Beloved Gay Teacher Fired, Refuses Bishop’s Gag as Families Mourn

Grieves his community as he offers his heart

I promise you this story is not boring, even though the Roman Catholic witch-hunt against gay staff has become so ordinary that people almost don’t get outraged about it anymore. Even loving Catholics who abhor their Church’s persecution of LGBTQ people often shrug their shoulders. What can we do, they ask. That’s an excellent question Matthew LaBanca wants you to consider. As a member of a large Irish Catholic clan, I ask the same. Will you listen?

Matthew paid a steep price to bring you this question —

I learned about it this morning from Prism & Pen writer John Cormier, who once performed with Matthew in a national tour of the Broadway musical Crazy for You. Matthew is a professional actor/singer who has played principal roles on Broadway, has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and NY Philharmonic, and who practiced enough to make it to Carnegie Hall. An album he sang in won a Grammy.

But this story isn’t about Matthew’s professional accomplishments. It’s about how he loves teaching and directing music, which is how earned his living until a couple weeks ago.

Then the Bishop of Brooklyn fired him from his teaching job at St. Joseph Catholic Academy, despite the school principal fighting to keep him. The bishop simultaneously fired him as Corpus Christi Parish music director, despite the pastor fighting to keep him. Matthew lost his only income and his health care — because and only because he’s gay. He grieves the loss of his communities, people who have been family to him for years, who love him and want him back.

But maybe this story is mostly about Matthew turning down severance pay he badly needs — so he could be free to tell his Church family what the Church did to him. You can click on the video above to hear the whole story in Matthew’s own words. Let me please focus on the Church’s effort to gag him, to stop that video from ever getting made.

Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio’s gag order is the heart of this story

DiMarzio, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, the man who fired Matthew earlier this month, wouldn’t do the minimally decent thing and offer him severance pay with no strings attached. Instead, he dangled a final pay package on the condition that Matthew promise never to tell anyone why the diocese fired him. (Edit: Matthew told reporters today, 10/27/21, that the severance package he declined was worth $20,000.00)

Matthew refused to sign, saying he loves his communities too much to accept the bishop’s hush money:

I was offered a severance package with a gag order that was almost ten pages long, which is a lot of ways to say, ‘Shut up, don’t talk about this.’ Obviously, I have not signed it, because I realized that no price could be placed on my personal integrity.

Matthew says he is motivated by love, that he misses his church family and needs them to know what happened. He can’t be with them anymore because of the depths of Bishop DiMarzio’s hatred of gay people, but asks them not to forget him, reminding them he is still their neighbor:

I love you all so much. I miss you. I’ve been missing you… Of course I’m still your neighbor, and I hope that I’ll be seeing you, and I hope that when you see me you’ll offer a wave or a smile or a gesture of support. You will always be in my hearts.

Matthew reminds me of Terry Gonda, a lesbian who lost her retirement last year in a witch-hunt that’s picking up steam

Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who urges gay conversion therapy on his flock despite conclusive evidence it is ineffective and harmful, fired Terry last summer after she had served three decades as musical director and openly gay woman. The archbishop fired her shortly before she would have become eligible for a pension she could have retired on with dignity. When Terry’s bishop discovered she had married her partner, he got rid of her almost at once, just like Matthew’s bishop.

Like Matthew, Terry mourns her communities, bereft and grievously financially harmed. As in Matthew’s case, her parish pastor fought to keep her, fought to protect her retirement, but Vigneron acted with what can only be described as cruel depravity, ironic given Church hierarchy insist on formally teaching that we gay people commit “acts of grave depravity” by loving one another.

Terry and Matthew are far from alone as witch-hunt targets

Mainstream journalists have been reporting for years on a Church purge of gay staff that began with legal same-sex marriage and intensified when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Since then, bishops have used evidence of those marriages to fire LGBTQ people who have been beloved Church employees for years, even decades, people the Church had tolerated or enthusiastically accepted while they were living in unmarried but intimate sexual unions the Church knew all about all along.

Bishops seldom show mercy, rarely act with humanity or decency. Astonishingly, men like Archbishop Charles C. Thompson of Indianapolis deny they’re engaged in witch-hunts, even while Catholic journalists present evidence they are issuing orders to fire all openly gay staff.

Bishops don’t just deny the witch-hunt, they use power to silence truth

Infamously, Archbishop Thompson’s diocese threatened to expel high school senior Dominic Conover weeks before graduation if he did not stop speaking up in defense of his fired gay guidance counselor. Unlike Matthew, Dominic briefly knuckled under. He says the threatened destruction of his college career was too serious to ignore. Who could blame him? He canceled media appearances and stopped writing publicly until he had his sheepskin in hand. Then he went live again with a vengeance, letting Thompson have it with both barrels while telling the nation how the bishop succeeded for a while in gagging him.

The same diocese fired straight school social worker Kelley Fisher for speaking up in defense of her fired LGBTQ school colleagues. She wouldn’t be silent either, so the bishop got rid of her almost immediately. He sent a powerful message that he would fire any staff member, gay or straight, who spoke up against the witch-hunt he denies to this day is actually happening. It is happening, though, all over the United States as the Church regresses, as leaders dig their heels in and rain down hate on innocent, decent, loving people like Dominic, Terry, and Matthew.

So what can we do about the witch-hunt? That’s the question, isn’t it?

Catholic lay people in the U.S. (like in the U.K., Ireland, Canada, and most of the E.U.) are some of the most LGBTQ-affirming people on the globe. The fact that Matthew’s principal and pastor didn’t want him fired isn’t strange, it’s ordinary. If you want friends who support trans and gay rights, look for Catholic lay people. Studies consistently show that U.S. Catholics are slightly MORE LIKELY than the general public to support equality and oppose discrimination.

My Catholic family tell me that’s because the Catholic values they love (the Jesus they emulate) demand love and acceptance. They say their Catholic Christian upbringing forms them to reject the kind of hate that strips a woman of her pension because she’s a lesbian, that forces a high school kid to stop defending his counselor, that deprives a man like Matthew of his communities.

Real power is in the purse

My cousin is a loving mother and Catholic high school social worker who has answered the question her own way. She will no longer contribute money to her parish or to any Catholic charity. She will not leave the Church she loves, but she will no longer help pay the salaries of powerful men whose values she abhors. She sent her pastor and her bishop letters to that effect. She wants them to know why she is resisting their un-Christian behavior. She says her resistance would mean far less if they didn’t know.

She received no response from her bishop, and nothing but a cold shoulder from her pastor, but she says when she lets the collection basket pass by, she knows she is doing what she must do.

What will you do? How will you answer hate and the persecution of innocent people like Matthew? Will you act? Or will your inaction allow evil to flourish?

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James Finn is a former Air Force intelligence analyst, long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, a regular columnist for queer news outlets, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].