Florida Attorney General Demands Catholic Schools Accept Religious Vaccine Exemptions or Lose Voucher Funding

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops on July 31, 2026 demanding that Catholic schools in the state begin granting religious exemptions from student vaccine requirements or risk losing eligibility for the state’s educational scholarship programs. The demand landed on an institution that has spent years defending vaccine requirements and put the state’s Catholic bishops in a constitutional dispute they did not anticipate.¹

Florida’s Catholic school system is not small. Roughly 95,000 students attend diocesan schools across the state’s seven Catholic dioceses, and many of those families pay tuition using state voucher funds.² More than 500,000 students in Florida participate in the state’s private school voucher programs, and by March 2026 those programs were accounting for nearly a quarter of Florida’s total education budget, more than twice what they held in 2021.³

Florida’s Vaccine Exemption Law

Florida law requires K-12 students to be vaccinated against polio, measles, rubella, pertussis, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus before attending school. The state does not require a flu shot or Covid-19 shots. Under Florida Statute section 1003.22, public school students may seek a religious exemption from those requirements and public schools are required to grant the religious exemption if the criteria for such an exemption are met. Private religious schools, on the other hand, do not need to grant the religious exemptions across the board. In the event the exemption conflicts with the school’s own religious tenets, the school may refuse to accept the vaccine exemption.⁴

Uthmeier cited the Catholic Catechism, Pope Leo XIV, and scripture in arguing that Catholic doctrine does not support refusing to allow students to receive a religious exemption. He quoted from a 2020 Vatican instruction stating that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary,” and concluded that the schools had no legitimate religious reason to refuse.⁵

Uthmeier wrote:

I therefore urge Catholic schools to comply with Florida law and grant religious exemptions to school vaccine policies. Failure to comply could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs.⁶

Florida’s Vaccine Mandate Battles

In recent years, Governor Ron DeSantis has pushed repeatedly to repeal vaccine mandates and expand exemption categories, including introducing a bill to add a conscientious belief  exemption allowing parents to opt out of any required shot and requiring health care workers to offer alternative vaccine schedules. The bills were not passed into law.

Most recently a bill permitting conscientious belief exemption, which had passed out of the Senate rules committee this year, was blocked by the Speaker of the House from being heard and voted on by state representatives.⁷ The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops has lobbied against vaccine exemption expansion efforts, including for conscientiously held beliefs, urging lawmakers to keep existing vaccine requirements and exemptions in place.⁸

The Church’s Position on Vaccines

Florida’s Catholic dioceses do not grant religious exemptions from student vaccine requirements because, as the bishops maintain, the shots mandated under Florida law allegedly do not violate Catholic teaching. Their position in part relies on Vatican documents that have addressed the ethics of receiving vaccines manufactured by growing viruses in human fetal cell lines, which include rubella, chickenpox (varicella zoster) and hepatitis A vaccines, and or the use of human fetal cells lines in the research and testing of biologicals like the mRNA COVID shots. Because no repeated abortions are used to maintain the manufacturing of vaccines, Catholic Church authorities point to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states at paragraph 2288 that “Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good. ”⁹

In 2017, the Pontifical Academy for Life, a permanent Vatican advisory body established by Pope John Paul II in 1994 to study bioethical questions and advise the Holy See, together with the Italian Bishops’ Conference, addressed declining vaccination rates and the morality of vaccines produced from fetal cell lines, concluding:

All such clinically recommended (vaccines) can be used with a clear conscience and that the use of such vaccines does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion. While the commitment to ensuring that every vaccine has no connection in its preparation to any material originating from an abortion, the moral responsibility to vaccinate is reiterated in order to avoid serious health risks for children and the general population.¹⁰

The Vatican’s 2008 instruction Dignitas Personae addressed parents with religious and conscientious objections to vaccines tied to fetal cell lines, stating:

Danger to the health of children could permit parents to use a vaccine which was developed using cell lines of illicit origin, while keeping in mind that everyone has the duty to make known their disagreement and to ask that their healthcare system make other types of vaccines available.¹¹

The National Catholic Bioethics Center has confirmed that the rubella, chickenpox, and hepatitis A vaccines used in the United States are produced from historic fetal cell lines derived from abortions performed decades ago, and that no alternative products currently exist for any of these vaccines.¹²

The Bishops’ Response

Michael B. Sheedy, executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, responded to Uthmeier stating that the bishops were under no legal obligation to justify their vaccine policies to his office but were responding out of respect, while making clear they expected their constitutional rights to be honored in return. The core question, Sheedy explained, is not what Catholic doctrine says about vaccines, but who holds the authority to interpret that doctrine.¹³

Sheedy wrote:

Respectfully, any insinuation that a government official can dictate to the Catholic Church (or any religion) how to apply her tenets and dogma, violates well-established constitutional religious freedom rights. It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology. ¹⁴

The letter cited the church autonomy doctrine, a principle the Supreme Court has recognized that bars the government from interfering in how a religious institution interprets and applies its own faith.¹⁵

Sheedy wrote:

The government may not decide that Church teaching is insufficiently religious, insufficiently consistent with Catholic doctrine, or insufficiently compelling to justify an ecclesiastical policy. Nor may it require Church leaders to defend their interpretation of Catholic doctrine before civil authorities as a condition of operating religious schools.¹⁶

The church autonomy doctrine had already been applied to a Florida diocesan vaccine policy specifically. In Flynn v. Estevez, the First District Court of Appeal held that the doctrine barred any judicial intervention into the diocese’s vaccination policy and that secular courts may not adjudicate competing interpretations of Catholic teaching, rejecting the argument that a diocese must produce proof of the theological foundations of its policy.¹⁷

The Voucher Threat

On the voucher threat, Sheedy cited Florida Statute section 1002.42(2)(h), in which the Legislature stated expressly that it is not its intent to regulate, control, or monitor the religious instruction or freedoms of churches. He also pointed to Catholic Charities Bureau, Inc. v. Wisconsin Labor & Industry Review Commission, where the Supreme Court held that the government may not distinguish among religions based on theological differences without satisfying the highest level of judicial scrutiny. Sheedy wrote that the state “cannot disqualify Catholic schools from the scholarship program merely because a state official’s views differ from the bishops’ views.”¹⁸

Sheedy’s solution for parents who have a religious objection to vaccination is to send their children to a non-Catholic school,¹⁹ even though Catholic Church doctrine states that it is a right and “most serious obligation” for Catholic parents to provide a Catholic education for their children.²⁰  Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami called Uthmeier’s demand an “unprecedented and unexpected overreach by a state official that intrudes upon our religious freedom under the protections afforded us by the First Amendment.”²¹

It appears that Florida’s Catholic schools are now caught between a government that controls a significant portion of their funding and making the argument that the First Amendment limits what that government can demand of schools operated by the Catholic Church when it comes to  allowing students to exercise freedom of conscience and decline the use of one or more state mandated vaccines, specifically in light of the fact that Catholic Church authorities take the official position it is the obligation of parents to vaccinate their children for “the common good.”

In an article published by EWTN, a Catholic news outlet, Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder & president of the National Vaccine Information Center, pointed out that Catholic school officials generally formulate vaccine and other public health policies based on the judgments of public health authorities. She argued that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed public distrust in scientific and governmental institutions, especially regarding data about who is at greatest biological risk for vaccines “that could hurt or even kill people.” She said:

Unfortunately, the entire notion of the common good rests upon the science. If the scientists and the government havenʼt done due diligence in doing the best science, or havenʼt told the full truth, that is a moral dilemma the Church is going to have to eventually grapple with.²²

The Florida attorney general’s office has not publicly responded to the Cathlic bishops’ letter.

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