Volume 25, Number 3    December 2003

Briefs

 

Fired by the pastor?

When it happened to pastoral ministers Ann Cass and St. Joseph Sr. Judy Molosky, they took action. And they came to conference to share their stories.  Cass and four other parish workers were fired in what was later seen as a unionbusting effort by the Brownsville, Texas diocese. The parish and the United Farm Workers Union rapidly mobilized and eventually won landmark protections including reinstatement, back pay and new rules that no new pastor can fire a parish worker during his first 90 days.

In Los Angeles, Molosky kept her 2,300-family parish together for over a year after the pastor was removed for having an affair with the parish secretary.  When a new pastor, John Love, arrived last June, he fired Molosky saying the parish “couldn’t afford to keep her.”  Molosky’s CSJ community stood behind her, wrote to Cardinal Mahony and took her story public in the L.A. Times. The result?  New policies are being written to prevent such firings in the future. Fr. Love (who Molosky says graduated from an “Opus Dei seminary”) was transferred to Catholic University for further (more enlightened?) study. Molosky is still looking for a job.

If you have a story to share of a church worker unjustly fired, Chris Schenk is collecting those accounts. Contact chris@futurechurch.org

Contemplative activists
Providence Sr. Kathleen Desautels recently served six months in federal prison for civil disobedience at School of the Americas in Georgia in 2002. “Prison life slows you down,” she told her CTA audiences. “It was an extraordinary time in my life. Our faith calls us to be mystic, contemplative activists, to reflect on the evening news.” Recalling the Catholic Action adage, “See, judge, act,” she said: “Sometimes it doesn't work in that order: sometimes we need to act first and then reflect on what made us do it.”