No mercy at Waldron Mercy

ATTENTION ALL YOU divorced, remarried, pill-popping, Viagra-chewing, infertility busting, masturbating and/or unmarried fornicating employees of Waldron Mercy Academy:

Your days are numbered. If longtime and deeply loved Waldron teacher Margie Winters got the boot for being a married gay lady, it's only a matter of time before you're kicked to the Catholic school's curb too for disrespecting church doctrine.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? If Waldron is like other Catholic schools that have fired nervy gays for being themselves, its administrators will continue to look the other way when their hetero employees behave in ways that aren't by-the-Catholic-book either.

The book is crystal clear, by the way.

Divorce, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is "a grave offense against the natural law" that is "truly a plague on society" because of the "disorder" it creates in the family and community.

Divorced people who remarry are "in a situation of public and permanent adultery."

Masturbation is "an intrinsically and gravely disordered action."

Fornication - the "carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman" - is "gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality."

The act of using donated eggs or sperm to conceive is "gravely immoral."

The act of using one's own sperm or eggs for the same reason is "perhaps less reprehensible, yet . . . morally unacceptable."

As for homosexual relations, they are "acts of grave depravity" and "intrinsically disordered."

That's one steaming pile of gravity, depravity and disorder, isn't it?

Yet only Winters has been fired at Waldron - a school where, one parent tells me, employees are no strangers to divorce and remarriage and where others, for sure, are in unmarried sexual relationships.

The same selective firing process was used at Bensalem's Holy Ghost Preparatory School in 2013, where longtime language teacher Michael Griffin was let go for marrying his partner. Oddly, divorced and remarried straight employees were left alone, as was a male teacher who knocked up his girlfriend: Instead of showing him the door, Holy Ghost showed him the love with a baby shower held on school premises.

I guess one man's grave offense is another man's gift-wrapped Diaper Genie.

The same discriminatory logic went down at Chestnut Hill College in 2011, when Catholic administrators canned highly regarded adjunct professor Jim St. George after they learned he was gay and married. Hetero employees were never held to the same standards as St. George, a priest in the Antioch Catholic church, which allows its priests - gay or straight, male or female - to wed.

And it's old news that Catholic priests in Philly who raped kids enjoyed decades of job security in archdiocesan schools, even though paragraph 2,389 of the catechism says that sexual abuse by adults on children entrusted to their care "marks a regression to animality."

So let's call Winters' firing what it is: An act of despicable discrimination based on nothing but her homosexuality. As such, the firing is itself a violation of the catechism's directive about how to treat homosexuals, spelled out in paragraph 2,358: "Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided."

Yet who's gonna punish Waldron Principal Nell Stetser for violating that command?

Certainly not Sr. Patricia Vetrano, president of the Mid-Atlantic Community of the Sisters of Mercy, which runs Waldron. In her letter to parents, she reiterated support of Winters' firing.

And - duh - not Philadelphia Archbishop Chaput, either. In a statement, he said Waldron's leaders had "shown character and common sense at a moment when both seem to be uncommon."

It is the school's right to fire Winters, by the way. As a private religious institution, according to Penn constitutional law professor Kermit Roosevelt, Waldron can fire whomever it wants for whatever reason it wants. Besides, gays have no legal protection whatsoever when it comes to employment. So the law is on Waldron's side here.

But Winters' supporters - almost 11,500 of whom have signed a petition for her reinstatement - sure aren't.

"This has been crushing," one long-time Waldron parent told me, describing the anguish he and his wife are feeling as they decide whether to withdraw their child from Waldron because of the way Winters has been treated. "We felt like we'd found that magic little place when we found Waldron. Margie was the face of mercy for us. It's not like she was out there screaming about homosexuality. They had asked her to stay below the radar and that's what she did. And then they fired her."

Stetser, in a statement, said that she fired Winters to "sustain the Catholic identity at Waldron Mercy Academy. For the privilege of calling ourselves Catholic, we adhere to the teachings of the Catholic church."

Except when they don't.

That's one gravely disordered identity.

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