Catholic homophobic campaign targets Colorado children

Posted by Robin Evans at 1:24 PM (PT)
In: religion, schools, Featured

Saturday March 13, 2010

Source: Boulder Daily Camera, KUSA 9News, Associated Press, KDVR Fox31, AD2000 (New Yorker), Huffington Post, BeliefNet, National Catholic Reporter

Demonstrators protested last Sunday at Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic church in Boulder, Colo, against a decision by the parish school to kick out two children because their parents are a lesbian couple screen-cap from Daily Camera video

About a dozen people staged a quiet and respectful protest last Sunday across the street from Sacred Heart of Jesus church in Boulder, Colorado.

“God loves all people,” declared one of the signs. Another advises, “Teach acceptance.” Another demonstrator carried a hand-scrawled sign with a biblical passage identified as “Matt 19:14”: “Jesus said, Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them…”

[see video clip of protest at the end of this post]

Sacred Heart of Jesus parishioner shares hot coffee with protesters Daily Camera screen capture

One youngster summed up things nicely for protesters when she, while holding a sign that read 'What would Jesus say?' said, “He would say let the kid go to school, even if he has two mommies or two daddies!” KDVR reports.

The demonstrators gathered outside Boulder’s oldest Catholic parish to protest a decision by the parish’s school to kick out two children because their parents are a lesbian couple, Boulder’s Daily Camera reports.

Inside the church last Sunday, its pastor, Rev. William Breslin, defended the expulsion which he called “the most difficult decision” of his life.

Some of the strongest criticism of the exclusion has come from Catholics in the Denver/Boulder area and beyond, but the decision is closely aligned with other educational decisions made in Denver by Archbishop Charles Chaput. He is one of the most notable of a new generation of bishops who justify committed activism for conservative anti-gay and anti-abortion politics through a reactionary theology.

Chaput runs a seminary in Denver that has become notorious as one of the US’s most reactionary training grounds for priests. In 2005, he told the New Yorker’s Peter Boyle that debate is not a valued lesson at the school.

“I think there’s real serious theological reflection, and we study all the issues of the time,” Chaput said of the seminary. “But we don’t see them as being equal opinions. The opinion of the Church is the opinion. The others, it’s just important to know them so that you know what the Church's challenges are.”

The two children at Sacred Heart, whose parents have been longtime members of the parish, will be able to stay at the school until the end of the current academic year, but will not be allowed to re-enroll next year, Breslin told parishioners. One child is in kindergarten and will not be allowed to enroll in next year’s first-grade class. The other is in the preschool program, but will be excluded from kindergarten next year.

“I chose to protect the faith over doing what would have looked like the loving thing to do,” Breslin said in the sermon, which was later posted to Breslin’s blog.

Catholic homophobic campaign targets Colorado children [contd.]

The protesters across the street from the church admitted that the private school has the right to exclude the children, but questioned the parish’s wisdom in doing so. “Our thought was just that silence usually means consent,” one of the protesters, Beth Osnes, told the Daily Camera. “This was just to say that we don’t agree with this policy and that—of course they have the right to keep a child from school—why would they choose to do that.”

David Ensing, chair of Boulder Pride, told KDVR, “We just came out to lend support to the couple and others who might want to put their child through Catholic school.”

Ensing noted to reporters that the parents at the center of the controversy have expressed gratitude for public support shown to them and their family, but hope to remain anonymous.

After the mass at the church, members of Sacred Heart parish walked across the street to offer coffee and donuts to the protesters, who gratefully accepted the hot beverage in their gloved hands on a chilly morning. Breslan declined to discuss the issue with the Daily Camera’s reporters.

Denver’s KUSA 9News first reported last week on the expulsion of the children. Reaction to the report was swift. On Friday, March 5, a meeting was held to discuss the issue at Wesley Chapel in Boulder, News9 reports.

“This could be one of those moments where the community is holding a mirror up to the church for it to take a look at its policy and reconsider what they've been doing,” Wesley Chapel Pastor Roger Wolsey said at that meeting.

9News reports, “Several staff members have said they are disgusted by the decision.”

The station quotes an unidentified parent with a child in the school as saying, “We’re all very hurt by this decision.”

DignityUSA, the advocacy and support group for LGBT Catholics, released a written statement Tuesday when it appeared that only one child had been excluded. “At a tender age, this child has learned that Catholic officials are willing to inflict pain on children and families,” the statement says.

“The Archdiocese has chosen to selectively enforce Catholic rules about families while trampling on core Catholic values of compassion, equality, and love. This is tragic for the family involved, and for all who turn to Church officials for moral guidance,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, DignityUSA’s executive director, in the statement.

DignityUSA and other groups have paid for full-page ads that are scheduled to run the Sunday editions of Denver Post and the Daily Camera, Associated Press reports.

“As Catholics, it is deeply hurtful to see the Archdiocese of Denver forcibly remove children from their educational programs to send a message of rejection and exclusion to those children’s parents,’ the ad reads.

The decision in Colorado to exclude a family from a church school came in the same week that the Catholic archdiocese of Washington, DC announced that it would no longer provide health-care coverage for families of the employees of Catholic Charities. The DC church said it had taken that action against all families so that it could avoid a requirement to offer coverage to a same-sex married partner of an employee. Catholic Charities takes in thousands of dollars each year in payments from the DC government to run social-service programs for the district.

In his sermon last Sunday in Boulder, Breslin suggested that the decision to exclude the family from the school had been made higher in higher levels of the church hierarchy.

Breslin said:

The choice could have been made to do nothing and allow a lesbian couple to enroll their child in our Kindergarten. But that choice would have been against Archdiocesan policy; and when a priest is ordained he promises obedience to his bishop; and I cannot violate that vow; and I will not.

Chaput, Denver’s archbishop, strongly defended the decision by the Boulder school.

“The main purpose of Catholic schools is religious; in other words, to form students in Catholic faith, Catholic morality and, Catholic social values,” Chaput wrote in a column printed last week by Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the archdiocese.

Chaput claimed that having children with LGBT parents in a Catholic school would violate church doctrine, while he also admitted that Catholic schools in his archdiocese willingly accept other children whose parents’ lives to not strictly conform to church doctrine.

He writes:

Many of our schools also accept students of other faiths and no faith, and from single parent and divorced parent families. These students are always welcome so long as their parents support the Catholic mission of the school and do not offer a serious counter-witness to that mission in their actions.

Civil divorce is not recognized by Catholic doctrine, and that means that parents who are divorced and remarried, or re-partnered in some other way, are living in what the church would regard as a state of sin. But Chaput is willing to accept that discordance with doctrine.

In his sermon last Sunday, Breslin argued that excluding the two children from the parish school is good for the children. “Actually, by this decision we really want to protect the child and his or her parents from the necessary conflict that their relationship would bring to a clear-seeing and committed Catholic community," Breslin said.

“If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad,” he said.

But there are similar conflicts that Chaput and Breslin are willing to accept, as long as the parents are willing to pay the school’s tuition. Although the doctrine has been de-emphasized since the 1960s, Catholic doctrine also declares that non-Catholics are not eligible for salvation. The children of non-Catholic parents or of remarried would be taught that their parents are living in “sin”.

Chaput writes in his column:

If parents don’t respect the beliefs of the Church, or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult, if not impossible. It also places unfair stress on the children, who find themselves caught in the middle, and on their teachers, who have an obligation to teach the authentic faith of the Church.

Breslan said,

My brothers and sisters, our school is a Catholic school and our teaching on the sanctity of marriage is as clear as a bell. So, the decision I made was based on my conviction that we needed to rest on the side of backing our beliefs and our values. We need to fight for our Catholic values because here in Boulder it seems, no one else is.

Archbishop Charles Chaput

A spokesman for the archdiocese told Associated press that schools have in the past barred children whose parents lives don’t conform to church doctrine—exclusions that have had nothing to do with sexual orientation. The spokesman did not say if diocesan schools would in the future exclude children of remarried parents.

Chaput, 65, was appointed archbishop of Denver in 1997 after serving for nine years as bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota.

In Denver, Chaput quickly went to work to wipe out vestiges of theological liberalism that had long been taught at a seminary in Denver called St. Thomas’s.

In a May, 2005 article in the New Yorker, Peter J. Boyle explained:

In the years after Vatican II, when Catholic academics felt increasingly unbound by Church teaching, St Thomas gained a reputation for being particularly freewheeling in its theological approach. Over time, some bishops became reluctant to direct their young candidates to the Denver seminary. …

When Archbishop Chaput took over, he renamed the campus the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization, and moved the archdiocesan headquarters there. In 1999, he opened a new seminary, St John Vianney, with an entirely new faculty and a markedly orthodox approach.

The new seminary’s rector is an intense forty-two-year-old priest named Michael Glenn, a West Point dropout who had avoided St Thomas Seminary himself because of its reputation - “I thought I’d have conflicts”. Fr Glenn attended Franciscan University, in Steubenville, Ohio, a campus that attracts orthodox and charismatic Catholics. He then received a bishop’s appointment to the Pontifical North American College, in Rome, an institution regarded as the Pope’s own training ground for the evangelisation of America. …

The Denver project, judging by the numbers, has been a success. There are now eighty-five seminarians studying at the former St Thomas campus.

While theological inquiry is a valued Catholic tradition, there is not likely to be much dissent on Chaput’s campus. “This is a seminary where people love the Church, and they love Jesus Christ,” the Archbishop says. “And dissent is not part of that kind of love here. I think there's real serious theological reflection, and we study all the issues of the time. But we don’t see them as being equal opinions. The opinion of the Church is the opinion. The others, it’s just important to know them so that you know what the Church’s challenges are.”

In an article printed this week by National Catholic Reporter, John L Allen Jr puts Chaput in a list of the ten most influential US bishops, even though he holds no formal position within church hierachy beyond his Denver bishopric.

Allen writes:

[Chaput] illustrates yet another way a bishop can matter: As an evangelist, an opinion-maker, a writer and speaker. Usually seen as a strong conservative, Chaput can be polarizing because he takes clear positions and defends them with relish. He’s consequential in somewhat the same way as politicians and pundits with bold views and the nerve not to pull their rhetorical punches: Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re hard to ignore.

Sometimes accused of being a traditionalist, Chaput is actually a very 21st century bishop in at least one sense: Whatever national influence he wields has almost nothing to do with formal ecclesiastical power. …

In an era in which institutional authority of all sorts has collapsed, a religious leader who wants to move opinion has to compete in a secular marketplace of ideas. Chaput does, rarely invoking “because the church says so” as an argument. In a brief talk recently on Catholic education, for instance, he never cited Ex Corde Ecclesiae, but rather Francis Fukuyama, Bill Joy, and Neil Postman, with Augustine thrown in for good measure. He called on Catholic universities to beef up their religious identity, not because the pope decreed it, but because a society of great technological prowess and a weak moral compass needs it.

As Allen suggests, Chaput has moved beyond theological issues into politics on several occasions. In an intentionally disrespectful Huffington Post column about Chaput’s exclusion of the children at Sacred Heart, Christopher Bauchli recalls one of those forays:

During the 2004 election year he said that anyone who voted for John Kerry had committed a sin that had to be confessed before the voter/supplicant would be permitted to receive communion. Charley has now come up with a new proscription that falls within the category of visiting the sins of the fathers/mothers on their children. It deals with families where there are two fathers or two mothers.

In 2008, Chaput again issued election guidelines, BeliefNet reports. He told Catholics that they could vote for Barack Obama only if they were able to explain their reasons, “with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life—which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.”

Chaput also met conspicuously—although privately—with Sen. John McCain during that campaign in which Colorado was considered an important toss-up state.

Bauchli has this suggestion for the problem that Chaput seems to now face regarding divorced parents who pay to send their children to his schools:

It seems obvious that at this point the school is going to have to send out a questionnaire to all parents since same-sex marriages are probably not the only proscriptions of the faith indulged in by parents of preschoolers. Votes for president in 2004 should be checked into. It makes little sense to say that a parent who voted for John Kerry cannot take communion but can send a child to Sacred Heart of Jesus preschool.

The questionnaire should inquire into the sexual practices of heterosexual parents. Some parents may view sex as having purposes beyond procreation and may even find those purposes amusing in a way that would greatly offend Charley. In furtherance of such practices it is possible they may take advantage of the marketplace's offerings to insure that no children are conceived as a result of those activities. It is not enough for Charley to decree such conduct to be reprehensible in its own right and to promise its practitioners untoward consequences in the hereafter. There must also be immediate consequences. Burning at the stake is not an option but expulsion from preschool of the children of the sexually frivolous is.