WASHINGTON — Call it the “Estridge Dilemma”: In the era of legalized same-sex civil “marriages,” what course of action should U.S. Catholic institutions chart when an employee publicly contradicts Church teaching by being a party to such a union?

Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ Baltimore-based foreign-aid charity, struggled with this question for several weeks following the mid-April disclosure that a CRS vice president, Rick Estridge, is civilly married to a same-sex partner.

On June 3, Estridge announced his resignation from CRS, but the issues raised by his case remain highly salient. And with the U.S. Supreme Court potentially poised to make “gay marriage” a constitutional right nationwide, the “Estridge Dilemma” soon could be a problem that virtually every Catholic institution will face as they seek to live out their mission while keeping their religious identity intact.

“If the Supreme Court finds for same-sex marriage (as many expect it to do this month), it will have made an error similar to its Roe v. Wade decision,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami told the Register June 2 via email.

“The Church and other people of goodwill continue to work for an override of Roe v. Wade — and if same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, we will likewise seek to witness to the truth; and in doing so, hope to change hearts and minds so that we can renew the culture,” added the archbishop, who earlier this year reaffirmed that all employees of archdiocesan institutions must continue to conform with Church teaching following a judicial order that redefined marriage in Florida.

Archbishop Wenski, who is a member of CRS’ board of directors, did not reference CRS in his comments to the Register about the broader significance of the issue and about how his archdiocese is responding to the state of Florida’s redefinition of marriage.

But for the previous six weeks, CRS was engaged in internal discussions about how to respond to the situation of Estridge, its vice president of overseas finance, who is in a same-sex “marriage” courtesy of a 2013 ceremony in Maryland, which legalized such unions that year. The Lepanto Institute broke the story and reported that Estridge publicly championed same-sex “marriage” on his Facebook page, which was subsequently disabled.

On April 20, a CRS official confirmed to Catholic News Agency that the information about Estridge’s same-sex union was accurate, adding, “At this point, we are in deliberations on this matter.”

 

CRS President Carolyn Woo

Those internal deliberations clearly were not simple to resolve. Carolyn Woo, the president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services, said in a May 18 interview with Aleteia that CRS was “working through” the question of whether employing a senior executive in a same-sex civil “marriage” constitutes a violation of Church teaching.

Woo noted that while the Church is “very clear” that marriage occurs between a man and a woman, it’s not necessarily a settled question whether this translates into “a blanket No” from the Church in response to the question of whether employees of Catholic institutions can be in a same-sex civil marriage.

“While the teaching is clear, as it translates into practice, there has not been defined a common approach for dealing with employment, particularly when the position is non-ministerial, when the person is not a Catholic, when the agency is not a school,” Woo said. “So we’re in that area when there have been various steps forward, but not a clear path.”

Added Woo, “Civil marriage is protected by the state of Maryland and 36 other states, as well as D.C., so we’re also dealing with a new intersection between, in this case, state law and Church teaching where the practice is being defined.”

Estridge subsequently announced his resignation in a June 3 statement released by CRS (see sidebar). The statement noted that because his position “did not involve mission-related decisions … CRS did not require that position to be held by a Catholic, and Mr. Estridge is not Catholic.”

The statement further indicated that the CRS official had decided to leave as a result “of the stress this situation has caused Mr. Estridge and his family,” not because of a perceived conflict between his same-sex civil marriage and CRS’ Catholic identity. And the statement expressed CRS’ “strong objection” to the manner in which the Lepanto Institute disclosed Estridge’s marital circumstances.

 

Financial Penalties

In her May 18 Aleteia interview, Woo did not amplify the nature of the “new intersection” between civil-marriage laws and Church teaching defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. But one major possible ramification for Catholic hospitals, schools and social-service agencies that refuse to recognize same-sex “marriage” is the loss of government contracts.

Organizations like CRS, which received slightly more than $226 million in government funding in 2014, could find themselves vulnerable to government retaliation if they terminate employees in same-sex unions.

According to a May 28 report by the Center for Family & Human Rights (C-Fam), a source within the federal government told C-Fam, “The White House is quietly moving forward with a policy change that will require charitable humanitarian groups to accept LGBT applicants in order to qualify for government funding, even those religious groups that might have religious objections.”

C-Fam reported the planned policy change is an extension of President Barack Obama’s July 2014 executive order requiring similar acceptance of LGBT employees by all federal contractors. At the time, the U.S. bishops denounced Obama’s action as “unprecedented and extreme.”

The Obama administration has already shown a willingness to tie government funding to abortion and contraception, in a way that compromises the capacity of Catholic organizations to participate in federal programs. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cut its funding to the U.S. bishops’ anti-human-trafficking program because the bishops would not refer trafficking victims to the full range of “family-planning services.”

And in March, CRS joined other faith-based agencies in expressing concerns that a new federal government rule could force them to provide access to abortion-inducing “morning-after” pills and abortion for unaccompanied minors who cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Given that CRS is a beneficiary of federal funding, that spigot may suddenly turn off if they don’t hew the line that the government establishes, whatever that may be,” commented Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society.

 

Supreme Legal Threat

The difficulties facing Catholic institutions could be compounded massively if the Supreme Court rules late in June that same-sex “marriage” is a constitutional right, as many legal analysts predict.

Such a ruling could open the door to a wave of anti-discrimination lawsuits, and U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli even acknowledged the possibility that religious colleges could lose their tax-exempt status during his April 28 oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that could lead to the civil redefinition of marriage.

“The federal government has told us the religious freedom of your church, of your religious organization, is at stake. As Catholic institutions, we must take these threats seriously,” said Christiana Holcomb, litigation counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal organization.

Holcomb told the Register that the immediate threats will come through anti-discrimination lawsuits based on statutes that an increasing number of states and municipalities are enacting to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

“The Church and other morally conservative bodies face extremely serious legal problems down the road if the Supreme Court declares a constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” agreed Russell Shaw, a Catholic writer and former communications director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

 

Taking Action

The fight is evident on many fronts. In San Francisco, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is the target of an aggressive public-relations campaign because of his efforts to include language in Catholic schoolteacher handbooks affirming the schools’ fidelity to the Church’s moral teachings on sexuality.

In 2013, a judge ordered the Archdiocese of Cincinnati to pay more than $170,000 in back pay and damages to a lesbian former Catholic schoolteacher who sued the archdiocese for firing her after she became pregnant through artificial insemination. More recently, the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J., has come under fire for removing a priest campus minister from Seton Hall University after he expressed support for the “No H8” campaign advancing same-sex “marriage.”

And schools in other dioceses, including Santa Rosa, Calif., and Seattle, have become embroiled in controversies over their own efforts to strengthen Catholic-identity language in teachers’ contracts or for dismissing school employees who take public actions that contradict Church teachings regarding sexuality and marriage.

Speaking to the Register, Archbishop Wenski detailed the actions he undertook immediately following the judicial order redefining marriage in Florida.

“In January, I shared with my employees the statement of the Florida Bishops’ Conference expressing our disappointment in the judge’s ruling (which overturned a constitutional amendment approved by more than 60% of Florida voters in 2008),” he said. “At the same time, I reminded them of the code of conduct to which they have to adhere to, as outlined in their employee handbook.”

Specifically, Archbishop Wenski referenced a handbook passage warning that, for all employees, “certain conduct, inconsistent with the teachings of the Catholic Church, could lead to disciplinary action, including termination, even if it occurs outside the normal working day and outside the strict confines of work performed by the employee for the archdiocese.”

“Not every employee has to be Catholic, but every employee should support the mission of the Church,” the archbishop elaborated to the Register. “After all, Coca-Cola would not tolerate an employee promoting Pepsi products or disparaging Coke products while an employee of Coca-Cola. Why should the Church be forced to hire or employ people who would work against our vision and our mission?”

 

Cincinnati’s Experience

The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has undertaken a number of steps since the 2013 civil award to the teacher who was dismissed after becoming pregnant through IVF, an action the Church teaches to be immoral.

Archdiocesan communications director Dan Andriacco said the archdiocese thought that it had the legal right to define “who is a minister” after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in a 2012 case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that the government cannot appoint ministers or prevent religious groups from selecting their own. But a judge in the pretrial stage ruled that the dismissed Cincinnati teacher was not a minister, a finding that was a “major reason” why the archdiocese subsequently included language in its teachers’ contract specifying that teachers are ministers and that they cannot publicly advocate for positions at odds with Church moral teachings.

And earlier this year, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati changed the wording of the morality clause in teacher contracts to direct employees not to engage in “public advocacy” for causes such as same-sex “marriage,” homosexual acts and abortion. 

“What we learned is we needed to do more work to establish that we consider our teachers to be ministers, and that is a fact,” Andriacco said.

Archbishop Wenski stressed that if current societal trends continue, the issue of how to bear authentic Catholic witness will continue to be a major challenge for the Church.

“Certainly there is a growing distance between our increasingly secularized culture and the Church’s vision of the human person and the conditions necessary for human flourishing in society,” he noted. “This vision is, of course, informed by our moral teaching — as Catholics we have to understand our vision and carry out our mission (bring the Gospel to all) in a way coherent with that vision.”

Brian Fraga writes from

Fall River, Massachusetts.

 

CRS Statement About Rick Estridge Resignation

Catholic Relief Services released the following statement June 3, regarding the resignation of its vice president for overseas finance, Rick Estridge:

On April 20, a self-described Catholic defense group issued a report on Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) vice president for overseas finance, Rick Estridge. Mr. Estridge was a valued employee of CRS for 16 years. He held a technical finance position that did not involve mission-related decisions. Because of that, CRS did not require that position to be held by a Catholic, and Mr. Estridge is not Catholic. He entered into a same-sex civil marriage two years ago, when doing so became legal in Maryland. Because of the stress this situation has caused Mr. Estridge and his family, he has made the decision to leave CRS.

“After 16 years of faithful service to CRS’ mission around the world, I have decided to resign from CRS,” Mr. Estridge stated in what he said would be his only public comment. “This is the right decision for me, and I thank CRS’ leadership for providing me with the space to make this determination during this difficult time. I continue to have full faith in CRS’ leadership and the organization as a whole. I thank my team and the global finance community for their hard work and dedication and have every belief that they will continue to serve with excellence.”

CRS respects Mr. Estridge’s decision and thanks him for his service. He has done a tremendous job during his years at CRS and will be missed. We are grateful that he has agreed to be available as needed for consultation to ensure a smooth transition.

CRS also wants to express its strong objection to these types of attacks and the tactics of the groups which launch them. This highly personal, public critique broadcast Mr. Estridge’s home address and used derogatory terms that are now part of the online record. This has caused great pain for many people. As a Catholic agency, CRS is committed to treating all people with the respect and compassion they deserve as children of God. We detest hurtful campaigns that do not build up, but undermine, individuals and Church agencies carrying out the mission of bringing the love of Jesus Christ to those who are suffering.

CRS is an organization with close ties to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and our Catholic identity is at the heart of our mission. We are resolute in our commitment to the Church and all its teachings, and we work in countless ways to support marriage and family life. Our board of directors and executives regularly review programs, policies and practices to ensure that these uphold our Catholic identity, as we remain true to our mission of caring for those in greatest need at the forefront of the Church’s engagement with the world.