From the Springfield Republican:
The athletic director at Cathedral High School [Springfield, MA] lost her job this week, saying she was pressured to leave after marrying her female partner in August. Christine M. Judd, who served as athletic director and dean of students, said she is no longer an employee of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield school system after a meeting Wednesday with administrators of the Catholic high school.
The diocese says Judd resigned, but she tells the paper she is exploring her legal options. According to the article, Judd began her career at Cathedral 12 years ago as a science teacher, and rose to athletic director and then dean of students.
The church faces a relatively new reality in which same-sex couples can legally wed, and real-world situations are now facing church authorities who have to weigh various factors. Is talent alone enough to keep someone employed? Can bishops and priests preach against same-sex unions on Sunday and then reap the benefits of its gay and lesbians employees on Monday? What leads to a bigger public scandal, employing a married lesbian at a Catholic school or nonprofit, or firing her and being charged with cruel intolerance by the court of public opinion?
It would be easy to condemn one side or the other, especially when confronting a very emotional issue. But the reality is much more complex. However the church chooses to respond will hearten some and infuriate others. But it will be important for Catholics to remember that as same-sex marriage becomes more mainstream, decisions like the one made in the Judd situation will be looked at by many as intolerant and narrow-minded. This viewpoint won't be exclusive to the church's detractors, but increasingly, especially from the younger generations, from within its own ranks as well. Careers, emotional well-being, authority, legitimacy, and relevancy are all at stake. It will be important moving forward to consider very thoughtfully what the church's policies will be in cases such as this.
Michael O'Louglin
This gets back to the old question posed by Aquinas: what is worse, pain or fault? Is it worse to suffer the pain of public opinion? Or to endorse morally corrupt positions that lead others to pain?
I can't get into an agrument on here today; however, the logic presented by the blogger is faulty. Just because popular opinion - now dominated by modern relativistic thinking - is against the teaching of the church does not mean that the Church should change it's position.
Abortion is considered appropriate by large numbers of the public - should the Church embrace this practice to stay out of the crosshairs of public opinion?
Also, considering the fact that the majority of the liberal mainline Protestant churches have adopted this dogma of liberal relativism YET they continue to decline in both membership and influence in the public square.
We are called to be the salt of the earth - not to blend in with moral disintergration and confussion of the modern world...
I think that's because they ARE intolerant and narrow-minded.
The result of these kinds of punative actions will merely be to undermine understanding and acceptance of Catholic sexual teaching.
God Bless
This was a deeply unpopular stance that most other religious demoninations did not take and the majority of public opinion is against.
However, when considering the impact of birth control on STD rates, unsustainable population decreases in Western (+Japan, Russia) socities, environmental damange of estrogen in water sources, divorce, and general abstraction/degridation of human sexuality - it is not a far strech that the Church was correct in her original condemnation and prohibition.
This is much more similar a comparison than on the issue of abortion.
And, if we want to truly be thoughtful on this issue we should consider the long-term societal impacts of such actions or lifestyles, as opposed to the simple psychological or individual impacts.
The teaching on birth control has much more authority when based on an opposition to Eugenics. It gets dicier when the celibate clergy tries to judge the quality of married love when contraception is used - or when it takes a position on medical ethics while disregarding the opinion of the community of embryologists and sexual ethicists.
"However the church chooses to respond will hearten some and infuriate others. But it will be important for Catholics to remember that as same-sex marriage becomes more mainstream, decisions like the one made in the Judd situation will be looked at by many as intolerant and narrow-minded."
Without knowing the specifics of this case, the author has already made an assumption of how the church chose to respond; and has already condemned the diocese as making an intolerant and narrow-minded.
The diocese says she resigned. Judd claims she was pressured to do so and is exploring legal options. That's all the public knows at this point. Snap judgments like Mr. O'Louglin's do no good. Keep in mind that the diocese...any diocese, really...is an effective punching bag and quite a large target these days, legally speaking. To "thoughtfully consider" the church's policies, reserve judgment until those policies are clear. As of yet, at least in this specific case, they are not.