Come to that, a sad time for us all

Andrew Sullivan marks another sad day for the Catholic Church:

               Firing A Teacher For Getting Married
               DEC 20 2013 @ 1:17PM 

Another day, another Catholic school fires a beloved teacher because he married another man. This time, the school’s students erupt in protest and moral outrage. One wonders how much longer Catholic archdioceses can keep doing this, without severe blowback from an entire generation. And let’s be clear here. The school and the archdiocese were fine with the teacher’s sexual orientation as long as he didn’t actually commit to another person for life. What they’re punishing is not gayness; what they’re punishing is love and responsibility. 

 Frank Bruni provided the back story in a recent column:

HONEYMOON isn’t a word usually associated with pontiffs, but Pope Francis is having an extraordinary one. Last week Time magazine named him its person of the year, saying that he had given fresh hope to many Catholics estranged by the church’s censorious ways. The magazine noted the absence of harsh condemnation in his mentions of divorced couples, of women seeking abortions and of gay people, including his statement that “if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.” From all of this, Time concluded that he had lifted the church “above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors.”  

Well, they didn’t get the memo in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where a teacher of French and Spanish was fired from a Catholic high school earlier this month because he’d let the school know that he intended to take advantage of New Jersey’s legalization of same-sex marriage and tie the knot there. According to news reports, it wasn’t any secret that the teacher was gay; he and his partner wore rings and attended faculty parties together. But honoring that union? Pledging the kind of commitment that is, or should be, more consistent with the church’s values than keeping it in the shadows? His Catholic supervisors, sending the message that the shadows were just fine, terminated his 12-year employment.  

The memo also didn’t make it to Little Rock, Ark., where Tippi McCullough, 50, got the ax after 14 years as an English teacher at a high school affiliated with the Sisters of Mercy. This was in October. Her crime, too, was to take a relationship that Catholic co-workers apparently knew about and formalize it. She told me last week that she and her longtime partner had even been overnight guests on the school principal’s houseboat. But when school officials learned that the couple had just been legally married in one of the New Mexico counties where that’s now possible, they told her they had to let her go, though she hadn’t announced the wedding or given any signal that she was going to be more public about her partnership than before.  

Her dismissal upset some school employees, one of whom apparently gave The Arkansas Times remarks that another Francis — Msgr. Francis I. Malone, a local priest — made in a faculty meeting afterward. “The devil is real,” he reportedly said. “He goes after people like you and institutions like this one.”“Don’t give in to him,” Malone added. “Rise up above this like the good and decent people God has made you to be.” In a subsequent exchange with the newspaper, Malone didn’t deny those remarks but said that they weren’t meant to characterize McCullough or her situation.  

McCullough said that she was struggling to reconcile the stated mission of the Sisters of Mercy with how she was treated. “Our whole school is founded on the mercy values,” she told me. “Things like the recognition of the intrinsic worth and dignity of each person and respect for varied religious traditions and beliefs.” But that recognition isn’t “applied equally to everyone,” she added. “That’s the hardest thing for me. And I loved teaching there.”   

Pope Francis has indeed been a revelation, his gentle tone and sustained humility more in touch with the heart of Catholicism than the bitter jeremiads of other Catholic leaders were. But it’s important to note that he hasn’t pledged to revisit doctrine, nor are such revisions likely to happen anytime soon. The world turns at a breathless clip; the church, at a glacial one.  

It’s equally important to note that beyond Rome, the very focus on sexual morality that the pope seems to be waving Catholics away from can still be keen and uncompromising. Examples are made where they needn’t be; punishment is meted out when it doesn’t have to be. And it’s this, as much as anything uttered in Vatican City, that continues to drive a wedge between open-minded Catholics and the church’s hierarchy.  

The church’s treatment of gays and lesbians is especially rife with mixed messages and hypocrisy. In schools and congregations, many priests, nuns and other Catholics state or quietly signal that they see nothing sinful in the loving relationships of gay couples, only to have more hidebound Catholics swoop in to sweep such couples away. For a gay person who doesn’t want to be exiled, secrecy is smarter than honesty, which is supposedly a virtue.  

“I DON’T understand,” said Nick Johns, whose Catholic church outside Atlanta asked him to resign from his job as an organist last May, as it became better known that he had a male fiancé. “They make it clear that they don’t think being gay is wrong, but they think gay people should be celibate,” he said, accurately describing Catholic doctrine. “And now that I’ve found the love of my life, I can’t imagine God wanting me to suppress that. If God made us and he gives us the gift of love and he gave me that gift, and if he made me this way, why wouldn’t he want this?”  

Johns, 28, was reared in a devout Catholic family and studied the organ with the goal of playing in church. Last January, he said, the priest in charge of the congregation that employed him advised him to make his Facebook posts, which included mentions of his fiancé, private, and he did so. “He said his best friend was gay and he realized it wasn’t a choice,” Johns told me. “He was really very understanding.”  

But that priest moved on in April; a temporary successor, citing the Facebook posts, informed Johns that he should resign or he’d be fired, Johns said.  

The Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group, has identified nine cases like his in the United States this year, but the group’s president, Chad Griffin, stresses that these are just the ones that have come to public light.  

McCullough observed that many employees of Catholic schools run afoul Catholic doctrine — and of the morals clause they routinely sign — but aren’t reprimanded or removed. Maybe they’re divorced. Maybe they use artificial birth control. The church turns a blind eye, as it frequently does with gay employees — until, all of a sudden, it doesn’t. That erratic, cruel rhythm is partly responsible for the breach that Francis has only begun to heal.  

McCullough recently took a new job with Little Rock Central High School, which, she proudly noted, was an important theater in the struggle for civil rights. Still, she feels a profound loss, and is drifting away from a church she loved. I asked her if she’d known how the school would react, would she have married anyway?  

Yes, she said. A thousand times yes. She’s finished with one-half openness or three-quarters openness or whatever calculation she’d made. “As I told the principal, I’m 50 years old,” she said. “I’m tired of this. I’ve tried to play this game my whole life. I don’t want to do it anymore.”