Catholic dioceses will not be exempt from the employer vaccine mandates announced last week by the Biden administration - and responses to the mandate could bring into the spotlight already-existing divisions among Catholics over vaccine mandates.
The new federal regulations, announced September 9, will be implemented by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). They will require organizations that employ at least 100 people to mandate that their employees be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or take weekly COVID tests.
“The OSHA vaccine mandate applies to dioceses that employ more than 100 people,” Roger Severino, Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, told The Pillar.
He added that the religious exemptions included in the mandate “are so narrow that I question their legality.”
The federal mandate enjoys the support of about 60% of Americans, but has also prompted legal questions, with the state of Arizona filing a lawsuit challenging it, and other states threatening to do so as well.
But even before the Biden administration had announced the new rules, a clear split on the topic of vaccine mandates was beginning to develop among Catholic dioceses.
In recent months, dioceses have offered differing answers to Catholics on whether they will assist those seeking a religious exemption to a vaccine requirement from a school or employer.
But dioceses have also had to decide how they will act as employers - and what requirements they will place on the people who work for them. Some dioceses have released statements critical of COVID vaccine mandates, while others have issued these mandates for their own employees.
Requiring Vaccinations
In El Paso, Bishop Mark Seitz issued a policy last month requiring that Church employees be vaccinated. The bishop said that serving the Church by its nature requires interacting with others, and that those employed by the Church represent the Church, and therefore must lead by example.
“I would certainly hope that Church workers and ministers are willing to follow these prudent directives in order to serve in the Church — out of love for God and charity for the people they serve,” Seitz said in an August statement announcing his decision.
Fernando Ceniceros, director of communications for the Diocese of El Paso, told The Pillar that Christians should make an effort to slow the spread of a potentially fatal virus.
Ceniceros said diocesean staff were cooperative about the requirement “as a means to protect our people,” and most personnel were already vaccinated when the requirement was issued. He added that there are masking and testing accommodations in place for staff unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons.
“The community of El Paso stepped up,” he said. “Not just our Catholic community, but our whole community.”
According to the El Paso Times, more than 70% of the population of El Paso County, Texas has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Employees at the Catholic Center of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky also must receive a COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of employment, Bishop John Stowe announced last month.
“This is an urgent matter of public health and safety. There is no religious exemption for Catholics to being vaccinated, and Pope Francis has repeatedly called this a moral obligation,” Stowe said in a statement, citing a public service announcement in which Pope Francis participated.
“The health care system is now overwhelmed by a crisis caused primarily by those who refuse to protect themselves and others by getting vaccinated,” Stowe added. “This is unacceptable, and our diocese now joins those employers who have already made this basic commitment to the common good a requirement.”
Last week, Stowe added a new mandate - priests in the diocese must be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to minister to sick, elderly, and homebound individuals.
Meanwhile, the Archdiocese of Chicago announced that it will require vaccinations for all staff as of October. It will allow exceptions for medical reasons but will not consider religious objections.
The Archdiocese of Chicago is also requiring priests and deacons to be vaccinated, a move that could lead to a canonical appeal at the Vatican.
Canon lawyer Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, OP, told The Pillar that the Vatican would not likely uphold a policy requiring clerics to receive vaccines. The priest noted that the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has explicitly rejected the idea that vaccines can be mandated.
“I would hope the Holy See would respect the decision made by [Congregation Prefect] Cardinal [Luis] Ladaria, and remind the local bishop that he could not impose such mandates,” Pietrzyk said.
Pietrzyk noted that a bishop could not impose punitive measures on a priest for being unvaccinated and would be limited in the ways he could restrict the ministry of such a priest.
“Such restrictions would have to be related to public health. The bishop couldn't withdraw his confessional faculties, for example,” he said.
“Keep in mind, the unvaccinated priest would still have to abide by some health protocols to prevent the spread of the virus,” he added.
Objecting to Mandates
Other dioceses have voiced opposition to employer vaccine mandates.
In a joint statement, the bishops of South Dakota - Donald DeGrood of Sioux Falls and Peter Muhich of Rapid City - criticized employer requirements to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, arguing that the Church should support those seeking a religious exemption if a Catholic “comes to the sure conviction in conscience that they should not receive it, we believe this is a sincere religious belief, as they are bound before God to follow their conscience.”
“We support any Catholic who has come to this conviction in seeking religious exemption from any Covid-19 requirement,” the bishops said.
A spokesperson for the diocese of Sioux Falls declined to comment about vaccination policy for staff, while a spokesperson for the diocese of Rapid City did not immediately respond.
The bishops of Colorado made similar objections to employer mandates, and circulated a letter template for Catholics seeking an exemption on religious grounds.
The Catholic bishops of Wisconsin issued a statement encouraging the faithful to get vaccinated, while also objecting to employer mandates.
“We encourage those eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine to do so because it is the most effective way to combat this virus,” the Wisconsin bishops said. “We are all morally responsible to protect our lives and the lives of others. This is an imperative of natural law that we treasure in our faith.”
The Wisconsin bishops added they believe that those who seek an exemption on religious grounds should be granted one, but those individuals should also take extra caution to slow the spread of the virus by other means.
“Every decision has consequences; and in this case, the person claiming a religious or ethical exemption should be ready to properly assume other scientifically recommended means of avoiding infection and contagion: face-coverings, social distancing, hand sanitizing, periodic testing, and quarantine,” they said. “Employers should respect their employees’ consciences and make necessary accommodations, but they are also responsible for the protection of the common good. Consequently, employers should maintain safety by requiring other ways of preventing the spread of infection by conscientious objectors.”
In an August statement, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City praised the bishops of Wisconsin, Colorado, South Dakota and those “who urge employers to respect their employees’ consciences and make necessary accommodations, substituting other reasonable safety measures for mandated vaccination.”
School Employees
In some states, dioceses have also found themselves needing to respond to state-issued mandates for employees in schools - including Catholic schools.
In Washington State, Gov. Jay Inslee issued a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for all school employees. The mandate, announced August 18, includes those in charter or private schools.
Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane issued a statement the next day, saying, “While we encourage vaccination, we do not intend on violating the consciences of our Catholic school teachers nor do we intend on vouching for another person’s conscience.”
He said the diocese was “in conversation with civic and health officials about government mandated vaccination requirements.”
In a follow-up statement, Daly clarified that parish schools must abide by the vaccine mandate, but added that both medical and religious exemptions would be permitted.
“The state recognizes two exemptions from this mandate,” he said. “The first is a medical exemption that one may obtain through his or her physician. The second is a religious exemption which, for us as Catholics, rests on the fact that a properly formed conscience is inviolable.”
On August 25, the state of Oregon announced that all school teachers and staff would be required to be fully vaccinated against COVID by mid-October.
The Archdiocese of Portland said in a statement that Catholic schools are expected to comply with this mandate, while also noting that applications for a conscience-based exemption would be considered on an individual basis.
 | A guest post by
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Vaccine mandates are not necessary. For those under 65 years of age and healthy, Covid is not Smallpox of a century ago, and has less of a death rate than during a severe flu season. For those over 65, especially those in convalescent homes, or those with comorbidities, and due to the coerced lack of other medical options, "proportional" moral reasoning could be used to support people to take the vaccine if they feel vulnerable and choose to do so. Thus, it is a private, medical and moral decision, protected by the 1996 federal HIPPA law, that should be made in consultation with one's doctor, and that doctor should be allowed to utilize other treatments, such as Ivermectin and HCQ (successfully shown in India recently to reduce infection rates and severity of the infection by a tremendous rate) and monoclonal antibodies to treat their patient, and also a patient should be able to weigh their decision with their confessor, depending on their circumstance.
Though Pope Francis has spoken of our communal responsibility to get the vaccine in order to stop the spread of the virus, recent studies in Israel and the U.K. published in the Lancet show that those who are vaccinated are more protected from the virus, yet they also carry a higher viral load and thus contribute much more greatly to the spread of the virus than do the unvaccinated. We should be careful of scapegoating the unvaccinated and instead look to how the virus was created, and which political forces are benefitting from the medical tyranny.
Other studies, and just our common experience with the yearly flu, is that natural immunity is more effective. Again, for those healthy and under 65 yrs old, it would be better for them individually to develop natural immunity, and discuss this with their doctor, and for society, it would be better for the virus to die out if most people have natural immunity. Yet, information about how many people have natural immunity is suppressed.
About the morality of taking the vaccine. Yes, the Pro-Life committee of the USCCB stated that it is okay to take the vaccine, that the actual vaccine does not have aborted fetus tissue in it, that it has only a "remote" connection to the original cell lines used, yet in their own statement they say that "cell lines derived from aborted fetuses were used in the testing of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine", which clearly violates what Pope John Paul II said in "The Gospel of Life" n.62 and 63, about experimentation. Do I need to spell out the obvious that JPII goes on to say, that if we do not protect the dignity of life, it will lead to a darkening of conscience and destruction of society?
As for Biden's diversionary political tactic of employer mandates, I ask our Bishops to refuse to comply with this mandate for diocesan staff in chanceries and parish offices, most of whose employees are seeking to be not coerced. If we do this nationwide, this will give support to employees in private business, or even employees in public institutions, like the LA Police Officers who are taking the mandate to court, to support them in their personal moral and medical decisions.
Mandates for schools is a more difficult decision because schools rely on tuition. The reality, though, is that many Catholic schools have been open since a year ago August, and, without vaccines, we have not seen children, even teenagers or young adults at college, have any severe symptoms, and rare hospitalizations, again, no worse than the flu. The difficulty is with the adults, teachers who insist on the vaccine, and parents and adult alumni who donate to the schools, who insist on the vaccines. Yet, the evidence of the past year, when most people were not vaccinated, is that children or adults who work in schools and youth activities were not affected any worse than the flu.
Finally, what is the morality of vaccine mandates here, not necessary for healthy people under 65, when in many poor countries vaccination rates are only 2% ? In India, which has a major pharmaceutical industry, yet only 20% vaccination rate (thus the turn to using Ivermectin, which proved extremely effective)? What of all the elderly people and people in poor health in these countries who need it more than healthy people here?
I am highly disappointed in our American Bishops for not realizing our mission here to help the church in poorer countries, whether it be about vaccine distribution, or speaking out about the human rights abuses in China, the religious persecution, the work camps that make tech products sold here, the organ harvesting, and the Big Tech/International Hedge Fund collusion there or funding the blood diamond type of mining of cobalt and lithium, used to make tech products, in the Congo causing the constant militia attacks throughout that region.
As an American who supports the Bill of Rights, I oppose vaccine mandates. As an educated free thinker who follows science, I oppose vaccine mandates. As a person who has acquired natural immunity (which scientific studies have shown to be much more effective and long-lived than any vaccine), I oppose vaccine mandates. As an observant Catholic who questions the claimed moral distance from the dependence upon tainted aborted fetal cells to these vaccines, I oppose vaccine mandates. Finally, as a Catholic who believes, and tries to live, the ideal of "momento mori", I oppose vaccine mandates.
(Stepping down off the soapbox now.) My point is that we have lost perspective in current times. We are not here to live a "good life" - we are here to live *well*, and as Catholics (and Catholic Americans), that means living 1) with the next life in sight always, plus living 2) with our succeeding generations' lives in mind, such that they might enjoy the freedom we do so that *they* can choose to live well also. Both 1 and 2 are blessings, and we need to consider them as such.
Secular America largely has very different goals. They are welcome to them, as long as they permit those of us who subscribe to the goals given above the freedom to pursue them unencumbered.
God bless each of you, and God bless this country.