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

"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, Florida’s Republican Attorney General, James Uthmeier, a Catholic, wrote a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops advising them that under Florida law, schools must provide 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,' wrote Wenski. He maintains, 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...

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."