On July 31, the Catholic attorney general of Florida, James Uthmeier, sent an open letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops threatening to withhold state voucher money from diocesan schools unless the state’s bishops allow students to claim a religious exemption from mandatory immunizations for “poliomyelitis, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps, tetanus, and other communicable diseases as determined by rules of the Department of Health.” State law requires every school—public or private—to allow religious exemptions, and the attorney general ordered Catholic schools to comply with that law.

The impetus for the attorney general’s letter was an articulation of the Florida bishops’ position on immunizations, published by the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee. (You can find a PDF on the diocese’s school policies website, in the “Students” section.) Diocesan policy requires students to provide proof of certain immunizations and states that exemptions based on religious beliefs “will not be considered.” The diocese cites a letter that John M. Haas, then the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, sent to the Florida Catholic Conference in 2011. In that letter, Dr. Haas stated that “Catholic schools or a Catholic diocese cannot grant an exemption on religious grounds since the Catholic Church does not teach that the use of vaccinations produced by cell lines derived from tissue from an aborted fetus is intrinsically evil” (emphasis in original).

Mr. Uthmeier does something extraordinary in his own letter: He attempts to catechize the Florida bishops. Even though he concedes that “a religious school itself may be able to claim an exemption from the requirement to grant religious exemptions if granting such an exemption would violate the religious tenets of the school,” he concludes that the bishops are not eligible to assert such an exemption. He argues that because there is no specific religious tenet of Catholicism that requires Catholic school students to take vaccines derived from aborted fetuses “against the sincerely-held religious objections of their parents,” the bishops have “no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions to the taking of abortion-derived vaccines.”

On these grounds, Mr. Uthmeier issues his solemn censure: “Catholic schools in Florida should comply with Florida law.” Among the religious authorities he cites in what might be called his “Tallahassee encyclical” are St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith).

Missing the mark

There are several reasons why champions of religious liberty should find the attorney general’s crusade troubling.

First, as the Supreme Court has noted in several cases since the 19th century, government officials have no business assessing the reasonableness, coherency or orthodoxy of religious beliefs or practices protectable under the First Amendment. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote just last year in a case involving a Wisconsin law, “official differentiation on theological lines is fundamentally foreign to our constitutional order.”

Even if you are sympathetic to Catholic parents who conscientiously object to mandatory vaccinations, do you really want to live in a country where public officials determine what counts as heresy or orthodoxy for religious citizens, whether they are Catholic parents or Catholic bishops? If you oppose the government forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide birth control to their employees, you surely must see the wrong in the attorney general of Florida using the denial of a public benefit to compel Catholic bishops to alter the internal church policy of diocesan schools. 

Second, Mr. Uthmeier misrepresents how the Catholic Church thinks through issues like this. Take the guidance from the N.C.B.C. upon which the Florida bishops rely. Although the attorney general is correct that the Florida dioceses do not allow for religious exemptions for mandatory school vaccinations, in principle they could allow for conscience exemptions (which are not mentioned in the state law). 

What’s the difference? In Catholic doctrine, “religion” is not merely a subjective set of beliefs but a technical term referring to the virtue of religion, a part of justice by which one renders to God what is due to him (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nos. 1807 and 2095). As such, “religious” obligations are understood as objective duties grounded in truth, not simply personal assertions of conscience. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught that the only time a Catholic is obligated to violate the civil law is when the government compels him to act “contrary to the divine law.”

Thus, if the bishops were to grant a religious exemption to a Catholic parent, they would be implicitly affirming that it is always contrary to the Catholic faith (that is, the divine law) to take the vaccines in question. But because the church teaches that taking these vaccines is morally permissible, including certain vaccines “whose production is connected with acts of procured abortion,” a bishop would effectively be lying by granting a religious exemption. No attorney general, especially a Catholic one, should use his or her power to compel a bishop to implicitly assent to religious views that he cannot conscientiously affirm.

A question of conscience?

Now to the distinct question of conscience exemptions. Although the church recognizes that even people with sincerely held erroneous beliefs have a right of conscience, all such claims of conscience are cabined by the common good. For this reason, any bishop disposed to grant conscience exemptions to students, perhaps out of respect for their parents’ sincere though mistaken beliefs, is required by Catholic moral theology to carefully weigh the severity of the medical risks that the unvaccinated may pose to other students and teachers. Because a religious tenet of the church is that any authentic law or rule must be ordered toward the common good, Mr. Uthmeier errs when he claims that the bishops’ policy on both religious and conscience exemptions is not a proper determination of church doctrine. 

This is why it is a red herring for the attorney general to claim that there is no Catholic teaching that specifically requires bishops to enforce, without granting exemptions, vaccine mandates in diocesan schools. After all, by the same reasoning one can also say that there is no specific Catholic teaching that forbids bishops from requiring mandatory immunizations without exemptions. 

The attorney general has another problem: Florida has its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This means that even though the vaccine exemption law applies equally to all voucher users, the state has the burden to prove that the only way that it can achieve its ends—protecting the religious liberty of some voucher-using Catholic parents—is to compel the Catholic bishops to violate the teachings of their church or to exclude Catholic schools from the voucher program. But either option likely runs afoul of the First Amendment, since the rationale for the state’s action against the diocesan schools—as Mr. Uthmeier contends—is entirely a religious one: The bishops are not adhering to authentic Catholic doctrine. It is hard to imagine a more egregious infringement of religious liberty. 

[Also read The Weekly Dispatch: “Catholic schools and childhood vaccines: A showdown between Florida’s attorney general and bishops.”]

Francis Joseph Beckwith is a professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas. He also serves on the advisory board of legal experts for the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission.