This review of church law has now been ongoing long enough to occasionally note developments in individual cases.  In the post titled The Finger in the Dike, July 6, 2017, the Supreme Court of Michigan’s opinion in Winkler v Marist Fathers of Detroit, Inc., Slip Op. (Mich. 2017), was summarized.  In that case, the student applicant to the church high school asserted she was denied admission due to dyslexia.  The defendant church school claimed the admission was denied because the student’s academic record did not meet the admissions requirements and that the disability was unknown to the church school at the time the admission decision was made.

The Supreme Court revised its own prior pronouncements that the Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine was jurisdictional and indicated it was not jurisdictional.  If a dispute could be decided on neutral principles that did not require an inquiry into ecclesiastical decisions, then the dispute could be resolved by a Michigan court according to the Michigan high court.  As we noted when we summarized the decision, the smaller and weaker the Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine is defined the more likely it becomes that a court, even a well meaning one, will simply ignore ecclesiastical sensibilities.  Another risk is that churches will be required to comply with laws intended to govern for-profit businesses and local governmental subdivisions, even though churches have a more fragile financial base.  Thus, the Michigan Supreme Court reversed the intermediate appellate court decision and ordered it to consider the arguments it had not reached.  The applicability of the Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine was left for the trial court to determine.

In Winkler v Marist Fathers of Detroit, Inc., Slip. Op. (Mich. App., September 21, 2017), the Court of Appeals ruled that Michigan laws requiring schools not to discriminate on the basis of disability applied to church schools, too.  The law allowed church schools to discriminate on religious grounds, i.e., exclude a student that was not an adherent to the beliefs of the church school but not based on disability.  Thus, the case was remanded to the trial court to determine whether there was any ecclesiastical issue barring consideration of the dispute and whether the school based its admission decision on the alleged disability of the Plaintiff.

Another implication that might arise is the financial burden on the church school.  If the trial court decides there is no ecclesiastical issue it could also decide the only issue is whether the admission decision was discriminatorily based on disability.  To avoid such an issue in the future, or because it is enjoined or otherwise prohibited from making admission decisions based on academic performance for fear that lurking within is an undisclosed disability, the church school might also be forced to admit an academically challenged student and then might be forced to allocate accommodation resources (e.g., lower performance expectations, tutors, learning disability professionals).  The taxpayers have been unwilling in most places to fund these accommodations in public schools and public budgets have only been able to pay lip service to these needs.  As a result, public school systems struggle to meet these requirements and usually fail.  Church schools might get the opportunity to fail as well because donated money may be no more plentiful than public money.

• Uncategorized