The Catholics Still in Exile
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.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-catholics-still-in-exile.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
