Catholic School Fires Gay Teacher After Threat from Catholic Church
Catholic School Fires Gay Teacher After Threat from Catholic Church
The church threatened to revoke their status as a Catholic school.
Only days after a Catholic school made headlines for going against the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and refusing to fire a teacher in a same-sex marriage, another Catholic school has done the exact opposite.
Cathedral High School announced Sunday that it would be firing an LGBTQ teacher after twenty-two months of discussion with the archdiocese.
“Archbishop Thompson made it clear that Cathedral’s continued employment of a teacher in a public, same-sex marriage would result in our forfeiting our Catholic identity due to our employment of an individual living in contradiction to Catholic teaching on marriage,” they said in a statement posted to their website.
They were clearly aware of the optics, specifically announcing this directly after Brebeuf Jesuit refused the same directive from the archdiocese, and explained that Brebeuf would be able to survive being cut off by the Catholic church due to its sponsorship by the Jesuits.
Cathedral High School reportedly has a “different nonprofit status” and would lose the ability to employ diocesan priests and offer the sacrament, whereas Brebeuf is not impacted in the same way.
Though the fact that Cathedral held out discussions for nearly two years suggests they were trying to come to some sort of better conclusion, one user on Twitter claimed to have had a negative experience at Cathedral in the past, and called out its leadership for hypocrisy and past issues with the LGBTQ community.
\u201chow can you, in good conscience, fire openly gay teachers because it \u201cgoes against catholic teaching\u201d when teachers are openly divorced, have had abortions, and use birth control? those also go against catholic teachings. this is blatant homophobia @archdioceseindy\u201d— kathleen (@kathleen) 1561329705
\u201cwith everything that transpired yesterday, i want to call attention to this exchange from last year. this is the leadership of cathedral high school. i am begging you, @GoCathedral, do better. do better for your staff, do better for your students. you should be ashamed.\u201d— kathleen (@kathleen) 1561375883
Hopefully the fired teacher — and any other LGBTQ teachers who suffer from the archdiocese’s current mission — find other work at schools that support them. It’s just too bad the students at Cathedral may not have that same support.
