Florida AG warns bishops: Catholic schools could lose vouchers over COVID mandates

Florida Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier warned the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops July 31 that Catholic schools could jeopardize their eligibility for state-funded scholarships and vouchers by denying religious exemptions from vaccination requirements.

“Ironically, they won’t offer religious exemptions as prescribed by state law,” Uthmeier wrote in an announcement of his letter to the bishops. “This is troubling and may disqualify them from state scholarships and vouchers.”

In the four-page letter to conference Executive Director Michael Sheedy, Uthmeier said he had learned that Catholic schools might refuse exemptions to parents who object to vaccines developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.

Florida law requires public and private schools to maintain students’ immunization records but expressly exempts children whose parents object in writing based on religious beliefs. The Florida Department of Health issues qualifying families a religious-exemption form that must be presented to the school.

The state requirement conflicts with policies maintained by some Catholic dioceses. The Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, for example, states that requests for religious exemptions “will not be considered in any Catholic schools of this diocese” because the Church does not teach that vaccination is intrinsically evil.

The diocesan policy also denies conscience exemptions, including to parents it describes as “erroneously” believing that vaccinating their children would be sinful. It argues that the danger to public health outweighs the parents’ conscientious objections.

Uthmeier, a Catholic, disputed the idea that the Church’s recognition of some vaccines as morally permissible allows schools to compel their use.

“As a Catholic, I am confident that the teachings of the Catholic Church do not require Catholic schools to compel students to take vaccines derived from the tissue of aborted children against the sincerely-held religious objections of their parents,” he wrote.

The Vatican’s 2020 doctrinal note on COVID-19 vaccines found that receiving certain abortion-linked vaccines could be morally permissible under limited circumstances. But the document also declared that vaccination “is not, as a rule, a moral obligation” and “must be voluntary.” It added that people who refuse such vaccines in conscience should take other precautions to protect vulnerable people.

CatholicVote previously documented the sharp division among U.S. bishops during the COVID era, with some prelates denying support for religious exemptions while others defended Catholics’ right to refuse vaccination according to an informed conscience.

Florida requires private schools participating in state scholarship programs to comply with applicable health, safety, and welfare laws. Uthmeier requested a response from the bishops’ conference by August 7.