The archbishop of San Francisco is walking back a proposal allowing the archdiocese to fire Catholic school workers who publicly support same-sex marriage, agreeing to amend the so-called “morality clause” after it sparked protests from parents of students and Bay Area Catholics.
Earlier this month, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone unveiled a new clause for the local Catholic school faculty handbook that outlined strict opposition to homosexuality, birth control, and abortion, among other things. The language instructed all parochial school employees — including non-Catholics — to avoid “visibly” contradicting the Church’s teachings on these subjects while in public, implying that doing so could be grounds for termination.
The archbishop tried to soften reaction to the new language by issuing a pastoral letter explaining that his intention was not to “target for dismissal from our schools any teachers, singly or collectively.” Nevertheless, the morality clause was widely panned by LGBT rights activists and Bay Area residents alike, with some prominent area Catholics calling it “a clumsy, inept Catholic version of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’” News of Cordileone’s decision also triggered sizable protests from parents of Catholic schoolchildren and other locals, and a cadre of San Francisco elected officials — some of whom attended Catholic schools growing up — signed a letter addressed to the archbishop asking him to remove the clause, saying it “infringes on the personal freedoms of [his] employees.”
Cordileone, who was deeply involved in past efforts to ban same-sex marriage in California, initially responded to the controversy with defiance, issuing his own letter rebuking the lawmakers and insisting he was simply following Catholic teaching. But after pressure mounted over the course of several weeks, Cordileone told the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday that he was assembling a committee of theology teachers from the archdiocese’s four high schools to draft a revised version of the clause.
“I was surprised at the degree of consternation over this,” Cordileone told the Chronicle.
Cordileone also told the Chronicle he is abandoning efforts to designate local Catholic high school teachers as “ministers.” This classification, while seemingly trivial, has significant legal implications: according to a 2012 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, religious organizations are afforded a “ministerial exception,” meaning they enjoy wide latitude over who they hire and fire for jobs that are designated for “ministers.” The decision broadened the definition of “minister” beyond ordained clergy, effectively granting religious groups the right to ignore state and federal non-discrimination laws when hiring.
By abandoning his attempt to designate teachers as ministers, the legal groundwork to enforce many aspects of Cordileone’s original morality clause is shaky at best.
Yet even as Cordileone backtracks on the morality clause, his hardline positions are receiving growing support from conservative Catholics across the country. More than 17,000 people have signed a petition on the right-wing website Catholic Vote expressing support for the archbishop, and the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group, published a blog post with the headline “This Man Won’t Be Bullied: Bravo Archbishop Cordileone!” that applauded his letter to politicians.
It remains to be seen what the revised morality clause will look like, but the debate in San Francisco could resonate in other parts of the country. The “ministerial exception” was used to justify firing two Catholic workers in Missouri and Illinois in 2014, and Florida Catholics sparred earlier this year when an archbishop and a bishop issued strikingly dissimilar letters to religious employees after marriage equality became legal in the state. In addition, last year several Catholic schoolteachers in Cincinnati and Oakland refused to sign contracts that reclassified their jobs as “ministers” and instructed them to “refrain from any conduct or lifestyle … in contradiction to Catholic doctrine or morals.” As a result, some of those teachers lost their jobs.