Ecclesiastical Immunity

Last month, a trial court in Connecticut applied the ministerial exception to dismiss a defamation claim brought by a charitable organization against the Catholic bishop of Connecticut. In brief, the vicar of a Connecticut parish had organized a charity in his native Tanzania and, among other things, raised funds for it from his congregation. The Bishop apparently came to believe that the charity was beset by financial irregularities and, after first ordering the priest to stop raising money for it, removed him as vicar. The Bishop then sent a letter and spoke to parishioners telling them that the charity was ineffectively managed and engaged in questionable financial practices.

The priest’s action against the diocese (alleging, among other things, racial discrimination) was dismissed based upon the ministerial exception. No surprise there.

The charity then sued the Bishop for tortious interference and defamation. As noted above, these claims were also dismissed based upon the ministerial exception. The exception has been applied in contexts other than claims based upon employment. In my home state of Wisconsin, for example, it has been applied to claims for the negligent hiring, retention and supervision of priests who committed sexual abuse.

But should it be applied here?

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Is It Right to Teach About What Is Wrong?

Milwaukee Common Council President Willie Hines (left) has written a nice piece on values education in the Journal-Sentinel. I know that President Hines and I disagree on many things, but he is someone whose leadership I greatly respect.

In response to the Hines piece, Patrick McIlheran points out an obvious problem. Under current law, it is unclear that schools could effectively incorporate religious perspectives on morality into values education. (There is some room for schools to teach “about” religion, but, in the type of normative education that President Hines is calling for, that distinction — and the lack of clarity about just where it ought to be drawn — would probably preclude any deep inclusion of religious perspectives.)

Marquette alum Tom Foley (the blogger known as “Illusory Tenant”) can’t wait to dismiss Patrick as a “tin pot philosopher,” but he is wrong to do so for at least two reasons.

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Ruan on the Accommodation of Religious Speech in the Workplace

In the fall issue of the Marquette Law Review, Professor Nantiya Ruan of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law has written an interesting article entitled “Accommodating Respectful Religious Expression in the Workplace.”  It is always hard to summarize a serious piece of scholarship in the few sentences that a blog post will permit and I am, of course, likely to emphasize those aspects of the piece that I found intriguing. It is also true, since I have decided to post a response and not a blurb, that I will emphasize those things that I see differently. So, with advance apologies to Professor Ruan, here is how I read the article.

Ruan posits an inconsistency between the emerging willingness of the Supreme Court to protect religious expression in public spaces (as illustrated by the Ten Commandments cases of 2005) and its rather narrow reading of the requirements to accommodate religious expression in the workplace under Title VII, where employers need incur no more than a de minimis burden to accommodate religious expression and practice.

I am sympathetic to Ruan’s arguments for greater accommodation of religious expression in the workplace. She does a nice job of advancing the notion that religion is fundamental to individual identity, although I would have added, as I have in recent papers, the notion that mandated secular spaces harm religion.

But I want to comment on her claim of an inconsistency between the recent trend toward toleration of religion in the public square and the treatment of religion in the workplace.

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