mystery movie

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | May 25, 2011

Ruth Kolpack doesn’t understand why she was dismissed from her post as a religious-education instructor for a Catholic parish in the Madison, Wisconsin diocese.

Brent King, a spokesman for the diocese, has an answer for her. Kolpack, he reports, had given public support to the ordination of women, announced her opinion that she herself could confect the Eucharist, and associated herself with groups “that clearly do not believe what the Church teaches.” Sounds reasonably clear, doesn’t it?

Not to Kolpack. After meeting with Bishop Robert Morlino, and refusing to renounce her heterodox views, she explained that she never promoted those views during her classroom time. In effect she claimed that while she believed heresy, she did not teach heresy.

Would you hire a geography teacher who admitted to the private belief that Belgium is located in Africa? It’s easy to see how his employment could create difficulties. If a student questioned him closely about the location of Belgium, he would be forced either to dissemble, hiding his true beliefs, or to teach according to real beliefs, and thus lead students astray. More to the point, someone who believes that Belgium is in Africa evidently does not accept the authority of standard maps, so how could you be confident that he would give his students accurate instruction on other questions?

There’s yet another consideration, and it’s perhaps the most important one. In a geography class, one hopes to impart a certain body of knowledge to students. In religious education, one hopes not only to convey knowledge but also to promote faith. An instructor who does not have that faith—who does not believe what the Catholic Church teaches—is obviously a liability.

I say “obviously,” and yet it’s not obvious to everyone. “It’s still such a mystery,” says Ruth Kolpack about her dismissal. The dissident group Voice of the Faithful has awarded her a $10,000 grant to explore that confusion in a documentary film, which can then be used to confuse other people.

Before we leave the unhappy Ms. Kolpack, we should note that her views on women’s ordination were put forward in a thesis “written for her master's degree in divinity from Milwaukee's St. Francis de Sales Seminary.” Do you find it troubling that someone studying at the seminary where Milwaukee’s priests are prepared was arguing in favor of woman’s ordination? I find it even more troubling that someone could continue making that argument, in the seminary and afterward, without ever getting the message that Church authorities found those arguments objectionable, until Bishop Morlino finally blew the whistle.