Massachusetts Bishop Orders School to Stop Calling itself ‘Catholic’ in Flag Controversy

A Massachusetts Catholic school can no longer refer to itself as Catholic following a controversy around Pride Month and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Nativity School, a Jesuit-run middle school in Worcester, MA, has been ordered by Diocese of Worcester Bishop Robert J. McManus to no longer call itself Catholic after it refused to take down a “Black Lives Matter” flag and a gay pride flag displayed on school grounds.

The flags began to be flown in January of 2021 due to student complaints that the school needed to be more inclusive. The Catholic News Service reports that on May 5, Bishop McManus released a statement asking the school to reconsider displaying the flags due to the conflicting messages their display could send to young students. In a June 10 decree, the bishop stated that he had asked the school to take the flags down in May, saying that the flags “sends a mixed, confusing and scandalous message to the public about the Church’s stance on these important moral and social issues.” He also added that while the Church affirms the dignity of all persons in the phrase “Black Lives Matter”, the platform of the organization itself “directly contradicts Catholic social teaching on the importance and role of the nuclear family and seeks to disrupt the family structure in clear opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church”. The bishop then declared that the school can no longer call itself Catholic and that it was prohibited from administering the sacraments on school grounds, along with other punishments.

Nativity President Thomas McKenney issued a statement June 15 saying the flags were never being flown to support any political organizations or ideologies. McKenney argued that “Both flags are now widely understood to celebrate the human dignity of our relatives, friends and neighbors who have faced, and continue to face hate and discrimination”, and that the ideas conveyed in them are in line with the social teaching of the Church. Additionally, the president stated that the school will be appealing the decision, and will continue to fly the controversial flags.

The New York Times reported that some parents questioned why this decree went into effect so close to the celebration of Juneteenth and in the middle of Pride Month. The effects of these actions on the school by the bishop remain unclear. Though the school is Catholic and Jesuit-run, it is unaffiliated with the diocese and receives its money from independent donors. McKenney’s statement concludes with the promise that “any decisions made by the Diocese will not change the mission, operations or impact of Nativity. With your ongoing partnership, we will continue to provide a transformational education for many years to come.”

Black Lives Matter has been critiqued by some for its previous stances on marriage in family matters. The organization originally had a “What We Believe” page on its website (the original writing can be found here) that included the statement: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” The organization also called itself “queer affirming”, voiced support for transgenderism, and encouraged its followers to liberate themselves “from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual.” As the New York Post reported, the organization removed this page from their website amidst criticism.

The organization also has had other troubling ideological allegiances. Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, stated in a 2015 interview that she and the other co-founder were “trained Marxists” and had been trained with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which expressed sympathies for the U.S. Communist Party.

The Roman Catholic Church has repeatedly condemned Marxism. Pope Pius XI in his encyclicalDivini Redemptoris said that communism “robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the oral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse”, and said that “Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms,” in another writing titled Quadragesimo Anno. Pope Leo XIII referred to communism as “the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of human society only to bring about its ruin.” And in Centesimus Annus, Pope St. John Paul II declared that “the Marxist solution has failed” and notes how “the historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.”