Time To Fire Some Ministers

 

CNA Staff, Jul 8, 2020 / 08:55 am MT (CNA).- The Supreme Court on Wednesday delivered a long-awaited religious liberty decision on the right of religious schools to hire and fire teachers. The court found in favor of two Catholic schools in California, ruling that a “ministerial exception” to government interference applies to teachers in religious schools. 

The ruling came in the consolidated cases of Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James Catholic School v. Biel. The justices ruled in a 7-2 decision that teachers at Catholic grade schools qualified for the “ministers exception” established by the court in the 2012 Hosana Tabor case. 

 

Meanwhile in New York... 

 

                                                                      Joanne Parotta

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Sep 5, 2020 / 04:12 pm MT .- Teachers from schools in the Archdiocese of New York have filed a labor complaint, saying they were not properly involved in negotiations regarding reopening, and were not kept informed about procedures.

The complaints were filed with the New York Public Employment Relations Board.

“These teachers need to feel safe,” said Joanne Parotta, the head of the Federation of Catholic Teachers Local 153, the union for the archdiocese’s teachers. “And right now, they really don’t. We don’t feel safe. It’s too quick.”

 

 

Papist Alert!!!

President Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the Supreme Court. We all know what THAT means!

The Trouble With Augustinians, Part 1

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- President Donald Trump has the chance to reshape the Supreme Court by filling the vacancy created by Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement.

Replacing Kennedy, who is Catholic and has been on the court since 1988, with anyone on his list of potential nominees will probably turn the court to the right on social issues and leave it about where it is on economic issues, according to legal experts who spoke to Catholic News Service.

"Kennedy was a justice who occupied the middle of the court, and he was sometimes unpredictable, but he was strongly committed to freedom of speech, federalism and gay rights," said Michael Moreland, a professor of law and religion and director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy at Villanova University, a Catholic university in Pennsylvania.

"His involvement in decisions related to gay rights is certainly the thing he's most famous for," he added

The USCCB versus the Holy Goalie

Catholic pews in the US are emptying, according to data from a recent Gallup survey, which showed that Mass attendance is down to a 39 percent weekly average over the past 10 years.
From 2005-2008, Catholics reported attending Mass on a 45 percent average within seven days, but it has since dropped 6 percent from 2014-2017.  
The average Mass attendance in 1955 was at 75 percent, which roughly consisted of all age groups. During this time period, around three in four Catholics had attended Mass within the past week.

But don't worry! United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is on the case!

 One of the highly watched cases of the Supreme Court’s current session, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, has sparked such passion that some 73 interested parties have filed amicus briefs in the matter. Among the most unusual is a brief by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops urging the court to rule against Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee who claims that a law requiring him to pay AFSCME an “agency” fee violates his rights. In an unusual move, a prominent bishop, Thomas John Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, has publicly disavowed  the conference’s position, arguing that no consensus exists among Catholics regarding an issue “on which reasonable people can disagree.” Several Catholic scholars have also contested the bishops’ arguments, especially the prelates’ startling suggestion that a ruling for Janus would “marginalize” the church’s voice on public-policy debates in the same way that the Court’s decisions on abortion and same-sex marriage have done. The Court heard arguments in Janus on February 26 and will issue a ruling before the end of its term in June.

The Holy Goalie

 
 What seems like the bishops’ effort to bend over backward to support AFSCME rankles critics like Bishop Paprocki because government unions are among the most socially liberal labor organizations, using their considerable resources—generated by compelled dues—to fight against the church on issues that have little to do with representing workers. “I don’t know specifically what Janus’ objections are regarding the union’s political work, but the public-sector union supports abortion and donates to Planned Parenthood,” Paprocki has said. In 2014, the union gave $400,000 to the organization’s PAC, which works to elect pro-abortion candidates.

Define "Imbecile"

 From a book review of  'Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck'

In 1927, American high society was swept up in a frantic religious mania. Leading politicians, intellectuals, philanthropists, educators, reporters, and scientists prophesied that the nation would be consumed by fire and brimstone in the form of “unfit” babies unless it offered up a sacrifice. The state of Virginia went before the U.S. Supreme Court, that temple of modernity, with an offering. Legendary progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes looked upon Carrie Buck, a 19-year-old imbecile with an imbecilic mother and imbecilic bastard infant, and embraced his role as Solomon. It was too late to split Ms. Buck’s baby in half, but the country could take a scalpel to Ms. Buck’s fallopian tubes. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell, an 8-1 ruling that permitted the state to forcibly sterilize deficient citizens. Eugenicists cheered, Buck’s doctors operated, Moloch smiled.

Hero to the Left, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

 The reviewer brings up an interesting point:


 Indeed, while elites converted en masse to eugenics, the one large constituency that opposed them at every turn was the Catholic Church, which countered that sterilization violated natural law. Cohen takes this opposition for granted, never exploring the meaning or roots of natural law and why it drove the church to quash sterilization in states such as Louisiana and New Jersey. Rather than confront sterilization on moral or philosophical grounds, Cohen bases his opposition on scientific grounds: Carrie Buck had a sixth grade education, sterilization alone couldn’t eliminate “feeblemindedness,” Jews, it turns out, are pretty smart (they just didn’t know English when the eugenicists gave them IQ tests). It is convenient that eugenics makes for crappy science, but what if it had checked out? Would that make it any more moral?