...for their decision not to readmit the child of a lesbian couple to Sacred Heart School in Boulder.
Many cafeteria Catholics will scream bloody murder about the school being______ (Fill in the blank: judgmental, self-righteous, intolerant, mean-spirited, etc.), but it's actually a mercy to the child. What kind of conflict is set up for a child when the school is teaching about the ten commandments and the child's "parents" are living in homosexual fornication, a mortal sin against the sixth commandment. The child is in pre-school now. Can you imagine the future including the expectation of the parents that the school should water down Church teaching to accommodate their lifestyle?
I had that problem when I was teaching fourth grade at a parochial school. One of my student's mothers was living with her boyfriend. The child's dad to whom she was married abandoned the family a few years earlier. That poor child turned from a happy, well-adjusted second grader to a fourth grader who was so filled with anger and so out of control that he tried to strangle a classmate and threw his desk over one afternoon.
I used to urge my students to be little evangelists in their own homes (without criticizing their parents, of course). When one of the children said they never went to Mass when they were on vacation I urged the class to ask their parents to take them to Mass when they were at the beach or travelling and to ask to go to Mass every Sunday. There are Catholic churches everywhere and I emphasized the great opportunity to visit other churches and see how the Catholic family is everywhere.
One of my own children was a second grader at the time and I attended first confession preparation for parents. The priest, who was a young, recently-ordained priest, told the parents that children frequently confessed missing Mass. He told the parents that he stressed to the children that it wasn't THEIR sin. They should ask their parents to take them to Mass, but if they didn't, the parents were the ones committing the sin. He urged parents not to put their children into that kind of moral conflict. If you want a Catholic education, live a Catholic life. I thanked that young priest after the meeting.
So a big public thank-you to Archbishop Charles Chaput and the administrators of Sacred Heart. Spend a minute to say a prayer for all involved in the decision and send the Archdiocese of Denver a big thank-you for upholding Catholic truth.
Address: 1300 South Steele Street, Denver, CO 80210
Phone: 303-722-4687
Email: info@archden.org
Thank you for posting the address. I however will not be writing a thank you, but a question: are they also going to expel every student whose parents are not married, who was conceived via IVF or IUI, whose parents practice birth control or whose parents admit to having premarital sex? Because if the answer to those questions is "no," then you will never convince me, a cradle Catholic with 16 years of Catholic education, that this was anything less than a publicity stunt. And if the answer is "yes" then they better hop to it. Sin is sin and this time the sin was committed to these children. Shame on them. Shame on us.
ReplyDeletePresumably the archdiocese would treat a fornicating heterosexual couple the same way since the couple would be living in public sin or a child of an abortionist.
ReplyDeleteDo you deny that the situation puts children in a terrible situation of conflict? This is not about punishing the children. They are punished enough by living in such a disordered household. How many parents would allow their little girls to visit these children and be under the influence of lesbians?
The shame is that people will use children to advance their own agenda, in this case approval of same-sex relationships.
God bless Archbishop Chaput for this policy. It is the most charitable situation possible under the circumstances.