Florida’s upside-down dispute over religious freedom

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 06, 2026

In the state of Florida, a Catholic lawmaker says that the Catholic bishops are violating a state law that protects religious freedom. The bishop’s defenders fire back, charging that the government official himself is offending against religious freedom, by interfering in church affairs. One way or another, it seems, someone is guilty.

Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier has warned the state’s bishops that Catholic schools could lose public funding. Uthmeier cites the schools’ policy that requires vaccinations for students, and refuses to allow exemptions on religious grounds. The state’s law, Uthmeier points out, requires recipients to allow for exemptions to vaccine mandates. Failure to meet that requirement could lead to loss of scholarships and tax credits provided by the state.

Notice here that the government of Florida is not threatening to prosecute anyone, nor even to force Catholic schools to change their policies. The only threat is a possible loss of funding, because the schools do not meet the criteria set by state law. Nor is the application of this law especially burdensome to Catholics; Uthmeier would presumably move to enforce the same legal standards on schools governed by the beliefs of any other religion—or by no religion at all.

Nevertheless the attorney general’s warning drew angry protests from defenders of the bishops’ authority. Notre Dame law professor Rick Garnett, for instance, characterized Uthmeier’s stand as “a glaring and dangerous government overreach.” He decried the attempt “to second-guess the orthodoxy of the Catholic bishops’ determination regarding policies for Catholic schools and the morality of certain childhood vaccines.”

Obviously the current debates about vaccination play a large part in this brouhaha. If the particular policies set by Florida’s Catholic schools had involved some non-controversial issue—the color of students’ uniforms, say—state officials would not have intervened. Even if the question had no clear connection to matters of faith and morals (as with color of uniforms), government officials would give the bishops a wide berth, avoiding any church-state controversy. But many people, including loyal Catholics in Florida, strongly object to mandatory vaccination of children.

Clearly the efficacy (or in this case, the necessity) of vaccination is not a tenet of the Catholic faith. The Florida bishops—or rather, the Catholic-school administrators working under their aegis—made the judgment that vaccination should be required, based on their own understanding of public-health issues. Neither the school officials nor the bishops who supervise them have any special expertise, charism, or other mandate to settle public-health questions. (Government officials do, as a matter of fact, but leave that aside.)

Professor Garnett says that the attorney general is trespassing on the bishops’ right to settle questions regarding “the morality of certain childhood vaccines.” But that charge is inaccurate. Uthmeier is objecting to the requirement for vaccines. On that question the teaching of the Catholic Church is clear, and it supports the attorney general.

In setting their mandatory-vaccination policy, Florida Catholic school officials claimed the support of a 2020 statement from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which concluded, in the wake of the Covid panic, that Catholics could be morally justified in accepting a vaccine—even if that vaccine was morally tainted by the use of fetal tissues—if the danger of disease was grave and no other practical alternatives existed. (That Vatican statement also repeated an earlier teaching that Catholics have a moral obligation to object to morally-tainted vaccines and demand the development of alternatives. The Florida bishops have not rallied the faithful to make those demands. But again, leave that aside.)

While the 2020 Vatican statement definitely encouraged the use of vaccines, it acknowledged that some Catholics are unwilling to accept them, and urged that those conscientious objections should be respected. The document stated, in no uncertain terms, that “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be mandatory.”

The Orlando diocese, in an effort to explain the mandatory-vaccine policy, made a similar error, citing the authority of a 2011 letter from the National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) without noticing that the letter contained a crucial distinction. The NCBC letter, signed by Dr. John Haas, the institution’s president, stated:

In fact, Catholic schools or a Catholic diocese cannot grant an exemption from vaccination on religious grounds since the Catholic Church does not teach that the use of vaccinations produced in cell lines derived from an aborted fetus is intrinsically evil…. Parents would, therefore, have to obtain a conscience exemption rather than a religious one. [emphasis added]

The thrust of this argument is that a diocese cannot declare a blanket religious exemption for all Catholics, since the Church does not teach that vaccines are evil. But if some Catholics have moral objections—as some do—the Church can recognize their legitimate right to follow their own consciences. “Personally, I encourage as liberal a policy as possible on the question of exemptions,” Haas wrote. The Florida Catholic schools did not follow that advice.

The Catholic Church does not have a settled teaching on the morality of vaccination—apart from the oft-neglected teaching that vaccines should not be prepared using immoral means. But the Church is extremely clear in teaching that those in authority—in the government, in the Church, and certainly in Catholic schools—should never force individuals to violate their own consciences. In his challenge to the Florida bishops, the state’s attorney general is upholding the Catholic understanding of religious freedom.