The curious case of the Catholic school

I had nuns for 12 years of formal education (followed by priests for four years of college). The habit of the Canadian-based religious order included long black veils with starched white cigarette-shaped protrusions resembling horse blinders around the headdress, and a tasseled rope extending from the waist that had three knots along its length. One day in the schoolyard I asked the recess monitor nun what the three knots were for. She replied, “Poverty, chastity, and obedience.”

Chastity was big when I was a schoolgirl. Of course that was just after dirt was invented. No one had to speak of lesbian chastity at the time—it was an idea still miles outside the Overton Window. Simple garden-variety heterosexual chastity was enough to deal with in the 1950s and ’60s. In ninth grade, Sister Bertha Marie taught us the word “concupiscence” in religion class, an old and certainly now obsolete word meaning lust.

Catholic schools run by nuns often avail themselves of lay teachers too, women who adhered to Catholic teachings, such as Madame Patenaude, my spinster second grade teacher to whom I owe knowledge of Roman numerals. Recently a lay teacher at Waldron Mercy Academy in Merion Station, Pa., was dismissed (after refusing to resign) because she is a lesbian and married to her partner.

I would have thought the parents of the Catholic school students would have been glad to have a fox out of the henhouse, especially since Winters was the religious studies director at the school. Instead, the ire of parents and tone of media coverage is being directed at the academy in threats of withholding tuition, well-attended vigils, and meetings in support of the fired teacher. The newspaper photos feature pre-pubescent girls holding hand-drawn posters saying “With Margie” and “WMA students stand.” (I shuddered to think that those well-scrubbed children even know what a lesbian is.)

Waldron Principal Nell Stetser explained the institution’s decision in an email, saying that although “many of us accept life choices that contradict current church teachings,” the school had to act in order to “continue as a Catholic school”—not exactly a rousing defense of biblical teaching. When the best one can do is invoke the ephemeral policies of the moment and the thinly veiled fear of losing a charter, the house of cards has all but fallen and awaits only a stiff breeze.

Pope Francis will arrive in Philadelphia in less than two months for the World Meeting of Families. Surely he will straighten this all out. Surely he will support Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput and Sister Bertha and Madame Patenaude in their defense of traditional Roman Catholic teaching? Or will he?