Florida’s MAGA Attorney Threatens to Defund Catholic Schools Over Vaccine Mandate
Florida’s attorney general gave the bishops until August 7 to accept vaccine exemptions their own doctrine calls dishonest. Nearly nine in ten of the state’s Catholic school students sit downstream.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a letter Friday to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops demanding that the state’s Catholic schools grant religious exemptions from vaccination — exemptions the Church’s own moral theology says it cannot honestly certify.
The threat arrives in plain language. “Failure to comply could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs,” Uthmeier wrote, aiming at the funding stream that carried roughly 88 percent of Florida’s more than 94,000 Catholic school students last year. He gave the bishops until August 7 to respond — ten days before most Florida schools open for the new year.
Within hours, the attorney general announced the letter on X. “Ironically, they won’t offer religious exemptions as prescribed by state law,” he wrote. “This is troubling and may disqualify them from state scholarships and vouchers.”
Uthmeier served as Ron DeSantis’s chief of staff before his appointment as attorney general in February 2025, and he is asking Florida voters to keep him in the office this November.
The demand also comes from an attorney general trailing ethics questions of his own. A federal judge held Uthmeier in civil contempt in June 2025 for defying her order blocking Florida’s new immigration law. And the University of Florida — its board chaired by a top DeSantis donor — quietly put him on the payroll as a $100,000-a-year part-time law professor, the highest-paid adjunct at its law school in decades, for two hours of class a week, with no conflict-of-interest disclosure on file.
Start with what the letter actually says.
Uthmeier, a Catholic, told Michael Sheedy, the conference’s executive director, that “at least one diocese” has adopted a position the National Catholic Bioethics Center articulated in 2011 — that a Catholic institution “cannot grant an exemption from vaccination on religious grounds,” because the Church does not teach that vaccination is intrinsically evil. The letter points to the immunization policies of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee.
Uthmeier wrapped the demand in his own piety, garlanding it with citations to the catechism and to scripture. “As a Catholic, I am confident that 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 wrote.
“Having no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions to the taking of abortion-derived vaccines, Catholic schools in Florida should comply with Florida law.”
It’s absurd that an officer of the state has audited the Catholic Church’s moral theology, ruled the bishops’ understanding of their own faith illegitimate, and attached a price to his verdict.
The bishops’ position was not improvised. When the Vatican’s doctrinal office examined the COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020, it judged their use morally acceptable even as it taught that “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.”
The Diocese of Orlando told its families as far back as 2014 that the Church does not consider vaccination “intrinsically evil.”
A religious exemption is an attestation that vaccination conflicts with a sincerely held religious belief. Catholic teaching holds that no such conflict exists.
Any Catholic school certifying one would put its signature to a falsehood about its own faith, and that refusal to bear false witness is the conduct James Uthmeier now proposes to punish. The catechism he quotes so freely names false witness a sin against the eighth commandment; he might have kept reading.
None of this happened in a vacuum.
Florida’s governing class has spent a year at war with vaccination itself. Standing beside Governor Ron DeSantis last September, Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo vowed to end every vaccine mandate in the state: “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
The crusade stalled. House Speaker Daniel Perez declined to bring repeal to the floor this spring, worried about children losing protection from measles and polio, and the legislature went home with the mandates intact. Blocked in the capitol, the movement found a softer target down the street: a church that declines to pretend its doctrine matches the state’s new health creed.
So the religious exemption — a legal instrument designed to shield believers from government coercion — lands on the bishops’ desks inverted, functioning as a loyalty oath the state expects the Church to administer against its own teaching.
Let me say what should never need to be said in America. How the Catholic Church runs its schools falls squarely within the purview of religious liberty, even when a particular policy remains debatable among ecclesial authorities.
Faithful Catholics disagree about vaccine rules in parochial classrooms.
The Church settles that disagreement through her bishops in communion with Rome — and the attorney general of Florida holds no seat at that table. Nothing about the principle depends on whether the bishops’ vaccine policy is wise — religious liberty exists precisely to protect the decisions a governing majority finds wrongheaded.
Antonin Scalia, of all people, marked this boundary. His majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith — the 1990 decision the conservative legal movement has wrestled with ever since — repeated the Supreme Court’s standing warning that it is not “within the judicial ken to question the centrality of particular beliefs or practices to a faith, or the validity of particular litigants’ interpretations of those creeds.”
The right came to treat Smith as the great wound of modern religious-liberty law because it left believers exposed to government power.
Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1993 to blunt the decision, and by Fulton v. Philadelphia in 2021, three sitting justices were demanding that Smith be overruled outright. Every brief in that long campaign rested on a single conviction: the government has no business inside the sanctuary.
Even Scalia’s critics accepted the deeper rule beneath his warning.
A unanimous Supreme Court held in Hosanna-Tabor that the First Amendment protects “a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission,” and it reaffirmed that autonomy for religious schools in 2020.
Uthmeier’s letter performs the exact inquiry Scalia declared beyond the government’s competence, then bills the Church for the answer. The late justice’s admirers run Tallahassee, and this letter would embarrass him in front of every one of them.
The voucher threat also betrays the movement’s own trophies.
Conservatives litigated for a generation to open public scholarship programs to religious schools, and in Espinoza v. Montana they won a rule from Chief Justice John Roberts: “A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Carson v. Makin extended the same rule to Maine two years later.
Florida built an empire on those victories.
School choice now absorbs roughly a quarter of the state’s education budget, up from 12 percent in 2021, and more than 500,000 children statewide carry its scholarships. Uthmeier proposes to yank that support from Catholic schools over the content of their religious governance — the very move his own movement spent decades branding unconstitutional.
The irony is wild. For half a century the American right has proclaimed religious liberty its lodestar, building a fortress of law around cake bakers, craft-store chains, and Catholic foster agencies. Now the Church has invoked that same liberty against a policy MAGA favors, and the state’s answer is a threat to defund the education of poor children. Religious liberty, on this evidence, was only ever meant to run in one direction.
Follow the logic to its destination. Grant Florida the power to strip scholarships over vaccine doctrine, and nothing stops a blue state from defunding Catholic institutions over the Church’s teaching on abortion.
Picture California’s attorney general reviewing the catechism, pronouncing the bishops’ doctrine of life illegitimate, and conditioning public funds on its revision. Every conservative in America would call that persecution — accurately. Uthmeier is drafting the permission slip.
Revolutionary France ran this experiment to its end. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy made priests employees of the state in 1790 and demanded an oath of loyalty to the new order; within a few years, clergy and religious who refused were climbing the scaffold. Nobody expects guillotines in Tallahassee. The intellectual edifice still deserves its true name: a government claiming authority over the internal life of the Catholic Church, with penalties attached to fidelity.
And Florida has form here. This is the same state government whose guards at Alligator Alcatraz denied Bibles to detained Catholics and blocked Mass at the camp for a month, until Archbishop Thomas Wenski and a caravan of bikers prayed their way through the gates. The post-liberal right has spent years teaching its followers that state power exists to enforce their vision of the good. Uthmeier just applied the lesson to the Church itself.
The bishops answered with the calm of an institution that has buried every empire that tried to instruct it. “Be assured, Florida’s Catholic schools are operating in accord with the law and Church teaching,” said Michele Taylor, the conference’s spokeswoman.
The Catholic Church will survive James Uthmeier. The children in her Florida classrooms deserve better than a school year held hostage to a creed their Church does not confess.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Florida’s bishops and with every scholarship family caught between a politician’s ideology and a child’s classroom.
We believe what the Church believes: the state holds no competence over the soul, the education of poor children is a work of mercy rather than a bargaining chip, and no community of faith should face government punishment for refusing to lie about its own doctrine.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people across the political spectrum are hungry for a faith that cannot be conscripted. Readers here stood with us at the fence line when Florida denied Mass to detained migrants, and they are standing with the bishops today.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill defending human dignity against governments that would draft the Church into their ideologies — I am asking you to join us.
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Until Trump and Covid the majority of Americans vaccinated their children to keep them safe. Trump refused to wear a mask and that set off a firestorm against government policies. I keep saying when polio comes and kills people or handicaps them for life they will wish they had been vaccinated and vaccinated their children. Polio is nothing to play around with.
The 20th century is full of the history of Catholic resistance movements refusing to comply with the arbitrary doctrines of the totalitarian state (the previous centuries are also replete with examples).