Plucky Anti-Murder Student EXPELLED!!!

Katelyn Sills writes:

As of Saturday, October 29th, I was given official notice by express mail that I am expelled from Loretto High School.
This was given completely without forewarning, without a meeting, and
without a chance to say goodbye. My family is now seeking legal advice,
and more details will follow.

SOURCE.

BACKGROUND.

LEGAL ADVICE: Sue–if at all possible. Loads of pro-life lawyers would do this totally pro bono. Take recourse to the diocese as well.

CHT to the reader who e-mailed!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

45 thoughts on “Plucky Anti-Murder Student EXPELLED!!!”

  4. I’m wondering as more and more stories like this appear if we may be starting a time when devout Catholics are punished for their faith.
    Have you seen how many hysterial articles there are about the possibility of 5 Catholic Supreme Court Judges?

  5. I posted a link in her combox to the Thomas More Law Center — I hope her parents check it out. They have the expertise to handle the case.
    ‘thann

  6. Question: Should an inter-Christian dispute be taken to a civil court? Especially before the diocese has had a chance to act, if they choose to?

  7. Interdict would have been a nice response, were it still allowed.
    Looks like the formerly Catholic colleges in rebellion against ex corde ecclesia have also joined to have a conference.

  9. Outrageous.
    Didn’t the *bishop* fire this teacher? Are they going to ‘expel’ the bishop too?
    Does this bishop have the power to clean house (the administration) at the school?
    Who is the principal and what is his fax/phone number?

  10. Directly from their website:
    President
    Contact the President with matters of school representation in the community, development, finance and The Board of Directors.
    (916) 482-7793 ext. 104
    Here is their fax number:
    (916) 482-3621
    Principal
    Contact the Principal with matters of student services, parent inquiries, faculty and staff management, and employment opportunities.
    (916) 482-7793 ext. 144

  13. I don’t think the stated reason for expelling girl will be of much significance. Probably some infraction of a little used by-law.
    The salient point is that this Catholic girl’s Catholic school wanted her GONE. They have apparently found some mechanism to accomplish this, but the fascinating thing is to note which side thay have taken in this whole matter.
    The administrators of Loretto High School are taking young people by the hand and leading them into hell.

  16. Hmm…why go back to a school staffed and filled with dumb lemmings?
    This is a Catholic school?

  17. “Question: Should an inter-Christian dispute be taken to a civil court? Especially before the diocese has had a chance to act, if they choose to?”
    Well, St. Paul certainly didn’t think so (see 1 Corinthians 6:1-8). His advice flies straight in the face of that offered by Mr. Akin, when he says “Why not rather put up with injustice? Why not rather let yourselves be cheated [than sue fellow Christians in non-Christian courts]?”
    That sounds pretty harsh (and it’s certainly not the way my inclinations lie), but it is inspired scripture.

  18. We need to be careful here. While it certainly looks like retribution(and I’d bet money on it too), there may be other things here we don’t know about.
    Now, if in fact it is retribution, then the first course of action is to take it to the bishop. He seems like the kind of man who will listen and intervene.
    But I don’t think shaking the dust is the proper thing to do as well. We simply cannot let people do this kind of thing within our Catholic institutions. I’m sorry, but the enemy would have us do just that. He counts on the ambivilance of the faithful or their lack of spine in situations like this.
    If indeed this is out and out retribution, then I believe she and her family need to fight this with all they have.

  20. Catholics should never sue others. The bible is very clear in its denunciation of all lawyers and their craft.

  21. No one has yet said what the child did.
    So we should condemn the school without knowing why they did what they did. We should just assume that a person who does somethings we like can never be wrong on anything. At most we should seek to find out what she is accused of!

  22. Well, St. Paul certainly didn’t think so (see 1 Corinthians 6:1-8). His advice flies straight in the face of that offered by Mr. Akin, when he says “Why not rather put up with injustice? Why not rather let yourselves be cheated [than sue fellow Christians in non-Christian courts]?”
    I know all about what St. Paul said, but it is a counsel rather than an exceptionless law and there are a number of relevant differences here:
    1) A Christian suing a Christian in our society is not as scandalous as it was in a society made up entirely of pagans. (This is not to say that there is no scandal, but that the scandal is far less than when Christianity is a religion just struggling to get started and there are only a couple dozen Christians in the whole city and they start suing each other. At that point they look like a litigious cult rather than a great world religion that has fallen on hard times in some quarters.)
    2) St. Paul speaks in terms of surrendering one’s own rights. That is something one can do with one’s own rights, but as a parent one cannot so easily surrender the rights of those in one’s care. As a parent one must make a determination of whether a child’s right can be defended in a way that will not cause more harm than good and, if it can be, then it normally it must be (though this gets fuzzier in late adolescence as the child is gaining greater control of her rights at this stage in life).
    3) St. Paul presupposes that there is mechanism for resolving the problem in the Christian community. If there is, great. That’s why I mentioned the bishop (any aciton by him being something likely to come long before a lawsuit would proceed). On the other hand, depending on the legal relationship between the school and the diocese, the bishop may not have control of the school’s admissions. Church law at least in some cases gives bishops more control over teachers than over students, and if the Church doesn’t *own* the school then he may not have control over who can be admitted to and expelled from its student body.
    4) If facts are as they appear, there is an evil in this school that has to be rooted out or at least neutralized. The nun-principal initially *supported* the murderous drama teacher and, after being overruled by the bishop on that, she has now apparently taken revenge on the plucky anti-murder student (possibly on grounds related to the student’s blogging, though we’ll have to see what emerges on this point). When you’re confronted with an institutional evil of this sort, you go in loaded for bear. That means using every tool you have at your disposal, including the civil law.
    If, while confronting the evil, a more moderate solution emerges (e.g., if the bishop intervenes) then you take the more moderate solution. But you never go into such a confrontation limiting what resources you can use to address the evil. You go in loaded for bear and with enough saber-rattling that your opponent realizes that you are serious and will not capitulate until the situation is rectified. This motivates the opponent to rectify the situation quickly, before the big triggers start getting pulled.
    Having said that, I’d point out that I don’t know all the facts in this case and it could turn out that the school had reasonable grounds for what it did. That may be the case, but at this point I don’t have any of that information and I can only respond to events based on what is known at the time of reporting.
    Based on what appears to be the case at this point (i.e., this is revenge on the student for getting the murderous drama teacher fired) I would advise the parents to vigorously pursue parallel tracks with civil and ecclesiastical law in order to confront the evil in the school, both for the sake of their daughter and for the good of the community.
    NOTE: If pro-abort nuns are known to get their way in Catholic schools (assuming that a pro-abort nun is what we’ve got here) because pro-life families just capitulate to them then THAT is a scandal greater than a pro-life family suing a pro-abort nun who has taken revenge on their daughter by unjustly expelling her in the middle of a school year.

  23. Catholics should never sue others. The bible is very clear in its denunciation of all lawyers and their craft.
    This is not the understanding of the Magisterium.

  25. As a Catholic and a lawyer, I would take exception to the comment about lawyers and their craft. Scripture does not denounce lawyers and their craft at all. As I understand it, there were no lawyers as we understand the term in biblical times. There were scribes and there were pharisees. No lawyers. Only in some poor translations of the Bible (NKJV for example) are scribes called lawyers. Scribes were copyists and scholars of Mosaic law. Given that issues of property, divorce and religious issues often overlapped, people would go to them to decide the outcome of their disputes. I do not believe that someone could go and hire a scribe to argue their case for them in court (although Jesus points out in several parables, they could be bribed to render a favorable decision.) If there were lawyers then, why didn’t Jesus or Paul have legal representation when they were tried. Scribes judged and did not advocate. Pharisees and rabbis interpreted the law and taught when and how the law applied. You might want to check out Matt. Chapters 22-23; Acts 5:34-42. The people that Jesus is rebuking in Matt. aren’t lawyers, but judges and legislators, as it were, who impose the law on the people but aren’t willing to follow it themselves. From my cursory knowledge of the history of law, lawyering was a Roman invention that later became institutionalized in 12th century England with the growth of common law.
    On the other hand, the nearest thing I can come up with in Scripture that compares to what a lawyer does may be found in the following passages:
    John Chapter 15:26-27 “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.”
    1 John Chapter 2:1 “My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.”
    Further, John Chapter 17 is a specific prayer by Jesus, the Advocate for all mankind, interceding for us all. That’s what lawyers do.
    If you can show me a passage that denounces lawyers and their craft, I would be happy to consider it.
    ~Paul H.

  26. I imagine St. Thomas More would be surprised to be told that the Bible condemns “lawyers and their craft.”

  29. You know, the problem with writing a book on the breakdown of Catholic education is that it can never be definitive. There’s always another “Catholic” school that does something like this after you go to press…
    “Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America” just came off the presses last week, so I didn’t get a chance to put Katelyn’s saga in. Sigh…

  30. Jesus rebukes lawyers in Luke chapter 11, verse 46. He rebukes them with a Woe and tells them they load up people with burdens that are difficult to carry, and do not lift one finger to help them.
    I wonder how many Catholics in this world would say, nothing has changed in the 2000 years since that statement was proclaimed.

  31. Jesus rebukes lawyers in Luke chapter 11, verse 46.
    This is exactly why I’m saying NeoConSpy is not someone to be taken seriously.

  32. NeoCon Spy-
    Umm, no…
    Jesus wasn’t talking about lawyers, as we would understand them. He was talking about teachers of the Jewish law, who made the law more and more oppressive and unnecessarily difficult to live by, hence his condemnation of them.

  34. Thank you for the citation. However, I was aware of that passage as it is a parallel to the passage in Matt. that I cited previously. It does not change my understanding of who Jesus was condemning. The term “lawyer” in Luke as elsewhere in the NT still means a “scholar of Mosaic law” more commonly known as a scribe. He is not person who conducts lawsuits in a court of law on behalf of clients or represents people in legal matters.
    Chapter 12 in Mark gives a accurate picture of what the scribes/scholars of the law/lawyers of the NT did. They posed questions, argued among themselves, debated, reasoned, but they did not represent clients which is the point of what I am saying. At best, the label of judge or law professor might be applicable as they did opine and decide on how Mosaic law was to be applied to various life situations, but they were not advocates. Even my handy-dandy Webster’s dictionary distinguishes between a modern day lawyer and the NT variety. (Actually there are three definitions, but I have no idea what a burbot is.)
    [Nota bene: I would like to point out that not all scribes/scholars of the law/lawyers were bad. Jesus even praised one of them at Mark 12:28-34. ]
    The point of all of my rambling is this: Jesus could not have been condemning lawyers as that term is used today, because the kind of lawyer who represents clients did not exist then. Instead, Jesus was condemning those who interpreted Mosaic law in such a way that set up needless formulistic requirements for a person to be considered “clean” which purely superficial as opposed to being to requiring people to be “clean” within. Instead of worrying about whether it was ok to pick wheat or heal the sick on the Sabbath, Jesus was making it clear that they should have been teaching how to love God with all of their hearts, souls, minds and strength and to love their neighbors as themselves. And that is worth more than all of the burnt offerings and sacrifices in the world, then as now. Pax.

  35. P.S. I am sorry about the poor English. I am trying to write and watch Star Wars III with my family at the same time.

  36. “P.S. I am sorry about the poor English. I am trying to write and watch Star Wars III with my family at the same time.”
    You’re making good use of your time in two ways at once 🙂
    The reason I raised the question in the first place is that I do think we Americans tend to resort to the lawsuit as a shoot-from-the-hip solution. Jimmy’s response is an eminently reasonable one (it’s more or less the same argument that supports Just War theory). I’m not sure I buy his point #1–if it’s not scandalous for a Christian to sue a Christian, that may say more about us than about our society–but the basic idea is supportable.

  37. I’m having a difficult time seeing on what grounds she could sue. Even a simple ground of defamation is mitigated by her, not the school’s, informal press release on the matter. Discrimination claims are simply very difficult to claim against private associations. This is significant when the claim is based on political discrimination. Quite frankly, the teacher would enjoy greater protection as an employee for political activities than a student as a beneficiary of a public good. At this point you are left with whistle blower protections. Here I’m not optimistic. The temptation is to treat this as a contract law case. Assuming breach of contract, the remedy is a refund of her tuition. This may already have been done voluntarily by the school.
    Canonically, I would really appreciate Jimmy adding something on this. Even if he really wanted to do this though, I can understand that this would be quite an endeavor. Reading what others have stated, the only remedy is for the society to acquiesce or for the bishop to expel the society from his diocese. Possibly, and I expect to be quickly corrected on this, the society might be challenged canonically depending on the details of the mission they were granted from Rome. The quickest path to get her back in the school is acquiescence from the society. My speculation is that any of the other options would take 3 years or more with appeals.

  39. “The point of all of my rambling is this: Jesus could not have been condemning lawyers as that term is used today, because the kind of lawyer who represents clients did not exist then.”
    Marcus Tullius Cicero, please call your office.

  40. Katelyn Sills Expelled!

    Yes, I am aware of the irony here. Ms. Bain was presumably fired “without forewarning, without a meeting, and without a chance to say goodbye”. I’m sure the Sills’ detractors will say that Katelyn’s expulsion is poetic justice. I wonder, though, if t…

  41. Dear Seamus,
    Please note that in my first post, I did state that the use of lawyers representing clients was a Roman invention. My premise was this: The notion of lawyers representing clients before a judge in Biblical Israel did not exist. So when Jesus was condemning “lawyers” in Luke 11:46, he wasn’t condemning what we would call a lawyer today or even a Cicero-type lawyer. (Besides I don’t think that the Catiline thought much of Cicero’s devotion to law considering he had them put to death without a trial. On the other hand, his writings did infludence St. Augustine to turn away from sin.)
    However, in further study of this point, I did come across an example of a lawyer representing someone in Scriptures. When St. Paul went before Felix, the Roman governor in Acts Chapter 24, the Jews who had accused St. Paul brought a lawyer (called an orator)named Tertullus with them to present their case on their behalf against St. Paul to make sure that they could get him convicted under Roman law (not under Mosaic law). That attempt failed, of course, as Tertullus did a pretty rotten job presenting their case for them. (I hope they were paying him on a contingency basis~lol) Tertullus got out-lawyered by St. Paul, who appears to have known Roman law better than he did.

  42. “If your brother sins (against you), go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.
    If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that ‘every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.’
    If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.”
    They were already at telling the church — the bishop’s authority — when this happened.

  43. Well, as a lawyer let me tell you that the only way to change the law on this subject is to change the constitution. Passing laws that any reasonable lawyer knows will be overturned is pandering to the ignorent, legal masterbation, a waste of the courts’ and legislatures’ time and the taxpayers’ money. Any church requirement to vote for such nonsense is politics not faith and morals and deserves the disregard all sensible people will give it. Peace!

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