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ComplineSanFran
Guest
Well, in an employee contract, the Ten Commandments would be extremely difficult to enforce, wouldn’t you say? How are you going to monitor idol worship, keeping Shabbat (Saturday), and coveting?
Archdiocese Letter Warns Employees About Supporting Same-Sex Marriage
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Havard
Guest
It won’t… this is not how the law (nor any diocese) works.
A diocese can proscribe advocacy of contrary positions, but it cannot regulate thought or what one does in private.
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ComplineSanFran
Guest
This is where my confusion is. I live in San Francisco and there have been many problems since the Archdiocese tried to put into teacher contracts things that were “private”. And I do believe that most Bishops are looking for models that can work in their own jurisdictions, thus the topic at hand.
The problem is, considering every single employee of a diocese, they are not all practicing Catholics. Not in schools, not in offices, not in Catholic Charities, or any other diocesan run organization. And if employees are not Catholic, you cannot ask them to abide by Catholic rules. You can certainly say that they cannot offer ‘contrary positions’ in public, but in private? On one’s own time? In one’s own home and bedroom? This is where San Francisco was upset with the Archdiocese. There was compromise involved. I think it was not the solution either side was looking for. We’ll have to see how it plays out over this next six months. All I know is that there are still gay men and women teaching in the schools. Lunch ladies? No clue.
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Havard
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The contract negotiations that took place in our Archdiocese, San Francisco, only pertained to teachers, and the proscribed behavior was always public behavior, such as advocacy. Private behavior never came into the picture, nor did lunch ladies, and the latter for good reason. The proposed language changes in the SF schools were the result of two recent high-profile decisions, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC and Dias v. Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Hosanna-Tabor established a precedent for teachers to be identified as part of a ministerial exception to workplace discrimination law, but then Dias more narrowly defined it.
The result of the SF negotiations wasn’t very different from the original proposal. The only major change is that while the teachers are not directly referred to as ministers, the four Catholic high schools (Marin Catholic, Sacred Heart Cathedral, Riordan, and Serra) are very much clearly defined as being ministries of the Church, and the teachers must assent that their roles as teachers are very much in furtherance of these ministries.
I can’t speak too much to the Miami situation, but I imagine it’s attempting something similar. There’s no way they could, or would attempt to proscribe private behavior of bookkeepers, IT staff, etc. There would be no precedent for something that broad. Reading the letter in the article, it sounds like they are limiting the proscribed behavior to advocacy, especially pertaining to contrary ideas about marriage. Whether they’d be able to win a case on this based on a Hosanna-style ministerial exception would depend on a lot of info I haven’t seen.
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ComplineSanFran
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Thank you for all this Havard. I do know that taking the term ‘ministers’ out of the teacher’s contract was a huge plus for the teachers and the union. That is the legal linchpin, as it were.
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Havard
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It’s all theoretical. The caselaw surrounding the ministerial exception isn’t so cut and dried as to hinge on whether the persons are explicitly called ministers. A trial outcome would have a lot more to do with the presiding judge’s analysis of the specific facts and the relevant jurisprudence. The language that’s in the contracts currently do open a door to the ministerial exception. IMHO, the much more important question is not the legalese, but rather how the legalese is applied. Specifically, I think what matters is first whether it is truly being enforced (i.e., are they turning the other way), and second whether it is being enforced consistently (e.g., are they picking on same-sex couples but not cohabiting heterosexuals.) I know the archdiocese is attempting both, however the schools themselves are not wholly transparent with the archdiocese about what’s what.
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PTL
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God bless Archbishop Thomas Wenski!! How wonderful his letter is!!
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Brendan
Guest
That is correct. A politician might hire a campaign manager who personally disagrees with them.
Their job, however, is to publically manage a campaign. They could tell their spouse over dinner that the candidate is a complete moron, and their job will be secure
If posting on their Facebook page that they feel their candidate is a complete moron, there is a significant likelihood that they will be fired.
Likewise with the Church and it’s employees. Private acts are just that, private. The employer has, by definition, no way of knowing it. When it becomes public, it becomes fair game for legitimate contract law.
Here is another example.
abcnews.go.com/International/woman-fired-tweet-aids-africa-sparks-internet-outrage/story?id=21298519
If this woman had simply muttered that comment to herself, she might have still had a job when she landed.
But she did something on her vacation ( non work hours) that her employer disagreed with, made it public, and that got her fired.
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exnihilo
Guest
I guess it would be hard to enforce strictly taken, like most laws. The government, despite its immense power, has a pretty hard time knowing if the average person is smoking marijuana. And yet it is illegal. The usefulness of employee contracts in the case of the Church is to prevent scandal. Scandal by necessity needs to be known. So it actually isn’t hard to enforce at all. If someone violates this in a public way so that it is known then the Church isn’t monitoring. Rather it is becoming aware of public knowledge just like anyone would. I actually don’t think the Church’s intent is to dig through people’s lives looking for issues. But it needs to be able to act when the employee chooses to be public with their sin.
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