Catholics are taking sides over the Florida attorney general’s recent letter to the state’s bishop conference instructing its Catholic schools to permit religious exemptions from vaccine requirements.
It has been interesting to watch different kinds of faithful Catholics line up on different sides of this matter.
Florida’s leverage in this case hinges on the state’s school voucher program. Nobody will go to jail if Florida’s Catholic schools don’t allow religious vaccine exemptions, but the schools could forfeit the tuition assistance that their students currently enjoy. So, one faction in the debate is Catholics who have long been warning that school vouchers will enable state control of the Church, and now think they have a great case in point.
With the COVID era’s coercive public-health measures and widespread pastoral compliance still fresh in the minds of many, this story has also provoked a warm response from Catholics who see episcopal defense of vaccine mandates and think of the locked churches and fired employees from five years ago. The subject of vaccination, though strictly speaking not what this dispute is about, has also refreshed debates over moral cooperation where vaccines are produced from cell lines derived from aborted babies.
Another interesting dynamic is that both main sides are flying the banner of religious freedom. Florida is insisting that Catholic schools, if they are to accept taxpayer money, must honor families’ (including Catholic families’) religious reasons for refusing vaccination. The bishops, meanwhile, argue that this requirement itself is an infringement on the Church’s religious freedom.
Baylor professor Francis Beckwith has been a vocal supporter of the bishops, arguing that Florida’s actions amount to dictating doctrine to the Church—“catech[izing] the Florida bishops.” He goes on to ask, “Do you really want to live in a country where public officials determine what counts as heresy or orthodoxy for religious citizens?”
Contra Beckwith, Catholic journalist Philip Lawler has written in support of the AG, arguing that Catholic teaching on conscience rights supersedes the prudential concerns of Catholic school leaders.
Which camp has the greater claim to support from Catholic teaching? Neither side, it seems to me, has a slam-dunk argument. From a strictly apologetical point of view, though, I find myself siding with the state over the bishops.
Religious freedom is a touchy subject, both among Catholics and in the wider world. It needs careful managing. There are countless millions of worldly people who hate Christian doctrine and morals and who in a heartbeat would use the power of the state to grind them down. To them, the more Christian doctors who are compelled to perform abortions, the more Christian bakers forced to whip up Pride cakes, the more Christian pastors and laymen jailed or fined for public prayer or “intolerant” tweets, the better.
Absent a massive renewal and expansion of Christian culture, the main hand holding the chain on such efforts is the American commitment to religious freedom. This is why Christophobic seculars hate it—and, moreover, doubt its sincerity. Visit any X or Reddit thread on one of the above topics and you will encounter volumes of comments to the effect that religious freedom is a canard—a convenient excuse for hate or bigotry or misogyny or whatever the Christian’s real motive is.
We know that it isn’t. And part of the apologist’s reply is to show that the doctor, baker, or pastor is reasonably acting according to an actual religious tenet that he really does hold.
Such a defense is weakened, though, in cases where the connection between the action and a religious belief is fuzzier. Because if anything can be an exercise of religious freedom, on the basis that whatever a religious person (or group) does is ipso facto a legitimate exercise of his right to define his religion… then nothing is.
This is dangerous ground to tread.
Though I’m sympathetic to the aim of safeguarding the Church’s rights from state encroachment, I fear that if we habitually circle the wagons in this way, defending Church leaders simply on parochial, you-can’t-tell-us-what-to-do grounds, we will wind up diminishing religious freedom’s utility. An infinitely elastic or overly nebulous concept of religious freedom feeds right into the haters’ claims.
Such a concept is also not, I think, squarable with the nature of Catholic teaching. Our doctrines, moral principles, and practices are fundamentally public, transparent, and discoverable. We have councils and catechisms; we have missionaries and a magisterium; our rites are open to all. We are not a mystery religion.
Neither are we Mormons who believe in ongoing revelation, or Muslims who posit a God of pure will who can simply replace old doctrines with contrary new ones.
All this makes it hard for a Catholic to protest in this case that the state is dictating doctrine to the Church. Because belief in school administrators’ power to compel student vaccinations is manifestly not on the list of Catholic doctrines.
It might be compatible with Catholic doctrine. It might be the smart thing for those administrators to do in any given case. But it is not a belief derived from divine revelation, rooted in Christian tradition, universally proclaimed by ecclesial teaching authorities, to which all Catholics are bound to assent. This is demonstrable as a matter of fact even by laymen, even by unbelievers—because Catholic teaching is public.
Yes, laymen and unbelievers and even many believers can misunderstand Catholic teaching on the margins or in its nuances. (E.g.: “the Immaculate Conception is Jesus’ conception.”) They can willfully misrepresent or try to subvert Catholic teaching to further an agenda. (E.g.: “God is pro-choice because he gave us free will.”) They can just be blind to a doctrine hiding in plain sight. But there is no evidence of any of those things in this case.
Still, you might ask, even if Catholic teaching is out in the open, isn’t the Church its final arbiter, not the state?
Strictly speaking, in a vacuum, of course this is true. But we’re examining the question not in a vacuum but in the context of a pragmatic compromise between parties asserting competing rights. If religious freedom in a pluralistic society is to be a thing at all, the state has no choice but to apply tests to balance religious-freedom claims against other claims (even other religious-freedom claims!). It seems reasonable that a primary test is to ascertain whether a claim actually originates in an express religious teaching or practice.
This is not “determining heresy and orthodoxy” for religious believers, but making a reasonable effort to determine, for legal not ecclesial purposes, whether a claim is truly located in religious belief—in this case, in Catholic belief. This effort is necessary, if also necessarily imperfect. For without it, religious freedom could mean anything and thus would mean nothing.
In which case, the enemies of religion would be emboldened and increasingly justified in their retort that “religious freedom” is just a pretext for the will to power. And then religious freedom could become one of those nice things that we just can’t have anymore.