Last month, a local college declined to renew the adjunct contract for a gay priest after administrators learned about his sexual orientation.
The college “learned” of it after a Daily News columnist wrote about the Rev. James St. George and his parish, St. Miriam, an Antioch Catholic Church — separate from the traditional Roman Catholic Church — and a reader researched St. George and forwarded what he found to the college and the Archdiocese, calling him a “heretic.”
In her Feb. 17 column, writer Ronnie Polaneczky never mentioned that St. George is gay or in a longterm relationship. She focused on St. Miriam’s ad campaign, which contrasts the church with the Roman Catholic Church and its sex-abuse scandals.
Nowhere did she mention that PGN had interviewed St. George in March of last year, where he talked about his partner Sean.
The next day, Chestnut Hill College sent St. George a letter stating his services wouldn’t be needed. He’d been expecting to find a contract requiring his signature.
In the letter, the college gave no indication of why it chose to rescind its employment offer.
According to its website, the mission of Chestnut Hill is to “provide students with holistic education in an inclusive Catholic community.”
Furthermore, the school seeks to “uphold an atmosphere of communal respect in which all may clarify and articulate personal values and beliefs while exploring the ethical and moral dimensions underlying all relationships. The college encourages inter-faith opportunities by acquainting all students with Catholicism, its theology and its Judeo-Christian roots and by engaging in dialogue with women and men of other beliefs.”
It’s curious that the college employs teachers of many different faiths, yet seems to have recanted when it comes to St. George.
The school’s actions, while disagreeable and intolerant, are also blatantly hypocritical.
They never asked if St. George was a Roman Catholic in the interview process — or if he was gay — and apparently never did any due diligence to determine if St. Miriam’s was either.
One would think someone in the administration of a Catholic institution might be familiar with various types of Catholicism — or at least familiar enough to know that it was a question that might need to be asked if it were so paramount to the school’s ideals.
And they recruited him.
Apparently, school administrators think St. George misrepresented himself.
A more accurate statement would be that the college misrepresented itself and its mission of inclusion.