The two stories were so similar that they actually morphed together in my mind.
Two different Catholic schools, one in St. Louis, Missouri, and the other in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, have come under fire for dismissing lesbian faculty members who violated the schools’ morality contracts.
In other words, two Catholic schools are being attacked for being Catholic.
How dare they adhere to their Church’s teaching. How dare they expect their faculty to adhere to the written terms of their contracts.
Both of these stories were reported in the first week of September, and when I read the second story, my first reaction was, “I must have confused MI for Michigan with MO for Missouri.” But no, these were two separate stories that were eerily similar.
In St. Louis, an all-girls Catholic high school asked two faculty members to resign after learning of their lesbian relationship.
The teachers, Olivia Reichert and Christina Gambaro, said that they “were asked to resign after the school said in late July it received a copy of a mortgage application with the couple’s names. The couple had married in New York over the summer, and the school said they had violated the moral contract faculty are required to sign as part of employment.”
In Bloomfield Hills, Barbara Webb, “said she was fired before the semester started because of her ‘nontraditional’ pregnancy.”
She also stated that “her termination letter didn’t give a reason. But her previous conversation with administrators made clear the concerns had to do with a morality clause allowing for firing over public conduct of ‘lifestyle or actions directly contradictory to the Catholic faith.'”
Yet rather than resign with health insurance, as she was asked to do, she felt that to do so would be a lie, and so she decided to get her story out, calling on others to “speak out against hate wherever you see it.”
But how it is “hate” when a Catholic school requires a faculty member to live by the code of conduct she has signed?
All three of these women violated their written, contractual commitments, and no matter how much they loved their students and their students loved them, they had no business teaching in a traditional Catholic school.
And so, it would seem to be only fitting and proper for the schools to dismiss them, especially since they are unrepentant and had previously signed the school’s morality contract. This is a no-brainer, right?
You would think the obvious answer would be yes, but these days, as gay activism continues its war against religious freedoms, the answer is no. The schools have come under serious verbal attack, especially from some of their alumni, who are threatening to withhold donations if the teachers are not reinstated. How dare this Catholic school be Catholic!
Once again, when it comes to gay activism, tolerance and acceptance are one-way streets to the point that today, a Catholic high school cannot practice Catholicism and hold to the church’s clear moral codes without coming under fire.
Even if these women differed with the school’s standards, they did agree to them in writing, and they did commit to live by them – and those standards do reflect the official teaching of the Catholic Church, even if Catholic public opinion in America is shifting somewhat on these issues (primarily due to many American Catholics being nominal).
Doesn’t honor and integrity require that you live by your commitment and, if you can’t, that you leave on your own accord?
How is it, then, that three lesbians are being hailed as courageous heroines for their disregard for school policy?
To give you an illustration of just how topsy-turvy our world has become, consider this statement from Molly Doherty O’Shea Gallucci, who graduated from the Michigan school in 1983 and served on its board of directors. Speaking of the pregnant Barbara Webb, Gallucci said, “Barb and her partner are choosing to do things exactly the way the Catholic Church wants things done” – as if the Catholic Church approved of a lesbian relationship.
She continued: “They’re married,” only not according to the Bible or the Catholic Church (they were secretly “married” in Canada); “they’re in a loving relationship, they’re choosing to have a family together” – a family without a husband or father, and with a child brought into the world that will never know what it’s like to have a father; “and we should be supporting that, not punishing them” – yes, supporting them for violating the school’s morality clause and scorning the historic teachings of all historic Catholic and Protestant churches.
Yet Gallucci claims that these two women “are choosing to do things exactly the way the Catholic Church wants things done,” surely one of the more bizarre statements I’ve read in recent years.
May I ask what’s coming next? And may I suggest that non-Catholics, like myself, pay careful attention to what is happening in these schools?
The latest conflict could well be brewing at a private religious school near you.
