SOME REVEALS by GARLIA CORNELIA JONES-LY
OCTOBER 6, 2014 3:54 PM
I had been raised Catholic. I was one of the first female altar servers when girls were permitted, and I enjoyed Mass as an involved parishioner throughout graduate school in Ny. But like many people, I questioned some of the teachings of the Catholic Church from the young age.
So when I first heard what happened to Barb Webb, the teacher at my former high school, I was shocked - and then I wasn’t.
Microsoft. Webb is a married lesbian who taught for nine years at Marian High School, an all-girls Catholic school in the affluent Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. In August, she informed the school administration that she was expecting. Ms. Webb said that she offered to take a leave of absence during the girl pregnancy, but that the school told her she could resign or be dismissed. She refused to resign, and the school administration fired her, citing the violation of the morality clause in her contract.
The response from numerous in the Marian community was outrage.
The response from the school for many several weeks was silence.
I do not personally know Ms. Webb. She wasn’t the chemistry teacher or Freshman Volleyball Coach; in fact , she didn’t teach in Marian when I was a student there. Ms. Webb and I have never met, yet I feel acutely connected to her. I am a mother, as Ms. Webb is going to be early next year. I am an alumna of Marian, as is Ms. Webb, in a way. And I have been pregnant with uncertain employment. I took Ms. Webb’s shooting personally. How dare the president of Marian, a woman I had once adored, do such a thing to an expectant mother?
The sense of shame I experienced for the halls I once walked in dissipated as I joined both teachers and non-graduates of Marian in a social media movement supporting Ms. Webb. We wasn’t the only member of our community to be angered - far from it. When i have had a distant relationship with the Catholic Church for a few years now, I had been one of many who had hoped for better from two establishments - my school and also the church I grew up in and still loved. The values of the Catholic Cathedral will always be within me and are passed onto our children. What has happened along with Ms. Webb, and to other teachers in similar circumstances, has pushed me personally to look closely at my feelings about the Church, as part of my past, and something I am going to talk with our children about in the future.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. During my mature year at Marian, I wrote a pro-gay-marriage paper in a required “Social Justice” course. Not everyone at Marian is Catholic, just like not everybody at Marian is heterosexual, and as an LGBTQ ally, I was proud of things i had written and equally excited to have one of my favorite teachers lead the class.
I am going to never forget how fast my heart began beating when it was returned in my experience with a failing grade and a note written in red at the top explaining which my opinion was not the view of the Catholic Church. I knew that, of course. What I hadn’t fully realized was that this school, where I had learned so much of exactly what made me who I was, required me to share that view or pay the cost. Was I seeing things clearly? Or were they?
However shocked I had been, I stood by what I had written. I had been naïve in assuming that marriage equal rights was a social justice matter for the Church despite the doctrine. Some part of me personally hoped that the idea of equality created an opening for discussion, or at least, that my personal favorite teacher would hear me out.
While my paper affected my course grade, it wasn’t damaging enough to alter my life. Ms. Webb seems to have created some of the same assumptions I did when I turned in that paper - that a cathedral that counts among its most important principles the command that each of us “love thy neighbor” would place blind adherence to doctrine over an individual person in the community’s welfare.
She is far from the only person to make that mistake; there are lots of stories of gay and lesbian teachers at Catholic schools who neither hide neither trumpet their identity, who are fired after actions that make it more difficult for the colleges to turn a blind eye.
My grade on my social justice paper experienced like a personal attack. But it wasn’t. The school, and the church, would likely say that the actual firing of Ms. Webb wasn’t “personal” either. But when I consider the children, the religion in which to raise them, and our coming choice regarding whether to send them to Catholic school, I find myself wishing the cathedral would be more personal, and take into account the people who are part of it, and the global local community of which we are a part today.
There are signs that the sisters of the Servants from the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the order that sponsors Marian High School, tend to be listening. The order’s president, Mary Jane Herb, issued this statement in order to alumnae:
These are challenging times and times in which we feel that God’s Nature is working with us, encouraging us to respond to the signs of the times in innovative ways. James Martin, SJ, reflecting on Pope Francis’ teaching, the Joy of the Gospel, states, “Pope Francis is challenging himself - and us - along with three questions, each of which flows naturally from the other: First, Why not take a look at things from a new perspective? Second, why not be open to doing things within a new way? And third, Why not have a new vision for the church? ”
I feel as if I’ve been asking those questions, along with many Catholics associated with my generation, for a long time. Questions, I hope that someday, my children - as well as Barb Webb’s - aren’t still asking.
View the original article here
No comments :
Post a Comment