More on hiring and firing Catholic school teachers

Over at dotCommonweal, Cathy Kaveny has a post up about the recent case out of Montana in which an unmarried teacher was fired from her teaching position at a Catholic school after she became pregnant.  As I said in an earlier post about the much-commented-upon situation in Seattle -- where an administrator at a Catholic high school was fired after he entered into a legally recognized same-sex marriage -- these are hard cases.  (Not legally hard, in my view:  I think that Catholic schools do and should have the legal right to hire and fire in accord with their understanding of their Catholic mission. Still, they are hard.)

I agree with Cathy that part of the reason these cases are hard is that we all know that teachers and administrators at Catholic schools -- like all of us -- are imperfect sinners, and we all know that Catholic schools do not refuse to hire, or fire, people because they are imperfect sinners.  We do not investigate teachers' private lives to be sure they are loving, charitable, generous, and joyful.  When people see Catholic school teachers being fired for things having to do with sex and sexuality, it can reinforce the (false) notion that all the Church cares about is sexual morality and that sexual sins are the most grave and mission-undermining.

I also agree with Cathy that the decision to fire a teacher or administrator in a case like the one she discusses should not be framed as punishment for the teacher's having done wrong.  Again, we all do wrong, and all teachers and Catholic administrators do wrong, and so if the firing is "punishment", it looks pretty arbitrary and selective.  It should not be, as Cathy says, a matter of expelling the teacher from the Catholic community, because that's not how the Catholic community works.

And yet, I think that a Catholic school has to think about the ability of a teacher to effectively and constructively participate in the school's mission of integrated formation in the faith.  It seems that (say) a teacher who (publicly) professed his or her Bill Maher-esque contempt for theism would have a hard time doing this, as would a teacher who (publicly) advocated for (say) euthanizing severely disabled infants.  What about an unmarried teacher who gets pregnant?  It seems to me that a lot would depend on what the school, and the teacher, "said" to the students and school community about a decision to fire, or retain, her.  Would the message be "this is no big deal"?  Would it be "our Catholic school believes that sexual activity is for marriage, and the teacher did the wrong thing, but she will continue teaching here anyway because, after all, we all do wrong things sometimes -- but don't follow her exampe"?  (Would it matter whether or that the teacher publicly identified what she had done as a mistake, as wrong?)  Something else?  Again . . . difficult cases.