S.F. archbishop fires back at lawmaker critics

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s guidelines have drawn praise and concern. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s guidelines have drawn praise and concern. Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close S.F. archbishop fires back at lawmaker critics 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone fired back this week at state lawmakers who characterized as intolerant and possibly illegal his effort to have teachers at four Catholic high schools sign a labor contract declaring their opposition to same-sex unions, abortion and contraception.

“Would you hire a campaign manager who advocates policies contrary to those that you stand for, and who shows disrespect toward you and the Democratic Party in general?” Cordileone wrote the eight Democratic lawmakers from San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma and San Mateo counties Thursday night.

“My point,” Cordileone said, is that “I respect your right to employ or not employ whomever you wish to advance your mission. I simply ask the same respect from you.”

In their letter, the lawmakers said the archbishop’s plan to include the morality clauses in the 2015-16 faculty handbook and recast the collective bargaining agreement “sends an alarming message of intolerance to youth” who attend Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory and Archbishop Riordan in San Francisco, Junipero Serra in San Mateo and Marin Catholic in Kentfield.

Faculty’s civil rights

As for faculty, the plan “effectively removes civil rights protections guaranteed to all Californians,” including how to plan a family and what issues to support through freedom of speech, the lawmakers said.

The morality clauses attempt to set conditions not only on the professional lives of employees, but on their private lives, said the lawmakers, who include San Francisco Assembly members Phil Ting and David Chiu, and state Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco.

Cordileone said the clauses don’t cover employees’ private lives.

He referred the lawmakers to the website of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, where he said documents and videos would “help clear up a lot of misinformation being circulated,” such as “the falsehood that the morality clauses apply to the teachers’ private life.”

A look at those documents, however, reveals some contradictory information, at least as it relates to Catholic employees of the schools.

A question-and-answer session on union contract proposals says the language is “not aimed at private belief or conduct.”

'Private behavior’

But a different document on the site, the statement to be included in the faculty handbook as of Aug. 1, includes a clause stating, “All administrators, faculty and staff who are Catholics, and particularly those who are classroom teachers ... are also called to conform their hearts, minds and consciences, as well as their public and private behavior, ever more closely to the truths taught by the Catholic Church.”

On Friday, Ting and Chiu said Cordileone’s arguments failed to convince them that the morality clauses were justified.

“The archbishop’s letter confirms that he wants to use religion to justify employment discrimination,” Ting said. “Discrimination in the name of the church or education is still discrimination. It would be illegal for any other employer to do the same thing.”

Chiu said, “If this was simply about whether or not employees in Catholic schools are supposed to be teaching Catholic doctrine, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. That’s not what this is about. It’s about respecting people’s personal lives in the workplace.”

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: nasimov@sfchronicle.com