(LifeSiteNews) — Florida’s Republican Attorney General, James Uthmeier, warned the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops that Catholic schools may be disqualified from state-funded scholarships and vouchers due to their denial of vaccine religious exemptions.

Uthmeier wrote a letter to the bishops on Friday advising them that under Florida law, schools must provide religious exemptions from vaccination requirements if a parent has a religious objection to the vaccine.

Today, I sent a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops regarding their schools’ vaccine mandates.

Ironically, they won’t offer religious exemptions as prescribed by state law.

This is troubling and may disqualify them from state scholarships and vouchers. pic.twitter.com/W595FEuvPu

— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) July 31, 2026

“Ironically, they won’t offer religious exemptions as prescribed by state law,” Uthmeier wrote in an announcement of his letter on X. “This is troubling and may disqualify them from state scholarships and vouchers.”

The letter noted that at least one diocese in Florida adopted the position of the National Catholic Bioethics Center that “Catholic schools or a Catholic diocese cannot grant an exemption from vaccination on religious grounds since the Catholic Church does not teach that the use of vaccinations produced in cell lines derived from tissue from an aborted fetus is intrinsically evil.”

The Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee stated that requests for religious exemptions “will not be considered in any Catholic schools of this diocese” for this reason. It claims that parents morally opposed to vaccines “erroneously” believe they are sinful. It is also the policy of the diocese to deny conscience exemptions because it maintains that the “risk to public health in our Catholic schools has been determined to be too grave to allow exemptions from immunizations on the basis of conscience.”

Despite this position, which has been promoted by the Holy See and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), some Catholics oppose the use of certain vaccines on moral grounds because they were developed using fetal cell lines derived from the tissue of aborted babies.

Uthmeier, a Catholic, 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.”

Uthmeier stressed in his letter that it is, accordingly, not a moral obligation for Catholics to be injected with vaccines developed using the tissue of aborted babies.

“As a Catholic, I am confident that the teachings of the Catholic Church do not require Catholic schools to compel students to take vaccines derived from the tissue of aborted children against the sincerely held religious objections of their parents,” he wrote.

He quoted the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which 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.

Some point out that there are, additionally, health risks posed by many Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccines. For example, the MMR vaccine has been linked to the development of autism, and even flu vaccines contained a neurotoxic mercury-containing preservative up until recently.

Uthmeier requested that Florida’s bishops respond no later than August 7.

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