The Supreme Court will be hearing a slew of religious liberty cases this term. You can pray about the cases heard today:

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday in a pair of consolidated cases, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel, that will examine the so-called ministerial exception.

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That’s a legal doctrine that protects freedom of religion by exempting religious institutions from the application of anti-discrimination laws to employees who carry out important religious functions.

In this case, the court will decide whether it will be Catholic schools or judges and bureaucrats who determine whether teachers are adhering to Catholic doctrine in their duties, including teaching religion class to young children. . . .

Here’s what happened in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru:

Our Lady is a Catholic school that provides education to young people steeped in Catholicism, its faith and traditions. In 2015, the school decided not to renew Agnes Deirdre Morrissey-Berru’s contract as a teacher.

School officials at Our Lady didn’t think Morrissey-Berru had been teaching in accordance with the Catholic traditions the school upholds. Morrissey-Berru sued and claimed the school was discriminatory.

The issue in St. James School v. Biel is nearly identical, and the Supreme Court will hear both arguments at the same time, in the interest of time and the cases’ similarities.

At the heart of these cases will undoubtedly be a zealous discussion of what defines the “religious duties” of a teacher and the scope of a religious employer’s “ministerial exception” from anti-discrimination laws.

The Supreme Court will likely inquire about the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling. That court sided with Morrissey-Berru’s discrimination lawsuit and said that although she had some “religious duties,” they were not “religious enough to warrant First Amendment protections” under the ministerial exception legal doctrine. Expect a lengthy discussion about this concept during oral arguments. . . .

Employees of religious institutions should have legal recourse if they face unconstitutional violations of their rights. But the ministerial exception is critical to preserving the freedom of religious institutions to determine how their own doctrines are applied by their own employees when carrying out an important religious function.

That’s something that courts and bureaucrats do not have the competence to do.

The ministerial exception does not negate all claims against a religious employer. It creates an exception that protects employers of religious institutions from getting sued every time an employee decides he or she isn’t going to act in accordance with religious doctrines, gets fired, and wants to retaliate.

Given that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment clauses should prevent government officials from meddling in the way religious organizations hire employees to carry out religious functions—or fire them when they don’t—this is an important case, and the distinctions they discover will aid future cases of a similar nature.

(Excerpt from the Daily Signal. Article by Nicole Russell.)

(Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash.)