Education · Statewide · FL · August 19, 2026
Report: Florida Catholic Bishops Defend Religious Vaccine Exemptions
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The attorney general's July 31 letter does not argue public health or state interest — it argues theology, citing the Catechism, Pope Leo and scripture, and a diocesan document that reportedly invoked the National Catholic Bioethics Center, to claim the bishops' own book forbids what the bishops are doing. That is Rule 4 in its purest form: the target is measured against its own stated rules rather than the state's. Sheedy's reply — that the bishops 'do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching' — is a refusal to accept the state as referee of the Church's book.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Close the gap yourself before someone else does: ask your diocesan school office for the written vaccine policy and the actual documents it rests on, and read the 2017 Pontifical Academy for Life note and the NCBC's own published material rather than a secondhand summary of them. Note that the diocesan document the AG quoted was reportedly taken offline in early August — do not defend a page that has been quietly pulled. If a diocesan document misstates its own source, say so plainly and ask that it be corrected and reposted.
Rule 9
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
The operative pressure is not an enforcement action but a sentence: failure to comply 'could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs.' No proceeding has been opened, no school has lost funding, and the letter landed roughly ten days before schools opened for 2026-27. Archbishop Wenski named the mechanism exactly — a 'not-so-veiled threat' — which is the threat doing the work the action has not done.
Counter-Rule 9 · Courageous Realism
Name the worst case out loud and cost it honestly. Fear of the unnamed is doing most of the work.
Cost the worst case out loud this month. Ask your diocesan superintendent, in writing, how many students in your diocese's schools attend on state scholarship funds, what statutory or rule process the state would have to follow to disqualify a school, and whether any school has actually received a notice. Write the answers down. A number on paper — even a frightening one — is manageable in a way an unnamed 'could jeopardize' is not.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The letter was addressed to one named man, Michael B. Sheedy, made public immediately, and aimed at one institution — Catholic schools — rather than at private schools generally or at the statute. That is target selection, freezing and personalising: a single conference and its executive director become the face of a statewide vaccine argument, and the framing splits Catholics against their own bishops, with outside groups quickly recruited on each side.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
Refuse the isolation concretely: write to your own bishop over your own name saying you have read the August 7 letter, and send a short courteous note to the attorney general's office identifying yourself as a Catholic parent who wants the diocese's policy debated with the diocese, not through the press. If your parish or school principal is asked about this, do not let them answer alone — ask the parish council to request a written diocesan explanation all families receive at once.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
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