Florida's Catholic bishops have told the state's attorney general that his theology is wrong, and they are not granting the exemption he wants.

In a letter to Attorney General James Uthmeier made public last week, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops said the church's refusal to accept religious exemptions from vaccines rests on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which holds that "life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God" that Catholics must reasonably protect. [1] Florida's Catholic schools have never accepted religious exemptions for vaccines. The bishops said they don't owe Uthmeier an explanation of their own doctrine, but offered one anyway "out of respect for you and your office."

The letter answers one from Uthmeier on July 31, in which he told the bishops there was "no legitimate religious reason" to withhold exemptions and that the diocese should "comply with Florida law." Uthmeier posted that letter to X, warning that Catholic schools could lose eligibility for state scholarships and vouchers if they kept resisting. [1] His argument leaned on the claim that some vaccines are "derived from the tissue of aborted children" — a claim vaccine researchers reject. Vaccines contain no fetal cells; a small number use cell lines grown from two fetuses aborted in the 1960s, filtered out entirely during production, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. [1] Pope Francis called COVID-19 vaccination an "act of love" in 2021 despite the same manufacturing history.

The bishops' response, signed by executive director Michael B. Sheedy, said "any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church... how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights." [1] They noted their schools serve as "one of the few safe havens" for children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons, and said parents who object on conscience grounds are free to choose a different school. The bishops also noted a measure of frustration at how the dispute has unfolded, writing that they wished they "could have met and discussed these concerns with your office and perhaps avoided all the public and legal posturing created by your correspondence." [1]

The scholarship threat gives the letter teeth beyond a doctrinal disagreement. Florida's voucher and scholarship programs route significant public and tax-credit funding into private and religious schools, including Catholic ones; disqualification would carry real financial consequences for dioceses that rely on that enrollment pipeline. Uthmeier's own framing treats that leverage as the point — his July letter did not just argue the church was theologically wrong, it tied continued funding eligibility to changing course.

Francis J. Beckwith, a church-state scholar at Baylor, called Uthmeier's position "extraordinary" in an op-ed for the Jesuit magazine America, arguing that using a state benefit to compel internal church policy should trouble anyone who opposed forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to cover birth control. [1] The comparison cuts against the usual partisan alignment on religious-liberty fights, where conservative officials have more often defended institutions resisting government mandates than pressured them to loosen their own rules.

The dispute lands the same week Florida's Department of Health moved to drop chickenpox, hepatitis B, Hib and pneumococcal vaccines from the state's public-school mandate list entirely and expand religious exemptions for the shots that remain — the newest step in Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's yearlong campaign to end school vaccine mandates, a push President Trump publicly opposed a year ago. [1] Uthmeier's fight, in other words, is not with vaccine mandates. It is with a private religious institution that wants to keep one.

-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago