Catholic Schools Week: The Arc Is Indeed Long

This week is Catholic Schools Week in the United States, which celebrates the church’s educational ministries. LGBTQ+ teachers, students, campus ministers, and administrators can be found in Catholic institutions nationwide, and each person has their own experiences of acceptance and struggle in the field.

To celebrate the LGBTQ+ members of Catholic schools, Bondings 2.0 is featuring a series of reflections from such educators and ministers about their experiences and insights about making Catholic schools more LGBTQ+ inclusive.

Today’s post is from Bondings 2.0 contributor Michaelangelo Allocca, who is currently a religion teacher at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. My own experience with Catholic high schools – an arc of more than forty years – confirms that the direction is indeed towards justice, but that we need to keep working to make the arc bend that way. Four different experiences show steady progress chronologically, with each stage also showing where more progress was then – and is now – still needed.

The first stop was my student years, 1977 to 1981, at a highly respected and academically competitive Jesuit all-boys high school in New York. Historically, the school has generally been considered closer to the progressive end of the Catholic school spectrum: besides the wonderful scholastic foundation, I will always be grateful for the solid understanding they gave me of the need to strive for social justice, to be “a man for others,” in the words of Fr. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit superior general at the time I was in high school. 

But it will likely come as no surprise that in those years, justice for queer folks was not even close to appearing on the radar screen. In retrospect, I am fully aware that, besides my then deeply-closeted self, there were a good number of classmates, and even faculty members, who were also gay. But nobody ever spoke about it, except in the snickering whispers quite common then in all-boys schools. As far as sexual orientation goes, I know for sure that I felt attracted to some of my classmates, but I was a world away from acknowledging that even to myself, let alone talking about it to anybody else – and there was certainly no hint that there was anybody at school that I could feel safe talking to, even if I wanted to. At that time, I was fairly certain that the only thing I could do about my homosexual feelings was to deny them completely and hope they’d go away – as they always do, right?

My college and graduate studies were at non-Catholic universities, where my sexuality would not have been an issue as far as the institutions were concerned, but for my own personal reasons, I didn’t fully grasp or accept my identity and actually come out until I was in my early 30s. In 2002, I began my first period of employment at a Catholic school, teaching Latin and Theology at an all-boys high school in Chicago. 

I am not really sure how much further along on the acceptance scale this school was, twenty years after my graduation from the first one – but I think we can safely describe it as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Though it wasn’t exactly something I brought up at my hiring interview, a good number of administrators and fellow faculty members were aware that I’m gay, and none of them had any concerns about it – just as long as I didn’t mention it. In that situation, my sexual orientation may not have caused any problems at work, but it certainly wasn’t received as a gift either. 

Still, there were some signs of progress: the school’s disciplinary code, and its enforcement, made it clear that homophobic language or behavior were not tolerated. And however well I observed the code of silence, my students “read” me well enough that one of them confided in me and sought my support when he was struggling with his own identity, and admitted that “all my friends have been saying, ‘Why not talk to Mr. Allocca? You know he’ll be ok about it.’” But at the same time, there was no actual open indication of tolerance or support from the institution.

Stage three came in 2016, when I found myself back at the same New York high school I had attended, this time as a Theology teacher. Much as my teenage self would never have dreamed it could happen, this school now had an officially approved LGBTQ and allies extracurricular club, and in my second year teaching there I was asked to take over as moderator. Besides the simple gratitude for the chance to serve my students in that capacity, consider the great advantages that came from my own personal experience: I could keep sharing my own history with them to say, “Yes, we still have a LOT more progress to make, and we should keep talking about how we can get there – but you are talking to living proof that we have indeed made great progress already, so let’s not get discouraged.” Being able to share my full identity with my students – while reminding them that there was nobody who could do that when I had been in their position – was a vast source of gratitude and joy. But then I was let go because I didn’t fit the agenda of a school president who was trying to turn the institution rightward – at least until he himself was fired for misconduct within two years after my departure.

I am currently (since 2020) in the fourth stage, again teaching Theology at a different Jesuit school in the greater New York area. At this school, besides the thriving Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) with full support of the administration and a wide popularity among the student body, we also have quite a large contingent of “out” faculty members, with no pressure on any of us to hide our identities. Administrators and fellow teachers often thank me and compliment me for my writing published here on Bondings 2.0. This year we have begun a queer-and-allies affinity group for faculty and staff, and are in the process of planning awareness programs to help the whole institution learn better how to support all our LGBTQ members, both adults and students. 

Is everything perfect at my current workplace? Of course not: we still live in a heteronormative world (and Church), and as long as we do, some of its problematic tendencies will seep into any institution, even one as serious about striving towards justice for all as my school clearly is. But rather than list the small imperfections we continue to work on, I would rather focus on celebrating the visible forward steps that I have experienced myself, and share this good news in hope of helping all I work with, and all who read this, keep that arc bending the way it should go.

—Michaelangelo Allocca, New Ways Ministry, February 1, 2024