Just a few days before the Rev. James St. George was to start another semester of teaching at Chestnut Hill College, the openly gay pastor was informed his services were no longer required — a decision stemming from his sexual orientation.
St. George, the pastor of St. Miriam in Blue Bell, taught several religion classes as an adjunct professor at the Roman Catholic college since January 2010 and was set to begin two more this week.
On Feb. 21, however, he received a brief letter from dean of continuing studies Elaine Green, who wrote, without an explanation, that he would not be granted the two contracts he had been offered for a class on justice and one on religion and culture.
“I opened that letter, and I just started crying,” St. George told PGN this week, saying he thought when he saw the envelope that it contained the contract agreements he was awaiting.
Following intense media coverage, the college posted a statement to its website saying St. George was not offered a new contract “not because he is gay but because his recent public statements regarding his long-term, same-sex partnership are at odds with the beliefs and mission of Chestnut Hill College and the Catholic Church.”
The college asserted St. George referenced his longtime partner on his blog last week when he made a passing reference to a PGN article on him published last year, in which he talked about his relationship.
St. George repeatedly tried contacting Green and other college representatives but, as of press time, no one from the school had responded to his phone calls.
St. George, 45, is an ordained priest with the Old Catholic Apostolic Church of the Americas, a denomination that branched away from the Roman Catholic Church more than a century ago and allows priests to be male or female, straight or gay, and does not require celibacy.
The college statement, issued by president Sister Carol Jean Vale, continued that St. George’s church’s acceptance of gay priests is “contrary to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.”
The issue first arose after St. Miriam was in the news a few weeks ago, when Daily News columnist Ronnie Polaneczky wrote about the church and its unique mission of providing a safe space for Catholics who feel excluded from traditional Roman Catholic communities.
Reader James Pepper, a former Archdiocesan history teacher and an attorney at Elliot Greenleaf — a firm headed by state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, who has repeatedly voted against pro-gay measures — evidently was offended by the goals of the church and on Feb. 17, the day the column was published, sent an e-mail to Chestnut Hill College administrators and Archdiocesan leaders, calling St. George a “heretic” and referring to his being openly gay.
St. George’s sexual orientation was not specifically referenced in the Daily News column, but a Google search of the pastor’s name brings up last year’s PGN article. Pepper did not respond to a request for comment.
The letter St. George received from Green is dated Feb. 18, the day after Pepper sent the e-mail. St. George was on campus Feb. 18 but said no one notified him of the pending letter.
Vale’s statement said that “it was with great disappointment” the school learned of St. George’s same-sex relationship, an admission they emphasized “came to our attention only after St. George chose to make his private life public information on his blog.” In a post published Feb. 18 in reference to Polaneczky’s column, St. George referenced backlash he faced from the story, including Pepper’s e-mail, which he suggested was motivated by the PGN story. Nowhere in the post, however, did St. George say that he was gay or in a longterm relationship with a man, issues that are addressed in the first paragraph of last year’s PGN interview.
Chestnut Hill College officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
St. George said he never hid his orientation, but also did not address his sexuality in class or in his job interview.
“In an interview you’re not going to go in and say, ‘Hi, I’m straight.’ You just don’t do that,” he said. “And I never brought it up in class because I wouldn’t want to sway my students. There’s just no place for that in the classroom, and it wasn’t germane to my teaching.”
Vale’s statement alludes to the notion that the school was unaware of St. George’s affiliation with the Old Catholic Church.
In his initial interview at the college in the fall of 2009, St. George said he asked if his not being Roman Catholic would be problematic and was told the school employs teachers of many denominations.
He said the college has changed its statement on the situation numerous times and called the latest comments “backpedaling.”
“Why has this not been an issue up until now? I did the PGN interview last year and I was working there at that time. And sometime last year, in the spring I think, the Archdiocese sent out this really nasty letter telling all their churches that St. Miriam’s isn’t really Catholic and they put it in all of the bulletins. And Fox and CBS actually came to investigate because they thought we were committing fraud. They saw that we weren’t, obviously, but they did stories on it. So they’d really have to be blind, deaf and dumb to not have realized anything in the past 14 or 15 months.”
In the latest statement, Vale wrote that St. George “presented” as a Catholic priest and she significantly dropped the “Father” from the front of his name, an action St. George said was as offensive as the school’s openness to admitting he was not awarded the contract solely because he is an active gay man.
“They felt comfortable enough to put that in writing, and that amazes me,” he said. “If they would have written a statement that said they fired someone because they were black or Jewish or Italian, people would be in an uproar. But they actually felt comfortable enough to say that I was fired for being gay and they thought that that’s OK and people would understand. It doesn’t make any sense to me how they could openly admit their hatred and bias.”
In addition to the emotional toll the situation has had on St. George, it also creates a financial hardship, as he earned about $20,000 a year from his position at Chestnut Hill, supplementing his income as a trauma chaplain and wedding officiate.
He earns no salary at St. Miriam.
St. George said he’s meeting with his attorney this week and has not yet made a decision about how he’s going to proceed.
Rue Landau, executive director of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which enforces the city’s LGBT-inclusive Fair Practices Ordinance, said St. George’s case would fall under the current religious exemption in the law.
St. George said he’s never considered himself an LGBT activist but his situation has begun to stir a new drive in him.
“I’m a little parish priest, and I believe in equal rights and marriage equality and everything, but I never really felt called to be waving rainbow banners or anything. But since that has happened, I realized that maybe this is something I have to stand up for not only for myself but because of who’s going to come after me and, in the future, who’s going to be fired because of their sexuality. As a priest, I want to call Mr. Pepper and Sister Jean and sit down with them and reconcile, but as someone who’s been wounded, I also want to seek justice.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].