“A Suicidal Denialism” — Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church’s Defense of the COVID Vaccine
Trump rewrote the childhood vaccine schedule, Florida is threatening Catholic schools, and the Senate wants Fauci jailed. Before he was pope, Leo XIV fought for vaccines, oxygen, and to save lives.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday gutting the science-backed federal childhood vaccine schedule. The draconian order narrows the list of diseases every American child is vaccinated against from roughly 18 to 11.
It also directs regulators to split the combined measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) shot into three single-disease injections and to move hepatitis B out of the universal-recommendation column.
Finally, it instructs the Justice Department to support legal challenges against state vaccine mandates.
Entitled “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” the executive order declares that federal programs should support “maximal parental choice over childhood vaccines.” States, it advises, should review the laws that govern which shots a child needs to enroll in school.
At the signing ceremony, Trump once again tied childhood vaccines to autism, a theory scientists have tested and debunked repeatedly for thirty years.
The American Academy of Pediatrics rebuked the order: “For now, unfortunately, we have to ignore everything about vaccines that is coming from our federal government,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, who chairs the academy’s committee on infectious diseases.
Trump’s executive order landed in a season already thick with organized suspicion of vaccines — and, strangely, of the Church that has spent decades defending them. In Florida, Attorney General James Uthmeier is threatening the Catholic Church itself, warning the state’s bishops in a July 31 letter that Catholic schools must accept parental vaccine exemptions or risk losing state scholarship money.
“If the Conference nevertheless refuses to comply with Florida law,” Uthmeier wrote, “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.” He gave the bishops one week to answer.
In Washington, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted last week to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment before the panel. Chairman Rand Paul and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had spent months floating his prosecution, which is precisely why Fauci’s lawyers told him to stay silent.
“A subpoena with no consequence is not a subpoena,” Paul said. “It’s a suggestion.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal saw the hearing differently: “Even during the darkest day of the McCarthy hearings, counsel was allowed to speak. We denied that to Dr. Fauci.”
Within days, the attorneys general of Florida, West Virginia, and Louisiana, Uthmeier among them, also served Fauci with state-level subpoenas.
All three incidents rest on the premise that vaccines are suspect, and religious authorities cannot defend them.
Under Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church refuses to cooperate with such nonsense. There has been no bigger institutional champion of vaccines in the modern world than the Catholic Church.
For centuries, the Church has operated the largest nongovernmental health care network on earth and has taught that immunization serves the God-given duty to protect life.
Uthemeir and his fellow travelers never got the memo, so let’s deliver it right now.
In December 2020, as the first COVID shots shipped, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Vatican’s doctrinal office, since renamed the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) took up the precise question of whether or not Catholics can and ought to take the vaccine.
Its answer approved for publication by Pope Francis?
“It is morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses in their research and production process.” The cell lines in question descend from tissue obtained decades ago; no vaccine on the American schedule requires a single new abortion.
The Vatican argued that taking the shot went beyond permission and constituted a religious obligation.
“The morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good,” the congregation wrote. Yes, the note said vaccination should remain voluntary “as a rule,” and in the same breath it bound every conscience to the neighbor: those who decline the shot “must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”
But the Church had settled this question long before COVID. The Pontifical Academy for Life studied it in 2005 and again in 2017 and concluded that “all 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.”
America’s own bishops agreed: the chairmen of the U.S. bishops’ doctrine and pro-life committees wrote in December 2020 that receiving a COVID vaccine “ought to be understood as an act of charity toward the other members of our community.”
Uthmeier demanded that Florida’s bishops explain the “religious grounds” for their vaccine rules. Does his office not have access to Google?
Four days after the doctrinal note, on Christmas Day 2020, Francis used his urbi et orbi message to beg the world’s governments for “vaccines for all, especially for the most vulnerable and needy of all regions of the planet.”
“Before all others: the most vulnerable and needy!”
Pope Francis didn’t slow the following year.
“I believe that morally everyone must take the vaccine,” he told Italian television in January 2021, days before he and Benedict XVI received their first doses. “It is the moral choice because it is about your life but also the lives of others.” The resistance baffled him, and he gave it a name: “a suicidal denialism.”
In August 2021, he recorded a public service announcement with cardinals and archbishops from across the Americas, aimed squarely at the hesitant.
“Being vaccinated with vaccines authorized by the competent authorities is an act of love,” Francis said. “And contributing to ensure the majority of people are vaccinated is an act of love.”
The Vatican backed the message by vaccinating hundreds of homeless people in the Paul VI Audience Hall and warning its employees that refusing the shot without medical cause could cost them their jobs.
Speaking to the diplomatic corps in January 2022, at the height of the omicron wave, Francis called health care “a moral obligation.”
“Vaccines are not a magical means of healing,” he said, “yet surely they represent, in addition to other treatments that need to be developed, the most reasonable solution for the prevention of the disease.”
Those who refuse them, he observed, frequently “let themselves be influenced by the ideology of the moment, often bolstered by baseless information or poorly documented facts.”
The man who now sits on the Chair of Peter learned these lessons in the country COVID punished hardest. The virus killed more people in Peru per capita than any nation on earth.
That’s why when HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed last week that the United States held that grim title, PolitiFact corrected him with a single word: Peru. Robert Prevost served as bishop of Chiclayo in Peru through the whole disaster.
In June 2020, with his city locked down, Prevost carried the Blessed Sacrament through Chiclayo’s emptied streets and told his people, “It is important that we keep fighting against contagion.” By February 2021, when hospital oxygen had run out across northern Peru, Prevost answered with a campaign he called Oxígeno de la Esperanza (Oxygen of Hope) and asked his diocese for 800,000 soles to buy an oxygen plant.
The people of Chicaylo gave him more than 1.4 million, enough for two.
“There will be oxygen, there is great hope, and it is thanks to all of you,” he announced when the total came in. When vaccines finally reached Peru, Prevost promoted them as well, urging COVID vaccination on social media as a way to care for the most vulnerable.
In August 2021 he amplified an archbishop’s appeal from Francis’ hemispheric campaign, sharing the prayer that vaccines be “available for all, so that we can all get immunized.”
Nothing has changed five years after his election in May 2025.
Addressing the Pontifical Academy for Life this February, Leo XIV told researchers that “all lives are not equally respected, and health is neither protected nor promoted in the same way for everyone.” His argument was simple:
“We need to strengthen our understanding and promotion of the common good, so it does not succumb to specific individual or national interests.”
Set that record beside this week’s news. The scientist Pope Francis invited to open a Vatican health conference now awaits a criminal referral from the United States Senate. In Tallahassee, a Catholic attorney general is demanding that his own bishops disown a doctrine the Vatican put in writing in December 2020.
The Trump-Vance White House, meanwhile, has ordered the federal government to treat immunization, the practice Francis called an act of love, as a capitalistic menu of consumer preferences.
The Catholic Church won’t play ball with the fake MAHA movement.
In the Church’s eyes, a vaccine has never been a private consumer choice, because the unvaccinated child sits in a classroom beside a newborn’s brother and a chemotherapy patient’s daughter. The common good has a body. Pope Leo watched that body gasp for oxygen in Chiclayo, and he spent his episcopate buying their time to breathe.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Florida’s bishops as the state tries to rewrite their doctrine for them. Every parent who wants measles kept in the history books belongs here too, alongside the public servants now dragged before congressional committees for the crime of doing their jobs during the worst plague in a century.
In an era poisoned by conspiracy and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that calls vaccination an act of love and health care a moral obligation.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than propaganda — they are looking for truth spoken plainly, and for love made visible in action.
If you believe that Catholics and people of goodwill must stand together for human dignity against a politics of contagion, I am asking you to join us.
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Trump.
How sickening.
How literally sick-making.
Again, if you voted MAGA you to blame. We don’t care about excuses that your parents were siblings. What matters is human dignity over partisan politics. The folks at the far right, disgraced Pillar Substack won’t report on this as told to by Hannity and others they deem more Catholic than the Pope.