A parish food pantry worker who was fired for her marriage to another woman sued the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph on Thursday, the latest in a number of clashes on gay rights between Roman Catholic leaders and their employees nationwide.
Colleen Simon, 57, said the diocese and the parish where she worked knew she was married and that her wife was a well-known community leader before Simon was hired. She was fired when the couple was mentioned last April in a newspaper article.
‘‘I was mostly shell-shocked,’’ Simon said. ‘‘I hadn’t thought it would come to this.’’
Diocesan officials had not yet seen the lawsuit, but said in a statement, ‘‘As a church, we have the right to live and operate according to our faith and church teachings.’’
New Ways Ministry, a Catholic gay rights group, has found more than 15 cases since 2010 of US teachers, school administrators, or parish musicians who lost jobs or resigned after expressing support for gay marriage or going public with same-sex relationships. Several of the former employees have sued.
Dioceses in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Honolulu; Oakland, Calif., and elsewhere have added morals clauses to their teacher contracts barring public support for gay rights. Other dioceses have asked volunteer educators to sign pledges on upholding church teaching.
The Missouri lawsuit was filed Thursday by Simon, who said she worked as a parish bookkeeper in the diocese before she was hired in 2013 as a food pantry coordinator at St. Francis Xavier Church. In each step of the hiring process, she said she told administrators she had married a woman a year earlier in Iowa, where gay marriage is recognized, and diocesan and parish representatives said her marital status would not be a problem.
Simon’s wife, the Reverend Donna Simon, is a pastor at a Kansas City congregation affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Colleen Simon said she underscored her wife’s public role in case the Jesuit parish had expectations the couple would be ‘‘discrete’’ about their marriage.
Then, the Simons were mentioned in a news article. Soon after, the priest told Simon he had to fire her over the article, she said.