CT Blue

A couple of days ago I expressed a bit of amazement about the fact that the Cardinal of Boston didn’t just order a Catholic school district in his jurisdiction to reverse a decision to discriminate against a child whose parents are lesbians, despite the fact that the Cardinal said he disagreed with the decision. This seemed to run afoul of time honored Catholic teaching, recognized in our law, that the Church is a hierarchical institution-indeed, perhaps the most hierarchical major institution in the present day world.

Well, it looks like the Church is officially abandoning that hierarchical status, at least when it doesn’t suit its purpose (via Truthdig, from the London Times Online):

The Vatican will today make its most detailed defence yet against claims that it is liable for US bishops who allowed priests to molest children, saying bishops are not its employees and that a document from 1962 did not require them to keep quiet.

The Vatican will make the arguments in a motion to dismiss a federal lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds filed in Louisville, Kentucky, but it could affect other efforts to sue the Holy See.

Jeffrey Lena, the Vatican’s lawyer in the US, said the Vatican would assert that bishops are not its employees because they are not paid by Rome, don’t act on Rome’s behalf and are not controlled day-to-day by the pope — factors courts use to determine whether employers are liable for the actions of their employees.

Mr Lena said he would suggest to the court that it should avoid using the religious nature of the relationship between bishops and the pope as a basis for civil liability because it entangles the court in an analysis of religious doctrine that dates back to the apostles.

“Courts tend to avoid constructing civil relationships out of religious materials,” he said.

Well, actually courts often have no choice but to construct civil relationships out of religious materials. Consider questions that arise when a local church decides to break away from the mother ship, as happened with the Anglicans here in Groton recently. The Anglican Church, like the Roman Catholic, is hierarchical, so the courts have generally ruled, as the court did in the case of the Groton Church, that regardless of who holds paper title the land belongs to the Mother church. Contrariwise, if the Church is congregational in nature. And, at least according to this Catholic website, the church’s hierarchical structure was laid down as a matter of religious dogma by the Big Guy’s son himself¹ .

The opposing lawyer, by the way, says he doesn’t have to prove that the Bishops were “employees”, merely that they were wholly controlled by the Pope and his co-conspirators, which they undoubtedly are. I wonder…if this gets to the Supreme Court, do Scalia, Thomas and the rest of the Catholics have to recuse themselves, and leave it to the Jews to decide if the Pope can be deposed?