PRO-LIFE ATTORNEYS NEEDED!
Pro-Life Catholic students at Boston College are facing a hard deadline of August 13, 2021 to undergo COVID-19 vaccination or accept the end of their academic life at the Jesuit university.
These principled students and their parents have well founded conscientious objections to the reception of vaccines derived from the procured abortion of innocent children.
Of the four COVID vaccines, Oxford-Astrid Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson used fetal cell lines in production, while Moderna and Pfizer used fetal cell lines in testing.
The Catholic Action League is hearing heartrending stories of personal suffering, financial distress, academic dislocation, and in the case of graduate students, the potential for career ending professional ruin.
The League has even received a report that Boston College is not only denying religious exemptions, but is granting only a minuscule number of medical exemptions.
BC claims that it has a right to discriminate against Catholics in the provision of religious exemptions because such exemptions will only be allowed if vaccination violates “the fundamental tenets of a faith.”
As Pope Francis and Cardinal O’Malley have endorsed vaccination, faithful Catholics who reject the bureaucratic policy preference of Church leaders, have, according to this arbitrary and Pharisaical standard, no legitimate grounds for refusing a vaccine.
This standard is plainly unlawful.
In Dalli v. Board of Education, a landmark religious freedom decision in 1971, the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth ruled that limiting religious exemptions to those who adhere to “the tenets and practice of a recognized church or religious denomination”—the BC standard—“violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, as well as Article II of the Declaration of Rights of the Massachusetts Constitution.”
The court’s decision resulted in Chapter 76, Section 15 of the Massachusetts General Laws—which mandates vaccinations as a condition of primary and secondary school attendance in the Commonwealth—being amended to allow religious exemptions to individuals on the basis of their “sincere religious beliefs,” without regard to the official position of their church.
The 1997 Massachusetts Religious Freedom in the Workplace Law also substitutes “sincerely held religious beliefs” for the previous “tenets and practice” clause.
As neither Boston College, nor the Archdiocese of Boston, nor the Holy See have any sympathy, solicitude or interest in the concerns of pro-life Catholics in this matter, their only possible redress is in the secular courts.
Pro-life students and parents now have less than two and a half weeks to seek injunctive relief. If any pro-life attorneys are willing to help in this urgent and important cause, please contact the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts at catholicactionleague@gmail.com or at 617-524-6309.
Our fellow Catholics are suffering for their Faith and for their pro-life convictions, and need our help, today.
BC is all about money, prestige and elitism. BC got its start from donations of immigrants and their descendents so that Catholic ethnics in the Boston area could get a good college education without
discrimination. Then in the 1970’s BC abandoned those goals. They decided to seek status, money and elitism. None of us are perfect and we all have our faults. However, it is very sad when institutions turn their back on people and the principles they were founded on.