The Catholic Church in Italy is strongly supporting a Green Pass to be extended even for people to attend Mass or access to the Sacraments. The Vatican was the first state to introduce mandatory vaccination for residents and employees.
Pope Francis has repeatedly pushed for vaccines “a simple but profound way of promoting the common good” and has recently also accused those who do not vaccinate of endangering the life of others through their “suicidal negationism”. Supporting the need for the much debated Green Pass is therefore just another, inevitable, piece of the Covid-19 puzzle.
As featured in ‘Avvenire’, the newspaper of the Italian Conference of Bishops, there are very harsh attacks against those who do not get vaccinated, treated as a threat to mankind, sorcerer’s apprentices or even worse. Since it is now clear that a pocket of resistance to compulsory vaccination is nestling among Catholics, it is understandable why the Italian government has asked bishops to exert pressure among the faithful.
Concerning the morality behind anti-Covid vaccines, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has clearly stated that vaccines are useful for “practical reasons” but that “vaccination is not – as a norm – a moral obligation” and “therefore it must be voluntary.” In everyday Church business, however, bishops and priests are already targeting the unvaccinated.
In Matera, Don Pasquale Giordano addressed children above all and urged those who have not had a vaccine or undergone testing to “refrain from coming to the parish”. In Belmonte del Sannio, in the province of Isernia, Don Francesco Martino wrote a post on Facebook stating: “we do not recommend unvaccinated and those who have not had Covid to access the Church.”
Don Massimiliano Moretti, parish priest of Santa Zita in Genoa, has forbidden those who are unvaccinated to be readers or sing, claiming that “the parish has the duty to establish rules to protect everyone’s health”. Finally, in Piedmont, a parish priest put up a sign at the entry to the Church which read, “whoever is not vaccinated constitutes a serious danger and is not welcome in this church”. Don Paolo Busto has also held that unvaccinated people who are infected with Covid-19 should pay for their own medical care.
Officially, the government has established that it is not necessary to have a Green Pass to go to mass. In fact, the Bishops’ Conference has also reiterated that for religious ceremonies the rules provided for by the CEI-Government Protocol and the Technical-Scientific Committee continue to be in force.
Within churches and places of worship, therefore, the conditions of participation are: obligation to wear a mask; spacing between the benches; no contacts during the sign of peace; communion only in the hand; no water in the stoups. For processions, no Green Pass is required, however participants are to “wear a mask and maintain a distance of 2 meters for those who sing and 1.5 meters for all the other faithful”.
Evidently, some priests are so scared of Covid-19 that they are even willing to exclude unvaccinated Catholics from accessing the Sacraments, even when official norms do not require either vaccination or a Green Pass to go to Mass.
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