An Open Letter to Archbishop Thomas Wenksi

His Excellency,

The Most Reverend Thomas Wenski,

Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Miami.

Your Excellency,

I have been contemplating writing this letter for a long time, actually since the fall of 2021, but each passing day has convinced me that I needed to write it. You see, I am the father of two students enrolled in Catholic High Schools in the Archdiocese of Miami and the issue I would like to bring to your attention is that of COVID-19 vaccines and the role the Archdiocese played in not only promoting them, but pressuring parents into having their children vaccinated.

As students were returning to school in August of 2021, the Archdiocese put a great of pressure on parents to vaccinate their children against COVID-19. At the time, the policy struck me as incongruous since all of the data from the first 18 months of the pandemic showed that children had no meaningful risk of serious COVID illness and were not meaningful vectors of infection of adults . That the vaccines were novel, with no track record of safety and efficacy, was deeply troubling to me. I was even more deeply disturbed that they were being pushed on parents by the Archdiocese.

In an August 13, 2021 letter from Jim Rigg, the Superintendent of Archdiocesan Schools, a discriminatory policy was announced, in which unvaccinated high school students were forced to wear masks and made to abide by a different quarantine and testing regime than vaccinated students after any travel. Meanwhile masking was optional for vaccinated students. The implication was clear, the unvaccinated students were somehow dangerous to vaccinated people.

Of course, the logic, not to mention the morality, of these policies was deeply flawed from the beginning,. As subsequent COVID waves came, masking became mandatory for all students, despite the lack of compelling scientific evidence in favor of masking. In fact the only two high quality randomized controlled trials of masks for COVID (the Danish DANMASK study and the Bangladesh study) showed zero to minimal effect. And finally, as it became clear that neither the vaccines nor the masks worked, all of the policies were rescinded.

Fortunately for my children, their mother and I resisted the incredible pressure we felt to have our children unnecessarily vaccinated with this experimental mRNA technology, though I must say she wavered and I had to convince her, with the help of a highly credentialed cardiologist friend. We should have never been put into that position, and what’s worse is that presumably many parents did succumb to the pressure. We now know that there are serious potential adverse reactions to these so-called vaccines. I pray that no Catholic schoolchildren in Miami were among the vaccine injured, but it’s almost a statistical certainty that there were.

The Archdiocese had an obligation to protect children from harm, not to enroll them as guinea pigs in an experiment. But the story doesn’t end there. Of course, there’s the issue of fetal cells used in the development of the vaccines. How it came to be that these products were endorsed by the Archdiocese is a riddle to me.

I pray that you, Dr. Rigg and anyone else responsible for these policies has been enlightened by the Holy Spirit in the intervening months and that such errors in judgement will never be committed again.

Respectfully yours in Christ,

José Ramallo

2 thoughts on “An Open Letter to Archbishop Thomas Wenksi”

  1. Since I have no connection to Catholic schools in Miami, I was unaware of this situation, but calling it exceedingly questionable is putting it mildly. There is no excuse for making parents go through such an ordeal, let alone using children to exercise uncritical though fashionable sociopolitical correctness.

    Although the letter refrains from demanding it, what is called for, at a minimum, is a formal mea culpa from everyone responsible, obviously starting with Wenski, and an express commitment to do everything possible to prevent anything like this ever happening again.

    I hope Wenski’s response is made known, but I am not holding my breath. Still, one assumes there will be some response, though it may be designed to be as slippery as possible. Besides, it’s not as if Wenski is used to being held accountable as Archbishop of Miami, particularly by Cuban-American Catholics.

  2. However, if this letter appears here but is not sent directly to Wenski, he could act as if he never saw or heard of it, which would be a way to evade responding. He may or may not follow this blog, but even if he does or someone does it for him, I doubt he’d volunteer that information. Again, don’t hold your breath.

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