Seven years after a New Jersey Catholic school fired an unmarried teacher who became pregnant, the state Supreme Court will decide if that decision is protected by the First Amendment.
The dispute began in 2014 when Victoria Crisitello, an elementary school teacher at St. Theresa School, asked her superiors for a raise. She explained that she was expecting a baby. A few weeks later, she was fired. The school’s principal told her that the decision was based on the fact that she was “pregnant and unmarried,” according to court records.
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The ensuing legal battle has since been working its way through the state courts. An appeals court has sided twice with Crisitello, finding that her firing was discriminatory. In May, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from the school, which has argued it was exercising its freedom of religion.
The school’s argument rests on the fact that the Catholic Church teaches against extra-marital sex. And because Crisitello was in a teaching position, where she was tasked with handing on the faith to the next generation of Catholics, “the school in this instance felt it could not overlook,” attorneys for the school wrote.
The state Supreme Court accepted the case on the heels of a major Supreme Court decision last year involving the freedoms religious schools have in their hiring and firing practices. In that case, a supermajority of justices found that the so-called ministerial exception protected such institutions from government interference in their hiring and firing practices.
The reason for that, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion, was that “very core” of the mission of religious schools is to teach young people “to live their faith.” The government had no right to disrupt that mission, he added.
St. Theresa School in Kenilworth, the archdiocese that oversees the school, maintains that the precedent set in that case also applies to the Crisitello incident. In a statement, it called a win in the case “fundamental” for the freedom of religion.
But New Jersey’s appellate court ruled that the school had not applied its standard equally to both sexes, noting that the school had never fired a male teacher for extra-marital sex.
“While a religious school employer may validly seek to impose moral doctrine upon its teaching staff, punishment singularly directed at the Hester Prynnes, without regard to the Arthur Dimmesdales, is not permissible,” the court wrote, referencing promiscuous characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.
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The state Supreme Court has not yet set a date for arguments. Catholic officials throughout the state have pushed hard for the appellate decision to be overturned.
“This case affects the fundamental freedom of religion not only for the Catholic Church and its institutions, but also for the operations of other religious organizations,” said Maria Margiotta, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Newark, in a statement. “Potentially, all religious organizations, including all Catholic schools in the archdiocese, are impacted.”
