When I was in Macon, a band director at the private Catholic school was fired after he decided to contract marriage with his live-in boyfriend.
I was astonished at how many Catholic students and parents protested the school administration's decision on this and made a federal case out of in the press and elsewhere. Yours truly was the brunt of some the Facebook posts, as moderate as I am.
But this seems to me to go beyond the pale when a Catholic "community" promotes secular sexual morality (amorality?) and does so in a liturgical and prayerful way.
Of course the child is the victim here on many levels including if an orthodox pastor decided not to baptize him because of the means of his conception and the male parents who have a secular agenda for the Church supported by their pastor and evidently the bishop who appoint the pastor.
Without getting hysterical, what solutions would you recommend in a world that is going through a sexual revolution that makes the one in the 1960's look like kindergarten?
20 comments:
St. Joan of Arc is looneytunes. I know some folks who go there and they are typical 1960s types: rejected their parents authority and that of the Church. This parish should have been suppressed long ago, but the bishops is gutless. But what would you expect from a Church which tolerates Pelosi, master theologian?
Dont worry, once sex robots are perfected, the culture will declare that monogamous relationships (with the robots) are wonderful.
"Eight-foot two, all steel, too, six transistors in each shoe, has anybody seen my gal!"
Fr. Z stated that someone should capture this video before it was removed and like magic it is removed. Do you think the bishop got wind of it??????????????????????
“As moderate as I am”! Good one!
Golly, I did not know that Macon Catholics were so liberal! You might expect that more in a larger area like Atlanta...speaking of which, happy 80th to Atlanta's Cathedral of Christ the King, which was dedicated this date on the third Wednesday of 1939. While the cathedral is not as attractive (in my view) as Savannah's, the former probably has a lot more members than does the latter!
Gene,
A tour de force!!
Mount de Sales paid out a pretty big court settlement in the Flint Dollar lawsuit, because they were in the wrong. I’ve been a Catholic for 40-plus years & never been taught that a gay person isn’t allowed to hold a job. And you can’t fire someone for exercising their legal right to marry. Could a Catholic school or the Diocese order people not to vote?
Mt. De Sales liberal Sisters of Mercy’s laxidasical written hiring policies came back to bite the institution. These have since been revised. But Catholic institutions most certain can fire teachers for what the Church considers public sins, especially those against nature. The problem, though, with liberal ideologies is that it is inconsistent in application especially towards priests and Protestants.
If Catholic organizations & schools employ Protestants who have divorced & remarried — and in the South, they all do, every one of them — then the Catholic-teachings argument goes out the window. That was part of the problem with the Macon case. That has nothing to do with liberal ideologies, it’s a problem of hypocrisy.
You hit the post Vatican II liberal spirit that has compromised the Catholic identity of our schools that are entirely lay led, hiring non practice Catholics as well as Protestants who compromise the mission of our schools to hand on the patrimony of the Church in a pristine way.
The hiring practices of most Catholic institutions would not be tolerated by the Alleluia Communy School inAugusta or the SSPX.
My.de Sales has had a problem with Catholic identity for decades settling to be just a good academic institution competing for students who can afford it with the other very good private schools there.
Georgia conservatives have had Mount de Sales in their sights for decades. They were the first Macon schools to integrate, years before the public schools. In that way, they stand apart from every other Macon private school, which were all formed around 1970 to evade desegregation.
People in Macon, Catholic & non, often say the school’s atmosphere & diversity, the moral & ethical teaching & its teaching of Catholic values all reflect well on the Church. None of those are “Vatican II” values (as you will likely say), but typical of Catholic education worldwide for centuries. (Yes, it’s Catholicism as taught to non-Catholics, but if the school had to depend on Catholics only (and hiring Catholic-only staff) it would have folded decades ago.)
I don’t know much about the Alleluia Society, but I know a lot about the St. Pius X Society (founded in France, in disobedience to the Pope, by anti-Semites & Holocaust deniers & cause division & discord where ever they go. If you think that’s an example of good Catholic values, I’m not surprised you’re against Mount de Sales.
You must be FrMJK who twists to suit. I don't like the Alleluia School or charismatic theology but the point is they hire those who believe as they do--that is how you maintain institutional identity. The same for SSPX--it is their identity they maintain regardless of the ideologies that you might oppose.
Mt. De Sales is a great academic institution and provides Catholic faith and morals. But I also know that a significant number of the Catholic teachers there did not attend Mass (although allowed to be Extraordinary Minsters of Holy Communion at their Masses) supported the gay marriage of their fellow faculty member by inviting many people to a wedding shower for him and often disagreed with other major teachings of the Church.
They also felt that they could justify this kind of heterodoxy by bragging about its integration policies which in fact are very Catholics as long as they agreed with it.
It's called individualism and cafeteria Catholicism btw.
If a school is staffed by priests or nuns or brothers, then the Church obviously can enforce whatever rules of behavior it sees fit on those people. But if it’s hiring from among the general public, then it can’t treat them as you’d treat priests and nuns and hold them to the. same rules. The fellow in question, of course, was a band director who taught the kids to play Louie Louie & Motown & what have you.
Within my lifetime (and yours of course), certain Southern religious groups argued that the Bible justifies Jim Crow and separation of the races and that interracial marriage was prohibited. (Of course, it was illegal in these parts.) thank God, the Catholic Church was never part of that garbage. But imagine a religious group in 2019 arguing for that kind of discrimination in hiring based on “because I say so.”
Anyway, if your problem is with individual faculty members and not the school itself, you ought to be clear on that. Your muddled arguments are all over the lot, from the school to the nuns to the faculty to the parents.
When we talk about why church attendance is declining (in many Christian communities across the board), I suspect it has more to do with issues like these than with which direction the priest is facing or whether the Mass is in Latin or English. I wonder whether young people see a place for themselves in the Church or their friends or family. They meet someone like that band director, see that he’s a nice decent fellow and not a monster or a predator and they don’t understand why he ought to be banned & ostracized. The priests don’t do a great job of explaining that either.
I think Church attendance is declining especially in the traditionally liberal Protestant denominations such as the Episcopal Church which bases its morality purely upon a secular pop psychology of "I'm okay, your'e okay" and not upon Scripture and Tradition. They celebrate same sex marriage, abortion and the like.
The logic can be extended to good priests in everything they do, caring for the sick, preaching well, organizing programs for the poor and all of that and yet, that priest thinking he is in a consensual relationship with an adolescent gives into unnatural and immoral urges.
Let's say a pregnant teacher comes to school after a few days of absence and states to everyone that she gladly had a safe, legal abortion because she wasn't ready to be a mother. Let's say she's the best teacher ever and well loved by her students. Yet she publicly declares her gratefulness for the ability to choose her abortion and flouts that as good. Wouldn't the children at the school be angry at the Church for excluding her from a paying job at her Catholic school?
But yes, you are right. But the biggest problem is that Catholic identity means nothing to these kids because of home and institutional formation which negates Catholicism but exalts the status quo of secular morality (amorality) based upon inclusiveness of not only people but their immoral behavior.
Good people act immorally. Always has been, still is and will be until the Second Coming.
So, to clarify, Father, do you think a conservative Southern religious group would be justified in firing a man or woman who was involved in an interracial relationship or marriage if the group taught that the Bible forbid it? I’m sure the members of that group would probably tell you it was necessary to preserve their “identity” (which of course trumps (!) legality.
First, you clarify something for me. Do you want the government interfering in the hiring practices of any religious organization. For example, should the government force the Catholic Church to ordain LGBTQ people actively engaged in their sexuality with whoever? Should the government force the Catholic Church to ordain women? Should the government force the Catholic Church to keep former Catholics who have renounced their faith on their jobs.
So let me clarify, in our freedom of religion society, the government should stay out of the hiring practices of churches, synagogues, temples and mosques, PERIOD!
We’re talking about a school, not a church or synagogue, but your answer appears to be yes, if the government should have no tile, then so-called religious group that runs a school or hospital or some other entity could & should discriminate on the basis of race by arguing that it’s based on their interpretation of the Bible and their need to preserve their racial “identity,” that answer is not even in the 20th century, let alone the 21st, and not in any way keeping with Church teaching.
"First, you clarify something for me. Do you want the government interfering in the hiring practices of any religious organization."
The government, by the Civil Rights Act, is already very involved, rightfully so, in the hiring practices of religious organizations. "It is illegal for an employer to discriminate against a job applicant because of his or her race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. For example, an employer may not refuse to give employment applications to people of a certain race.
An employer may not base hiring decisions on stereotypes and assumptions about a person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information." - EEOC
If a position has bona fide religious requirements - a Catholic school principal, a Jewish day school teacher, etc., - the religious organization is exempt only from the ban on employment discrimination based on religion.
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