ROME (ChurchMilitant.com) – Italian bishops are celebrating Italy’s unprecedented expansion of State power as the predominantly Catholic country strips its unvaccinated population of basic human rights — including the right to work, travel, access healthcare, enjoy equality and exercise freedom of conscience.
Pope Francis praying with the Italian bishops’ conference
“We are making these choices in order to restrict the unvaccinated as much as possible,” health minister Roberto Speranza told Italian media after Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, as the State tightened its grip on the unvaccinated.
Avvenire, the Italian Episcopal Conference’s newspaper (which has been rooting for stricter vaccine policies), gleefully announced that “the bridge had been crossed and a general vaccine obligation imposed.”
“The vaccination obligation must in fact be understood, above all, as protection of the health of the individual person,” Avvenire argued. “The general vaccine obligation must be understood as the choice of a State and a community determined to put the protection of life first.”
It is “neither rational nor spiritual to refuse vaccines” because adverse effects to the shots are “significantly lower” than those of other drugs, and religious authorities have dispelled doubts about the ethics of using aborted fetal cell lines, the newspaper’s editorial speciously claimed.
Since “persuasion was not enough” and “the gentle push” of the green pass has not convinced everyone, “the government was compelled to make vaccination obligatory,” the bishops’ publication maintained.
The green pass, which allowed for the option of getting tested for COVID-19, gave people who had a “conscientious objection” the freedom to work — a solution the bishops claim to have found unsatisfactory.
The episcopal media also insisted that mandatory vaccinations would protect the State-funded health system so it can better treat all diseases, for everyone’s benefit.
“We want to slow the growth of the infection curve and push Italians who are not yet vaccinated to get vaccinated,” Italy’s Jesuit-educated prime minister, Mario Draghi, said at the start of Wednesday’s fractious cabinet meeting.
Nominal opposition to mandatory vaccination from right-wing parties (led by populists Matteo Salvini [League] and Giorgia Meloni [Brothers of Italy]) gave way to compromise, as conservatives succeeded only in temporarily blocking the “super green pass” for access to services.
From Feb. 15, all workers above the age of 50 will need the super green pass, proving they are vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19, to enter the workplace. Anyone refusing vaccination will be fined 100 euros. Unvaccinated workers caught in the workplace will be subject to fines from 600–1,500 euros.
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Residents seeking access to personal or public services, such as shopping malls, hairdressers, post offices, banks and government offices, will have to produce a green pass proving vaccination, recovery from COVID-19 or a negative test in the last 48 hours.
Individuals without a green pass will continue to be banned from using public transport.
The government has also extended compulsory vaccination to university teaching and non-teaching staff — as well as to those who work in music, art and dance training institutes.
Faithful Catholic teacher and mother-of-four Vittoria Sertori told Church Militant she would fight on. “This is not a human fight; it’s a spiritual war between good and evil,” Mrs. Sertori said, noting that she and her husband, a university professor, will not comply, at any cost.
Sertori continued: “We are hopeful because we know that God is in charge. Normal is not coming back, but Jesus is! This is the truth we follow. It gives us the strength to prepare. We may not win every battle, but the war was already won by Christ. Non praevalebun!”
“Our kids go to state schools, but if they continue to push for vaccines for them to be able to go to school, we will not think twice before pulling them out of school,” Sertori said.
Prominent Italian historian, novelist and educationist Elisabetta Sala told Church Militant she would be suspended from her job if she continues to refuse the experimental injection.
Sala explained:
It’s clear by now that the vax campaign has been a big failure — as well as a huge waste of money — and that the shots do more damage than offer protection. What’s evident is that the government isn’t really interested in our health, as they have been deliberately neglecting effective treatments. Instead, they are taking away our basic freedoms and transforming unvaccinated people’s lives into a never-ending nightmare.
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“All this reminds us of the worst totalitarian regimes, either real or imaginary,” remarked Sala, author of Elizabeth the Bloody: The Creation of a Myth. The Persecution of a People.
Meanwhile, in a letter to Prime Minister Draghi, mayors of Italy’s small islands belonging to Italy’s National Association of Small Island Municipalities warned that their inhabitants will be “forced into exile” by vaccine restrictions.
Most of Italy’s 87 small islands do not have permanent health facilities, and unvaccinated residents will be banned from traveling by planes and boats to reach the mainland.
“Sea and air transport represent the only possible link for some inhabitants,” president of ANCIM Francesco del Deo noted. “Prohibiting access to these means of transport means condemning to forced exile residents who, for various reasons, have not been vaccinated.”
The mayors called for island residents to still use a negative test to travel to the mainland for health, education or work reasons.
Speaking to Church Militant on condition of anonymity, an Italian judge called Draghi’s decree “a violation of Italy’s Constitution.”
Mario Draghi at a meeting of the World Economic Forum
The judge explained that pursuant to Article 32 of the nation’s Constitution, “No one may be obliged to undergo any health treatment except under the provisions of the law. The law may not, under any circumstances, violate the limits imposed by respect for the human person.”
“Our Constitution was written in 1947. When the constitutionalists wrote Article 32, they had in mind the horrors of a war that had trodden on all respect for the human person and the diabolical use that could be made of medicine,” he observed, adding, “they had in mind the Nuremberg Code, written in the same year, which requires the voluntary consent of the human subject as absolutely essential.”
In January 2021, the Council of Europe passed a decree prohibiting compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations, Church Militant reported.
Resolution 2361 (2021) orders governments to ensure “that citizens are informed that the vaccination is not mandatory and that no one is politically, socially or otherwise pressured to get themselves vaccinated if they do not wish to do so.”
The council, the European Union’s leading human rights organization and the governing body of the European Court of Human Rights, also instructed member states to “ensure that no one is discriminated against for not having been vaccinated due to possible health risks or not wanting to be vaccinated.”
In October, the Italian Higher Institute of Health drastically downgraded the country’s official COVID-19 death toll number by 97.1%, after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died “from COVID” rather than “with COVID.”
Of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone, the report stated, debunking the fearmongering of the Italian government and mainstream media.
Among Italians who died after being infected with SARS-CoV-2, 65.8% were already ill with arterial hypertension, 23.5% had dementia, 29.3% had diabetes and 24.8% atrial fibrillation. A further 17.4% had lung problems, 16.3% had had cancer in the last five years and 15.7% suffered from previous heart failures, the institute concluded.