COMMENTARY: Florida can respect the bishops’ authority over Catholic schools while preserving a workable path for parents with vaccine objections.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s clash with the state’s Catholic bishops over vaccine policy in Catholic schools threatens the eligibility of Catholic schools to participate in Florida’s universal school choice program.
Uthmeier, who is Catholic, insists that individual families’ religious freedom must be respected within the schools the Church operates. The bishops assert autonomy in how they administer their own schools, including their health and safety policies. Both claims have real force, and the dispute raises a harder question of how civil authorities respect both a church’s authority over its own educational institutions and the conscience of individual parents within them, without treating the two as mutually exclusive.
I have no personal objection to childhood vaccination, and my own school-age children attend private Christian schools where tuition assistance comes entirely from the school community, not any state program. I raise this so it is clear that what follows is not special pleading for vaccine-hesitant parents, but a case about who gets to decide what, without losing sight of families.
Much of the commentary on this dispute — including a
