Can Catholic employers fire employees for not following the Church?
A New Jersey teacher’s dismissal from her Catholic school classroom over her role as a surrogate mother has raised the question of just when Catholic employers can dismiss workers for not adhering to the faith.
The teacher, Jadira Bonilla, was put on paid administrative leave after school officials discovered that she had agreed to serve as a surrogate for another couple. She told a Philadelphia news station that she had previously served as a surrogate for the same couple without incident while working at another Catholic school.
Administrators at St. Mary Catholic School in Vineland “said I was possibly in violation of my contract and that I would be suspended or placed on administrative leave,” the teacher told the news outlet.
Bonilla “is a valued teacher and one we hope will one day again teach in our school with the full knowledge of our faith, which guides our educational principles,” the school told the media in a statement.
Court rulings protect Catholic employers
L. Martin Nussbaum, an attorney who specializes in First Amendment and religious freedom protections and who serves as counsel for the Catholic Benefits Association, said there are “many protections for Catholic employers” in the United States.
The Catholic Benefits Association says on its website that it “advocates for and litigates in defense of our members’ First Amendment rights to provide employee benefits and a work environment that is consistent with the Catholic faith.”
The organization notes that “new regulations, laws, legal outcomes, and legislation” can affect how Catholic employers can do business, though Nussbaum said there are “a number of very powerful protections” for Catholic businesses in the U.S.
It is unclear if Bonilla, the New Jersey teacher, has filed a lawsuit against the school over its policies, but Nussbaum said if she did, “she would probably file it under a discrimination lawsuit, under the basis of pregnancy, which is a protected class under some laws.”
Yet the school and other Catholic employers can cite multiple Supreme Court rulings in their defense, Nussbaum said. Among them is the landmark 2012 Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In that decision the high court ruled unanimously that the First Amendment allows religious organizations to hire and fire ministers without regard to federal discrimination laws. A ruling in 2020’s Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru further strengthened that principle.
The rule applies to teachers as well, “especially if they’re involved in helping inculcate the faith,” Nussbaum said.
“[That’s] the only reason Catholic schools exist,” he noted. “You can hire a secular atheist to teach a child to read. But parents make tremendous sacrifices to put their children in Catholic schools, not only to read and write, but to transmit the faith.”