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If this nun-doctor can’t get a vaccine religious exemption, who can?

Shannon Mullen By Shannon Mullen for CNA

Sister Deirdre “Dede” Byrne, POSC. / EWTN News Nightly

Washington D.C., Mar 11, 2022 / 08:10 am (CNA).

Sister Dierdre Byrne, a Roman Catholic nun who is also a physician-surgeon and a retired U.S. Army colonel, is suing Washington, D.C. for denying her a religious exemption to its COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health care workers.

Known as “Sister Dede,” Byrne was an Army doctor who did a three-month tour in Afghanistan as a reservist prior to joining the Sisters of the Little Workers of the Sacred Heart. In Washington, she serves as medical director of her convent’s free medical clinic. She also operates an abortion pill reversal ministry in the city.

She objects to the mandate on moral grounds because all three vaccines approved for use in the United States “have been tested, developed, or produced with cell lines derived from abortions,” which she says violates her Catholic beliefs, according to a statement from one of her attorneys, Christopher Ferrara, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm focused on religious liberty cases.

The district began requiring health care workers to be vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19 in August. Though the policy includes exemptions for medical or religious reasons, Byrne’s application was denied.

In an interview with Raymond Arroyo that aired on EWTN’s “The World Over” March 10,  Bryne said the city has suspended her medical license because she remains unvaccinated, though she maintains she has natural immunity to COVID-19 after contracting and recovering from the coronavirus.

“I can’t practice. I’ve closed my clinics for the month. I can’t see patients. I just can’t help anyone,” said Byrne, a board-certified general surgeon and family physician.

Byrne told Arroyo she decided to fight the district in court “because I feel like I’m just a little tip of an arrow of so many people who are being forced to do the same thing.” You can watch her full interview with Arroyo in the video below.

The Thomas More Society filed the lawsuit on March 9 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, the district’s. health department, and other district officials are named as defendants.

“The suit against Bowser and DC Health (the district’s health department) is based upon the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, both of which protect Sister Dierdre’s fundamental right to the free exercise of her religion,” Ferrara said in the statement.

The lawsuit notes that Bowser has twice been previously chastised by the court for burdening religion by her abuse of “emergency powers.”

“Judicial intervention is required once again,” Ferrara said. “This time to prevent a senseless bar on the practice of medicine by a religious sister who has devoted her career in the District of Columbia to healing the sick who cannot afford quality medical care.”

You can read the full complaint here.


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25 Comments

  1. Perhaps the legion powers that be should be barred from spreading and imposing their ideological bromides until they’ve been vaccinated with sodium pentothal. But, who knows, they might be allergic.

  2. I suppose if she also refuses to use Tylenol, Advil, Motrin, Aleve, Sudafed, Benadryl, Claritin, Robitussin, Mucinex, Tums, Maalox, Colace, Ex-Lax, Pepto-Bismol, Albuterol, Azithromycin, Lidocaine, and Hydroxychloroquine, she has a case. But that case would be personal religious observance, not Roman Catholic

    • Remedies you mention are to treat discomfort or disease. Covid vaccines are aimed at preventing disease.

      Roman Catholics value life, her position in relation to not injecting aborted fetuses is God honouring and church affirmed.

      With respect

      • Seriously? The pope didn’t speak ex cathedra on the “vaccines,” so there is no dogma involved, and he could be wrong.. It remains his opinion rather than a teaching of the Church. Study the Catechism, please.

      • Yeah, seriously.
        .
        I really do not care of the Pope spoke ex cathedra or not concerning the vaccines. The fact remains–the Vatican has imposed them on employees and visitors alike. That may have changed recently with the wanning on Omicron, but there are a number of articles on that fact. There are also articles on a couple of diocese requiring the vaccine of priests or employees, or for in-peron Mass attendance, etc.
        .
        Her case will be tried in a secular court, and were I a secular judge, I suppose I would have to look at this and say “Your own relious authorities/superiors mandate this vaccine for this or that; but you say your religion forbids it? Appeal denied.”
        .
        And that is reality, and a mighty sick one at that. I feel for this nun. What has been done, and is being done, is wrong. It is a loss for everyone involved.

      • The vaccines(sic)

        The experimental, mRNA gene therapy injections aren’t vaccines. People need to stop referring to them as such.

    • You frequently appear here to demonstrate a willful ignorance of the Catholic religion, not to mention a hostility towards its values. You might be more comfortable at the NCR, the silly one.
      No one is obligated to cooperate with an intrinsic evil, including the evil of genetic altering serums fraudulently promoted as “vaccines” and immorally derived from the intentional destruction of innocent life.

      • This would be fake news. As of late, I’ve been commenting on political matters. When I look around, being anti-violence and pro-truth is more of a religious value than Russia apologism, and the promotion of falsehoods. I am sure that being in disagreement is unsettling.

        On this thread I merely pointed to a list of commonly used medications with the same remote cooperation. I think a person can state firmly, “I don’t want to do what they’re telling me to do.” Such persons often violate speed limits on roads, safety protocols at work, or receive Communion when they are told they shouldn’t or can’t.

        Now, if Sister Byrne opts for non-pharma remedies for headaches, inflammation, and other routine hiccups, her personal stance is consistent. Any Catholic anti-vaxxer who uses ExLax but clings to the remote cooperation principle, that person is treading close to hypocrisy.

        To complete the distancing from cooperation, I recommend declining to buy anything made in China. Moral principles are good things, even when they run against the grain of one’s friends and associates. What else is there to be said? Buy North American herbs for aches, pains, and constipation.

  3. If this special lady is prevented from her healing ministry, her patients are the poorer. If she states she is unvaccinated and patients have no qualms, then let her practice! Ultimately God is our protector. Though vaccinated, I would not have taken the vaccine had I known stem cells were used from an aborted fetus.

    Her principled stand exalts God and informs her patients. May the Lord bless her.

    Proverbs 6:16-19 There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.

    Acts 21:31-32 And as they were seeking to kill him, word came to the tribune of the cohort that all Jerusalem was in confusion. He at once took soldiers and centurions and ran down to them. And when they saw the tribune and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul.

    Psalm 82:4 Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

    A person of character is a great blessing to the church, through fidelity and their godly activity.

  4. Hey Sister, (nun) try some Circumspect Analysis on your situation. Is it smarter to have medical people vaccinated, so they may not infect their patients? I’ll help you: The answer is yes. ALWAYS look at the other side of an argument before opposing it. This is a policy issue. Don’t take it personal.

    • The vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission of the SC2 virus. It might help reduce symptoms.
      .
      There is no justification for any mandate for anyone, by anyone, for this vaccine. Including for our medical professionals.

  5. This mandate can’t see the forest for the trees.

    The Epoch times recently had an article by a scientist that Omnicron actually did more to eventually ebb the pandemic than the vaccine.

  6. I encountered a “Catholic” friend in the grocery store this past week, and in our conversation, I mentioned that I have not been vaccinated because of the connection all the “vaccines” have to abortion. She became adamant and actually strident in her statement that the “vaccines,” according to her immunologist daughter-in-law, had no connection to abortion. Really? Even the USCCB said that the abortion connection of all the “vaccines” was “remote,” clearly acknowledging the connection and recommending that Catholics choose some over others because the abortion connection was “greater” in some than in others. (My response is that there is no statute of limitations on murder). The only persons who can judge anyone’s conscience in any regard are that person and God. The United States government was established by colonists seeking religious freedom. I applaud Sister Dede and pray that her lawsuit is successful.

  7. It basically revolves around governance not acknowledging the science about natural immunity. Why the heavy push for vaccines and total disregard for the effectiveness of natural immunity? big $$$ maybe?

    • This is definitely a control issue with $$$ directing the power over the peasants. The mandates are enacted irrespective of the facts at hand. A moral rejection is not even necessary, as an intellectually honest assessment of the ‘science’ easily dismisses any argument promoting these mandates. It’s unnatural for tyrants to relinquish power once gained. Thank God for regular election opportunities; pray that they are truly ‘regular’ in the true sense of the word.

  8. If there is one life that cannot be saved (eg. a brain dead patient on life support or a recently aborted foetus), I would have thought our creator would smile favourably upon us if we were to save one little piece of those lives (eg. a whole kidney or a single kidney cell) to save the life of another by kidney transplantation or the lives of millions by the establishment of a kidney cell line to be used in medical research[eg. HEK-293 from which Astra Seneca Covid -19 vaccine comes]. After all, Christ himself taught, ‘There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another’.(John:15.13) He really meant it as evidenced in the sacrifice of his own earthly life for all others. Perhaps the good nun-doctor is in need of a refresher course at Medical School and of the exhortation to look for the good that comes as a gift from her God in the depths of the bad. Great good came from Christ’s terrible, unethical, human death. Why not from the deaths of we mere mortals?? Being anti-abortion should not be a bar to seeing evil defeated by the ascendance of some good.

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