Catholic schools and childhood vaccines: A showdown between Florida’s attorney general and bishops

A showdown over vaccines between Catholic school officials in Florida and the state’s attorney general this week revived debate over the morality and efficacy of vaccinations—an at-times bitter dispute that predates the Covid-19 pandemic but was supercharged by that crisis. In a post on the social media platform X on July 31, James Uthmeier, the Republican attorney general of Florida, announced that he had sent a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops demanding that the state’s Catholic schools accept parental requests for religious exemptions to vaccine requirements, or risk losing support for student tuition through Florida’s voucher program. In his letter to the conference, Mr. Uthmeier, identifying himself as a Catholic, acknowledges that Florida law permits a religious school “to claim an exemption from the requirement to grant religious exemptions if granting such an exemption would violate the religious tenets of the school.” But, he argues, because of church teaching on the primacy of conscience and the sanctity of life, Catholic schools have no “legitimate religious reason to refuse” vaccine exemption petitions. Some parents who seek religious- or conscience-based exemptions for vaccinations argue that specific vaccines are illicit for Catholics because they were developed using human cell lines obtained from abortions in the 1960s and 1970s. It is no small irony that vaccine objectors for years have turned to Catholic sources for model religious exemption letters that now present a threat to Catholic school funding in Florida. Exempt from exemption appeals? Mr. Uthmeier warned conference officials that failure to comply with Florida law regarding vaccine exemptions “could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs.” He added: “If the Conference nevertheless refuses to comply with Florida law, then please state clearly the religious grounds on which Catholic schools may force persons to take vaccines derived from abortions against their deeply held moral and religious objections.” Conference officials told America they are preparing a response by the Aug. 7 deadline proposed by the attorney general. Rick Garnett, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, told OSV News that Mr. Uthmeier’s letter “reflects a misunderstanding of Americans’ fundamental right to religious freedom and is a glaring and dangerous government overreach.” Mr. Garnett charged that “the attorney general presumes, ‘as a Catholic,’ to second-guess the orthodoxy of the Catholic bishops’ determination regarding policies for Catholic schools and the morality of certain childhood vaccines.” “However, it is not remotely the role of a government official, even a Catholic one, to tell the bishops what to teach or how to run the church’s apostolates,” Mr. Garnett said. “It is certainly not up to him to decide whether the Catholic bishops’ reasons are ‘legitimate.’” “For a government official to threaten official punishments—and to jeopardize the ability of parents in Florida to choose Catholic schools for their children—on the basis of his own—in this case, mistaken—interpretation of Catholic teaching is a clear violation of the First Amendment and other legal religious freedom protections,” Mr. Garnett said. He suggested that Mr. Uthmeier “should withdraw the letter and apologize publicly for creating confusion on such important matters.” Catholic schools across the nation may be facing a difficult reopening this fall as concerns about vaccinations and the threat of new viral outbreaks, particularly measles, appear to be accelerating simultaneously. Moral theologian Daniel Daly is the executive director of the Catholic Health Association’s Center for Theology and Ethics in Catholic Health and has advised Catholic schools and dioceses on health policy. He said that, contrary to the attorney general’s assessment, Catholic school officials in Florida are not “forcing anyone to do anything,” but merely setting reasonable expectations for safe school environments. Catholic schools have the obligation to protect the well-being of the children who are in their care, their teachers, staff and visitors, Dr. Daly said. They cannot force families to vaccinate their children, he added, but neither are they obliged to allow unvaccinated children onto school grounds where they represent a threat to, among others, children who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons and siblings of schoolchildren who are too young to have been fully vaccinated. Dr. Daly pointed out that resistance to vaccines is often based on misinformation about vaccines, which “today are in no way dependent on ongoing direct, immoral, illicit abortions for their production.” According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, some vaccines “involve growing viruses in human cell cultures originally developed from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s.” Those cell lines are still being used, according to the academy, “so no new aborted fetuses are ever needed.” What is morally permissible? The church has long been aware of potential moral hazards related to the historic connection between abortion and vaccine production but has urged parents all the same to seek vaccinations for themselves and their children, most recently intervening to endorse vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. Church officials have explained that vaccines produced with fetal cell lines derived from abortion “for which no alternatives currently exist” are morally permissible “to ensure the health of individuals and the population as a whole.” In 2017, the Pontifical Academy for Life sought to counter declining vaccination rates in Italy in a statement prepared with the Italian bishops’ conference: “We believe that all clinically recommended [vaccines] can be used with a clear conscience and that the use of such vaccines does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion.” Academy officials urged a continuing effort to find alternatives to vaccines prepared from cell lines derived from abortion but reiterated “the moral responsibility to vaccinate…in order to avoid serious health risks for children and the general population.” Despite other attempts to clarify church teaching on vaccines, a degree of confusion among Catholic parents continues. Arguably contributing to that confusion has been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health, who continues to amplify misleading or factually incorrect statements about vaccines, among them erroneous claims about “fetal debris” in vaccines. According to the A.A.P., “Purification processes filter the vaccine during production, and no fetal tissue remains.” But Mr. Kennedy is not alone among government officials who are adding to vaccine skepticism. Gov. Ron DeSantis has positioned Florida as the national leader in “medical freedom” with the ambition of eradicating all vaccine mandates. In that campaign he enjoys the enthusiastic support of the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Dr. Ladapo said of vaccine mandates, speaking at a press conference in September 2025. “Who am I as a man standing here to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in [their] body?” Fortunately, the church has wisdom to share about balancing individual rights and communal obligations. “As American Catholics, our first allegiance is to the truth of the faith,” Dr. Daly said. “Even if there’s a kind of a libertarian culture in the society that says, ‘Well, I can really do anything I want, and I have no obligation to consider other people.’ That’s not the case for those of us who are Catholic.” “The Gospel always calls us to promote the well-being of others,” he said. “And that has been codified in church teaching as well through concepts like the common good [and] the preferential option for the poor.” “You may have a right not to be vaccinated,” Dr. Daly says. But “it cannot impede upon the rights for health and safety of others…. We don’t exist in a vacuum. We are social creatures that exist in a community.” Choosing not to be vaccinated or choosing to prevent your children from receiving vaccines is not a decision that limits risk to the individual or to the individual’s family. Infants yet to receive their vaccinations are vulnerable, Dr. Daly points out. “Pregnant women and the unborn are vulnerable. The elderly are vulnerable. Persons who have immunocompromised systems are vulnerable. Those who are undergoing treatments like chemotherapy are vulnerable,” he says. “That’s a huge number of people…who are vulnerable to communicable diseases. And the question is: ‘Are you willing to fail to do something that could protect them?’” “There are people who are dying from these diseases in this country,” he said. “There are children who are dying.” Viral skepticism On social media, vaccine skeptics ask what is the harm to the vaccinated if they individually choose not to protect themselves from disease. That is the “free rider” problem, Dr. Daly said—“I don’t have to be vaccinated because I’ll be protected by everyone else.” That perspective reveals a deep misunderstanding of how a vaccine’s so-called herd immunity works. The percentage of people who need to be vaccinated to prevent the spread of a disease varies depending on virulency. Measles, currently on the rise in the United States after being on the verge of being eradicated just a few years ago, is especially contagious and requires a 95 percent vaccination rate to prevent outbreaks. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 95,000 people died from measles in 2024—mostly children under the age of 5, “despite the availability of a safe and cost-effective vaccine.” While some politicians and vaccine skeptics on social media continue to raise questions about vaccine safety and efficacy, among health professionals the issue has long been settled. Vaccines prevent illness and save lives. A report from the Centers for Disease Control in 2024 found that among almost 120 million children born in the United States during 1994 to 2023, routine childhood immunizations prevented 508 million lifetime cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations and averted 1.13 million premature deaths. According to a landmark study in 2024 conducted by the U.K. health journal The Lancet, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives over the last 50 years, including the lives of 101 million infants. Dr. Daly called the church’s endorsement of vaccines, an effort to protect the most vulnerable from disease, “at its core, a pro-life position.” The issue of vaccine mandates has become politicized, he said, an expression of a kind of civic post-traumatic stress related to the Covid-19 pandemic when positions against vaccines hardened. A “deep skepticism about authority figures and experts” persists. “We’re in a moment of incredibly low social trust,” Dr. Daly says. Political leaders and civic institutions need to “engender that trust again.” Instead, he worries that a gulf between public health officials and political leaders is only widening. The outcome of that disconnect is perhaps predictable. In 2020, 13 measles cases were reported in the United States, 49 in 2021; 121 in 2022; 59 in 2023; and 285 in 2024. By the end of July, 2,371 U.S. measles cases have been confirmed so far in 2026, a figure that already exceeds the 2,289 confirmed cases for all of 2025. There were five confirmed cases of measles in Florida in 2025; there have been 141 so far this year. More from America - Vaccines have become the victim of their own success. You could say the same for Jesus. - Do not give religious exemptions for Covid vaccines, New York archdiocese tells its priests - I am a Jesuit scientist. I’m all for vaccines, but we have to do more than just ‘follow the science’ - Explainer: Is it ethical for Catholics to get a vaccine derived from abortions? A deeper dive - Note on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines - Dignitas Personae: on certain bioethical questions - Moral Reflections on Vaccines Prepared from Cells Derived from Aborted Human Foetuses - Vaccine Skepticism Has Risen in the U.S.—And in Many Other Countries The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past each week. Last time: Archbishop Wenski condemns Catholic governor Ron DeSantis’s execution rampage. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week: Meet Britain’s first Catholic prime minister in 500 years and What the World Cup reveals about faith and belonging—amid Trump’s immigration crackdown.