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Dawnia
Guest
It’s obvious you know nothing about our political system or our Church…or the definition of a cult.
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It’s obvious you know nothing about our political system or our Church…or the definition of a cult.
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Trader
Guest
Bishop Rhoades has issued an additional short statement in support of Monsignor Kuzmich. When Bishop Rhoades was conscecrated a bishop he chose as his motto, Veritas in Caritas (truth in charity), so we here this a lot.
diocesefwsb.org/2012/04/pastoral-statement-from-the-diocese-of-fort-wayne-south-bend/
diocesefwsb.org/2012/04/pastoral-statement-from-the-diocese-of-fort-wayne-south-bend/
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TheHolyTrinity
Guest
Well that’s a little embarrassing for the CC. Believes and employment should be kept apart.
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FromTheAshes777
Guest
So having freedom of religion makes us all cult followers and makes our Catholic Bishops cult leaders? Really? Seriously?
What about when Pope Benedict told us to get serious about defending religious freedom? Why would he say such a thing if religious freedom is such a terrible thing to have in society?
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Digitonomy
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I’m pretty sure the Church doesn’t consider its lay school teachers “ministers.” Perhaps if a teacher also performs some ministry during mass or in some other way, that label would apply. However, I am guessing a Catholic school will in some future case invoke Hosanna-Tabor and claim that legally, a religion teacher is a minister under the H-T precedent (and can therefore be fired more easily).
You speak a broad truth when you say a teacher (or as others have alleged, even a janitor) is furthering the Catholic mission of spreading the Gospel, and thus a minister. However, the court is not going to accept that a non-Catholic is a Catholic minister. It’s simply laughable, and for this reason, Hosanna-Tabor doesn’t apply here.
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Trader
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Although I have never been a journalist, I have always wanted to start a post like this:
Tonight I was informed by a high diocesan official that the reason the teacher filed suit is that the EEOC, which initially ruled against our diocese, has decided not to pursue the case precisely because of the Hosanna-Tabor 9-0 decision by SCOTUS. The EEOC ruling came before Hosanna-Tabor was decided. A church does have the right to govern its own affairs without government interference.
I also had dinner tonight with a non-Catholic teacher in a Catholic school who told me she has had the same contract as the fired teacher for twelve years, and that she takes it very seriously. Even a totally secular institution can enforce a morals clause in a contract that both sides have agreed to. Ask Tiger Woods about that.
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Digitonomy
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Absolutely, but that’s entirely different from Hosanna-Tabor.
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Trader
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Yes it is. The contract argument is a separate second reason why the teacher loses this case.
The EEOC thought the Hosanna-Tabor decision applied so much that they declined to enforce their own ruling through the courts. Saint Vincent is a large parish that subsidises its school with more than $1,000,000 each year to keep tuition low. There is no way EEOC can claim the school is not a major part of the church ministry. In my brother’s diocese the board has set a limit to how much a parish can subsidize its school. The idea is that the school should be more self-supporting with parental involvement.
There is a even a third reason the teacher loses here. As someone else already mentioned, she was not terminated. She was just not offered a new contract at the end of her current contract. Any employer can do that with nothing more than they found someone better to fill the position unless a collective bargaining agreement forbids it.
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Digitonomy
Guest
So under your logic, the school could, say, fire all janitors who hadn’t been to mass the previous Sunday?
I think the Hosanna-Tabor decision is much narrower than you suggest. Assuming the EEOC’s actions were related to you accurately, I suspect the commission did not pursue its previous decision because it was moot for the other reasons we’ve discussed.
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Trader
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If janitors are doing that in a public way, or advocating that children miss Mass without a valid excuse, absolutely. Catholic schools exist to help parents in their obligation to pass on the faith to their children. Reading, writing and arithmetic are nice, but secondary. That role can be accomplished anywhere. No one has a right to employment in a Catholic school while frustrating the primary mission.
Some Catholic schools also require parents to meet minimum standards in order to enroll their children. It is destructive to the mission if children are taught opposite standards at home and at school.
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Digitonomy
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Presumably if the janitor is known to be a practicing Jew, he won’t have attended mass, and he may even have been seen washing his car in his driveway and doing chores in his yard across the street from the school on Sunday.
Hard to hold that against him in general, but it’s unbecoming for a Catholic minister to be doing such things, so you would say the school can fire this Jewish janitor if it chooses?
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Trader
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I admit I had not thought about that, but since the Jewish or other non-Catholic would have no obligation to attend mass, then it would not cause scandal and he should not be fired. As for the part of my post that you left out, if he is advocating that Catholic children not attend mass without a valid excuse, yes he should be fired. I would expect any practicing Jew who accepted a job at a Catholic school to have the integrity to abide by his contract.
This whole case began because the teacher in question made her action public and that did bring up the danger of scandal. Her action was not a matter of Catholic discipline but of natural moral law that applies to everyone. The very fact that many Catholics do not understand that is all the more reason protect the children at a Catholic school from that example.
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Digitonomy
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I left that out because it distracts from my point. It’s easy to add reasons why an employee must be fired - if he’s also running a prostitution ring from the school parking lot, then yes, he should be fired. For the sake of my point, let’s assume there is no morality clause in the employment contract, the contract is not soon coming to an end, and the minister is not doing anything illegal.
The issue I have with your expansive interpretation of the ministerial exception in Hosanna-Tabor is whether an employee who plays no significant role in the education of children, much less in their religious education, can truly be called a Catholic minister simply because their employer is a Catholic school. If so, it seems logical that the school could hold them to account for not following natural law, divine law, canon law, etc.
If a Catholic minister performs servile work openly and extensively on Sunday, rather than observing the Lord’s Day as the Church prescribes, that would seem to be at odds with his calling as a Catholic minister; he would be a poor example for the students, and a possible source of scandal. So it seems entirely proper in such a situation for the school to fire the minister.
If on the other hand, it’s OK for some ministers to defy Church teaching and discipline because they happen to be Jewish or atheist or whatever, I have to question whether they are really Catholic ministers.
Here is how the Supreme Court determined that the teacher in the Hosanna-Tabor case was a Lutheran minister:
They didn’t say everyone must meet these standards to be a minister, but you’ve clearly set the bar a lot lower than what was used in that case.
Surely you’re not suggesting that the school only has the right to fire a minister when he violates natural law, not divine or canon law?
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Trader
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Last Saturday I spoke to both Monsignor Kuzmich and Bishop Rhoades and told them the story of my friends/inlaws from post #5 in this thread. Monsignor Kuzmich had a chuckle. Bishop Rhoades had a stronger response. He loved it. “I told people to pray about this, if you read my article in Today’s Catholic”(our diocesan newspaper). This is what I would expect from a bishop. If you ask about a headache, he will tell you, “Pray first, take two aspirn, and pray again in the morning.”
Bishop Rhoades was concerned enough about the current state of religious liberty in America that he gave a full hour interview with Dr Matthew Bunson that aired on our local Catholic radio station, Redeemer Radio AM 1450 for a locally produced program called Faith Works. I would love to give you the link to that interview, but the station web site does not yet have that feature of archived programs. What I know and Bishop Rhoades does not know is that one of the people working on that an intern who is the fifth daughter of that same formerly infertile couple.
Bishop Rhoades was concerned enough about the current state of religious liberty in America that he gave a full hour interview with Dr Matthew Bunson that aired on our local Catholic radio station, Redeemer Radio AM 1450 for a locally produced program called Faith Works. I would love to give you the link to that interview, but the station web site does not yet have that feature of archived programs. What I know and Bishop Rhoades does not know is that one of the people working on that an intern who is the fifth daughter of that same formerly infertile couple.
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Trader
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I see you know more than most about the Hosanna Tabor decision, and I agree that like most SCOTUS decisions it deals with a narrow issue. Some the the worst court decisions in our history came about when the ruling went beyond the narrow scope of the case at hand and dealt with wider issues that could have been dealt with by elected officials. Both Dred Scott and Roe v Wade fall into this category and the results were disastrous.
EEOC had at least three similar cases where they ruled against Christian schools based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. One was from Michigan, one from Fort Wayne, and a third from Cincinnati. They picked Hosanna Tabor to litigate because it was their strongest case. There was no misconduct alleged and the disability, narcolepsy, was easier to understand as a disability than infertility. When SCOTUS ruled against the EEOC 9-0 in Hosanna Tabor, they really had no choice but to drop the other cases. The court wisely did not try to define what a minister is, only that both the teacher and the school agreed in Hosanna Tabor that the teacher was a minister, and that the First Amendment to the US Constitution trumps the ADA. It upholds the principle that the rights and powers actually enumerated in the Constitution have greater weight than those deduced from other rights. The only government agency determined to make up its own definition of churches and ministers is HHS and they have drawn up a definition so narrow that even Jesus and the apostles could not be considered a church.
What I find interesting is the recent change in tactics for those opposing freedom of religion. For almost all of my lifetime the attacks have involved a new interpretation of the establishment clause. Prayer in school, posting of the ten commandments, public display of religious symbols, and public contracts with religious organizations have been attacked in court with some success. Only recently has the emphasis changed to attack the free exercise clause. Most grave of the threats is the HHS mandate, but also Connecticut sought to force the Catholic Church to reorganize itself to a congregational model, and in San Francisico there was an attempt to ban circumcision.
We got off track to argue whether or not a church should fire an employee for a specific reason. The Hosanna Tabor decision means that churches will be able to manage their own internal affairs without government interference. I believe that is the clear intent of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
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Digitonomy
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If you could provide a source for your claim that this is the EEOC’s strategy, I’d appreciate it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that a stronger case can be made against the ministry of a “commissioned minister” than against a non-Catholic who had no specifically religious duties in the school.
I assume you’re engaging in hyperbole here.
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Trader
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In the Hosanna Tabor case the Solicitor General of the United States argued before SCOTUS that churches should be treated the same as anyone else, despite the priveleged postition given them by the first amendment. It was the first and hopefully the last direct challenge to the ministerial exception. All of the justices rejected that argument. Based on the government theory that the ministerial exception did not exist, the Fort Wayne case was weaker because it also included a violation of a contract and was only a non-renewal of a contract, not a termination. In the Cincinnati case, there was also a contract violation and even worse scandal since the teacher became pregnant through IVF and she was not married. I understand that the government’s theory of the case may not sense to you. It did not make sense to me or to even one of the Supreme Court justices either.
I also was told by another local source that the Fort Wayne teacher was baptised and raised Catholic, but I cannot confirm that, and I don’t know if it matters anyway, since her contract required her to be familiar with Catholic moral teaching and act accordingly. It is my understanding that even non-Catholic teachers normally start classes with prayers in a Catholic school. I know my teachers did, although they were all Catholic. I personally know a Baptist who teaches music in another school in our diocese, and she follows that rule.
The source of the information on the EEOC not proceeding to court to enforce its ruling against the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend was the "high diocesan offficial’ I mentioned before. Let’s just say he is in the top two officials of the diocese and was in a postion to know the details of the lawsuit. The top two officials of the diocese are 1) Bishop Kevin Rhoades and 2) Monsignor Robert Schulte, who is Vicar General, Chancellor, and rector of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception which has been my parish since 1984. I am not saying who told me. Flip a coin.
As far as the hyperbole about Jesus and the apostles, I borrowed that phrase from more than one bishop. The HHS mandate defines church ministries as those that hire mainly its own members and serve mainly its own members. Jesus would have run afoul of that definition by preaching to the Samaritan women at Jacob’s well and healing the servant of the Roman centurion.
No religious hospital, homeless shelter, soup kitchen, or religious university could meet that definition today. Even the Catholic seminary I attended in 1971-72 had Protestants attending classes on church history and scripture. It is not just a Catholic issue. Here in Fort Wayne, with a strong German heritage and almost as many Lutherans as Catholics, the Lutheran churches sound a lot like Catholics on this issue:
lcms.org/hhsmandate
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Trader
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journalgazette.net/article/20140905/LOCAL03/309049915/1039
The wheels of justice turn slowly. US District Judge Robert L Miller, Jr has thrown out a claim against the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend that they illegally discriminated against Emily Herx by not renewing her teaching contract after she made it public that she had undergone in-vitro fertiization treatment and planned to do it again. She had won at the EEOC on this claim, but once again that activist, politically aligned agency has been found on the wrong side of the law.
The court did allow Mrs Herx to go forward with another claim that her firing was gender based. Will she have to prove that our diocese fires women who use in-vitro fertilization, but not men who use in-vitro fertilization? I know there is another case out west where a single woman was fired and won at the EEOC after she gave birth to a child by in-vitro fertilization.
Among the strange things going on in our country, infertility is legally recognized as a protected disability, but employers are not required to cover infertility treatment (moral or not) in their insurance plans. Employers are required to cover contraception, which intentionally causes infertility–a recognized disability.
Also, plaintiff’s attorney argues that, “The (Civil Rights Act) must protect the rights of women to attempt to have children through all methods,” her attorneys wrote in their response to the motion for summary judgment. “Otherwise, it would allow employers to substitute their judgments for those of their employees’ doctors and give them the right to ban certain types of medical procedures.”
Would this means laws against adultery are unconstitutional because a woman might choose to become pregnant through that method?
The wheels of justice turn slowly. US District Judge Robert L Miller, Jr has thrown out a claim against the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend that they illegally discriminated against Emily Herx by not renewing her teaching contract after she made it public that she had undergone in-vitro fertiization treatment and planned to do it again. She had won at the EEOC on this claim, but once again that activist, politically aligned agency has been found on the wrong side of the law.
The court did allow Mrs Herx to go forward with another claim that her firing was gender based. Will she have to prove that our diocese fires women who use in-vitro fertilization, but not men who use in-vitro fertilization? I know there is another case out west where a single woman was fired and won at the EEOC after she gave birth to a child by in-vitro fertilization.
Among the strange things going on in our country, infertility is legally recognized as a protected disability, but employers are not required to cover infertility treatment (moral or not) in their insurance plans. Employers are required to cover contraception, which intentionally causes infertility–a recognized disability.
Also, plaintiff’s attorney argues that, “The (Civil Rights Act) must protect the rights of women to attempt to have children through all methods,” her attorneys wrote in their response to the motion for summary judgment. “Otherwise, it would allow employers to substitute their judgments for those of their employees’ doctors and give them the right to ban certain types of medical procedures.”
Would this means laws against adultery are unconstitutional because a woman might choose to become pregnant through that method?
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Joe_5859
Guest
Thanks for the update! Things do move slowly! Good to see the case got thrown out.journalgazette.net/article/20140905/LOCAL03/309049915/1039
The wheels of justice turn slowly. US District Judge Robert L Miller, Jr has thrown out a claim against the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend that they illegally discriminated against Emily Herx by not renewing her teaching contract after she made it public that she had undergone in-vitro fertiization treatment and planned to do it again. She had won at the EEOC on this claim, but once again that activist, politically aligned agency has been found on the wrong side of the law.
The court did allow Mrs Herx to go forward with another claim that her firing was gender based. Will she have to prove that our diocese fires women who use in-vitro fertilization, but not men who use in-vitro fertilization? I know there is another case out west where a single woman was fired and won at the EEOC after she gave birth to a child by in-vitro fertilization.
Among the strange things going on in our country, infertility is legally recognized as a protected disability, but employers are not required to cover infertility treatment (moral or not) in their insurance plans. Employers are required to cover contraception, which intentionally causes infertility–a recognized disability.
Also, plaintiff’s attorney argues that, “The (Civil Rights Act) must protect the rights of women to attempt to have children through all methods,” her attorneys wrote in their response to the motion for summary judgment. “Otherwise, it would allow employers to substitute their judgments for those of their employees’ doctors and give them the right to ban certain types of medical procedures.”
Would this means laws against adultery are unconstitutional because a woman might choose to become pregnant through that method?
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Trader
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There is another update on this case. There is more than one thread here on this case, but I picked this one because it is easier for me to find a thread I started.
journalgazette.net/news/local/courts/Diocese-appeals-ruling-in-bias-case-8677467
The jury’s original award to the teacher whose contract was not renewed has already been cut twice because their judgement was in conflict with federal law. Bishop Rhoades and his legal advisors are determined to fight this because the ability of the Church to proclaim the truth about human dignity and procreation are important enough to fight for. The first amendment to our constitution means that all churches have the right to determine who their ministers are, and what guidelines they have to observe to continue in those positions, free from government interference.
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