The Trump administration and Florida officials have led the push to give parents more control over childhood vaccination. Several states — and, perhaps more surprisingly, Florida’s Catholic bishops — are resisting efforts to broaden religious exemptions.
In September 2025, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo called for the state to eliminate school vaccine mandates altogether.
“People have a right to make their own decisions, informed decisions,” Ladapo said at the time. “They don’t have the right to tell you what to put in your body.”
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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier brought that fight to the state’s Catholic schools. In a July 31 letter, he urged them to accept religious vaccine exemptions and warned that refusing could jeopardize their eligibility in the publicly funded School Choice program.
The state’s Catholic bishops refused. In an Aug. 7 response, Michael Sheedy, the executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, outlined that vaccination does not violate Catholic teaching and argued that allowing the government to determine how the Church applies its beliefs would infringe on its First Amendment rights.
“It’s highly unusual for a state to target its religious school for something like this,” said Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. “As far as I know, it’s unprecedented.”
The broader push continued in August. President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to promote “maximal parental choice” and enforce applicable protections for religious and medical exemptions. Florida also advanced a narrower version of Ladapo’s original plan, proposing to eliminate school requirements for vaccines against hepatitis B, chickenpox, Haemophilus influenzae type b and pneumococcal disease while broadening religious exemptions to cover moral and ethical beliefs.
The standoff between Florida officials and the state’s Catholic schools comes as exemptions from childhood vaccine requirements rise nationwide. The share of U.S. kindergartners exempt from at least one required vaccine nearly doubled in five years, rising from 2.2% in 2020–21 to a record 4.2% in 2025–26, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationally representative data do not show which religious groups account for routine childhood vaccine exemptions, but a 2021 survey found only 8% of Americans said their religion’s teachings prohibited vaccination against childhood diseases.
The confrontation exposes a larger question at the heart of religious vaccine exemptions: Who decides whether an objection is religious: the individual invoking faith or the religious institution interpreting its teachings?
Why parents seek religious exemptions
Most Catholics do not view routine childhood vaccination as prohibited by their faith. In a 2021 national survey, just 5% of white Catholics and 6% of Hispanic Catholics said their religion’s teachings prohibited vaccination against childhood diseases.
Still, a frequently cited objection to certain vaccines is that cells originally derived from abortions decades ago were used in their development, production or testing.
Brianna, a 35-year-old mother of eight from New Hampshire, told Straight Arrow earlier this year that concern became part of her and her husband’s decision to stop vaccinating their children around 2013.
“We had gotten into church around that time, and my husband and I have both always been pro-life,” she recalled. “We started researching how many of them are really made with tissue from other humans, how many of them actually have, you know, aborted fetal DNA, things like that.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics has said vaccines do not contain fetal tissue. Though some viruses are grown in cells originally from aborted fetuses, the vaccines are purified during production. The church has reassured Catholics that receiving these vaccines does not violate their faith because they did not cooperate in the original abortions. In 2021, Pope Francis implored Catholics around the world to get the COVID-19 vaccine even though fetal cells were used to test some of the shots.
Parents who invoke religion do not always draw a clear line between faith and safety concerns. Brianna said her doubts began after what she believed was a vaccine reaction in one of her children and grew from concerns about ingredients and distrust of the medical system. She later obtained a religious exemption for her unvaccinated children to participate in public-school sports.
Cory Anderson, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies Amish communities, described a similar overlap. Amish attitudes vary widely, he said, but vaccine decisions may reflect religious teachings, distrust of outside institutions, reliance on community networks and natural remedies and concerns about abortion-derived cell lines.
“It’s hard to dissect into two camps of culture versus religion,” Anderson said.
The law draws that boundary differently. Reiss said a religious objection generally depends on an individual’s sincerely held beliefs, not whether those beliefs conform to a church’s official teachings. A Catholic parent’s objection, for example, could be legally religious even if the pope or local bishop supports vaccination. But a concern that vaccines are unsafe, standing alone, would not qualify.
“The courts aren’t there to enforce the rules of religion,” Reiss said. “It’s about personal beliefs, not about the institutional religion.”
What the law says
School vaccination requirements — and the exemptions from them — are largely determined by state law. All 50 states require certain vaccines for school attendance and allow medical exemptions, while 45 states also permit religious exemptions and 15 allow exemptions based on personal or philosophical beliefs.
Where religious exemptions exist, states differ in how closely they examine a claim. Florida law says parents may obtain one when vaccination conflicts with their religious beliefs or practices. A 1998 ruling found that state officials could not investigate whether a parent’s stated objection was genuine, making Florida’s process effectively a check-the-box system.
Other states have required more scrutiny. Before New York eliminated its religious exemption in 2019, school officials could question parents and determine whether an objection arose from a genuine and sincere religious belief. Illinois currently requires parents to identify the vaccines they oppose and explain the religious grounds on a state certificate. The local school authority then decides whether the explanation constitutes a valid religious objection. Illinois also requires a health care provider to certify that the parent received counseling about the benefits and risks of vaccination.
Even when a state examines religious-exemption requests, Reiss said, determining sincerity is difficult. Loosely regulated systems can allow parents whose primary concerns involve vaccine safety to present those concerns in religious terms, while stricter reviews may favor applicants who know what language officials expect.
Religious exemptions, she said, can “help people who are better liars, who are better at masking that the real concern is that they think vaccines cause autism, and not religion.” Reiss said a safety concern alone is not a religious belief, although it may become part of a broader objection that a parent sincerely understands through faith.
Legally, any individual’s religious objection does not have to match the official doctrine of a church. Courts generally focus on the individual’s beliefs rather than asking whether a pope, bishop or other religious authority agrees. But that principle becomes more complicated when an individual’s claim collides with the religious-freedom rights of the institution being asked to accommodate it.
That conflict was at the center of the 2017 case of Flynn v. Estevez.
A Catholic father argued that his personal faith entitled his unvaccinated son to attend a Catholic school, while the Diocese of St. Augustine maintained that it had the right to operate its schools according to its own understanding of Catholic teaching. A Florida appeals court sided with the diocese, ruling that civil courts could not decide whether the parent’s or the church’s interpretation of Catholicism should prevail. The decision established that Florida’s statutory exemption protects a parent from a state vaccination requirement but does not necessarily compel a Catholic school to accept the child. That ruling may provide a key precedent for the current confrontation between Florida officials and the state’s Catholic schools over whose religious-freedom claim should prevail.
What the church says
Wenski and representatives from Florida’s Catholic dioceses and schools have been adamant: Catholic teaching permits vaccination, and Catholic schools may require it to protect their communities. They argue that the state is infringing on the Church’s religious freedom by trying to dictate what qualifies as a Catholic objection and how Catholic schools must apply their faith.
Wenski grounded that position in the Catholic obligation to protect health and promote the common good. The Catechism instructs Catholics to take reasonable care of their own health while considering the needs of others. In schools, Wenski said, high vaccination rates protect children with medical exemptions, as well as teachers, parents and other potentially vulnerable people.
“We are obliged as human beings to take good care of our health, not to endanger our health, not to endanger the health of others,” he said. “There’s no reason for a religious exemption because there’s nothing in those vaccinations that are against Catholic teaching.”
Wenski, Sheedy and other Catholic officials acknowledge that a parent may sincerely object to vaccination as a matter of personal conscience, and “the Church respects that conscience,” Sheedy told Straight Arrow.
However, that does not make the objection part of Catholic teaching, nor does it mean that the child is exempt from the vaccination requirement to attend a diocesan school, nor that a Catholic school is required to accommodate it. Sheedy pointed out that in its current form, Florida law permits religious exemptions but not those based on conscience. Parents remain free to choose another school, he said, while the Church remains free to define the principles governing its institutions.
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