CALIFORNIA
Think Progress
BY JACK JENKINS POSTED ON FEBRUARY 7, 2015
The Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco is attracting criticism after issuing a new handbook for Catholic high school employees instructing them to refrain from “visibly” contradicting the Church’s teachings on homosexuality, birth control, and abortion.
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone unveiled the new language for the 2015-2016 faculty handbook earlier this week, announcing that all parochial school employees — including non-Catholics — will be expected to comply with church teachings. The language listed and reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to a variety of things including same-sex marriage and abortion, and compelled to school staff not to refute these positions in public.
“…administrators, faculty and staff of any faith or of no faith, are expected to arrange and conduct their lives so as not to visibly contradict, undermine or deny these truths,” the statement read. “To that end, further, we all must refrain from public support of any cause or issue that is explicitly or implicitly contrary to that which the Catholic Church holds to be true, both those truths known from revelation and those from the natural law.”
In a pastoral letter accompanying the release, Cordileone, who also played a key role in helping drum up support for California’s 2008 ban on same-sex marriage known as Proposition 8, insisted that the new language did not “target for dismissal from our schools any teachers, singly or collectively.” But he still cautioned against defying the rules, saying, “Dissenting from Catholic teaching or the natural moral law in a Catholic high school does not promote holiness, virtue and evangelization.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.