Catholic Teacher in Crookston, Minnesota, Diocese Fired for Supporting Marriage Equality

Among many disturbing aspects, the one I find most mind-boggling in this story of the firing of a Catholic teacher in Moorhead, Minnesota, because she supports marriage equality?  It's this:

Cameron said her decision to speak out goes back to a day last fall, when Bishop Michael Hoeppner of the Diocese of Crookston made his annual visit to her class. 

"When he came to talk to my fifth graders this year this was the topic, gay marriage and the Minnesota Marriage Amendment," she recalled. "And it ended with a direct call to 'talk to your parents,' kind of 'tell them how to vote and make sure — this is important for the church.' And I was really troubled by that, I was very uncomfortable with that" (emphasis added).

And that puts me in mind of this.  As abundant sources demonstrate, the Nazi Government in Germany used children to intimidate and spy on their parents.  Hitler Youth were instructed to report ideological infractions on the part of their parents--statements made in the privacy of their homes that suggested less than absolute loyalty to the Party and its leaders; any expression of sympathy for Jews or others hounded by the Nazi government, etc.

I wrote last October that the organization of teams led by "church captains" in Minnesota Catholic parishes, with the intent of whipping the parish into shape as an anti-marriage equality voting machine, put me in mind of the use of the Gauleiter system in Nazi Germany.  That system sought to assure total ideological conformity at each local level through the creation of teams to whip people into shape ideologically and punish dissenters.  People quickly learned to curb their tongues and be exceedingly circumspect about expressing their true thoughts about almost anything, once that system was set into place.

Perhaps many defenders of the Catholic church in the configuration its present leaders have made of it will think I'm reaching with these analogies.  To me, they tend to come rather naturally, though, since I have lived for 40 years with a spouse whose roots are in the very diocese in Minnesota in which Trish Cameron was just fired for thinking thoughts outlawed by the present lords of the church.

A diocese which contains a heavy proportion of Catholics with German and Austrian roots--the same roots my spouse Steve has . . . . Roots that have led him to read obsessively for years now about the Nazi period, in an attempt to figure out how his own people, people with a deep Catholic heritage going back centuries, could have done what they did in the Nazi period . . . .

We tend to think of the Nazi times as over and done with.

But when I read what the current leaders of the Catholic church are trying to accomplish here, there, everywhere--in the state of Minnesota and the diocese of Crookston, Minnesota--I wonder if that's the case.