Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—RELIGIOUS—D. Ariz.: Discharged Catholic nurse’s failure-to-accommodate claim in vaccine-refusal case may proceed to trial, (Mar 18, 2025)

By Nadine E. Roddy, J.D.

The nurse’s statements in support of her religious exemption request, which was denied, raised jury questions on the sincerity of her religious beliefs and their conflict with the employer’s mandatory vaccine policy.

A discharged Roman Catholic surgical nurse who refused to comply with her employer’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy, even after her religious exemption request was denied, raised material fact questions on her Title VII claim of failure to accommodate her religious beliefs, a federal district court in Arizona has ruled. But her “disparate treatment” discrimination claim, which was largely based on hearsay evidence, was insufficient to avoid summary judgment (Piccolo v. Mayo Clinic, No. 2:22-cv-02007-DJH (D. Ariz. Mar. 13, 2025)).

Mandatory vaccine policy. A discharged RN brought suit against her former employer, the Mayo Clinic Arizona, asserting claims of religious discrimination and failure to accommodate under Title VII and parallel state law. She had been employed for nearly eight years before her termination in March 2022 for noncompliance with the employer’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy. At the time of her discharge, she had been working with patients undergoing surgical procedures, including high-risk surgeries such as organ transplants.

Religious exemption request. She requested a religious exemption from the vaccine policy based on her Roman Catholic faith, stating her belief that her body was “a temple in which God’s Spirit dwells.” She also stated that her request was based in part on the use of fetal cell lines in the manufacture of the vaccine, which she opposed on religious grounds, and the presence of “neurotoxins, hazardous substances, carcinogens, and chemicals wastes” in the vaccines themselves, which substances were “proven harmful” to the human body.

Denied and fired. The employee’s request was denied because it contained “[i]nsufficient evidence of a sincerely held religious belief,” and her request for reconsideration was denied as well because it “still [did] not have a strong religious tie,” and it was “mostly concern[ed] about side effects,” which was “secular in nature.” The reason given for the employee’s discharge was that she failed to comply with the mandatory vaccine policy after she requested, but did not receive, a religious accommodation; the reason given for denying her accommodation request was that she had not demonstrated a sincerely held religious belief that conflicted with the policy.

Before the court was the employer’s motion for summary judgment.

Failure-to-accommodate claim. The court noted that whether an employee’s asserted religious belief is bona fide depends on whether it is (1) sincerely held, and (2) religious, in the employee’s scheme of things. The “narrow function” of the court in such an inquiry is to determine whether the espoused belief represents an ‘‘honest conviction.” However, “vague expressions of sincerely held Christian beliefs alone cannot serve as a blanket excuse for avoiding all unwanted employment obligations.”

In this case, the employee easily met her prima facie burden to show not only that she had a bona fide religious belief, but also that her belief conflicted with the employer’s vaccination policy. As she declared in her accommodation request, “According to Scripture my body is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27, Genesis 9:6, Genesis 5:1, 1 Corinthians 11:7, Colossians 3:10, James 3:9) and is a temple in which God’s Spirit dwells.” Her reconsideration request detailed that “I refuse to accept the unknown risk of injecting something that is potentially harmful into the ‘temple’ God has given me!” Further, because the employer wholly failed to provide evidence—or even argue—that it had initiated good-faith efforts to accommodate the employee, or that an accommodation would have created an undue hardship, it was not entitled to summary judgment on this claim.

Disparate treatment. The employee testified that she had heard on her unit that LDS Church members were being disproportionately granted accommodations, while those of other faiths were not. She named a friend, an LDS Mormon, who received an accommodation, as well as a coworker, a fellow Catholic, whose request was denied. The employee also contended that the employer had “baked” discrimination into its decision matrix by using certain “magic words” that were treated as automatically favoring denial of accommodation. The court noted, however, that much of the employee’s evidence was inadmissible hearsay, and that the employer had identified a Catholic employee who was granted an accommodation. Further, there was no evidence even suggesting that those involved in the decision-making process harbored a discriminatory animus toward the employee’s religion.

For these reasons, the court granted summary judgment for the employer on the disparate treatment claim but denied it on the failure-to-accommodate claim.

The case is No. 2:22-cv-02007-DJH.

Judge: Humetewa, D.

Attorneys: Joshua William Carden (Carden Livesay) for Nichola J. Piccolo. Andrea Gayle Lovell (Littler Mendelson) for Mayo Clinic Arizona.

Companies: Mayo Clinic Arizona

Cases: ReligiousDiscrimination Discrimination Covid19 ArizonaNews