Celebrating 33 Years of Ministry in the LGBT Catholic Community!
Hingham, Same-Sex Marrige, and Life Issues
By James Martin
America Magazine Blog
May 17, 2010
Hingham is an affluent town on Boston’s monied "South Shore," whose Main Street, dotted with handsome white-clapboard houses, was called by Eleanor Roosevelt the prettiest street in the country. How do I know this? Because my first spiritual director, a Bostonian "by birth and by choice," when driving the novices to a vacation house owned by Boston College Jesuit Community in nearby Cohasset, always used to retell this tidbit--every time we drove through the town. “Did I ever tell you what Eleanor Roosevelt said about this street?” Yes, we would say wearily, but we would enjoy hearing him retell it with pride, nonetheless. At Christmastime, he would then invariably say, all the houses, by mutual agreement, set out white Christmas lights in their windows—rather than the (apparently) tackier multicolored ones. Hingham is an attractive town.
Recently, however, Hingham has been the focus of some not-so-attractive goings-on.
In the Catholic parish of St. Paul, the Rev. James Rafferty, the pastor, decided that an eight-year-old boy could not attend St. Paul's parochial school because his parents are lesbians. David Gibson at Politics Daily, provided a helpful overview of what quickly became a controversial decision. The case echoed the one in Boulder, Colorado, in which Archbishop Charles Chaput upheld the decision of a local parish to similarly reject a young girl whose parents were lesbians. "If parents don't respect the beliefs of the Church, or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult, if not impossible," Chaput said. In Hingham, the couple was told that their union was "in discord with the teachings of the Catholic church." "I'm accustomed to discrimination, I suppose, at my age and my experience as a gay woman," the mother told the AP. "But I didn't expect it against my child."
But the Archdiocese of Boston is handling this matter quite differently—that is, more wisely—than Denver did. Dr. Mary Grassa O’Neill, the superintendent of Catholic schools, issued a statement in which she declared (with the approval of Cardinal Sean O’Malley, I am told by a good source) the following:
The Archdiocese does not prohibit children of same sex parents from attending Catholic schools. We will work in the coming weeks to develop a policy to eliminate any misunderstandings in the future.
Since the issue involving St. Paul School in Hingham was brought to our attention on Tuesday of this week, we have met with the pastor and principal to learn more about their decision. Earlier today I contacted the student’s parent and expressed my concern for the welfare of her child. I offered to help enroll her child in another Catholic school in the Archdiocese. She was gracious and appreciative of the suggestion and indicated that she would look forward to considering some other Catholic schools that would welcome her child for the next academic year.
The Boston Globe has quoted Cardinal O’Malley, in a letter on behalf of the Catholic Schools Foundation, as saying, “We believe a policy that denies admission to students in such a manner . . . is at odds with our values as a Foundation . . . and ultimately with Gospel teaching.” (The letter came from the Foundation, which O'Malley chairs.) The quote was highlighted in a column entitled "Good call by the archdiocese." (When was the last time you saw that in the Boston Globe?)
Full disclosure: I greatly admire Cardinal O’Malley. To me, he is a wise, generous and pastoral priest and bishop. So you’ll have to take my comments with that in mind. Nonetheless, even if I weren’t an admirer, I would admire the archdiocese’s decision here.
One oddity, though: the archdiocese seems to be saying that it doesn’t have any power to influence the parish, or the pastor, in Hingham. That's odd, to say the least. Why couldn't they have simply asked the pastor to accept the child into the parish school? If this had been something regarding a liturgical abuse--say, something against the rubrics of the Mass--I doubt there would have been such leniency. That is, I doubt that the archdiocese would have recommended that a parishioner complaining about a serious liturgical abuse move to another parish. Rather, the archdiocese would have most likely exercised the authority that it has over any of its parishes.
Overall, though, the archdiocese has taken a wise and pastoral approach to a question that will increasingly face Catholic schools where children come from all sorts of marriages and unions. Does one punish a child for what the child’s parents have done? Jesus seemed to have answered that question a long time ago, when he was asked, “Lord, who sinned, this man or his parents, the he was born blind?" (John 9).
The archdiocese's decision is not only pastoral, but sensible--even practical. For how can one adequately determine if the parents of a child agree with all of Catholic teaching? Or even "respect the beliefs" of the church? Many of the parents in parochial schools in the U.S. aren’t even Catholic. How many of them are divorced and remarried? How many believe in everything that the church teaches on important matters? How many even know what the church teaches on important matters? Likewise, how many funerals of less-than-devout Catholics are celebrated? How many couples with little interest in the faith are married in Catholic churches?
Singling out children of same-sex couples smacks of targeting one particular group.
The Boston decision also stands in contrast to the increasingly heated language coming from church leaders on the topic of same-sex marriage. Pope Benedict XVI's comments last week in Fatima, Portugal, in which he stated that abortion and same-sex marriage were "some of today's most insidious and dangerous threats" to the common good seemed oddly discordant. The equation of abortion, something that clearly is about a threat to life, with same-sex marriage, which no matter how you look at it, does not mean that anyone is going to die, is bizarre. A good friend of mine, who is gay, recently resigned from a position at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he said, with great dismay, that “abortionsamesexmarriage” had become one polysyllabic word among some of his bosses.
Why has same-sex marriage been equated with abortion? Are they really equivalent "threats" to life? If you’re looking for a life issue with stakes as high as abortion, why not something that actually threatens life? Like war? Or the death penalty? Or the kind of poverty and destitution that lead to death? Why aren't “abortion and war” the most "insidious and dangerous" threats to the common good? Or “war and the death penalty”? Or “war and poverty?” The great danger is that this increasingly popular equation will seem to many as having less to do with moral equivalency and more to do with a simple dislike, or even a hatred, of gays and lesbians.
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