LITTLE ROCK (AR)
Bilgrimage blog
February 22, 2019
By William Lindsey
Readers of this blog who have followed it for any length of time will know the story of how my career as a Catholic theologian and that of my now-husband Steve were destroyed by a Benedictine college in North Carolina, Belmont Abbey, with the active assistance of the diocese of Charlotte. The “About Me” section of Bilgrimage’s home page contains a brief biographical statement with links to a number of postings providing details of that story. Please click them if you want further information about this story. A compendium is here.
Steve and I were hired by Belmont Abbey College in 1991 to teach in its theology department. I was appointed department chair. In the spring semester 1993, I was presented with a one-year terminal contract. I had just received a glowing evaluation of my teaching, scholarship, and service to the college community and community at large. When I asked for an explanation for the termination, the college president refused to provide one.
I asked — repeatedly — to meet with both the abbot of the Belmont Abbey monastery that owns Belmont Abbey College and the bishop of Charlotte, who was then William Curlin. Both gentlemen refused to meet with me. I told them as I requested these interviews that how the college was treating me was producing crisis for me. My faith was being seriously challenged. The effect of the stonewalling I was encountering was to make me think I had no choice except to resign, rather than spend one more year working for an institution that could betray basic Catholic values about honesty and human decency and workers’ rights in such an appalling way. I wanted to discuss all of this with Abbot Oscar and Bishop Curlin before I took that step.
Both gentlemen refused to meet with me, and I did resign. Not long before I did so, Abbot Oscar convened a meeting of the entire college community in which he said that diseased limbs must be lopped from the tree of the college community to make it wholesome. After I resigned, he gave an interview to the local media speaking of the need to shore up the college’s Catholicity because it had been threatened.
A step I took before resigning was to ask for a hearing of the college’s grievance committee. Prior to that hearing, a lay member of the committee said to me, “I’m not sure there’s any point to this hearing. What if you sexually assaulted a student? The college would have grounds to fire you.”
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