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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