An Indianapolis Jesuit high school is standing by a teacher who the Archdiocese of Indianapolis said should not be rehired after the employee’s same-sex marriage became public. As a result, the archdiocese will prohibit Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School from calling itself “Catholic,” a decision the school plans to appeal.
CBS News reported the Archdiocese's explanation:
"Whether they teach religion or not, all ministers in their professional and private lives must convey and be supportive of Catholic Church teaching. The Archdiocese of Indianapolis recognizes all teachers, guidance counselors and administrators as ministers," the archdiocese said in a statement Thursday.In an impressive show of solidarity, the school administration, the school's board of trustees and the Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus all are standing by the teacher, who hasn't been identified in news reports I've seen so far. A public statement signed by the school's Jesuit principal as well as the chairman and chairman-elect of the board of trustees, provides the following rationale:
To our knowledge, the Archdiocese of Indianapolis’ direct insertion into an employment matter of a school governed by a religious order is unprecedented; this is a unique action among the more than 80 Jesuit secondary/pre-secondary schools which operate in dioceses throughout North America, along with the countless Catholic schools operated by other religious orders such as the Christian Brothers, Dominicans, and Xaverian Brothers. After long and prayerful consideration, we determined that following the Archdiocese’s directive would not only violate our informed conscience on this particular matter, but also set a concerning precedent for future interference in the school’s operations and other governance matters that Brebeuf Jesuit leadership has historically had the sole right and privilege to address and decide.The decree, which I have not been able to locate online, was issued by Archbishop Charles Thompson, who has led the Indianapolis Archdiocese since his appointment by Pope Francis in 2017. According to the archdiocesan website, Archbishop Thompson has a background in canon law. NCR notes that this is not Archbishop Thompson's first controversy regarding LGBTQ employees at Indianapolis Catholic schools:
In March, a guidance counselor at Roncalli High School, operated by the Indianapolis Archdiocese, filed a second discrimination charge after she was placed on administrative leave last year when the school found out about her marriage to her female partner. Later that month, a second guidance counselor at Roncalli was told her contract wouldn't be renewed because of her same-sex marriage.Because Roncalli High School is a diocesan school, it is under the direct control of the Archbishop and his education staff. By contrast, Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory High School is operated by a religious order, the Society of Jesus. Religious orders are not directly supervised by bishops and dioceses, but typically operate schools, parishes and other religious institutions within a diocese with the bishop's permission. The Indianapolis Star reports that Brebeuf receives no financial support from the archdiocese.
James Martin, SJ, an advocate for LGBTQ fair treatment within the church, also stands with the school and the teacher, according to CBS News:
Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who is one of the leading advocates for greater LGBT inclusion in the Catholic church, applauded the move by Brebeuf's leadership. "The targeting of LGBT employees in Catholic institutions must cease, and Brebeuf and the Jesuits are here standing with the marginalized," Martin said in an email. "Despite what the Archdiocese says, this is the most Catholic thing that the school could do."
In regard to Father Martin's comment, with most of the public and the Supreme Court now OK with gay marriage, the only place LBGT people are marginalized is in Christian churches. Is it possible to stand with those whom one is marginalizing?
ReplyDeleteI read the America article, and thought that the Brebeuf leadership did the right thing. The point was made that the teacher in question was not a religion teacher, I assume one of the Jesuits would be filling that roll. It's a stretch to maintain that all lay teachers in a Catholic school are "ministers" of the church. Does the archbishop plan to micromanage the lives of all who teach in, or work for, the Catholic schools in the archdiocese? For instance, is he going to check and see that all of them are in valid sacramental marriages? That they aren't using birth control? That they are regular Mass attenders? For that matter, if the person in question had been living with his partner without civil marriage, would that have triggered the inquisition to come down like a ton of bricks?
ReplyDeleteIt's a challenge enough for Catholic schools to hire and retain qualified teachers, because usually their pay isn't as good as the public system. I assume Brebeuf uses the same criteria any school would to hire and retain staff; i.e. professional competence, passing a criminal background check, observing professional boundaries with students, etc.
Re: a bishop or archbishop deciding who may or may not call themselves Catholic, how well has that worked out in the past? I seem to recall a bishop (I forget who, maybe it was Flyyn?) having a cow and insisting that NCR had to take the "Catholic" out of their name. If it was Flynn, NCR is still around, name intact, and he isn't.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: it wasn't Flynn, it was Bishop Robert Finn.
DeleteYeah, it was Finn. A fine specimen of clericalism.
DeleteMany, many years earlier, Bishop Charles Helmsing, with the weight of his brethren -- who were mad at him for nursing our viper in his breast (NCR started in the Kansas City chancery office) on his head --, "condemned" NCR. (The issue du jour was resisting the draft; we were for resistance), but the real issue with the brethren was birth control. When Humanae Vitae was issued, Helmsing called Bob Hoyt, the founding editor, and said, "Please, be gentle, Bob.")
After the condemnation, Bob Olmstead, the founding news editor, called then-Msgr (later Cardinal) William Baum, who was serving briefly as chancellor, and asked what condemnation meant. Baum couldn't think of any immediate consequences, so Bob asked, "If I present myself for Communion, will you deny it?" "Gee (he said 'Gee'), Bob, you are not vitandus." (We had to go look up the meaning of "viandus. Learn something new every day.)
Yes, new word of the day. I also had to look up vitandus: "(Latin for "one to be avoided") was someone affected by a rare and grave form of excommunication, in which the Church ordered, as a remedial measure, that the faithful were not to associate with him "except in the case of husband and wife, parents, children, servants, subjects", and in general unless there was some reasonable excusing cause.[1]" , in other words, someone who is shunned .
DeleteBlessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed. Amen? Amen!!!
DeleteAs I understand it, prospective Catholic school teachers usually sign an agreement saying that they will not openly contradict Catholic teaching. I presume two openly married lesbians contradict Catholic teaching by their very existence. But, then, so do Lutherans, and Catholic schools seem to have no trouble hiring them.
ReplyDeleteThe policy at The Boy's Catholic school was to give Catholics first consideration in all hiring situations. The teachers were hired "at will," and non-Catholics were dismissed as Catholic candidates became available.
I don't think this policy lends itself to a faculty that is committed and at the top of its game, but some dioceses will come down on the side of purity of message and example over quality of instructional ability.
I'm glad that our parish school doesn't do things that way. We had a Lutheran teacher who taught there her whole career and recently retired. If they have a goood teacher, they hang on to them, and a Catholic isn't necessarily given preference.
DeleteJean, I agree that those agreements for teachers are common. Two married lesbians don't contradict church teaching by their existence, but their claim to be married contradicts the church's understanding of matrimony. Their married life together contradicts church teaching.
DeleteI think all Catholic school teachers understand going in that they aren't going to be paid as much as their brethren in the public schools. Catholic school teachers aren't in it for the money. They're in it, at least in part, because they subscribe to the church's educational mission. Embracing the mission is an employment requirement for Catholic school teachers. People whose work is mission-focused often are willing to forgo monetary gain or other perks and comforts.
Does a Lutheran's way of life contradict church teaching? I think that's a difficult question to answer, and the answer may depend in part on the circumstances. Catholic ecumenical teaching is that Lutherans are our sisters and brothers in Christ, and there is much that unites us. In addition, Lutheranism has its own 500 year history, so a person who is Lutheran today may have inherited a half-millenium tradition from her/his parents and ancestors. The church recognizes that that is not quite the same thing as a person who quits the church because of a doctrinal disagreement and joins one of the Lutheran churches.
I would add that Catholics today don't live in impermeable religious and cultural bubbles. All of us interact in our daily lives with LGBTQs, Lutherans, atheists, Hindus, Spanish speakers, the elderly, persons with special needs, and all sorts of other demographic profiles. There is a Catholic way to do this interaction. I agree with Martin that firing people who don't meet some standard of perfection is not the right approach.
I think some Catholic parents see Catholic school as a way to keep children in the impermeable bubble Jim describes. Other mothers talked to me earnestly about preserving their children's "innocence," which merely seemed translate into keeping them ignorant about certain facts of life. Whatever their hope, I saw as much Lord of the Flies behavior among small boys in our Catholic.school as I did in the public school. Original sin.
DeleteMy hope for a Catholic education was that it would give The Boy a foundation for a life of service to God and kindness to others. So, clearly, the other mothers and I were not plugged into the same goals.
I'm not sure how the low pay of Catholic school teachers squares with the Church's social justice teaching.
And last time I looked, the Church upheld the dignity of homosexual people right along with Lutherans and others of our separated brethren. So the logic that allows a school to hire those erring in their faith but that requires it to fire those erring in sexual practice eludes me.
Fr. Martin has a talent for thinking and writing clearly, and I'd like to call attention to the first phrase of his that is excerpted in the post:
ReplyDelete"The targeting of LGBT employees in Catholic institutions must cease"
"Targeting" strikes me as an apt word. I haven't read a detailed account yet of how this teacher's marital situation came to the archbishop's attention, but O'Loughlin's article in America states that his situation became public via social media. If it follows the same pattern as other cases I've observed, then that would mean that someone - a parent or a parishioner - saw something about his marriage on Facebook, was scandalized, and alerted the chancery.
Also, this is the first instance of this type of story I'm aware of in which a school, and a religious order, defied the bishop. All the other instances I've read about, the school principal followed orders and dismissed the teacher or school employee.
In the sex-abuse scandals, a number of dioceses have disclaimed responsibility for religious order priests who have abused, pointing the finger instead at religious order leadership. I don't know if that is quite the same as the diocese throwing the order under the bus, but it does seem that, if religious orders are to be solely responsible for member clergy that abuse, they should be permitted to be solely responsible for teachers in their employ.
From what I was reading, this school did not receive any funds from the archdiocese. So there wouldn't be the same element of control over them which a bishop would exercise over a school in the archdiocese system.
DeleteMakes me think of the school I attended during my middle school years when my family was temporarily living in New Mexico. It was a private Catholic school run by an order of nuns but was not the parish school and was not supported by the diocese. The local pastor was a bit of a petty tyrant and caused the nuns trouble whenever he could. Coincidentally the same order of nuns staffed the parish school and he could dominate that staff more effectively. That is until the mother general of the order payed him a visit and threatened to withdraw the nuns who staffed his school unless he treated all of them with more respect.
Alasdair Macintyre, the (now) Catholic philosopher of ethics, in his marvelous book After Virtue talks about the concept of taboo. He refers to Captain Cook's sailors remarking on what they (happily, no doubt) considered the very lax sexual attitudes of the Polynesians contrasted to the fact that women were not allowed to eat with men. When they asked why, there were told that it was taboo. When they asked why it was a taboo, they were met with silence.
ReplyDeleteMacintyre remarks that taboos appear when a moral rule is still in place after something has happened where the original reason for the rule has disappeared. He notes in support of this that when King Kamehameha II banned the taboos, there was no public outcry at all. While Catholic theologians no doubt will say that they have very good reasons for opposing gay marriage, the sort of thing outlined in the article above has all the earmarks of a taboo.
What has changed? Marriage itself has changed. Divorce is prevalent but more importantly to us, Catholics don't really care (except for a few professional pearl clutchers) if their co-parishioners are divorced anymore. They don't even care if they go to Communion after they are divorced. It seems very rare today that anyone sits Communion out as they used to in droves in the sixties and before (and I don't think that it's because we have become far more holy since then). The whole LGBT is the Church trying to assert itself in an arena where they have already been proven irrelevant on the heterosexual side. "Dammit, there's gotta be SOME law!" they seem to be saying. But claiming somehow that gay marriage is a threat to marriage is silly. It's too late. That horse has already run.
Is gay marriage a bad thing? I don't know. Honestly. I know happily married gay people. But on the other hand, I grew up in a very homophobic age, which is why I am even able to ask this question. This question wouldn't even be asked by my children.
I am the very last one to support a liberal "anything goes" morality. I would probably be called Thomist in my ethical outlook and certainly not liberal. But this business of what is a rearguard action of cutting out anyone who disagrees to maintain the purity of a smaller and smaller Church that itself is no longer anything like what it was even fifty years ago is nonsense.
I don't know how many bishops in the US would do as Bishop Thompson did here. Probably quite a few still. I suspect not all would, though.
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