WASHINGTON (CN) — Considering the case of two teachers fired from Catholic schools, the Supreme Court struggled on Monday with the boundaries of a doctrine that insulates religious institutions from lawsuits over hiring and firing decisions for certain types of employees.
"I'm struggling with where you draw the line and how much entanglement both sides are going to get us in here in deciding what's an important enough person in a particular faith and how we avoid that difficulty," Justice Neil Gorsuch said during a telephone hearing.
Across an hour and a half of oral arguments on Monday morning, the justices considered whether the so-called ministerial exception should prevent two teachers from bringing employment discrimination lawsuits against their schools.
The ministerial exception dates back to a Fourth Circuit case from 1985, and generally exempts religious groups from federal anti-discrimination laws when making hiring decisions. The Supreme Court first endorsed it in the 2012 case Hosanna-Tabor v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but kept the formula determining who qualifies for the exemption loose.
In the cases at hand Monday, Agnes Morrissey-Berru sued Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach, Calif., for age discrimination in 2016. A year earlier, in nearby Torrance, Calif., Kristen Biel sued St. James School because it did not renew her contract after she disclosed she had breast cancer and would need to take time off for treatment.
Our Lady of Guadalupe says Morrissey-Berru's contract was not renewed because she did not properly implement a new reading program and an "experiment" creating a part-time job that allowed her to teach religion and social studies was unsuccessful.
Teachers at Our Lady of Guadalupe sign documents agreeing to align their teaching with "the values of Christian charity, temperance and tolerance" and to model the Catholic faith in school. They also participate in faculty prayer services, take the students to Mass and teach daily religion classes.
Biel says she was let go due to her diagnosis while the school says Biel's classroom management was poor, necessitating weekly meetings to improve her performance.
Like Morrissey-Berru, Biel's job at the school required her to teach religion, take part in prayer and attend Mass.
The schools won at the federal district court in both cases, but the Ninth Circuit reversed in Biel's case in December 2018, saying the religious duties she performed were "limited to teaching religion from a book," while the ministerial exception was meant to apply to people in roles of religious leadership. Biel died in 2019 and her husband is now the plaintiff in her case.
A later panel of the Ninth Circuit followed that holding in reversing the decision in Morrissey-Berru's case. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the cases last December.
Arguing for the schools on Monday, Eric Rassbach with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty told the justices it is crucial for religious groups to have broad discretion to say who is and who is not qualified to pass on their teachings to children.
"To have control over what they are doing and to be able to control the performance of this important religious function — conveying the faith to younger kids — that is a free exercise right that they absolutely have and should have," Rassbach said.
Citing the holding in Hosanna-Tabor and Justice Samuel Alito's concurrence in the case, Rassbach said the ministerial exception should apply to employees at school who perform important religious functions.
Assistant to the Solicitor General Morgan Ratner, who argued for the Justice Department in support of the schools, also pointed to the Hosanna-Tabor factors, saying courts should look at teaching, preaching, worshiping and performing rituals as signs that an employee is engaged in important religious functions.