Colin Collette after a meeting with Cardinal Francis George on Sept. 9, 2014.
A lawsuit by a church employee who was fired after getting engaged to his male partner will move forward after a federal judge rejected the Chicago Archdiocese’s motion to dismiss the suit.
Colin Collette asserts in his lawsuit that his civil rights were violated when he was terminated in 2014 as music director at Holy Family Catholic Community in Inverness, where he had worked for 17 years. Collette sued both the archdiocese and Holy Family, claiming his firing amounted to “intentional” discrimination and seeking reinstatement of his job, lost wages and damages.
In its motion to dismiss the suit, the archdiocese cited what’s called the “ministerial exception,” which restricts employment discrimination claims by church ministers. The motion notes that Collette’s job titles were “director of worship” and “director of music.”
But Judge Charles Kocoras cited case law indicating that a title alone doesn’t determine whether a church employee should be defined as a minister. He ruled that further legal arguments would be needed to determine whether the ministerial exception applies here.
Collette previously told the Tribune that he was “not trying to be anti-Catholic,” in filing the suit.
“This is an issue the church needs to deal with. There are a lot of good people that are hurting,” he said.
Collette’s firing divided the parish. Many members spoke out in support of him; others said the church should not be forced to employ someone who enters into in a marriage not sanctioned by the church. Collette’s suit asserts that many employees, both homosexual and otherwise, are in nonsanctioned marriages.
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese said the church does not comment on pending litigation.
Speaking to a group of Polish bishops, Pope Francis delivered a harsh critique of teaching children they can choose their gender identity.
“Today, children are taught this at school: that everyone can choose their own sex,” Francis said last week, according to the Catholic Herald and other news organizations that read a Vatican transcript of the closed-door meeting. “God created man and woman; God created the world like this and we are doing the exact opposite.”
Teaching children that they can pick their gender, Francis said, is “terrible.”
DignityUSA, an organization for LGBT Catholics, issued a statement Wednesday saying that Francis’s words on gender identity “put lives at risk,” because they could encourage violence or bullying toward transgender youth in many countries.
“The pope is demonstrating a lamentable and dangerous ignorance of a subject that is literally a matter of life and death to some people,” the organization’s executive director, Marianne Duddy-Burke, said in the statement. “What many, including Pope Francis, do not yet understand is that people do not ‘choose’ their genders. A gender is assigned at birth, and some people discover that they were incorrectly classified. … It is interesting that until recently, the prevailing belief was that people chose their sexual orientation. Now, even the Catechism of the Catholic Church acknowledges that there are some people ‘who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex’ and that this is a ‘deep-seated’ reality. It seems that we will have to undergo the same kind of conversion in our thinking about gender.”
Early in his papacy, some in the LGBT community looked to Francis as a source of hope when he said about gay priests, “Who am I to judge?”
Since then, however, many have seen their hopes dimmed for change in the Catholic Church’s policies on gender and sexuality. Some thought that Francis’s major paper on family issues, which was completed in April, would offer some movement on gay relationships; it did not.
“There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family,” the document said instead.
“Strange goings on” and “a quarrelsome” atmosphere led to Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s decision.
The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has announced that he will not send trainee priests from his own diocese, the largest in Ireland, to the national seminary at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.
When asked about his decision to send three seminary students from Dublin to the Irish Pontifical College in Rome instead of Maynooth later this autumn, Dr Martin said “I wasn’t happy with Maynooth…”
“I have my own reasons for doing this,” the Archbishop continued. “There seems to an atmosphere of strange goings-on there, it seems like a quarrelsome place with anonymous letters being sent around. I don’t think this is a good place for students,” he said.
Martin made his assessment after a series of anonymous letters alleging inappropriate behavior among some of the seminarians in Maynooth made headlines, including claims that some of them may have used the hookup app Grindr, which is primarily used to arrange gay sexual encounters.
Maynooth seminary
But Dr Martin made no comment on those sensational reports to the Irish Times, instead explaining that he had what he called a “certain bonding” with Rome (where he lived and worked for in the Holy See for 25 years) and where he felt the Irish college offered “a good grounding” in the Catholic faith.
Monsignor Ciaran O’Carroll, the rector of the Irish college, confirmed that the three Dublin based seminarians would be “transferring” to Rome, adding this was very much the usual practice, since this was the time of year when bishops nominated students for the college.
It is however extremely unusual for Irish seminarians to be transferred from Maynooth to Rome after an Archbishop cites “strange goings on” in the national seminary as the reason for the transfer.
Maynooth currently has around 60 seminarians in residence and when rumors broke of “inappropriate behavior” earlier this year a spokesperson quickly assured the press that procedures were in place to handle any controversial complaints against seminarians.
The suggestion that a thriving gay subculture exists at Ireland’s national seminary first came to light in May of this year after anonymous letter suggested that both seminarians and staff members at Maynooth had been using the hookup app Grindr.
At the time Monsignor Hugh Connolly told The Irish Catholic the church intended to “thoroughly deal” with any concerns regarding such behavior.
Meanwhile, acknowledging that the number of seminarians for Dublin has dropped, the Archbishop told the Irish Independent “What is more important for me is the quality of the men who come forward and the training that they receive.”
The fact that the Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, in whose diocese Maynooth sits, apparently believes that Maynooth is currently an unsuitable place to train Irish priests is a remarkable development.
Accountability and transparency for the crimes of childhood sexual abuse today and in the future absolves no one from the accountability and transparency for the sexual crimes committed against children in the past.
Deep pockets denied the rights of all those who were sexually abused as children.
Their right to access justice in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was denied them by groups that had much to lose; the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese along with the other Pennsylvania dioceses as well as the insurance industry and and several business lobby groups.
Mostly, however, the opposition to the retroactive measure, statute of limitation reform, was led by Archbishop Charles Chaput, by way of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference which he leads, and the heads of the Pennsylvania dioceses who dutifully follow orders.
Sister Maureen Paul Turlish
And why? Is it money? Hardly.
Keep in mind that about $10 million dollars has been spent defending Msgr. William Lynn.
One can only guess at how much the public relations firm and the lobbyists from the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference are costing [the church]. That will likely never be known.
Then what is it?
It’s the fact that the bishops, the members of the hierarchy, will continue to do whatever they have to do, and what they have done for decades if not centuries.
And that is to do whatever it takes to protect a powerful institution and its secrets.
The safety and protection of the most vulnerable, the children, was never their priority regardless of the words of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Archbishop Charles Chaput also stated that gay Catholics should also ‘live chastely’ in new rules issued after Pope Francis urged more acceptance of others
Charles Chaput, the Philadelphia archbishop, is known as one of the staunchest conservative leaders in the US Catholic church.
Catholics in Philadelphia who are divorced and civilly remarried will be welcome to accept Holy Communion – as long as they abstain from sex and live out their relationships like “brother and sister”.
New guidelines published by the conservative archbishop of Philadelphia this month also called on priests within the archdiocese to help Catholics who are attracted to people of the same sex and “find chastity very difficult”, saying such individuals should be advised to frequently seek penance. Because same-sex attraction takes “diverse forms”, the archdiocese also said that some people can still live out a vocation of heterosexual marriage with children, notwithstanding “some degree of same-sex attraction”.
The guidelines, which took effect on 1 July, come three months after Pope Francis urged bishops to be more accepting of Catholics who lived outside of the church’s social teaching and doctrine, including people who have divorced and remarried, and people in same-sex relationships. The pope’s views were published in April in a document titled Amoris Laetitia (Joy of Love), which was hailed as potentially groundbreaking. Because the document called on bishops to show greater mercy and flexibility to bring Catholics back to the church, while also calling on bishops not to veer from church doctrine, it was seen as giving both traditional and more progressively minded bishops the chance to interpret the document as they saw fit.
The Philadelphia archbishop, Charles Chaput, is known as one of the staunchest conservative leaders in the US Catholic church, a view that is reflected in the rules the archdiocese published.
John Allen, a veteran Vatican journalist, said he believed Philadelphia was among the first archdiocese to publish such rules based on its interpretation of Amoris Laetitia.
“My suspicion is that those who are inclined to a more progressive reading [of Amoris Laetitia] are not going to put out documents to say so. It will quietly be made clear to priests that it is OK under certain circumstances, for example, to allow some people to quietly come back to communion,” Allen told the Guardian. “My suspicion is that the more traditional line [adopted by some bishops] will be more public.”
Allen said that he did not think Pope Francis would be surprised by Chaput’s reading of the papal document, since he is likely aware of traditional interpretations of his document.
In its examination of homosexuality, the Philadelphia guidelines state that two people in an “active, public same-sex relationship, no matter how sincere, offer a serious counter-witness to Catholic belief, which can only produce moral confusion in the community.
“Those with predominant same-sex attractions are therefore called to struggle to live chastely for the kingdom of God. In this endeavor they have need of support, friendship and understanding if they fail,” the rules state.
But the greatest attention in the guidelines are focused on couples who are divorced and civilly remarried who have not obtained an annulment of their first marriage.
While divorced and remarried couples should be welcomed by the Catholic community, and not be seen as outside the church, the archdiocese said they are required by church teaching to refrain from all sexual intimacy.
“This applies even if they must (for the care of their children) continue to live under one roof. Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly-remarried to receive reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance, which could then open the way to the Eucharist,” the archdiocese said.
Priests are also directed to consider Catholic couples who are living together but are not married, including whether the couple have had children born in these “irregular unions”. If a priest senses that one person in the couple is reluctant to take the plunge, the archdiocese recommended trying to break up the pair.
“Often cohabiting couples refrain from making final commitments because one or both persons is seriously lacking in maturity or has other significant obstacles to entering a valid union. Here, prudence plays a vital role. Where one or another person is not capable of, or is not willing to commit to, a marriage, the pastor should urge them to separate,” the guidelines state.
If the cohabitating couple seems ready to tie the knot but is just a bit slow, the priest should encourage them to practice chastity.
“They will find this challenging, but again, with the help of grace, mastering the self is possible – and this fasting from physical intimacy is a strong element of spiritual preparation for an enduring life together,” it said.
