Leaves of Peace & Justice by Vicky Otto, Companions Director, lgbt Ministry Committee Member
Throughout the documents of Vatican ii, the bishops encouraged the baptismal call of the laity. In the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church they wrote,“ The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, that through all their Christian activities they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the marvels of him who has called them out of darkness into his wonderful light( see 1 Pet 2:4-10).” Following the council, many lay men and women obtained formal training in theology and ministry to answer the call of service that they discerned for themselves. An ongoing phenomenon in the institutional Church has been the growing number of lay men and women working in the Church who serve in professional ministry. In 2011, a cara study reported that over 38,000 lay people serve the Church in salaried positions. This number has continued to grow as the Catholic population grows in the United States. The institutional Church now more than ever needs the gifts and talents that lay people can offer. Yet an unspoken and silent conundrum now is serving as a source of discouragement regarding answering the call to service.
In 2016, Jeffrey Higgins was fired as a cantor in his parish because he got married. Several school teachers across the country have also been fired because they got married. Susan was fired from her position as parish administrator after she reported inappropriate use of parish funds by her pastor to authorities in the archdiocese. Firings such as these have begun to surface in the media recently because in
many circumstances reporters have seen a correlation between the firings and the employee’ s sexual orientation or because the individual was civilly married to their partner. Fr. James Martin, s. j. offered a response regarding these firings that I found interesting. He wrote,“ The selectivity of focus on lgbt people and their sexual morality is, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a sign of‘ unjust discrimination.’ We choose to overlook some of the other matters because we’ ve accommodated those situations.”
While I agree with Fr. Martin that this is a justice issue, I disagree that it is exclusively an lgbt issue. I have served in the Church for many years and have witnessed lay people being fired for reporting inappropriate behavior of pastors or other clergy, single people being fired for living together before they were married, or those who were divorced and remarried without obtaining an annulment. I have also witnessed men and women being fired because they have spoken out or written, or participated in demonstrations that challenge the teachings of the institutional Church. The situations also change if the employee is a man or a woman, with different standards set for both. While every bishop across the country may determine how the varied teachings of the Church are interpreted and how these rulings affect the personnel in each of the churches, the wide variation of these interpretations create an environment where in one diocese the actions of an employee may be accepted while in another it is grounds for immediate firing. One article about lay workers in the Church described this environment as“ working in a mine field.”
6 • The New Wine Press • June 2018