“Secular Catholic schools” and same-sex marriage: the case of Waldron Mercy Academy

Last updated on: October 13, 2016 at 7:51 am by Jane the Actuary

“Secular Catholic schools” and same-sex marriage: the case of Waldron Mercy Academy 2016-10-13T07:51:19-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In the news today (as linked to by The Deacon’s Bench), a lesbian employee was fired from her job at Waldron Mercy Academy, a Catholic school in Philadelphia, after marrying her female partner.

The kicker? She was the director of religious education.

Now, everyone’s flipping out in the comments section of the news site that reported this: not only do they perceive it as inherently unjust to fire someone for having a secular wedding ceremony, but they raise the issue that Pennsylvania has a “tax credit for donations” program which benefits the school, so that, in a way, the school could be said to be getting public funding — $270,000 per the school’s website, plus an unspecified additional amount. Has this been worked out in courts with respect to other voucher programs? I imagine so, though I don’t know for certain.

The bigger issue is this: not just community members, but parents themselves are reported to have been perfectly A-OK with a lesbian religious ed director (though the woman herself says she kept this relatively hidden) and rather upset at her firing. Is this a small minority? Is this part-and-parcel of being “sponsored” by the Sisters of Mercy, but not directly affiliated with any particular church or with the archdiocese? Looking around on their website, there’s scant information on religious education. They are also quite a bit more expensive than an ordinary parochial school — tuition is $13,250 per year.

And note that a separate article reports that “Many parents point to the school’s diversity – 30 percent of students are of other religions*, for example – in arguing Winters’ release.”

(* Other religions? Do they really mean 30% of the students are non-Christian, or was this careless phrasing by the reporter or a parent to speak as if Catholicism is a different religion than Protestantism, for example?)

Which means this has all the earmarks of being de facto a private school in which the director of religious education is really more of a hired chaplain, and whose instruction to the students may well have been rather nondenominational in any case.

And here’s the difficulty: it’s reasonable to ask a Catholic hospital, which serves all comers and whose services are, by and large, not directly related to Christian doctrine, to be nondiscriminatory in their hiring practices. We’d all look at it as inappropriate if such an institution were to fire a same-sex-married doctor, for instance.

A Catholic school, on the other hand, when, as in the typical parochial school, the entire faculty is expected to model Catholic living, and incorporate Catholic teaching throughout the school day — in this case one hopes that it should be fairly clear that behaviors that openly and unapologetically violate Church teaching would be grounds for dismissal, whether that’s same-sex marriage or the band director leaving his wife to move in with the orchestra director, or the first grade teacher on the front page as a Planned Parenthood clinic volunteer.

But the more a school opens its doors to the wider community — either out of service or to fill seats — and becomes “just another private school option”, the more it can, and deserves to be treated as exactly that, losing its religious exemption. The problem is that there’s no halfway point — you can’t half-fire someone.

(Incidentally, I wrote about this about a year ago, in connection with another incident, in California, where the bishop was tightening up the “morals clause.”)

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Catholic schools

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