a mention in Catholic ethics.
For example, the University of Pittsburg reported how they grafted the scalps of aborted children onto rodents to study staph infections. Hundreds of children aborted in the second trimester were dissected to study the accumulation of flame retardants in utero (for wanted children). And an enormous effort is underway to build a fetal cell atlas. This will map molecular-level genetic changes throughout gestation, requiring a steady supply of fetuses. (Summaries here and here.)
The wave is coming. These research programs are intended to bring significant cures. The fetal cell atlas alone is predicted to end most pediatric deaths. Fast forward this current vaccine debate ten years into the future. The issue will not be fetal cell lines in vaccines. It could be the use of life-saving cures from fetal tissue research. What do we do? Perpetually point to the past and call it remote?
Cooperating in future evil?
Because if we shrug and say we are willing to accept benefit from abortion now, we are not avoiding the risk of scandal. We may be cooperating in future evil by influencing sin in researchers’ decisions.
I do not want my children to someday sit in doctors’ offices with their babies knowing that every medical benefit offered to them, not just vaccines, came from the exploitation of the remains of unwanted children killed by abortion and used like lab rats – and then wonder why Catholics did not unite and absolutely protest this entire practice when they could.
For these reasons, I suggest that consideration of the risk of scandal be re-inserted in our moral calculus, and that we think hard about the influence our words and choices have on our leadership roles in the fight for human dignity. I think it is time to get beyond vaccines.
Whenever it began to thunder, my older brother and I, having reached a certain level of “sophistication,” liked to quip that “the gods must be angry.” This was said in a knowing way and was meant to demonstrate our superiority to younger kids, and also to primitive people who didn’t realize that thunder could be completely explained by science.
Poor, benighted savages. If only they knew a little science, they would have realized that the gods had nothing to do with it. Or so we thought. But, of course, we didn’t think very deeply about the matter. Science understood the mechanics of thunder and lightning, and that was all one needed to know. But never mind about the straw-man primitive gods that we airily dismissed; how about the God? The God who created the heavens and the earth, the rain, the clouds, the ions and the atoms? Having created the laws of nature, wouldn’t He be able to make natural processes serve His purposes?
These thoughts occurred to me while reading an address by Catholic historian Roberto de Mattei. De Mattei points out that “God… has the power to arrange the mechanism of the forces and laws of nature in such a way as to produce a phenomenon according to the needs of his justice and mercy…Whoever has a supernatural spirit does not stop at the superficial level of things but seeks to understand the hidden design of God…”
Professor Mattei’s talk was, in part, a response to a statement by Cardinal Angelo Scola who denied that the coronavirus epidemic had anything to do with divine punishment for sin. “One thing is certain,” said Scola, “this virus was not sent by God to punish sinful humanity. It is an effect of nature…”
Cardinal Scola was, in effect, rejecting the “primitive” view that “the gods must be angry.” But does he think that God has nothing to do with Covid-19 or other natural catastrophes? After all, even the dictionaries define a natural disaster—a hurricane, flood, or wildfire—as an “act of God,” and the term is still widely used in legal documents. If natural disasters can have a supernatural dimension—if they are acts of God as well as acts of nature—what is His purpose in allowing them?
Commenting on Professor Mattei’s address, theologian Peter Kwasniewski observes:
This ‘hidden design’ includes God’s chastisement of human beings for sins, which pertain to all of us, since we are all implicated in the fall of Adam, and no man… can claim to be without personal sin.
Even if we have no serious sins, we are all under the same judgment because of our relation to Adam. And it’s likely that our sins may be more serious than we think. We may not bear direct responsibility for the sexualization of society or for corruption in the Church, but how much have we really done to stop it? Have we chosen to look the other way? Has cowardice kept us from speaking out?
Even if you have done your level best to right the wrongs in Church and society, there is another possibility to consider—the possibility that the situation has gotten so completely out of control that only a divine intervention can turn it around. Indeed, having seen just how desperate the situation has become, many Catholics have been praying for a divine intervention. But what did we expect it to look like? Firebolts from heaven targeted to consume only wicked cardinals, corrupt politicians, and porn industry magnates?
The possibility that Covid-19, besides being “an effect of nature,” is also a divine chastisement for the sins of many, raises some uncomfortable questions. Primarily, it makes us wonder if God is a good God. But, as theologian Fr. Thomas Weinandy explains, it is precisely because God is good and because he wants us to be “holy and blameless before him” (Eph. 1: 4-5), that his cures for what ails us are far from painless:
Because he is goodness itself and love itself, God loves all that is good, and therefore, by his very nature, he must hate what is evil…If God tolerated or excused evil, or if he thought it to be of little account, he would not be all-good and all-loving, for he would sanction and so participate in evil itself…
Many people, of course, will still balk at the possibility that an epidemic or an earthquake is a divine chastisement; but they may be open to the possibility that it is a divine reminder—that God is reminding us that we have strayed from the way that leads to eternal happiness.
But whether one thinks of the “act of God” as a punishment or a reminder, a question remains: Why must it be so severe? Couldn’t God show us that we have gone astray in more gentle ways—say, seven days of rainy weather accompanied by a bad cold? Why does the reminder have to be a pandemic or a fire or a flood?
Here, we come to the question of our own nature and to the fact that we are all sinners. Not only does our human nature incline us toward temptation, it also blinds us to the gravity of our sins. In retrospect, we can sometimes see that our earlier sins were much more serious than we realized at the time. But often, our present sins don’t seem that bad. In fact, they often seem to us as mere misdemeanors– if we recognize them at all.
Fortunately, God understands this blindness. When Christ asked his Father to forgive his murderers “for they know not what they do,” he was speaking not only of Roman soldiers, but of all of us.
Since Christ died to atone for our sins, the manner of his death should tell us a lot about the awful consequences of sin. But many are unfamiliar with the gospel story, and many who are familiar ignore it or dismiss it or forget it. It stands to reason, then, that beyond the fact that God died for our sins, further shocks are sometimes needed to wake us up both to the goodness of God and to our own call to goodness.
Some Christian apologists maintain that God is a gentleman and, therefore, never forces us to be good against our will. It’s true that God doesn’t overrule our free choice, but the idea needs qualification. Although God doesn’t force us, it seems that he often provides strong inducements to help us choose the right path. And many of these inducements can hardly be considered gentle. After all, many conversions only come after the sinner has hit rock bottom. It may be that Christ sometimes comes to us in the guise of the bouncer who tosses us onto the curb and then douses us with a bucket of cold water. Better to recall the Christ who threw the money changers out of the temple than to think of him as a well-mannered Victorian gentleman.
“They know not what they do” applies to people in all ages, because people in all ages are blind to the gravity of their sins, but it has special application to our own times. It’s not so much that moderns reject God, but that they have become indifferent to Him. And having lost sight of God, they have a diminished sense of sin and salvation. In a recent article, Francis X Maier points out that, as the pace of secularization speeds up, “inherited religious certainties weaken, become irrelevant to many adults and incomprehensible to the young.” The “woke” generation is awake to many things, but not to the one thing that matters.
In that light, the coronavirus can be seen as not simply an act of God, but as an act of God’s love. Faced with financial ruin, with the possibility of our death or the death of a loved one, we are forced to think about the meaning and purpose of our lives—forced to see beyond the carefully cultivated distractions that cause us to drift away from God and our own eternal happiness.
Paradoxically, the disease can also be the remedy. Let’s return to the possibility that the epidemic may be a divine intervention. As a surgeon intervenes to remove a cancerous tumor that is killing us, God may intervene in radical ways to remove a spiritual sickness that is killing souls. In “East Coker,” T.S. Eliot refers to Christ as the “wounded surgeon” who operates with “sharp compassion.” In lines that capture the paradoxical nature of the current pandemic, he suggests that the cure of our spiritual sickness may require that it first grow worse:
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse
Cardinal Scola says that the virus was not sent by God to punish sinful humanity, but Jesus told his disciples quite clearly that sinners who do not repent face eternal punishment. Why is it so difficult to entertain the possibility that God might send punishments/remedies on earth to save us from a far worse punishment in eternity? He would be remiss as a father if he saw us drifting into danger and did nothing about it.
