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conscience always rejects direct, intentional abortion;<br />

we are not “pro-choice”<br />

[We] affirm that chaste living necessarily requires<br />

abstinence from all sexual intimacy outside<br />

of marriage<br />

We accept the Church’s teaching that all extra-marital<br />

sexual relationships are gravely evil and that these<br />

include adultery, masturbation, fornication, the<br />

viewing of pornography and homosexual relations.<br />

year, he announced he would attend a<br />

rally in Washington, D.C., in support of<br />

traditional marriage. Nancy Pelosi, the<br />

liberal congresswoman from San<br />

Francisco, warned Cordileone in a<br />

letter that the March for Marriage<br />

would be “venom disguised as virtue.”<br />

He went anyway.<br />

“That is our very nature,” Cordileone<br />

said at the march, “and no law can<br />

change it.”<br />

This past winter, the archbishop took<br />

on the allegedly lax morality plaguing<br />

Catholic schools, introducing new language<br />

into the faculty and staff handbook<br />

for the four archdiocesan high schools in<br />

San Francisco and Marin County under<br />

his direct control. The first draft of the<br />

new handbook included more than a<br />

dozen “affirm and believe” statements,<br />

many of which focused on sex:<br />

[We] reject direct, intentional abortion<br />

and recognize that any well-formed<br />

+<br />

BALLOT PAS DE DEUX:<br />

Cordileone outraged many<br />

with his vociferous (and<br />

financial) support of a<br />

California initiative that<br />

outlawed gay marriage.<br />

Everyone within the Catholic schools would be<br />

“expected to arrange and conduct their lives so as<br />

not to visibly contradict, undermine or deny these<br />

truths.” The new handbook counseled its subjects<br />

to “refrain from public support of any cause or issue<br />

that is explicitly or implicitly contrary to that which<br />

the Catholic Church holds to be true.”<br />

This raised obvious, troubling questions. Would<br />

a teacher at a Catholic high school who posted on<br />

Facebook about his wife’s successful fertility treatments<br />

be subject to discipline? What about a female<br />

teacher who tweeted about the blissed-out weekend<br />

she spent with her girlfriend in Point Reyes?<br />

“Our schools are not seminaries,” complains<br />

Sal Curcio, who was raised in the Catholic Church<br />

in the Bronx and now teaches religion at Sacred<br />

Heart Cathedral Preparatory. “Teachers are starting<br />

to feel like they have to decide between conscience<br />

and paycheck.”<br />

Others were troubled by Cordileone’s tactics in<br />

contract negotiations with the high school teachers,<br />

who are represented by a union. In seeking<br />

to make all school employees “ministers,” he appeared<br />

to want to deprive them of federal workplace<br />

protections, from which religious institutions<br />

are at least partly exempt.<br />

The day I met with some of Cordileone’s opponents<br />

in the Catholic schools, he had released a revised handbook that<br />

doesn’t mention “gravely evil” acts. The overt reference to school employees<br />

as ministers in the contract negotiations was gone too. And yet they<br />

were not mollified, convinced that Cordileone had only hidden his sword<br />

behind his back. “He is a cultural warrior in the extreme,” said a retired<br />

religion teacher, Jim McGarry. He added that Cordileone “doesn’t represent<br />

the tradition; the tradition is much richer than that.”<br />

STAR OF THE SEA is the kind of<br />

church Cordileone has been tasked with saving. Located on an unglamorous<br />

stretch of Geary Boulevard, in the Inner Richmond neighborhood, it had<br />

seen drops in membership in recent years. Long gone are the days when<br />

Irish immigrants filled the pews. Cordileone’s solution was to bring in the<br />

Reverend Joseph Illo, a tall man with exceedingly white hair and a plangent<br />

smile. There is something ungainly about him, and that somehow makes the<br />

NEWSWEEK 33 09/18/2015

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