NEW JERSEY
Religion Dispatches
Post by PATRICIA MILLER
A central contention of the Catholic bishops’ “religious liberty” argument is that Catholics shouldn’t have to “check their faith at the door” when it comes to religious objections to contraception or same-sex marriage in public life. In other words, Catholics are always on duty, whether at church or at home or at work at Hobby Lobby or baking a wedding cake.
But the same thing doesn’t hold true for priests who molest children. They, apparently, are “off duty,” or so argues the Diocese of Trenton, NJ. A lawyer for the diocese told the Delaware Supreme Court that Rev. Terence McAlinden wasn’t “serving in his capacity as a priest” when he molested a New Jersey teenager he took on trips to Delaware.
When one of the justices asked how you could tell if a priest was on duty, the lawyer argued:
“Well, you can determine a priest is not on duty when he is molesting a child, for example. … A priest abusing a child is absolutely contrary to the pursuit of his master’s business, to the work of a diocese.”
And the court bought it, ruling that Naples didn’t have a case because he couldn’t prove the trips were “church sanctioned.”
So I guess by that definition none of the 850 priests who have been defrocked by the Vatican for molesting minors were “on duty.” Problem solved.
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