Teaching in Catholic Seminaries has a reputation for being a very perilous undertaking. In these institutions, there is no such thing as tenure. The best that one can expect is an initial one-year contract followed by a series of three-year contracts. For someone with a family, this puts a spouse and children in a perilous situation. Having to move because a contract has not been renewed means being forced to uproot all social networks. Children have to say goodbye to school mates and to casual friends and to start over in another city.
Even in those instances where an institution has a Faculty Handbook that sets out rules of fair play when dismissing a faculty member, rectors still have the option of ignoring the procedures described in the Faculty Handbook entirely. I remember my consternation at discovering that Sister X had summarily resigned during the summer recess. When I asked about this in an open session of the faculty, the rector acknowledged that a confirmed case of “improper conduct” came to his attention and he felt obliged to ignore the normal procedures (a) in order to safeguard the good name of Sister X and (b) so as not to interrupt the summer plans of faculty members. I tried to locate Sister X in order to assure myself that she had been treated fairly. Apparently she had broken all ties with the faculty. Was this because she was guilty of some “secret failing” or was she receiving a partial salary to make up for the fact that she was dismissed at a time when finding a new position would be nearly impossible. In that case was the partial salary contingent upon her “silence” respecting the reasons for her sudden dismissal.
I’m telling you about Sister X in order to prepare you for my own sudden dismissal on July 2nd of 1989. It was the 4th of July extended weekend. On Saturday morning, I received an express letter from the Rector dismissing me on the grounds of “suspected heresy” within my latest book published by a world-wide Catholic press.
I immediately drafted a formal letter to challenge the injustice of the “sudden dismissal” order of the Rector without any regard for the procedures spelled out in the Faculty Handbook. I went to the Seminary and gave copies of my formal complaint to key members of the faculty and, for good measure, I slid a copy under the door of the Rector so that he would be the first to know of my filing.
When I later filed a court case against the Archdiocese of Cincinnati for “wrongful dismissal,” I learned many things that I did not know on July 2nd.
#1 I learned that the Rector was having a secret two-year love affair with a woman and that he was getting ready to file for a release from his promise of celibacy and from the priesthood that he had exercised for 25 years. I also discoverer that he had already given Archbishop Pilarczyk his letter of resignation.
Now why would a Rector who was planning to leave the priesthood and to quietly disappear along with his beloved suddenly decide that, before he left the Seminary, he needed to fire me due to the unorthodoxy of my latest book?
#2 When he was subpoenaed some five months later, my lawyer asked him, “When did you first read Milavec’s book and discover that it was unorthodox?” His response: “I never read Milavec’s book.” So, the Rector is only the lapdog for someone else. Whom might that someone be?
There was a fanatic ultra-right Catholic two years earlier who tried to take over the teaching of my class by his constant badgering me with hostile questions. I asked the Rector to bar him from continuing in my classroom and to refund what remained of his tuition. He agreed. No questions asked. “This man is unable and unwilling to learn anything from me,” I told the Rector. The Rector alerted me to the fact that he had been teaching religion in a Catholic high school, but “due to his inability to relate to students, he was not rehired.” So, it had to be someone else. Who?
As the subpoena continued, the full drama was gradually disclosed. “I never had any complaints from Milavec’s other students. They liked his teaching style. He had a way of engaging them to make their own explorations into the Sacred Scriptures.” So, my lawyer asked, “Why then did you ask two faculty members to read Milavec’s book and to make a list of statements that might be unorthodox?”
His response: “I felt a responsibility to the Archbishop to investigate. We are a Catholic Seminary, and Catholics take orthodoxy very seriously. My job was to assure the Archbishop that all our faculty were teaching the faith using the well-established Catholic tradition.” My lawyer, “Why didn’t you use the procedures defined in the Faculty Handbook?” The Rector responds: “Those procedures deal more with teachers who make unfair demands, who grade unfairly, or who fail to prepare their classes. Hence, I consulted the Archbishop and asked him how I should proceed in this matter. He suggested that I would ask two faculty to examine my book. If they gave me high marks, then the matter would end right there. If they found multiple unorthodox statements, then further steps would need to be taken.” “What sort of further steps?” “Well, Milavec should be shown the case made against him by the two faculty members, and he should be given the chance to clear himself in writing.” “And then” “The Archbishop said that Milavec has been with us for nearly twelve years. He has a good reputation for being well-informed. Everyone makes a heretical statement from time to time. To be a heretic you need to be aware that you are teaching in opposition to what the Church teaches and you must stubbornly refuse to return to what the Church teaches.” “So was that the moment that the Archbishop stepped forward and wished to function as judge as to whether Milavec was simply misinformed or whether he adamantly holds positions that the Church rejects.” “Yes, as I now recall our conversation, that was how it happened that the Archbishop entered into the process.”
#3 There was one other event that might indeed have given the Archbishop a reason to use the Rector as his lapdog. He might even have hinted to the Rector that his “letter of resignation” could be turned into an “early retirement.” This latter category would give him a small, steady income for the next twenty-five years. “Given your life choices, I’m sure that money will be in short supply. If you do a good job with Milavec, I could see my way clear to solve your financial needs for the years to come.”
So, what was this “other event.” Father Y was regarded as a gifted speaker and a holy man who gave retreats that healed an untold number of broken hearts and broken lives. In 1989, Father Y was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Aware of this situation, Archbishop Pilarczyk suggested that there was a holy 18th century bishop that needed just one more miracle to assure his canonization as a certified “Saint.” If Father Y would be willing, he would gladly organize a prayer crusade that petitioned Bishop Z to heal Father Y. At a dinner in our home, Father Y shared this possibility and asked whether he should take it up. I thought about it for a while and said this:
Since you ask me, here is what my concerns would be. The prayer crusade has some pros and cons. Most people who are diagnosed with cancer do not have the opportunity of storming heaven with a half-million prayers to Bishop Z on your behalf. But does God work this way. Do you think that God can easily turn down the prayers of 10,000 but, when the numbers go over 200,000, God can hardly say, “No.” ?
Do you actually think that the whole purpose for your cancer is to give the Church another obscure bishop who is a saint? I am sure our Archbishop would be delighted to know that he can now safely channel his prayers through Bishop Z? But who else in this whole archdiocese has any existential link to Bishop Z? How many know the least bit about him? If there were 20, I’d be surprised. If there were 200, I’d be amazed.
Hence, I would invite you to see your cancer as an early warning sign from the Lord. Few people know how close they are to death. You do, however. This is a gift. The Lord is near.
What do you need to do before you die? Maybe make a wish-list for yourself: Things I need to do before I die. Maybe think of all the people that love you and trust you. Maybe you would want to publish “Prayers of a Priest on his Deathbed.” Or maybe you would want to visit a Hospice and interview dozens of people who are also on their deathbeds. What do they anticipate as death approaches? What do they expect after death? What is the “unfinished business” that troubles them while they are still alive? Any of these routes would be much more beneficial for the living in contrast with having another episcopal saint to pray to.
Knowing you as I do, I’m quite sure that what you discover for yourself will be much more meaningful than hitching yourself to the Pilarczyk wagon. Bishop Z can wait for someone else. You have the Lord’s work to attend to.
I never gave any thought of Archbishop Pilarczyk after this conversation. I would have expected Father Y to have told Archbishop Pilarczyk that “he needs to turn down his generous offer.” When asked why, he might then have shared the advice he gathered from a “good friend.” If I know Archbishop Pilarczyk well, he would have casually asked who was this good friend. When he heard my name, he would have seethed with anger. “How dare Milavec mess with me and my private affairs?” And, in that frame of mind, the Archbishop decided to advise the Rector in such a way as to ensure that he would never have to deal with me ever again. But the Rector overplayed his cards, and he never set any timelines for how things would unfold. So, when the faculty affairs committee put my new three-year contract on his desk awaiting his signature, he finally snapped to attention and, in his panic, he prepared a “dismissal letter” based upon the dozen “suspected heresy” comments identified by the two faculty members.
I had prepared a systematic rebuttal of twelve pages that demonstrated that the two faculty members were expected me to use the Catholic apologetics that was in vogue in the 1950s. Then, using the textbook of one of my Catholic professors at the GTU, I showed line-by-line how the ideas in my book were confirmed and repeated within his textbook. To condemn me, therefore, would be condemning my professor. Condemning my professor would be condemning the massive transformation in apologetics that was made possible following Vatican II.
But, as I said a moment ago, the Rector had not created a timeline for himself. If he had gone ahead with submitting my rebuttal to the Archbishop, it would take two or three weeks for the Archbishop to make a decision. He had already lined up a replacement for me. But now there was no time to arrange for a campus visit and for a formal interview by the two faculty members who normally handled new hirings. Moveover, the replacement had been offered a part-time contract with another seminary and, if he didn’t act quickly, he would dismiss me and have no one to replace me in the five courses that I was scheduled to teach in the Fall Term. So, yes, the Rector panicked!
That explains why he did not want to dismiss me in his office. When someone has served an institution for ten years, it is a matter of courtesy to dismiss a person face-to-face. But if he did that, he would first of all have to explain to me why he was not following through on his promise to send my rebuttal to Archbishop Pilarczyk and to have him make the final decision. He knew that he had bungled the whole process by not setting down a time-line that all three parties agreed to abide by. So that’s when he decided to pretend that it was all my fault—“Milavec should have sent me his rebuttal many months ago.”
In the juridical interview he said, “I felt sure that Milavec could successfully defend himself. Yet, here I was with his three-year contract on my desk awaiting my signature. In my conscience, I knew that I could not sign that contract because his orthodoxy had not been approved. So, it was his forgetfulness or his stalling that done him in. Maybe he failed to make a time-line for himself.”
And, this is what he told the faculty when they expressed concern that Milavec had not been given adequate time to defend himself. “I waited for his refutation, but it never came. So, I was forced to go directly to dismissal, and to hurriedly sign a contract with his replacement.” Since this explanation satisfied most of the faculty, this was the explanation the Rector later gave to newspaper reporters. This was the explanation that he was going to use in court as well.”
The only problem with this explanation is that it rings hollow. I sent an email to the Rector in early May saying, “Shouldn’t you create some time-lines for this process?” But, for reasons that are unclear, the Rector never responded to this email. Nor, at any time, did he stop me in the hall to say, “How is your rebuttal coming along.” But his mind was elsewhere. He was waiting for a dispensation from his promise of celibacy and from his ordination as a priest. He was afraid of being spotted with his Beloved when they moved about in Cincinnati at night. He was afraid that I would fight his move to demand “sudden dismissal” by registered mail. It wasn’t until late August that he had the presence of mind to ask me to vacate my office and to turn in my keys.
My first visit with a dear friend, who happened to be a prestigious lawyer. He told me, “I love you dearly, Aaron, but I can’t take you case. Other members of my law firm take on big cases for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. My taking on your case would be blocked by my colleagues as “a conflict of interests.”
The second legal shock came from my own lawyer some five months later. We were in the middle of the discovery process which allows us to interview those whom we subpoena. “I admire you, Milavec, for taking on the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Based on the testimony of the Rector who swears to tell the truth under oath, I’d say that you have been falsely accused and then robbed of the possibility of getting a fair hearing. But, you do recognize, that I have to advise you to settle out of court.” “I don’t understand. You just said that I have been robbed, but now you’re saying that you advise me not to take the case to court.” “Exactly. Sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it. If you go to trial, you will undoubtedly win. But you will never collect any reparation monies from the Archdiocese because, the moment you win, the Archdiocese will make an appeals in a superior court. This will eat up time and money from the lawyers on both sides. As this process unrolls, the legal fees will bleed you dry. Meanwhile, the Archdiocese has what lawyers call “deep pockets”—that means that the Archdiocese has unlimited monies to spend in the appeals process while you don’t have the money to put more gas in your tank. They will subpoena the ultra-right Catholic and have him trash your teaching as biased against the faith of the Church. They will search out all your enemies and have them demonstrate what a scumbag you really are. It will be messy and it will be exhausting. In order to get your life back, you will finally be forced to settle out of court. So that puts you back in the same position that you are now.”
Yipes! I would have never thought that having “deep pockets” shielded the Archdiocese from ever having to admit that they acted unethically when securing my sudden dismissal.
There was also another threat: Any Catholic theologian who used the secular courts to get justice would be seen as a security risk. I asked my lawyer if I could get any protection from being “black listed” following my court case. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “You will even be facing the real possibility that Archbishop Pilarczyk will verbally notify the Dean of Studies to the effect that care must be taken to shred any glowing teaching awards or positive reviews that might be in the files of the Dean.”
So, was I black-listed. You bet I was. In the ten years after my court case, only one Catholic institution (San Diego University) gave me the dignity of an interview. All my hirings were within Protestant seminaries and colleges. Then, in 2007, I was chosen by a group of Catholic academics in the UK to design and to head-up a world-wide online college, Catherine of Siena Virtual College. Our objective was to use a cutting-edge, small-group pedagogy that blended encounter-group dynamics with rigorous gender studies. My final eight years teaching were thus filled with engaging small-group learning that exceeded my wildest expectations. Had I not sued the Athenaeum for wrongful dismissal, I would never have been chosen for this extraordinary and demanding experience. As the College grew in size, the administrative tasks quadrupled. It was then that Roehampton University in London took over and absorbed the entire College. My fifty-hour-work-weeks came to a peaceful end.
CONCLUSION
In the end, I ask myself whether justice was served. Hardly. The Rector got his early retirement and his new life with his beloved. The Archbishop made sure that his role in getting me fired was to remain a closely guarded secret. My folder in the Dean’s office had not the slightest hint of why Archbishop Pilarczyk was bent upon making me suffer for the pastoral advice that I had given Father Y. The Rector, meanwhile, had entirely focused upon his suspicion of heterodoxy. Everyone thought that this was the focus of his investigation and that this was the reason for his July 2nd dismissal. But this was only a smoke screen.
#1 If my book was so unorthodox, why didn’t the Catholic publishers take due notice of this?
#2 If I was teaching heresy, why didn’t my students take notice of this during the dozen years that I was teaching seminarians and lay ministers?
#3 The Rector was leaving the priesthood. Not for twelve years did the Rector ever show any zeal for maintaining orthodoxy among the faculty. So, why would he suddenly want to put his energy into investigating my orthodoxy as his final task before openly living with his beloved? Remember that he admitted under oath saying, “I never even read his book.”
No. Orthodoxy was never the driving force. The Rector chose to play the “orthodoxy card” by way of easily “getting rid of me.” The Rector had no personal animosity directed toward me. We worked well together.
One has to go more deeply. The truth is that I unwittingly advised Father Y to turn down the Archbishop’s dream of getting a second miracle that would canonize an obscure 18th century bishop. The Archbishop was furious at my interference. This was my “great sin.” For this, I had to go.
#4 At some point, Archbishop Pilarczyk gave the Rector orders to “get rid of me.” If successful, he would change his “resignation letter” into a “early retirement.” No one would need to know.
#5 The Rector asked two faculty members to read my book and to provide a list of statements that hinted of suspect orthodoxy. These lists were useless. They never isolated how or why each statement was suspect. They never discerned between “inadvertent heresy” and “deliberate heresy.” Clearly the Rector was out of his depth here.
But, more importantly, the Rector was distracted. He failed to set deadlines. Then he was shaken by the three-year contract that the Dean had prepared for him to sign. If he signed, he would have failed to “get rid of Milavec.” So, in a moment of panic, he completely dropped the idea of having the Archbishop judge my degree of orthodoxy. There was no longer any time for this. Thus, he proceeded by jumping ahead to instant dismissal based upon the “suspicion” of heresy. After a dozen years of working together harmoniously, he realized that he didn’t have the guts to dismiss me in a face-to-face meeting. So, he chose to FedEx the dismissal order at the beginning of the long 4th of July weekend. Meanwhile, he quickly drew up a contract to hire on someone whom he had chosen to replace me.
The Faculty Handbook has detailed set of rules for respecting due process and open procedures when it came to disciplining or firing faculty members. The Rector completely bypassed this.
Archbishop Pilarczyk had drawn up a detailed set of rules for providing guidelines whereby bishops could act with dignity and justice when censuring faculty members. Archbishop Pilarczyk completely ignored his own procedures. Why might he have done that? For the simple reason that he did not want to appear as the one conducting the investigation of my orthodoxy. At all costs, he had to maintain the fiction that the Rector was the one who dismissed me. But, as already explained, the orthodoxy charges were just a smoke screen.
Catherine of Siena College (CSC) is an independent, online educational body focused on gender, justice, and theology,
which became part of the University of Roehampton, London, in 2015. It offers six-week online courses aimed at analyzing injustices in personal, public, and religious spheres,particularly supporting women in the global South.
When the world is designed to erase you,
refusing to stay silent is
the most radical act of all
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ZdrIgTOAU @57:06).