Attorney General as State Theologian: Florida’s Vaccine Mandate and the Freedom of the Church 

A legal controversy is brewing in the state of Florida, and it seems to pit the religious liberty rights of Catholic parents against those of the Catholic Church. In a July 31, 2026 letter addressed to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, the state’s Catholic attorney general (AG), James Uthmeier, threatened to exclude diocesan schools from the state voucher program unless the bishops allow religious exemptions from mandatory immunizations.  

Because of the recent controversies over compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations in government, military, education, and industry, one may be tempted to think that the AG’s threat concerns only those vaccines. But it doesn’t. It concerns vaccines for all communicable diseases for which students in public and private schools are required to be immunized under Florida law: “poliomyelitis, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps, tetanus, and other communicable diseases as determined by rules of the Department of Health.” But there’s an exception to the requirement. In addition to a verifiable medical reason, parents can opt their children out if the parent “objects in writing that the administration of immunizing agents conflicts with his or her religious tenets or practices.”  

According to the AG, his office has received “hundreds, probably thousands, of complaints” from Catholic parents that the Catholic schools that their children are attending would not grant them religious exemptions. The basis of the parents’ request is that the cell lines from which these vaccines originated were derived from fetuses aborted in the twentieth century. Because Catholic moral doctrine maintains that the intentional killing of unborn human life constitutes unjustified homicide, and because the Catholic parents believe one would be effectively cooperating with an abortion if one takes the vaccines, they are convinced that they are religiously forbidden to allow their children to be immunized. This line of reasoning is untenable, however, insofar as it is contradicted by the authoritative teaching of the very Church to which these parents belong and that administers their children’s schools. As the Pontifical Academy for Life affirmed in 2005 and 2017: “[A]ll clinically recommended vaccinations can be used with a clear conscience and that the use of such vaccines does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion.” 

This is not to say that the Church does not recognize that taking the vaccines is fraught with moral tension because of their illicit origin. This is why the Church recommends, in various official documents, that one should seek viable alternatives to these vaccines if they are available. The Church also says that one has the right to refuse the vaccines even if there are no comparable alternatives, but if and only “if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health.”  

Thus, according to the Church, it is not only morally permissible to use these vaccines, it may very well be necessary under certain conditions. This is why the National Catholic Bioethics Center in 2011 advised the archbishop of Miami that “Catholic schools or a Catholic diocese cannot grant an exemption on religious grounds since the Catholic Church does not teach that the use of vaccinations produced by cell lines derived from tissue from an aborted fetus is intrinsically evil.” It was the AG’s fierce opposition to this policy, as found on the website of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, that was the catalyst for his letter.  

Even if Florida had no statutory religious exemption to vaccine mandates, parents would still have under the U.S. Constitution a fundamental right to direct the education of their children. (It is, however, not settled whether that right is capacious enough to provide a constitutional basis for an immunization exemption.) The Supreme Court has, since the early twentieth century, articulated this view in several landmark cases. In the 1925 case Pierce v. Society of Sisters, in which the Court rejected as unconstitutional an Oregon statute that effectively barred parents from sending their minor children to private religious schools, the majority penned these famous words:

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. 

In 1971, in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court, relying on Pierce as precedent, vindicated the rights of Amish parents to remove their children from compulsory education after eighth grade. And most recently, in the 2025 case Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court affirmed a preliminary injunction so that parents could excuse their elementary-aged children from required reading of LGBTQ+ books. Citing Yoder, the Mahmoud majority held that “a government burdens the religious exercise of parents when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”   

Consistent with the Court’s rulings, the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, affirmed that “[p]arents … have the right to determine, in accordance with their own religious beliefs, the kind of religious education that their children are to receive.” Thus, the Florida AG is correct when he states in his letter, quoting the Catechism: “The Catholic Church has long held that ‘the role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute.’” 

But Dignitatis Humanae also affirms “the freedom of the Church.” According to the Council Fathers, “the Church should enjoy that full measure of freedom which her care for the salvation of men requires.” This at least means that “the Church … claims freedom for herself in her character as a society of men who have the right to live in society in accordance with the precepts of the Christian faith.” Within this “society of men” is the Church’s extensive network of parochial schools, with each institution under the ultimate authority of a bishop appointed by the Holy Father.  

Something like “the freedom of the Church” has found its way into several landmark Supreme Court decisions. The Court has long held that the government may not determine what constitutes heresy or orthodoxy in a religion (West Virginia v. Barnette (1943); United States v. Ballard (1944); Presbyterian Church in the United States v. Mary Elizabeth Blue Hull Memorial Presbyterian Church (1969); Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission (2025). It has also ruled that anti-discrimination employment laws do not extend to the hiring and dismissal of employees performing ministerial functions (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC (2012)), Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020)). In addition, the Court has made clear that private religious schools may not be excluded from otherwise neutral state voucher programs on the basis of their religious beliefs and practices  (Carson v. Makin (2022)), and that religious institutions cannot be denied public benefits solely because of their religious character  (Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020)).  

Because Florida has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), couldn’t the bishops argue that they should be given a religious exemption from the state’s requirement that all schools grant religious exemptions from mandatory immunizations? Remarkably, AG Uthmeier dismisses that possibility, arguing that the bishops have no authentic claim to a religious exemption because, in his words, “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 is, of course, technically correct, since no Church teaching is that specific. Yet by precisely the same logic, one can just as accurately say that the teachings of the Catholic Church do not prohibit Catholic bishops from requiring, as a condition of enrollment, that students at diocesan schools take those very vaccines against the sincerely-held religious objections of their parents.   

But, in fact, the bishops’ policy can be reasonably inferred from several strands of Catholic moral teaching, especially on conscience, cooperation with evil, and the limits of religious liberty. Because Catholic conscience is authoritative only when properly formed in accordance with Church teaching, a Catholic’s claim to a “religious exemption” has doctrinal grounding primarily when it concerns conduct the Church identifies as morally impermissible. This is why the bishops cannot grant a religious exemption to Catholic parents, for it would imply that taking the immunizations would violate Catholic moral teaching. But as we have seen, the parents’ belief is erroneous, and thus if a bishop were to grant the religious exemption he would be engaging in a performative lie.   

This does not mean that the bishops could not, in principle, grant a conscience exemption. However, as the National Catholic Bioethics Center said in its counsel to the Miami archbishop: “It should be made clear that … [a conscience] exemption from immunization with these vaccines is being made in order to allow the parents to make a pro-life witness not because the Catholic Church teaches that the use of these vaccines is immoral in and of itself.” Although the Church teaches that even an erring conscience must be respected, its claims are not without limits; those in authority are obligated to determine how the recognition of such claims serves the common good: “Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it.” If the Florida bishops determine that immunizing their students is required for the common good, then their policy of mandatory vaccinations is, contra the Florida AG, supported by Catholic teaching. As the bishops’ own policy states: “[T]he Catholic Church recognizes a parent’s right to decide what is in the best interest of their child, so long as the effect of that decision only impacts them or their child. … The good of respecting the conscience of parents of a single child is outweighed by the harm which could come to many as a result of an exemption on the basis of conscience.” 

What is happening in Florida is striking. The attorney general of an American state, in his official capacity, is pronouncing a negative theological judgment on the orthodoxy of Catholic bishops. Armed with that judgment, he concludes that the bishops have no legal right to exercise their ecclesial authority to create a particular policy for their diocesan schools—and that those schools may therefore be denied a public benefit unless the bishops renounce their heretical viewpoint and change their policy. We have a Catholic government official publicly entertaining legal action that would contravene both the teachings of his own Church and Supreme Court precedent on religious liberty. If Attorney General Uthmeier were wise, he would rescind his threatening epistle to the Florida bishops, issue a public mea culpa to them, and immediately seek confessional absolution. 

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