WATCH: Leo XIV urged COVID vaccination as ‘act of love’ in resurfaced 2021 video
Resurfaced footage from 2021 shows the future Pontiff pressing his Peruvian parishioners to ‘make the effort’ to receive the COVID shots, many of which relied on aborted fetal cell lines.
Pope Leo XIVAdri
Salido/Getty Images
- 47
Wed Oct 14, 2026 - 11:20 am EDT
Listen to this article
3 min
(LifeSiteNews) — The future Pope Leo XIV encouraged COVID-19 vaccination as an “act of love” in a rediscovered 2021 video, despite grave moral issues with the shots’ use of aborted fetal cells and doubts that were eventually vindicated about their effectiveness.
In the clip, archived on the website Un Católico Perplejo, then-Bishop Robert Prevost of Chiclayo, Peru, said he wanted to “encourage everyone to participate in the vaccination campaigns being carried out in different parts of the region” at the time, according to an English translation of his remarks.
“Put your shoulder into it. It is very important that we all make this effort to receive the vaccine. It is something that helps ourselves and is also a service to others, because that way, and only that way, will we be able to lower the rate of infection, protecting ourselves from that third wave that is already being pre-announced,” the future leader of the Catholic Church said, going on to reiterate the late Pope Francis’s words calling COVID vaccination an “act of love.”
Yet pro-life and Catholic objectors to the COVID vaccines have raised ethical objections to taking the vaccines based on how they were developed.
According to a detailed overview by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all used fetal cells derived from aborted babies during their COVID vaccines’ testing phase; and Johnson & Johnson also used the cells during the design and development and production phases. The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s journal Science and even the left-wing “fact-checking” outlet Snopes have also admitted the vaccines’ abortion connection, which gives many a moral aversion to associating with them.
Despite these convictions, for which various faithful Catholics have lost their jobs, Leo is continuing in the tradition of Francis, who invited disgraced former White House COVID czar Anthony Fauci to the Vatican to promote the shots. Before taking the papacy, Leo “reportedly imposed receiving Communion on the hand” during the pandemic “and Confession by telephone, which is both invalid and sacrilegious,” LifeSite previously covered. As Pope, he has promoted other bishops who supported the COVID shots, as well.
TOPICS
TAGGED AS
- Abortion
- Abortion-tainted Vaccines
- Catholic
- Catholic Church
- Church
- Covid Vaccines
- Covid-19
- Covid-19 Vaccines
- Pope Leo XIV
- Robert Prevost
- Vaccine Mandates
