Florida archbishop tells state that Catholic schools will continue to mandate vaccines

[Stone]

Florida archbishop tells state that Catholic schools will continue to mandate vaccines
Archbishop Thomas Wenski suggested that parents who seek religious exemptions for vaccines 

– which are often made with aborted babies’ cells – should not be allowed to send their children to Catholic schools.



Archbishop Thomas Wenski
Joe Raedle / Staff / Getty

Aug 18, 2026
(LifeSiteNews - [slightly adapted - not all hyperlinks included from original]) — A Florida archbishop said that Catholic schools should not allow for religious exemptions to vaccination in defiance of the state attorney general’s warning that Catholic schools may be barred from state-funded scholarships.

Earlier this month, Republican state Attorney General, James Uthmeier, a Catholic, wrote a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops advising them that schools must provide under Florida law religious exemptions from vaccination requirements if a parent has a religious objection to a vaccine. He warned them that Catholic schools may be disqualified from state-funded scholarships and vouchers due to their denial of vaccine religious exemptions.

On Monday, Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami published an op-ed in the Miami Herald in which he ironically insisted that Uthmeier’s challenge to their policy “intrudes upon our religious freedom.”

“The state cannot disqualify Catholic schools from the scholarship program merely because a state official’s understanding of Church teachings differ from that of the bishops,” Wenski wrote. He maintained, however, that a Catholic school may disqualify a student from admission because their understanding of Church teachings differs from that of the bishops.

Wenski claimed that Catholic schools do not grant religious exemptions for student vaccinations “because the vaccines as presently developed and administered do not violate Church teachings.”

Some Catholics oppose the use of certain vaccines on moral grounds because they were developed using cell lines derived from the tissue of aborted babies. The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) teaches that Catholics have a “general moral duty to refuse the use of medical products, including certain vaccines, that are produced using human cells lines derived from direct abortions” as part of its Vaccine Exemption Template Letter.

Uthmeier has pointed out that, because abortion violates the right to life of the unborn, “the Catholic Church has historically encouraged the faithful to abstain from the use of vaccines produced from aborted fetal tissue, while at the same time recognizing the moral permissibility of using such vaccines in certain circumstances.”

Several vaccines required for school entry are developed using aborted babies’ tissue. Rubella-containing vaccines were developed using the WI-38 cell line; chickenpox vaccines were developed using cell lines derived from aborted babies, including WI-38 and MRC-5; and the viruses of Hepatitis A vaccines can be grown in these baby cell lines. The Florida Department of Health currently lists two doses of MMR and two doses of chickenpox vaccines among the routine school immunization requirements.

According to Wenski, parents who desire vaccine religious exemptions due to the use of aborted babies’ tissue in their development should simply not be permitted to attend Catholic schools.

“The Church does not force or coerce parents to vaccinate their child. No one must go to a Catholic school,” the archbishop wrote. “At the same time, we do try to accommodate those children whose physician indicates that a medical exemption is necessary.”

As Uthmeier noted, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has stated that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a general rule, a moral obligation.”

“But even if abortion-derived vaccines may be permissible to take, Church teaching also recognizes that no one should be forced to take a vaccine ‘if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience,’” Uthmeier added in his letter.

Wenski was the first U.S. bishop to publicly receive a COVID-19 shot. After the COVID-19 outbreak, he posted to his Instagram account two pictures of himself receiving the abortion-tainted Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot. The Pfizer shot was tested on the cells of aborted babies.

There are compelling moral arguments being presented by bishops and priests as to why it is morally illicit to receive a vaccine connected to the use of aborted children’s tissue.

Fr. Michael Copenhagen, in his article “Restore Ye to its Owners: On the Immorality of Receiving Vaccines Derived from Abortion,” begins by highlighting the issue, in these vaccines, of the theft and desecration of human remains.

He brings up Scripture’s story of Tobit, who “insisted on honoring God and neighbor by burying the dead at a time when the desecration of their remains was the state mandate. For this great deed, he was forced to flee and placed under a sentence of death.”

Dr. Copenhagen points out that the human remains involved in vaccines have likewise been desecrated through exploitation and trafficking, that “labeling human remains obtained through violence as ‘illicit biological material’ is not only insufficient but dehumanizing and offensive.”

Also, because the cells belong to the child, who has been “silenced,” and “the parents have forfeited by abortion any right of consent to respectful scientific use of the body, the scientists and patent holders have no right to possess or use the cells: these human remains belong to God, must be respectfully reposed.” Therefore, the remains of the child have been stolen, and our “distance” from this act does not negate moral complicity in taking a vaccine involving their exploitation.