Bill Donohue, for those of you who aren’t mackerel snappers, is the Roger Ailes of the Catholic Church: a big, fat CHAVALA who depends on the elderly to fund his comfy lifestyle and be able to trash good people for a living. He’s the head of the Catholic League, which is as relevant to modern-day Catholics as the rhythm method yet still gets play in conservative media. We’ve featured Donohue’s whining before—like when he tried to accuse me of targeting only Catholic pedophiles instead of ALL pedophiles, or when he inadvertently defended Eleuterio Ramos, OC’s worst-ever pedophile priest, a guy who admitted to molesting “at least” 25 boys.
And now Donohue returns to Orange County with another whiny screed—although he doesn’t dare call out his target by name. In a May 18 press release titled “Victims’ Pros Lie about NY Archdiocese,” Donohue rails against the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), which has only been one of the most important organizations in the United States fighting against pedo-priests and their enablers in the Catholic Church. Donohue has never liked them because they do a great job, and he’s now mad that “someone whom we have never heard of has surfaced demanding that the New York archdiocese publish the names of six miscreant priests, the implication being that there is a cover-up.
Casteix, from our 2008 profile
“This is a non-starter,” Dononhue continues. “The names of the offending priests have already been published by the archdiocese. It is scurrilous to imply otherwise. The only real story here is how far some will go to try to discredit the Catholic Church.”
What the hell is the lace-curtain Irish crying about? He provides no links, no context, no nada in his write-up (which you can go ahead and Google on your own). But the person he was targeting is someone well-known to OC Weekly readers, a heroine we should all emulate.
Say her name, Billy: Joelle Casteix.
She’s the Western regional director for SNAP, and someone who has long advocated for sex-abuse survivors because she herself is one: a music teacher at Mater Dei High abused her, and school and diocesan officials long stonewalled her about it. Casteix held a press conference last week talking about the pedophile protectors at the New York archdiocese, cretins of whom Donohue laughably says, “When it comes to clergy sexual abuse, the New York Archdiocese has one of the best records in the nation.”
Casteix and an attorney for the survivors streamed their press conference on
Facebook Live. None of the New York press present quoted Casteix in their stories, which means Donohue has no life because he watched a Facebook Live segment. But why didn’t Donohue have the stones to call out Casteix by name? Does anyone really buy Billy Blob’s shit that he “had never heard of” Casteix, who’s only been a national presence on the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal for about 15 years? How the hell can Donohue continue to get fatter with every passing year?
So many questions, but at least we have two answers: Casteix is a secular saint; Donohue is a PENDEJO. Hey, Billy: Learn from St. Joseph and get a real job.
A religion teacher at one of the city’s most prestigious private high schools said he was harassed and threatened by students after they found his online dating profile — and then he was fired by the school.
Matt Tedeschi, who taught religious studies at St. Ignatius College Prep in Little Italy, said students found out he was gay and “outed” him to the rest of the school — then went on to harass him about his sexual orientation in the classroom and on social media.
Tedeschi, who taught for about four years at the school, said he believes he was then fired because his sexual orientation conflicts with some Catholic teachings, and the incident — and ensuing gossip — embarrassed top leaders at the elite school. He was slated to be considered for tenure in the fall.
“In this place that prides itself on being a value-based school and teaches us to care for the vulnerable and marginalized, it’s precisely the same religious basis that allows horrible harassment to take place,” he said.
In a statement released Thursday, St. Ignatius leaders said Tedeschi was not fired from school because of his sexual orientation. Previously, St. Ignatius administrators declined to directly address Tedeschi’s firing and subsequent allegations, but said that the teacher “was treated fairly” by the school’s administrators.
“Saint Ignatius College Prep must respect the confidentiality of the term of employment of its present and former faculty and staff members,” school spokesman Ryan Bergin said in a statement. “Although I cannot comment on Mr. Tedeschi’s claims regarding his prior employment at Saint Ignatius College Prep, I can assure you that he was treated fairly at all times by the administration of the school, and we wish him all the best in his future career.”
‘Outed’ by students
Tedeschi, who was raised in the Catholic faith and graduated from Marist High School, a coed Catholic high school in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood, studied religion at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign before earning a master’s degree in biblical studies from Yale Divinity School. In August 2013, he was hired to teach religious studies at St. Ignatius, the school he had dreamed of going to when he was a teen.
“In a lot of ways, I fell in love with it all over again when I became a teacher there,” said Tedeschi, 31. “I was really pleasantly surprised by how bright these [students] are.”
Two years ago, the school expanded Tedeschi’s responsibilities, and he began teaching French classes in addition to religion classes.
“Matt was known as being a really tough teacher, but he was really good” at his job, a former colleague said. “Most of the kids really enjoyed him — he was very smart, witty.”
And while Tedeschi described the students as generally “very polite,” his experience at the school changed in February 2016, when a student “outed” him to the student body after finding Tedeschi’s profile on OKCupid, an online dating website.
Tedeschi had never discussed his sexual orientation in the classroom, he said, and the online dating profile did not list his name or that he was a teacher at the school. The profile, which said he is interested in men, features three photos, including one which portrayed him shirtless.
There is no explicit content.
“Never once did I think a high schooler would be on it,” he said of the dating website for those 18 and older. Other teachers at St. Ignatius have online dating profiles, he said, including profiles on OKCupid.
“Everyone should have the right to a private life,” Tedeschi said.
After discovering the dating profile, the St. Ignatius student texted screenshots of Tedeschi’s profile to several other St. Ignatius students, and it spread across campus.
“He ‘outed’ me to a bunch of students. He knew that he was making fun of me and insulting me,” Tedeschi said. “He wanted to embarrass me.”
Discussing the profile in a group text message that Tedeschi obtained screenshots of, one student wrote: “Wow. This is SOOO juicy.”
“He was sort of cyberbulled by some of our students,” said one of Tedeschi’s former colleagues who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
A ‘horrible’ environment
When Tedeschi found out the student had seen his profile, he said he told two administrators hoping they would take action to stop the bullying from students. At first, the administrators “were supportive,” he said, and brought the issue to St. Ignatius Principal Brianna Latko. Tedeschi talked to the students after the incident, but the students were ultimately not punished, he said. Latko did not respond to emails seeking comment.
“It was a horrible environment for me,” he said, and students continued to harass him.
In April 2016, one of Tedeschi’s students went on a 16-tweet tirade about him, writing on Twitter: “Let’s not forget I have screenshots that can end you.” The student attached a photo from Tedeschi’s dating profile.
Tedeschi said the student’s tweet was “public blackmail” and “a threat” that declared Tedeschi could be fired because he is gay.
Tedeschi brought the student’s tweets to the principal, and asked for him to be punished. The student received two Saturday detentions, Tedeschi said.
“It was a slap on the wrist,” he said.
Tedeschi said administrators could have prevented “the culture of harassment.”
“They were just watching it play out,” he said. “I was having anxiety attacks before I went to class. It just completely undermined my authority as a teacher and made me feel small. … This unnecessarily pitted me against my students, which never should have been the case.”
The harassment from students continued to happen in his classroom this school year, Tedeschi alleged, but he continued teaching.
Then, during a class this spring, a student unexpectedly shared sensitive information involving other students. Tedeschi said he didn’t know the student was going to share the information, told her she should report it to the administration and also reported the incident himself to a counselor at the school.
Latko subsequently called Tedeschi out of class to discuss the incident, and reprimanded him for “allowing the discussion to go on,” he claimed. St. Ignatius administrators declined to answer questions about the incident.
Later that week, in March, the principal informed Tedeschi that St. Ignatius was not going to renew his contract.
The school gave him the opportunity to finish out the school year, but after he discussed his departure with a colleague, the school called him to say that his employment was being terminated immediately. In exchange for the rest of his salary he would have earned over the semester, school administrators urged him to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but Tedeschi declined, he said.
Tedeschi said he was told he was being fired because he showed poor judgment posting photos online and didn’t stop the classroom conversation involving the sensitive information. He said he was also told he was negative and undermined authority — although administrators declined to elaborate to him on these charges or provide further details in writing.
He said that no one told him directly that he was fired because of his sexual orientation.
St. Ignatius administrators declined to answer DNAinfo’s questions about why Tedeschi was fired, but in a statement released Thursday said the teacher was not fired because of his sexual orientation.
Tedeschi contends he received positive reviews from the school’s leaders in his four years at St. Ignatius, and his employee file contained no disciplinary complaints.
Tedeschi said he believes he was really fired because he is gay and the school was embarrassed by the “outing” and subsequent fallout. He also believes the school administrators fired him “in retaliation” for complaining about the harassment he experienced at the school.
St. Ignatius administrators declined to answer general questions about the school’s hiring practices, specifically whether they hire, and allow, gay teachers to work at the school.
“The questions that you raise touch upon issues that are taken seriously by our school,” Bergin said in a statement. “Saint Ignatius College Prep has as its core mission a diverse community dedicated to educating young men and women for lives of faith, love, service and leadership. Through outstanding teaching and personal formation, the school challenges its talented student body to intellectual excellence, integrity, and life-long learning and growth. Inspired by the gospel of Jesus Christ, this community strives to use God’s gifts to promote social justice for the greater glory of God.”
Tedeschi said that he was “outed” to the school through no fault of his own and that if St. Ignatius doesn’t want to hire gay teachers, the school’s policies should explicitly express that. While the Jesuit school is part of a “more open-minded order,” some leaders at the school believe that same-sex relationships conflict with Catholic teachings, he said.
“It’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, because they are worried about negative fallout,” he said. “I never would have taken this job if I thought this could happen to me.”
St. Ignatius has other gay faculty members and gay students, but it’s “kind of hush-hush,” Tedeschi’s former colleague said.
“I don’t think he was necessarily targeted [from the beginning] because he was a homosexual male, but because there was too much attention being called on Matt being gay,” the source said. “It was creating too much trouble” for the administration, the former colleague said.
“The fact that he was fired still leaves me scratching my head,” his former colleague said. At a school that preaches social justice, “Matt tried to advocate for himself, and he was [reprimanded] for it until he was told to leave.”
Juan Perea, a Loyola University law professor who specializes in employment law, said religious institutions are afforded some employment exemptions under the law, including a ministerial exemption that states that churches and other religious institutions can discriminate against others in favor of hiring Catholics over non-Catholics, for example.
Under the exemption, ministers are not protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that an employer can’t hire or fire a person based on an individual’s “race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
By the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s definition, ministers can include employees “that conduct religious ritual, worship or instruction.”
Under federal law, it is a relatively new finding that sexual orientation can count as a form of sex discrimination, Perea said. For decades, the federal circuit courts regularly rejected claims of LGBTQ discrimination under Title VI.
But the U.S. EEOC’s view of sex discrimination began to change under the Obama administration, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit — the court that governs Chicago — agreed last month that a lesbian professor can bring a lawsuit against her former employer Ivy Tech Community College.
“The law is changing right now on all of these issues,” he said.
A private, coed Jesuit high school, St. Ignatius College Prep was founded in 1869.
Support for gay marriage in the U.S. has reached a new high, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.
Sixty-four percent of respondents said marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by the law as valid, the survey found.
The percentage increased slightly from last year, when 61 percent of Americans said same-sex marriage should be legal.
The poll found 71 percent of independents and 74 percent of Democrats support same-sex marriage.Slightly less than half of Republicans, 47 percent, back it.
Sixty-five percent of Catholics and 55 percent of protestants and non-Catholic Christians support gay marriage, Gallup found.
Seventy-two percent of Americans say same-sex relations should be legal, up slightly from last year.
The poll was conducted from May 3 to 7 among 1,011 adults. The margin of error is 4 percentage points.
Abigail Eltzroth was ordained Sunday in Asheville by the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests.
By Tim Funk
An international group defiantly opposed to the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests Sunday ordained its first woman Catholic priest in the 46 counties that make up the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte.
The ordination ceremony for Abigail Eltzroth happened in Asheville at Jubilee! – a nondenominational faith community – with Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan presiding.
“It’s time for a change and we’re in the forefront, leading the charge,” Eltzroth told the Observer on Sunday. “We expect that eventually everybody is going to follow us.”
Eltzroth said, she now plans to to start a Catholic worship community in the Asheville area.
But reached for comment Sunday, David Hains, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, said: “I hope that Catholics in the diocese will understand that it would be sinful to receive a fake sacrament from a woman priest and that includes attending a fake Mass.”
According to a news release about the Sunday ordination from the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests, 250 women in 10 countries have been ordained as Catholic priests. In the United States, it said, women priests serve in 65 “inclusive churches.” That includes women priests affiliated with the association and with a second allied group – Roman Catholic Women Priests – that has the same mission.
Several major Protestant denominations have women clergy, including the Episcopalians, Lutherans, United Methodists and Presbyterians. And most American Catholics say they’d like their church to ordain women, too. A Pew Research Poll in 2015 found that about six in 10 American Catholics said they favored allowing women to be Catholic priests.
But the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy has stood by its longtime prohibition against women becoming priests.
Not only that. In 2007, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the blessing of then-Pope Benedict XVI, decreed automatic excommunication against anyone “who attempts to confer a sacred order on a woman, and the woman who attempts to receive a sacred order.”
Excommunication means the person cannot receive the sacraments or participate in the liturgy unless he or she repents.
Citing Jesus
Pope Francis, who has proven to be more liberal than Pope Benedict on some issues, briefly raised hopes among Catholic reformers when he established a commission to study whether women could be ordained as deacons. Catholic deacons cannot celebrate Mass or hear confessions, but they do perform some priestly functions, including marrying couples, baptizing babies and others and giving homilies, or sermons, during Mass.
But, when asked last year about the prospect of female priests in the next few decades, Pope Francis said the church’s teaching banning women priests was likely to last forever.
He said Pope John Paul II had the “last word” on the issue – a reference to a 1994 apostolic letter that said ordaining women was not possible because Jesus chose only men to be his 12 apostles.
But Bridget Mary Meehan, a Florida-based bishop with the Association of Roman Catholic Priests, pointed to Mary Magdalene, also a major disciple of Jesus in the Gospels.
“The risen Christ appeared first to Mary Magdalene, not to (apostle) Peter, and called on her to announce the good news of Christianity – the resurrection being the central message of Christianity,” Meehan said. “Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles.”
The association also claims that their ordained women priests are true priests because a male Roman Catholic bishop, acting as a spiritual descendent of those first apostles, ordained their first women bishops.
On its web site, the group says that “we stand in the prophetic tradition of holy obedience to the Spirit who calls all people to discipleship. The movement began with the ordination of seven women on the Danube River in 2002. Today there are (250) women priests and 10 bishops worldwide.”
Catholic convert
Eltzroth, the woman who was ordained Sunday, grew up Presbyterian but became a Catholic in her 50s. “It’s the most ancient tradition,” she said of Catholicism. “It’s the tradition that we all look to. Everybody looks to what the pope and the Catholic leaders are doing.”
Her resume includes several pastoral jobs: jail chaplain in Saginaw, Mich.; pastoral associate on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana; and pastor to two churches in the sand hills of Nebraska.
Eltzroth, who is divorced, is the mother of two grown children.
She said she sent an invitation to her ordination to Bishop Peter Jugis, who heads the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte. She received no response.
Asked about Pope Francis, Eltzroth said, “He’s a great leader. I’m very pleased with his stands on social justice. I hope the same social justice will be brought not only to the civil world but to the the religious (Catholic) world, too.”
As for the threat of excommunication, Eltzroth said: “I’m sure that I will be (excommunicated) if I haven’t been already. But there are plenty of saints who have been excommunicated. So that’s not going to stop us.”
An Anglican vicar who became the first in Britain to marry his same-sex partner has announced he is quitting as a minister in the “institutionally homophobic” Church of England.
Father Andrew Foreshew-Cain, a member of the ruling General Synod, is leaving his church in north London to move to the Peak District with husband Stephen, but will not seek another parish as he said he was told he wouldn’t be given one.
“I’m resigning my parishes and won’t be a licenced minister anymore and, because I’m married to Stephen, it was made clear to me that I wouldn’t get a licence for a new church,” he told The Independent.
“In the normal run of things, I’d be looking for a parish up north but I can’t have one because of the institutional homophobia of the Church of England.”
At 53, Father Foreshew-Cain agreed he was young to retire but said it had become “wearisome” to constantly fight prejudice.
Officially, the Church forbids same-sex marriage for its clergy, but his was “tolerated” in his north London parish in a way he said it would not be in many parts of the country.
Having worked in the Church for 30 years – 27 of them as a priest – he said his overriding feeling now was one of “relief” as he waits to conduct his final service at St Mary and All Souls in West Hampstead in July.
“The Church of England is an organisation which is primarily institutionally homophobic, which has policies and statements which are harmful to LGBTI people, and I’m looking forward to not being responsible to an organisation which treats gay and lesbian people quite as badly as it does,” he said.
He stressed he still had his faith and would carry on going to church. He hopes to remain a campaigning voice for greater equality in the Church.
“There is a kind of pressure in being paid by an organisation which just treats you so badly, and you just have to keep on taking it because that’s how you make a living,” he said.
“I don’t know any of my gay and lesbian friends who intend to stay in the Church until the end of their working lives.
“Most of us are supposed to go on until we’re 68, but all of the gay clergy seem to want to take early retirement … I think it’s wearisome, actually, to be constantly the focus for other people’s nastiness.”
The two men show off their rings at their wedding, which is not officially recognised by the Church of England
Father Foreshew-Cain said he had been told he can’t be a “true Christian” and be married to a man by a senior cleric.
But he stressed that, in contrast to some senior Anglicans, his own congregation had been “wonderful” and very supportive.
“The problem lies in a small sub-section of the Church which is profoundly nasty and homophobic and in a leadership which is institutionally homophobic and refuses to accept that it is,” he said.
He said that while there has undoubtedly been real progress in his three decades working for the Church, there remained some way to go before true equality was achieved.
“I don’t expect to be able to see all marriages being celebrated in Church of England parishes for a long time yet. Although I do think there will be thanksgiving services and celebrations for gay marriages, I don’t think it will be full equality.”
Father Foreshew-Cain said his final message for the Church would be that there are risks associated with failing to move with the times.
“It has to truly be the Church of England and not just the church for the minority of people within it, and that means welcoming LGBTI people – or it will eventually become an irrelevance.”
