The Congregation for Catholic Education has suspended the Archbishop of Indianapolis’s decision to forbid Brebeuf Jesuit Academy from identifying itself as Catholic in late September. Archbishop Charles Thompson had issued his decree after the school refused to dismiss a teacher in a same-sex marriage.
“We have just learned that the Congregation for Catholic Education has decided to suspend the archbishop’s decree on an interim basis, pending its final resolution of our appeal,” the school president wrote in an email to the community in late September. “The archbishop very kindly informed me that, as a result of this temporary suspension of his decree, Brebeuf is free to resume our normal sacramental celebrations of the Eucharist.”
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, a group for LGBT Catholics, said in a statement: “We see the Vatican’s restoration of access to our church’s sacraments during the appeal process as a hopeful sign. Depriving people of access to the sacraments is deeply unjust and severely damaging to individuals and communities.” Those at Brebeuf, she wrote, “deserve to continue to be sustained by the ability to celebrate liturgy together.”
What this means is Brebeuf is free to call itself Catholic for now, pending a legal outcome. But is it indicative of where thinking in the Vatican may be going?
Perhaps not. JD Flynn of the Catholic News Agency writes that “commentators reducing it to a battle over doctrine could lead Catholics into serious confusion.” He points out that the Code of Canon Law allows the local ordinary to approve or reject teachers of religion, but not other teachers. There are, he writes, “a number of technical issues of canon law at play in the dispute between Brebeuf and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, and those issues have to do with the scope and exercise of a bishop’s authority, not with broad questions about homosexuality and Catholic identity.”
We should also bear in mind that the same office that suspended the decree, earlier this summer issued a scathing document about “gender theory” which, it said, seeks to “annihilate the concept of ‘nature’.”
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