Vouchers and Vaccines
The state of Florida is threatening to pull over a billion dollars of school choice funds from Catholic schools because those schools refuse to admit unvaccinated children in obedience to the policy of the Florida Catholic Conference.
The Florida Attorney General’s notice to the Conference urges it to respect the conscience rights of those Florida citizens who do not want to give their children vaccines derived from aborted fetal tissue. The notice requires clarification of the Conference’s religious basis for denying conscience exemptions by yesterday (August 7th).
The Florida Catholic Conference has held that, because the state’s bishops believe any relationship between vaccines and abortion is so distant and slim, the vaccines are morally acceptable. Since there is no reason for anyone to object to vaccines according to Catholic doctrine, Catholic schools should not grant religious exemptions.
While this situation is complex, the Catholic tradition has a framework which can help resolve it. Pius XI’s 1929 encyclical, Of That Divine Teacher (Divini Illius Magistri ), offers a helpful summary. It identifies three necessary societies: family, state, and Church. Each has distinct rights and responsibilities.
The family, by natural and divine law, has the primary responsibility and most intimate care of the child, including education and health – although the family cannot violate the natural or divine law.
The state has the right and duty to assist the family in accessing services it cannot reasonably provide for itself, such as comprehensive education and basic public health and security.
The Church has the divine right and duty to ensure the spiritual and moral well-being of all humanity and provide definitive guidance on moral and religious matters.
In applying the rights and duties of each society in this case, we stay faithful to the old notion that to have a right to do something does not necessarily make it the right thing to do:
First, parents have the right and responsibility to oversee immunizations for their children. The state should provide basic access and medical guidance, and the Church should provide moral guidance to inform parents, but coercion usurps the parents’ role.
Second, the state has the right and responsibility to provide funding for its citizens to attend the schools of their choice and to ensure public health. It must act morally in exercising these powers. The state may collect taxes to do this, and it may set up the definitions and rules necessary to promote these functions.
In the Florida case, the state can determine that citizens must be allowed vaccine exemptions, and it can define and interpret them. Some legal experts assert that the law often defines religious or conscience exemption in broad terms. It does not need to be limited to a particular doctrinal clause or formal point, but it can include general religious motivation related to a topic. A citizen should not need a ruling from a religious authority to object to vaccines on a religious basis.
The State of Florida has decided that exemptions should be granted to those citizens who want absolutely nothing to do with abortion-affiliated vaccines, no matter how distant, in their children’s bodies. This is within the state’s rights and duties.
And third, the Church has a right to speak definitively on matters of morality. She also has the right to refuse admittance to Catholic schools to those who do not share its religious or moral precepts.
In this case, the Church has made two relevant and binding moral claims. First, there is no moral prohibition against using the required vaccines, as the abortion link is so distant. Second, “Vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and therefore must be voluntary” (Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in a 2020 statement). The Church, therefore, teaches that vaccines are neither required nor forbidden.
Florida’s vaccination exemption does not appear to conflict with Catholic teaching, as long as a Catholic claiming the exemption appeals to individual conscience and not Catholic doctrine. The Vatican also suggests it is not immoral for Catholic schools to accept students whose parents claim a state-defined religious exemption. Indeed, a number of Catholic schools and dioceses around the country already accept such religious exemptions.
The argument against admitting the unvaccinated, then, needs to turn on the religious school’s right to decide its own practical criteria for admittance, without state interference. But just as the school has rights, it ought not violate the natural rights of parents and of conscience. Here we return to the notion that having a right to do something does not necessarily make it the right thing to do.
Playing the role of vaccine bully is not a good look for the Church. The world has changed radically since the Florida Catholic Conference first drafted its vaccine protocols. It may be prudent to draft a new set.
The whole vaccine mandate debacle surrounding COVID has significantly affected young parents. They have lost confidence in the government, schools, and even the Church. Those institutions seeking to regain trust should reject strong-arm tactics. They should not force young families to choose between a child’s spiritual and physical health.
Catholic schools need to make space for our young families. Let parents disagree with us on the proximity-to-abortion question. It allows for a morally licit exemption and helps them negotiate a much more complex, post-COVID, vaccination world with us at their side – not in their way.
Young families today are not so much anti-vaccine as vaccine-hesitant. They exist in a time of personalized medicine, fear of toxicity, and real fear of vaccine side effects. They care deeply about what goes into their children’s bodies. They have deep safety concerns but are inundated with contradicting advice. They need time, space, and our support. . .and we need them in our schools. It seems like a match made for Heaven.
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