Federal appeals court sides with Catholic employee fired for refusing Covid vaccine
July 31, 2024
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CWN Editor's Note: Overturning a lower court decision, a federal appeals court panel unanimously ruled that a Catholic nurse fired by her employer for refusing to receive the Covid vaccine could file suit under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
In Bube v. Aspirus Hospital, the panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals noted that two nurses, one a Catholic, were denied a religious exemption for the Covid vaccine by a Wisconsin hospital chain.
The nurses’ “requests contain health and safety concerns, but the critical point is that their requests by their terms are also based in part on religious belief,” the appeals court ruled. “We have no trouble concluding that both of these requests are based at least in part on an aspect of the plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.”
[The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s note on the morality of Covid vaccines taught that it is licit to receive the Covid vaccine, but added that “practical reason makes evident that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary. . . . Those who, however, for reasons of conscience, refuse vaccines produced with cell lines from aborted fetuses, must do their utmost to avoid, by other prophylactic means and appropriate behavior, becoming vehicles for the transmission of the infectious agent.”]
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