CALIFORNIA
SFGate
By Kevin Fagan Updated 8:20 am, Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Under pressure from parents, students and staffers at the San Francisco Catholic Archdiocese’s schools, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said Tuesday that he is reaxamining strict guidelines he proposed for teachers that would require them to reject homosexuality, use of contraception and other “evil” behavior.
Cordileone also said he is dropping an effort to designate high school teachers as “ministers,” which, under a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, would have removed government-mandated employee protections by placing them solely under church control.
Cordileone ignited a political firestorm this month when he told the nearly 500 people working in archdiocese high schools that he wanted them to “affirm and believe” strict morality clauses in an updated faculty handbook. Many teachers, parents and students objected, saying they interpreted the clauses to mean staffers could be fired for having homosexual relations, using birth control, masturbating or engaging in other actions labeled as “gravely” or “intrinsically” evil.
In an hour-long meeting Tuesday with The Chronicle’s editorial board, Cordileone said he is forming a committee of theology teachers from the archdiocese’s four high schools to go over his proposed guidelines. The committee, he said, will “recommend to me an expanded draft” and “adjust the language to make the statements more readily understandable to a wider leadership.”
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