by Kate Anderson
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a former Catholic school employee Thursday whose contract was not renewed after disclosing her same-sex marriage.
Michelle Fitzgerald, the school’s former co-director of guidance, filed a lawsuit in 2019 after the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and Roncalli High School informed her that the school did not intend to renew her contract for the next year because she had violated her terms of agreement by being in a same-sex relationship, according to the lawsuit. Judge Richard Young rejected Fitzgerald’s appeal to a previous ruling, noting that she had violated the terms of her contract by entering into a same-sex relationship, which goes against the Archdiocese’s beliefs about marriage.
“[T]he parties do not dispute that Roncalli and the Archdiocese had a non-pretextual religious policy against employees entering into same-sex marriages and that Fitzgerald was terminated because she did so,” Young wrote. “As such, Fitzgerald’s Title VII claims would be barred by the religious employer exemption.”
Fitzgerald argued in her lawsuit that her role at the school as its co-director of guidance was religious and granted her a religious exemption to the school’s ability to terminate her based on faith. The appeals court agreed that Fitzgerald’s role was religious in nature but ruled that her admittance of this fact did not help her case because it proved that she violated the religion she actively worked to promote.
Fitzgerald also said in her lawsuit that she exaggerated her involvement in some religious duties because she knew it would help her get a raise. Young argued that this further weakened her claim.
“Even if we accept that she exaggerated on her evaluation and did not actually perform these religious duties, the fact that she mentioned these activities in her self-evaluation to get a raise supports that she understood these criteria to be important to the school,” Young said in the decision. “As the defendants persuasively explain, ‘the very fact that she would exaggerate about performing religious tasks to get a raise only underscores that it was Roncalli’s expectation that she perform them.’”
Joseph Davis, counsel at Becket, said in a press release that religious schools must be able to hire employees that will help pass their faith on to students.
“Religious schools exist to pass on the faith to the next generation and to do that, they need the freedom to choose leaders who are fully committed to their religious mission,” Davis said. “The precedent keeps piling up: Catholic schools can ask Catholic school teachers and administrators to be fully supportive of Catholic teaching.”
Fitzgerald’s attorney did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Kate Anderson is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Roncalli High School” by Roncalli High School.
