Priest at Catholic School Protests Resignation Request

The former head of the religious studies department at a Roman Catholic high school is protesting that he was forced to resign because he was ordained a priest in a small denomination known as the Old Holy Catholic Church, which is not part of Roman Catholicism.

Father Mark Jaufmann, who picketed Bellarmine-Jefferson High School in Burbank for the third consecutive morning Wednesday, said he was told Monday by administrators of the 850-student school and a school official of the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese to resign or he would be fired without severance pay.

A spokesman for the archdiocese said that in becoming an ordained pastor of a small Glendale church not in communion with Rome, Jaufmann had broken his contractual agreement with the school.

“When a non-Catholic is employed, generally it is not in the religion department,” said Father Gregory Coiro, the archdiocese’s spokesman.

Jaufmann, 39, received a master of divinity degree from the Los Angeles archdiocese’s St. John’s Seminary in June 1994, but never became a priest of the archdiocese. He was hired four months later by the Burbank high school while he was still a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

“The school and the archdiocese have known of my plans to become ordained in the Old Holy Catholic Church since last October,” Jaufmann said. “Some faculty members and Roman Catholic priests actually attended my ordination in January.”

Jaufmann said his denomination, based in Montreal, has about two dozen parishes in North America. A number of other independent church bodies with European roots also claim to be “Old Catholic” churches. None have relations with or ties to the Vatican.

“We are not masquerading as Roman Catholics,” said Jaufmann, who was accompanied in his picketing outside the school by one of his new parishioners and another Old Catholic priest.

Jaufmann is now associate pastor of the 10-member Old Holy Catholic parish of St. Andrew and St. Paul in Glendale, which was organized last fall. It has been renting an 80-seat church in a converted garage from the tiny Divine Redeemer Metropolitan Community Church.

Jaufmann said his parish is looking for another location because many people know that the MCC is a gay-oriented denomination.

“We ourselves are not, although we are open to all who want to come and praise the Lord,” he said.

Backed in his school dispute by a number of students who said he was treated unfairly by school officials, Jaufmann said the faculty includes non-Catholics, including a Baptist and a Jew. He conceded, however, that only Catholics teach in the religion department.

On a recent lunch break, student Gerard Orozco of Los Angeles said that Jaufmann was popular with students and never seemed to depart from Catholic teachings. “He taught the curriculum and was a very fair teacher,” said Marisa Donovan of Sun Valley.

Father Coiro of the archdiocese said Jaufmann’s contract called for the teacher to “maintain by words and actions a position that is in conformity with the teaching, standards, doctrines, laws and norms of the Roman Catholic Church as interpreted by the archdiocese of Los Angeles.”

Jaufmann charged that the archdiocese was “dealing with semantics to justify an injustice.” He said Wednesday that he signed a letter of resignation on Monday because he felt he had no other choice, but that he was not cashing his severance check until he investigated possible legal action.