Catholic School Principal Learns $2 Million Catechism Lesson

Catholic School Principal Learns $2 Million Catechism Lesson December 26, 2014

The IVF case that generated as much heat as light earlier this month has been decided, a jury determining that the Diocese of Fort Wayne – South Bend was indeed guilty of discriminating against a female employee in firing her for seeking IVF treatments.  When I initially commented on this case, working only from a few anecdotes told from the plaintiff’s side, I wrote:

Terrible handling of the situation.  There should have been no doubt, long before Ms. Herx ever began her job at St. Vincent’s, that IVF was right out.  That this kind of moral teaching was sprung on a Catholic school teacher so late in the game is genuinely sinful.  You have to wonder about the school and what it’s teaching the kids. 

I did not realize until reading the article in the Register this afternoon just how bad things were:

The case is complicated by the fact that Herx was fired after her second round of IVF treatments. According to court documents, Herx informed the school’s principal, Sandra Guffey, in March 2010 during the first round of treatment — part of which was paid for by the diocese’s health plan — and her contract was renewed. Guffey registered no objections at the time, explaining during the trial that she had been unaware of the Church’s teaching on IVF, and only learned it reading a magazine a year later.

IVF is not a new procedure.  Here’s what the Church had to say on the question in 1987:

Nevertheless, in conformity with the traditional doctrine relating to the goods of marriage and the dignity of the person, the Church remain opposed from the moral point of view to homologous ‘in vitro’ fertilization. Such fertilization is in itself illicit and in opposition to the dignity of procreation and of the conjugal union, even when everything is done to avoid the death of the human embryo.

It may indeed have taken a while for that ruling to trickle down to the average Catholic school principal. But the Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1993 — with an index in the back — has this to say, which applies even to the most morally-restrained possible variation on IVF:

2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. the act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that “entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.”167 “Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses’ union …. Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person.”168

So you’re a Catholic school principal, and you don’t really know what’s in the Catechism?  Or how to quick look up a tricky question when your staff come to you to discuss their situation?  Or how to shoot an e-mail to your pastor and say, “Gee this Catechism is too hard for us, it has so many big words! Could you check it for us?”

Yeah, that’s the sound of me making fun. Because you know what?  As a catechist, teaching for free an hour a week to a room full of ten-year-olds, I was expected to know the answers, know when I didn’t know the answers, and know how to get them and report back.

I stand 100% behind the teaching of the Catholic Church.  But I think that if you’re going to draw some kind of moral line in the sand for your staff, it’s a matter of justice (not to mention prudence!) that you be clear and consistent on what those lines are.  That you set forth your standards early and often, and not pull the rug out from under employees who took on their job in good faith, only to be given their little Catechism lesson years down the road.

Was the Diocese of Fort Wayne – South Bend guilty of discrimination against Ms. Herx?  Well, it was guilty of something much, much worse: Utter neglect and failure in its mission to teach and proclaim the Catholic faith.

Note to bishops: Hire principals who can read a Catechism.

File:Aquinat.jpg
Did somebody call me? Because it seems like maybe your school could use some supernatural intervention.

Image by Sandro Botticelli [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


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