Queer Teachers In Catholic Schools

Since 2007, a Catholic LGBTQ+ organization called New Ways Ministry has documented over 60 cases of LGBTQ+ educators and allies who have been fired from Catholic schools throughout the US. The firings are met with significant local and national public outcry, resulting in fragmented, polarized, and wounded Catholic school communities throughout the nation. Who are these educators? Why are they fired? And is there a better way to respond to the presence of LGBTQ+ employees (as well as students and families) in Catholic education? Dr. Ish Ruiz responds to this controversy with a new theological framework, based on Pope Francis’s vision for a synodal Church, that will aid Catholic schools in an effort to include LGBTQ+ educators while remaining faithful to the Catholic tradition. His framework offers a multifaceted approach to this issue by examining the fields of pastoral ministry, sexual morality, ecclesiology, and Catholic social teaching to craft an inclusive synodal vision for Catholic education. More importantly, Ruiz answers Pope Francis’s calls for a Church that listens by lifting up the stories of LGBTQ+ educators and their invaluable contributions to Catholic schools. This book calls upon Catholic school leaders (including bishops, diocesan officials, school administrators, and other stakeholders) to treat LGBTQ+ educators with compassionate justice and to foster a school environment where all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, can feel respected, welcomed, and cherished as beings made in the Image of God.

In Homophobia in the Hallways, Tonya D. Callaghan interrogates institutionalized homophobia and transphobia in the publicly-funded Catholic school systems of Ontario and Alberta.

Make sure your Catholic school's LGBT students are getting the support they need Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students is a comprehensive training guidebook for educators who are committed to diversity and the full inclusion of LGBT students in every aspect of the Catholic high school experience. Based on five years of pilot testing in Catholic schools, this unique book emphasizes safe-staff training in integrating the Church's pastoral, social, and moral dimensions with the special needs of LGBT students. The book presents strategies and resources for building safer schools, helpful materials for communicating with parents, and general guidelines for developing and maintaining professional helping relationships with LGBT students. Based on a “training the trainer” model, Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students encourages the development of grassroots leadership within the school. This unique book promotes a positive framework for navigating the challenging landscape of the Catholic tradition and the LGBT experience as it helps to establish anti-harassment and anti-bullying protocols for school environments and models for developing LGBT student support groups and gay/straight student alliances. The book promotes role-play by students, alumni, teachers, and parents—a hallmark of the ministry work and training methods of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities—and is flexible enough to allow each school's individual climate and culture to be respected. Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students includes: * first-hand stories from students and teachers * realistic, dynamic, and creative role-play scenarios that explore various relationships between students, teachers, parents, administrators, and the school board * opening prayer and meditation rituals * a special foreword by Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton, one of the few Catholic bishops to publicly affirm LGBT persons * an extensive bibliography and glossary regarding the experiences, language, culture, and spirituality of LGBT youth * the latest research findings on at-risk behaviors of LGBT teenagers * training handouts that are easy to duplicate and use as transparencies * a manual log that can be used as a training diary * and much more! Creating Safe Environments for LGBT Students is an essential resource for faculty and staff members at Catholic high schools, particularly school administrators, chaplains, campus ministers, psychologists, social workers, and counselors.

This book draws upon contemporary Irish and international research which explores the critical interplay between education studies and sexualities. Scholars from Ireland, Canada, Spain, the U.K. and Sweden employ the conceptual lens of Queer Theory to interrogate and destabilise long-standing regimes of truth/knowledge, and in so doing, highlight the suitability and applicability of this theoretical perspective within educational discourses. By reframing and repositioning gender identity/expression as a performative expression on a fluid continuum, this book provokes readers to (re)view how they see education, pedagogy and schooling. The book interrogates what happens to teaching, and teachers, when queerness permeates their practice, thus exposing the ways in which heteronormativity informs and shapes our places/sites of education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Irish Educational Studies journal.

Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures equality regarding sexual orientation and gender identity in Canada. Despite this, gay, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming teachers in publicly-funded Catholic schools in Ontario and Alberta are being fired for living lives that Church leaders claim run contrary to Catholic doctrine about non-heterosexuality. Meanwhile, requests from students to establish Gay/Straight Alliances are often denied. In Homophobia in the Hallways, Tonya D. Callaghan interrogates institutionalized homophobia and transphobia in the publicly-funded Catholic school systems of Ontario and Alberta. Featuring twenty interviews with students and teachers who have faced overt discrimination in Catholic schools, the book blends theoretical inquiry and real-world case study, making Callaghan’s study a unique insight into religiously-inspired heterosexism and genderism. She uncovers the causes and effects of the long-standing disconnect between Canadian Catholic schools and the Charter by comparing the treatment of and attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer teachers and students in these publicly-funded systems.

The only study of its kind, Being Gay and Lesbian in a Catholic High School offers compelling evidence to Catholic educators, clergy, and laypeople that their superb academic institutions are not fulfilling the clear mandate of the Church on inclusive, loving behavior toward sexual minorities. This powerful and moving book presents personal testimonies and an original study of Catholic students' attitudes toward gays and lesbians, as well as reprinting the actual teachings of the Church on homosexuals and homosexuality. To view an excerpt online, find the book in our QuickSearch catalog at www.HaworthPress.com.

Winner of a 2015 Catholic Press Award: Gender Issues Category (First Place). In this first book from an openly lesbian and celibate Catholic, widely published writer and blogger Eve Tushnet recounts her spiritual and intellectual journey from liberal atheism to faithful Catholicism and shows how gay Catholics can love and be loved while adhering to Church teaching. Eve Tushnet was among the unlikeliest of converts. The only child of two atheist academics, Tushnet was a typical Yale undergraduate until the day she went out to poke fun at a gathering of philosophical debaters, who happened also to be Catholic. Instead of enjoying mocking what she termed the “zoo animals,” she found herself engaged in intellectual conversation with them and, in a move that surprised even her, she soon converted to Catholicism. Already self-identifying as a lesbian, Tushnet searched for a third way in the seeming two-option system available to gay Catholics: reject Church teaching on homosexuality or reject the truth of your sexuality. Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith is the fruit of Tushnet’s searching: what she learned in studying Christian history and theology and her articulation of how gay Catholics can pour their love and need for connection into friendships, community, service, and artistic creation.

A loving mother shares her journey of parenting a gender creative child, from toddler to adult.