A controversy that has been ongoing for the past several days involves Mons. Salvatore Cordileone, Archbishop of San Francisco, known for his orthodoxy, who has decided to remind the teachers of the city's four diocesan Catholic high schools that they are teaching in Catholic institutions and are therefore dutybound to uphold Catholic doctrine. And he wants the reminder made clear in a new handbook for the faculty as well as in all forthcoming teacher contracts. It is probably unprecedented for a bishop to do this, but if his archdiocese is funding and running the schools, he is certainly well within his rights to be explicit about requiring all the school's faculty and personnel to commit themselves to upholding Catholic doctrine, particularly in terms of sexuality, marriage and the family - subjects on which the teachers insist they and their students ought to have the freedom to make their own decisions. The following article summarizes the issue and the reactions so far...
City of San Francisco tells archbishop
his Catholic school reform is discriminatory
Legal action being considered, even as 80% of the city's Catholic high school teachers
protest inclusion of Catechism guidelines in faculty handbook and New faculty contracts
by Lisa Bourne
SAN FRANCISCO, March 6, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors says
the archbishop’s effort to ensure the city’s Catholic schools uphold their faith is discriminatory, and one member of the board says the city is considering legal action.
At the same time, a reported 80 percent of teachers in the archdiocese’s four Catholic high schools have sent a petition to Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone that accuses him of fostering “mistrust and fear.”
“We believe the recently proposed handbook language is harmful to our community and creates an atmosphere of mistrust and fear,” the letter said. “We believe our schools should be places of inquiry and the free exchange of ideas where all feel welcome and affirmed.”
Organizers report that 355 teachers from Sacred Heart Catholic Prep, Serra High School, Archbishop Riordan, and Marin Catholic have signed the petition, according to CBS San Francisco.
The archdiocese announced plans in early February to add language from the Catechism of the Catholic Church spelling out Church teaching on sexual morality into faculty handbooks for the purpose of clarifying the long-standing expectation that Catholic school teachers uphold Church teaching and not publicly contradict it. Three new clauses clarifying the same were also proposed for teacher contracts in the four archdiocesan high schools.
Part of the opposition was over the idea of classifying teachers as ministers, which some fear would make it more likely for teachers to face discrimination. The archbishop has said they would not be defined as ministers, but the word ministry would be part of the contract language.
The archbishop has stressed throughout that the efforts to preserve Catholic principles in the schools are not meant to target anyone.
Earlier this week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution calling Archbishop Cordileone's efforts to preserve the Church’s moral teaching "contrary to shared San Francisco values of non-discrimination, women’s rights, inclusion, and equality for all humans."
The resolution pressed the archdiocese "to fully respect the rights of its teachers and administrators, and pursue contract terms with ... educators that respects their individual rights, but also recognizes
the informed conscience of each individual educator to make their own moral decisions and choices outside the workplace."
[[But in this case, their workplace is a Catholics school, in which they have no right to impose 'their own moral decisions and choices'!]
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, supervisor Mark Farrell, who is Catholic, says “city officials are considering legal action to prevent what [Farrell] described as Cordileone’s discriminatory measures from going into effect.”
Eight San Francisco-area lawmakers sent Archbishop Cordileone a letter February 17 telling him his efforts “conflict with settled law, foment a discriminatory environment, violate employees’ civil rights, send an alarming message of intolerance to youth, infringe upon personal freedoms, and strike a divisive tone.”
Archbishop Cordileone wrote the lawmakers back, asking whether they would hire a campaign manager "who advocates policies contrary to what they stand for, and who shows them and their party disrespect."
“My point is: I respect your right to employ or not employ whomever you wish to advance your mission,” said Archbishop Cordileone. “I simply ask the same respect from you.”
Two of the Democrat legislators then called for an investigation of working conditions at the archdiocesan high schools by the California Assembly Labor and Employment Committee and Assembly Judiciary Committee.
A high-profile PR strategist was hired last month by as-of-yet unidentified individuals to counter the archbishop’s efforts in the court of public opinion. It’s not clear whether this week’s petition and related media coverage are a result of that.
“This language in this judgmental context undermines the mission of Catholic education and the inclusive, diverse and welcoming community we prize at our schools,” said Sacred Heart Cathedral teacher Jim Jordan, who was among those who organized the campaign. “It is an attack not only on teachers’ labor and civil rights, but on young people who are discovering who they are in the world.”
The Cardinal Newman Society, which promotes and defends Catholic education, said the petition underscores the need for Archbishop Cordileone to be doing precisely what he is doing to defend Church teaching in the schools.
“These protests against common-sense policies only confirm the great need for Archbishop Cordileone’s efforts to shore up his schools’ Catholic identity,” Adam Wilson, the Cardinal Newman Society’s director of communications, told LifeSiteNews.
“The Archbishop is doing a service to students, but these protesting teachers pose a serious threat to students’ Christian formation.”
Sign a petition to support San Francisco Archbishop Cordileone!
https://www.lifesitenews.com/petitions/i-stand-with-archbishop-cordileone
To affirm truth in the Church today,
one needs a Cordileone
by Riccardo Cascioli
Editor
Translated from
March 5, 2015
Cordileone (heart of a lion): Destiny gave this surname to the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, who has decided to defy the LGBT juggernaut armed only with the
Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In fact, Mons. Cordileone did something very simple: he circulated a document saying that in Catholic schools, teachers are required to observe behavior and teaching in line with Catholic morality. Accordingly, as Metteo Matzuzzi points out in
[Il Foglio, they cannot tell students that “homosexual acts are not against natural law”, that contraception is “not intrinsically negative”, and that research using embryonic stem cells is “a great scientific breakthrough”.
If the bishop felt it was his duty to make these matters explicit – which would seem to be something all Catholics ought to know – he must have received information that statements contrary to truth and the Magisterium of the Church are being routinely affirmed and borne witness to, by the teachers at his Catholic high schools. Indeed, an uproar ensued immediately.
Beyond the reaction of
The New York Times, scandalized that Mons. Cordileone would have dared issue such a reminder in the city that gave rise to the ‘gay’ movement, and of some local legislators who accuse Cordileone of discrimination (from which one might think that in the USA, religious freedom is a thing of the past), what must make us reflect is the internal reaction: An ‘uprising’ of teachers and students who speak of ‘witch hunts’ and staged a torch parade of protest in front of St. Mary’s Cathedral, obviously trotting out Pope Francis’s ‘Who am I to judge?” as an argument!
A tempest has descended on Mons. Cordileone, who said that the document he circulated to the four Catholic high schools simply contained what is written in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church..
[In fact, those who would use the JMB/PF slogan to justify LGBT should also remember that on the occasion he said it, he added that he was ‘a son of the Church’ and advised the journalists he was addressing to check what the Catechism says about homosexuality. So, in his own way, Mons. Cordileone was facilitating the Pope's advice for his teachers – by actually quoting what the Catechism says, which JMB/PF could not be bothered to say even if it only takes one sentence - "The Church considers homosexual practices sinful because they violate natural law"]
But there’s the rub: It seems that today, in order to affirm what the Church has always taught in two millennia, one needs lionhearted courage not just to confront the world but many within the Church itself – that is the extent to which worldly thinking has penetrated into the mystical Body of Christ (the Church).
We can be sure that the anti-Catholic drift of teaching in Catholic institutions (including seminaries) isn’t confined to San Francisco, but how many bishops are there who, despite being aware of this, keep quiet and do nothing about it, if they are not themselves protagonists of such a drift?
We are equally sure that today, Mons. Cordileone does not have the sympathies of most of his fellow bishops in the Western world. Not even in Rome, at least, not from those who are seeking to steer the family synod not just towards allowing communion for unqualified remarried divorcees but also towards a change of Catholic teaching on homosexuality.
We know the stock objection: That it is useless to lay down moral rules – and what is needed is witness.
[Yes, but what ‘witness’ exactly? To allow what is, in effect, a class exemption from sin in the case of these favored categories of Catholics living in a chronic state of sin?]
But this is exactly what Mons. Cordileone is asking of this teachers: to bear witness to the truth, and Truth is Christ and what he has taught us.
“It is not he who says, ‘Lord, Lord...’ but he who does my Father’s will…”, Christ said. Not to reduce everything to moralism but to make it clear that following the will of God (which includes the indissolubility of marriage and the existence of two sexes which are complementary, not just helping the poor) is what makes my life more human.
The tragedy that we are now experiencing in the Church – and which we are being taught by the debate on the ‘favored’ issues in the family synods
[Which were the pretext for calling them, not any direct crises involving normal families, which still constitute the great majority of Catholic families today! Whereas validating the situation of RCDs and practicing homosexuals, and even unmarried cohabiting couples - a stealth addition at the last minute to those whom JMB/PF, from all indications, wishes to favor with sacramental leniency - would aggravate the trend of declining marriages (sacramental as well as civil), routine divorce and LGBT lifestyles.] – is precisely this scission of the human from the divine, in which doctrine is considered as nothing more than rules invented by men to wield power over other men.
In recent days, I came across an item about a Lenten conference organized by a Milan parish with the suggestive title, “Correct doctrine or contradicting human nature?” Whoever thought up the theme evidently does not believe that doctrine is what Jesus taught us for a true understanding of man. It shows a true and proper spiritual schizophrenia.
And yet in the Gospel, all of the encounters with Jesus are marked by clear judgment on good and evil, even as he welcomes the sinner who wishes to convert himself or who, at the very least, perceives the wound dealt to his soul by sin.
The mercy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son is shown towards the son who returns home – the son he always expected to return home – not for he who ended up tending pigs after he had squandered his inheritance in women and other diversions.
Moreover, what could be more useless than mercy bestowed on a sinner who is not even able to recognize his own sins?
[Worse, in the cases we are discussing, when the sinner is told, in effect, that he has not really sinned, and presumably, may go on living in a state which, in all other Catholics, would be considered sinful!]
What makes matters worse is the fact that whoever tries to reaffirm these rather simple and rather obvious truths, is now made an object of intimidations and calumnious accusations. In the collective imagination, Mons. Cordileone will end up in the cauldron of the supposed ‘enemies of the Pope’, a category created by that powerful lobby which, being able to count on the support of the powerful MSM – are seeking to lead Pope Francis to carry out actions and take decisions that would constitute a ‘rupture’ with the Tradition of the Church.
[Cascioli is here taking his habitual ‘normalist’ stance which assumes that despite all contrary indications, this is the best of all times for the Catholic Church and we have a Pope who would never ever change the ‘deposit of faith’ by the slightest iota. How can normalists continue to ignore that Jorge Mario Bergoglio already enforced ‘communion for everyone’ as the pastoral rule in Buenos Aires? What does it say for his Episcopal divergence from the universal Church at the time? (So much for his repeated references to ‘collegiality’ – though I suppose, as Pope, he wants all bishops to be ‘collegial’ with him, even if on this particular point, he did not think he needed to be ‘collegial’ with the universal Church.) Other bishops may have tacitly allowed ‘communion for everyone – “Do whatever you think is right, just don’t let me know” – but Bergoglio actually issued a directive to his priests. With his announced intention of giving doctrinal authority to every bishop, he would not just be diluting the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, but encouraging episcopal autonomy of the kind he practiced in Buenos Aires. Imagine the universal chaos in the Church when each bishop thinks his word is just as good as the Pope's on practically anything in his diocese?]
One must forcefully denounce the lie which would divide the Church into friends and enemies of the Pope. The true division is between friends and enemies of the Truth.
[Fine words, Mr. Cascioli, but who is it who has labeled critics of this Pope as ‘enemies of the Pope’ but the breast-beating, proudly triumphalist, and self-identified ‘friends of Pope Francis’? One must suspect they realize that ‘opposition’ to Pope Francis is growing among Catholics who write for the media and are active on the Internet, and are trying to preempt any impact they might have by intensifying their pro-JMB propaganda, which means crushing his ‘enemies’ if they can. Would Mr. Cascioli call them ‘friends of the truth’?]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/03/2015 22:03]