Posted on 04/06/2006 10:11:21 AM PDT by Cheverus
When he confessed to impregnating his new girlfriend, the Catholic Church refused to marry a devoted parishioner, then last week fired him from his teaching position at Bishop Feehan High in Attleboro for choosing fatherhood over abortion or abandonment.
“Obviously in my heart, I wish he had not fathered a child out of wedlock, but I’m very, very proud of what he’s done: to choose life and love over his job,” glowing first-time grandmother Tammy McCoy of North Attleboro said yesterday of her son Robb McCoy and his 2-month-old daughter, Jaelyn Ruth.
“She’s terrific,” Tammy McCoy said. “She’s gorgeous. She’s a gift. This child is going to be loved. Is there anything more the church wants?”
McCoy, 27, claims he was forced to tender his resignation as both a social studies teacher and head coach of Bishop Feehan’s football team last Thursday because he violated the Diocese of Fall River’s celibacy policy for single employees.
When he found out last year his 21-year-old girlfriend was expecting his baby, McCoy met with his priest, the Rev. David Costa of Sacred Heart Parish in North Attleboro, to discuss the possibility of marriage.
“He wouldn’t allow it,” McCoy said. “He said it wasn’t a union of love, that we weren’t getting married for the right reasons.”
Costa yesterday declined to comment, but McCoy defended him.
“He was right,” McCoy said. “Marriage is still a possibility. Right now, the important thing is both of us being loving parents.”
Diocese spokesman John Kearns declined to provide a copy of the celibacy policy to the Herald or to comment on McCoy’s situation. “It’s a personnel matter,” Kearns said.
Sarah Wunsch, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said McCoy, unlike a woman with a baby bump, could have cloaked his love life in secrecy.
“In a sense,” Wunsch said, “they’re punishing honesty. They’re punishing someone for not having an abortion. It’s just another thing the Catholic Church is doing that makes you wonder.”
McCoy, whose family invested $200,000 in his Catholic education, is hoping to land another teaching job.
“I want to raise my daughter,” he said. “There’s no ‘mistake’ about her. She’s awesome. I still have to look at myself in the mirror every day. I still have to look at my baby’s face. And you know what? Everything’s OK.”
>> When he confessed to impregnating his new girlfriend, the Catholic Church refused to marry a devoted parishioner, then last week fired him from his teaching position at Bishop Feehan High in Attleboro for choosing fatherhood over abortion or abandonment. <<
Gee, that's not a little slanted, is it?
Yes, and sadly the Herald is actually better than the Globe.
Excuse me, but if he chose life and love over his job he would have married his girlfriend/mother of his child at the county courthouse as soon as he found out she was pregnant.
Since he didn't marry the mother of his child, he's got no comparison has he?
But every day that they do not marry increases the likelihood that they will never marry, while simultaneously increasing the chances of failed marriage the longer they delay (danged statistics), and increases the likelihood of multiple men in the childs life.
In the meantime the baby has no home, instead she gets shuffled with her baggage from house to house, mom, dad, Grandparents, daycare etc.
Furthermore the baby is two months old. Why'd they fire him now instead of when the pregnancy was acknowledged? Or is he still engaged in fornication with the mother of his child?
He should have called Dr. Laura instead of his priest for counseling, he'd have gotten better advice, the baby would have a real two parent home and Daddy would still have a job.
I'm with you on that (and I'd add "from any Protestant institution, also" to your statement). From the way the article is written (and this may be the fault of the writer, not the Church), the teacher was let go for fathering an illegitimate child, and not for willful sexual immorality in and of itself. That's just not right.
Another load of "objectivty" from Laurel "I have an agenda" J. Sweet.
You have a poor grasp of Scripture.
While I understand her sentiment, that's really an overstatement. He didn't have any legal role in the decision to choose life for the child or not. That's entirely up to his girlfriend.
This is a case of a church being so rigid that its conduct ends up punishing good behavior (that is, not the decision to have a pregnancy on his hands out of wedlock, but to marry the woman and take an active role in the life of the baby). Whenever you punish good behavior, you get less of it, not more of it.
How is that comment relevant to this article?
Not only is it not relevant, it is an untrue broad generalization. (You are right about the majority of molesting clergy were gay, not pedophiles. Calling the vast majority of them pedophiles is another myth of the media.)
"The belief that bishops moved child abusers from parish to parish, allowing them to abuse over and over, may well be one of the greatest myths created by the press coverage of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church. This has become the conventional wisdom of the press, and also of many Catholics. But is it true? Research done in recent years casts doubt on that widely accepted belief.
The most important study of this issue was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The researchers acknowledged that because of the bishops' cooperation, the study was based on "an almost unheard of 97 per cent response rate." Commenting on the data, Karen Terry, PhD, and James P. Levine, PhD, the Principal Investigator and the Administrative Coordinator of the Study, stated categorically:
"It is clear that transferring priests with allegations of child sexual abuse was not a general response to the problem, and was limited to a finite number of cases."
Bishops did not generally move abusing clergy around because they were very often not aware of the abuse taking place. In recent years, a torrent of accusations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy has inundated the Church and society. It is natural to assume that Church authorities were aware of all these accusations and that they ignored them. The press certainly tends to affirm that belief. However, it is far from true.
The story later makes it clear that there's a policy against illicit sexual relationships, period. The child is just the evidence, not the cause.
And, unless the policy is poorly written, he would have been fired even more quickly had the school learned that he had played a role in having the child aborted.
A very biased and slanted article, IMO.
I'm sorry, but you appear to be engaging in thoughtful analysis. Somebody's likely to hit the abuse button.
Perhaps someday they will get married.
But as Fr. Costa pointed out, you shouldn't necessarily get married to someone just because you fathered her child.
Are you saying this story is ten years old?
I don't get how this pertains to the article. Unless you are saying the Church is finally getting its act together and cracking down on violations of all all kinds.
If anyone thinks he is behaving improperly toward his virgin, and if a critical moment has come and so it has to be, let him do as he wishes. He is committing no sin; let them get married.
Out of wedlock pregancy meets both criteria of improper behavior and critical moment. How many scriptures can you cite forbidding marriage in similar circumstances?
Joseph married the mother of Jesus in a similar critical moment even if that critical moment was an act of the holy spirit rather than his own.
For a preist or pastor to recommend against marriage because it's not a "union of love" is just stupid. What about the parental love for the child, or love and commitment to God and family, are those sufficient "love" to sactify marriage. It is God that sanctifies marriage, not love. Big duh!
"Union of Love" is humanistic tripe. We shouldn't get married because we don't love each other enough and the marriage might fail. That is despair and death talking. How about "I love my child enough to try, to commit and do my best with God's help"?
Apparently in Boston it is a virtue to have promiscuous sex and to father a child out of wedlock. And it also must be a sin to oppose shuch things.
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter
-Isaiah 5:20
I agree. This is pretty much a media copy and paste from this story:
Anti-Abortion Group Backs Fired Pregnant Teacher
So much for the ACLU's charges of gender discrimination in the other case: "Michelle McCusker was fired from her job as a pre-K teacher because she was pregnant," said Donna Lieberman, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. "This is a policy that the church applies to women but not to men.
"Only women employees are subject to being fired for being pregnant or having engaged in non-marital sex," she added. "They don't apply that policy to male employees. That's gender discrimination. It has nothing to do with religion."
Yes, but then at least they are holding to their principles.
The couple shouldn't be married. Marriage is for life, and the article even calls it "his new girlfriend", indicating that the relationship is not that old. So until they are both in a place where they can honestly decide if marriage is desirable, they shouldn't marry. At the very least they should wait until after the child is born.
I agree. It is not a valid reason for marriage. "Father, I knocked my girlfriend up. Now that she is pregnant, we feel like we should get married."
Allowing for such marriages is one of the reasons for the massive amounts of annulment requests the Church receives every year.
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