Faith-based schools ‘no place for gay teachers’

Faith-based schools should be able to sack or exclude gay teachers says senior American cardinal visiting Australia.

Cardinal Burke at the St Aloysius church in Caulfield. Picture: Aaron Francis

Freedom of religion laws should allow faith-based schools to sack or exclude practising homosexual teachers and those in irregular (de facto) heterosexual relationships, a senior Vatican cardinal visiting Australia this week says.

If the law did not allow that leeway “there is something wrong with the law’’, US Cardinal Raymond Burke, who headed the Vatican’s highest legal authority, the Apostolic Signatura, from 2008 to 2014, told The Weekend Australian.

“Maintaining the integrity of the Catholic faith in Catholic schools requires decisions to be made about hiring teachers who will uphold and teach the faith.’’

Students with homosexual inclinations should not be excluded, he said, because they were children, but Catholic schools and parents needed to encourage them to live chastely and behave modestly, in accordance with church teaching. Taking a same-sex partner to school formals or proms would not be acceptable in Catholic schools.

Labor MPs have supported a Greens push that would ensure teachers — as well as students — could not be discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality in line with the “doctrines, tenets and beliefs of a particular religion”.

Cardinal Burke said the debate over freedom of religion should also focus on broader issues such as the rights of church-run hospitals and medical staff not to be forced to practise abortion, sterilisation and euthanasia. Arguments that church-run schools and hospitals accepting government funding should fall in with secular standards were false. “Catholics and other Christians pay taxes and governments should be happy to have institutions strengthening the moral fibre of the country.’’

Presbyterian Church moderator John Wilson yesterday saidit was imperative that anti-discrimination exemptions — allowing religious schools to discriminate against teachers on the basis of sexual orientation — were not rolled back by parliament. He said there were 13,000 students being educated in Presbyterian schools, and it was imperative for those schools to “enhance its mission by employing teachers who support the whole-of-life ethos that drives the school”.

“If you have a restriction about who you might choose to employ, then the threat comes that you haven’t got 100 per cent of your employees committed to the ethos of the school,” he said. “That will wear down and cause fissures and cracks in their overall delivery.’’

Michael Worker, general secretary of Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Australia, said it was essential teachers “share the values, beliefs and moral principles of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church so they can contribute to the culture and faith ethos of our schools”.

The government will introduce legislation next week to roll back existing but largely superfluous legal protections for faith-based schools relating to students. It will better protect gay students from discrimination and expulsion because of their sexual orientation.