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Florida’s Catholic bishops recently rejected a ludicrous demand from the state’s attorney general that their school bend the knee to the state’s GOP-led government and retract its vaccine mandate requirement for students in Florida Catholic schools.
In a five-page letter to Attorney General James Uthmeier, the bishops rightly said the state has no authority to judge how the Church interprets its own teaching.
The letter, signed by Michael Sheedy, executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, responded to a July 31 legal threat from the Attorney General, which gave the bishops seven days to respond and warned that refusal could jeopardize the schools’ students’ ability to receive publicly funded vouchers from the state.
Roughly 95,000 students attend the state’s diocesan schools, and about 300,000 Florida students use state vouchers to pay private-school tuition. I covered Uthmeier’s opening letter the day it landed.
Florida law requires schoolchildren to be immunized against diseases including measles and polio, and it permits religious exemptions.
Catholic schools in the state do not grant them, and the bishops say that is a matter of doctrine: the Church holds that clinically recommended vaccines may be used in good conscience, and that protecting children and the vulnerable is a duty owed to the common good.
Uthmeier, a Catholic who teaches religious education at Tallahassee co-cathedral, contends the schools must honor parents’ objections, including to vaccines developed with cell lines derived from decades-old abortions, or forfeit public money.
The standoff has hardened in recent days. Here’s the latest.
