Sunday, May 13, 2012

Fair play and religion

I read a story on Reddit about a Catholic high school refusing to play in a baseball final because a girl was on the apposing team. My first thought was, “Is this a story from the 1950s?”

Our Lady of Sorrows, a fundamentalist Catholic school in Phoenix, chose to forfeit the championship final rather than play against Mesa Preparatory Academy, because the school has a 15-year-old girl Paige Sultzbach on their team.

Read more: Catholic school in US refuses to play in baseball final because of girl on opposing team

The reason given:

"Our school aims to instil in our boys a profound respect for women and girls. Teaching our boys to treat ladies with deference, we choose not to place them in an athletic competition where proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty."

A helpful redditor offered this clarification. 

Just wanted to clarify: this is NOT a Catholic school. It's a Society of St Pius X (SSPX) school. SSPX is not recognized by the "official" Catholic church, nor by the Pope, and they are generally acknowledged (among actual Catholics) as being troublemakers at best. I just wanted to clarify this because the title of this post is misleading.

I’d assume that a Catholic school not recognized by the pope makes it a Catholic cult. I’m not sure which piece of news I find more disturbing, a wrong-headed religious decision, or the discovery, for me anyway, of another cult. I know so little about religion, nor do I understand it well.

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