Pregnant, unmarried, fired
"I don't understand how a religion that prides itself on being forgiving could terminate me because I am unmarried and choose to have a baby," said a teacher in a Catholic school in Queens, NY, who came to work pregnant and unmarried.
Question: Is there a difference between forgiving and condoning?
Question: She thought there would be no problem? Adolescent girls wouldn’t think it’s OK to go all the way because Miss McCusker did it, and look, she teaches at St. Rose of Lima? A teaching moment.
She called in the NYCLU, which filed with the EEOC:
The complaint charges that the school's policy is sex discrimination since only women can become pregnant and thus be charged with violating a doctrine against premarital sex.
This is brilliant. Only men have penile organs, so exposing one as cause for dismissal penalizes (!) a man unfairly because you can’t penalize (!) a woman for doing it because she doesn’t have one?
Busy, busy, busy they are with problems threatening the foundations of our society. And busy is this teacher who will teach her old school a thing or two by calling on the state to interfere with the church.
Music hath charms
“The prose and music emanating from the church left me mesmerised,” says Rev. Matthew Das, S.J., a convert from Hinduism and the first Assamese to be ordained a Jesuit priest. He joined the Jesuits in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1992, was ordained Nov. 20. His first assignment is to Assumption Church, in Kathmandu.
He intends to “use the spirituality of Church music to strengthen Nepali culture” — a typical Jesuit response going back centuries at least to the Italian Matthew Ricci, who went Chinese in a big way in the late 16th century.
Assam presents itself to tourists as “the gateway to the north eastern part of India.” It’s just east of Bhutan, which is just east of Nepal.
Das’s family opposed his conversion at first but now are proud as punch, says a Jesuit superior, quoted in The Telegraph of Calcutta.
Jesuits in Alaska
Very bad news out of Alaska, where Jesuits have had to pay $1 million so far for sexual abuse of various women and girls by one priest, for a total so far of $7.5 million. See The Oregonian and the Tacoma News-Tribune.
More on this from the Oregonian story: the Oregon provincial is “asking priestly communities to reduce expenses.” As things are shaping up, this won’t cover it, however: "If all the claims come though in million-dollar increments, we'll be in trouble," said Rev. John D. Whitney.
Many years ago in Wilmette, IL, a Jesuit rector, former high-ranking Army chaplain in WW2 and accomplished man in many respects, lost sleep for the first time in his life as he faced loss of a new school because of financial difficulties. (He saved the place.) This Fr. Whitney has to be in the same boat.
SOMETHING FOR ALL SOULS DAY
The rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say, is that the good-guy priest mentioned yesterday was himself accused, the mother thinks falsely. She and others knew about the molester, as recounted here yesterday. But nobody reported the good guy, seven or eight years older and now also dead. Indeed, the mother remembers him as "a holy guy, innocent." She had him as her regular confessor. As said yesterday, he characterized the molester as "nuts" on grounds of his sex survey of junior-high boys.
But he was among priests named in recently settled civil suits. The mother thinks the accuser got names wrong or details confused "after all these years." He wasn't "a cagey guy or slick." She wonders how deep the archdiocese will dig to clear his name, "rather than settle and get it over." She doesn’t understand why most accusers are not identified, being now in their mid-30s and 40s. As much as she is repelled by her memory of the one priest, she is abashed by the besmirching of the other’s reputation. "These were quite different men," she said, "and now they are painted with the same grisly brush."
SOMETHING FOR ALL SAINTS DAY
Consider this account of a priest molester of 30 or so years ago, now dead. As a young priest he did a sex survey of the 7th- and 8th-graders in the parish school, posting results on the rectory stairway.
"The guy's nuts," said another young priest, showing the poster to a school mother.
He would beckon boys out of class one by one into the coach’s room, a secluded area, where he had the boys "drop their pants," as some of them told the girls, among whom was this woman’s daughter. "She told me the boys would slide down in their seats when he came to the door and wiggled his finger at one of them."
The teacher had no authority in the matter. No parent complained. The principal informed the pastor, who said it was being taken care of. But nothing was done. The woman confronted him in the coach's room one day and told him if he ever took her son, a fifth-grader, into his "office," she would call the police. He "smirked" at her.
When the man was outed recently, another mother, whose family had taken this priest with them on camping trips, had been certain her son was NOT the boy who brought the case against him. But once his case hit the papers, her son told her what he had not even told his wife – exactly what this priest had told the boys to do once they "dropped their pants" – besides whatever took place on the trips.
The priest later headed the archdiocesan marriage tribunal, where people go for annulments. He died in middle age. His case was recently one of many suits settled by the archdiocese.
The account is by a highly trustworthy and knowledgeable woman. It’s offered here as an object lesson for us all. May the saints preserve us.
