People have a duty to get vaccinated, Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn told journalists in a TV interview on Austrian state television.
The Austrian government plans to introduce countrywide mandatory vaccination in February.
“Vaccination is without doubt a matter of Christian love of one’s neighbour. There is no such thing as freedom without responsibility or obligations. And, especially during a pandemic, the duty to protect one’s neighbour is the condition for living together in freedom,” Schönborn said.
The Church’s response was the response that philosophy had always given: “Freedom is something unbelievably precious. It is only limited by one thing – namely the freedom of others. We must above all protect others,” the cardinal said.
The government and the experts had to pay heed to the health of the majority. It seemed that the pandemic could not be overcome without a certain percentage of vaccination coverage. “Of course mandatory vaccination, even if it is only temporary, is an encroachment on personal liberty but that applies to every law,” Schönborn added.
At the same time it was important to take the relatively high number of people who were frightened of being vaccinated seriously, he added. Schönborn expressly warned people not to be taken in by “pseudoscientific ideas” and conspiracy theories.
Four days earlier, on 14 December, former CDF Prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller, whom Pope Francis appointed a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura in June 2021, outlined his conviction that a “strong financial elite” was using Covid policies worldwide in order to “enforce conformity” and to “take over total control”.
In an interview with the traditionalist Catholic organisation St. Boniface Institute, German Cardinal Müller said wealthy individuals are using the coronavirus to “push through their agenda”, and specifically cited Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros.
The 73-year-old cardinal also singled out Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum. But it was Müller's mention of Soros that led Jewish leaders to push back.
In response to the interview, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, which represents more than 700 rabbis, called on the Vatican clearly to distance themselves from such “crude statements and positions”.
Interviewed by Alexander Tschugguel of the Austrian St Boniface Institute, Müller spoke of the “illegitimate influence of super-rich elites in various countries”.
On 16 December Cardinal Müller told CNA Deutsch that he had not used any “anti-Semitic codes” as his critics had claimed and only used quotations from the Bible concerning creation and parables.
The St Boniface Institute, which aired the interview, was founded by Catholic activist Tschugguel who in 2019 stole statues of pregnant Indigenous women during the Vatican's Amazon synod from a church near the Vatican and later threw the statues in Rome’s Tiber river.
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