Illinois Bishop Reminds Gay Parents: Catholic Schools Will Teach You're Sinning

The Roman Catholic bishop of Springfield, Ill., who conducted an exorcism after the state legalized same-sex marriage, has now initiated a policy that could make children of gay parents feel unwelcome in the schools in his diocese.

Diocesan schools won't turn away students with gay parents, but Bishop Thomas John Paprocki is asking schools to have parents and guardians sign an agreement that requires them to meet with their local priest if they are "not living in accord with church teaching" and emphasizes that this teaching may characterize their family situation as "objectively sinful," reports The State Journal-Register of Springfield.

"That would take in persons who are divorced and remarried but haven't been granted an annulment, unmarried couples living together, and people who are in same-sex marriages or partnerships," the paper reports. The agreement, issued by the bishop this summer, comes partly in response to a same-sex couple's attempt to enroll their children at a Catholic elementary school in Springfield.

The agreement also obligates the parents to weekly Mass attendance and tithing, even if they are not Catholic, and makes clear that the schools will teach Catholic doctrine "even if those teachings conflict with ways parents are living their lives," Jonathan Sullivan, who oversees schools in the Springfield diocese, told the Journal-Register.

"Some parents aren't living lives in a manner consistent with the Catholic faith," he said. "What they're teaching in schools is going up against something very different at home."

Paprocki, in a letter to parents and pastors in the diocese, said no child will be turned away if parents sign the agreement and don't meet its requirements, but allowed that they might not want their children to attend schools teaching that the parents are living "in an objectively sinful situation," the paper reports.

That will undoubtedly be the case, said John Freml, a Springfield-area leader of Call to Action and Equally Blessed, two groups that advocate for LGBT equality within the Catholic faith. "What parents in their right minds would idly sit by while a religion teacher is forced to tell their children that something is wrong with their family?" he told the Journal-Register.

Not all schools in the diocese are asking parents and guardians to sign the agreement, and some are still reviewing it, the newspaper reports. More than 10 percent of students enrolled in diocesan schools are not Catholic, its article notes. Sullivan said the agreement merely formalizes what parents already knew the church expected of them. It is modeled after one that's in use in the diocese in Wichita, Kan.

The Springfield diocese, based in the state's capital city, covers 28 counties in central Illinois. Bishop Paprocki made headlines in 2013, as Illinois was enacting its marriage equality law. When pro-equality activists rallied in the city that October while the legislation was pending, some planned to pray for its passage at Springfield's Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, but Paprocki said doing so was "blasphemous" and had police present to keep out anyone wearing symbols of the LGBT rights movement.

Then on November 20, 2013, the day Gov. Pat Quinn signed the marriage equality bill into law, Paprocki conducted a service of exorcism of "every unclean spirit" that, he said, led to the legalization of same-sex marriage. He claimed the new law was the work of the devil, although he also said he did not intend to imply that its supporters were possessed.