Today's Must-Read

Archbishop Salvatore "DUI" Cordileone, Pope Benedict's last slap in the face to San Francisco, is getting some pushback on his new "guidelines" for the area's Catholic school teachers:

When Gino Gresh, high school senior at Sacred Heart Cathedral Catholic school in San Francisco, California, returned home from a religious retreat in early February, he said he was “shocked” to learn what had happened while he was away: Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, head of the San Francisco archdiocese and key organizer behind California’s short-lived same-sex marriage ban known as Proposition 8, had unveiled a new handbook for Catholic high school employees in Gresh’s area, instructing them to refrain from “visibly” contradicting the Church’s teachings on birth control, abortion, and homosexuality.

Worse, Cordileone was vying to designate teachers as “ministers” so the archdiocese could benefit from the so-called “ministerial exception,” a legal category expanded by a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court case that exempts religious groups from non-discrimination laws when hiring for “ministry” positions that can include people who are not clergy.

Read the whole article -- it's fairly detailed and, I think, a good analysis, but hard to excerpt. But those opposed to the Archbishop seem to be on firm ground:

But Sally said Cordileone, when speaking to the teachers about the morality clause in the cathedral, derided “those protestors” outside. Teachers were furious, and Sally said that, more than anything, she wanted to tell the archbishop, “‘Those protestors’ are your children, and you are an educator, and you are trying to create an environment of mistrust, fear, and harm for these children.”

Yet Catholic students like Gresh mostly shrugged off the insult, responding by organizing more protests. Raised and taught by instructors such as McGarry and Sally and formed by Francis’ inclusive rhetoric, their activism — and their concept of Catholic teaching — already seems very different than that of Cordileone. Gresh said the core inspiration driving the students, like most Catholics, comes from a higher authority than the archbishop, or even the pope himself.

“We all model the faith after Jesus Christ,” he said.