The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that “a ministerial exception” protects a pair of parochial schools from facing age and disability discrimination charges related to the firing of two teachers.

The high court’s 7-2 decision in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru focuses on its 2012 ruling in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church vs. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission et al., which said a religious school can claim a ministerial exception to a discrimination charge under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wednesday’s ruling involved two underlying court decisions. In Agnes Deirdre Morrissey-Berru v. Our Lady of Guadalupe School, Ms. Morrissey-Berru contended the Hermosa Beach, California, school, for which she had worked since 1999, demoted and then terminated her in 2015 because of budget cuts. Ms. Morrissey-Berru, who was 65 at the time of the termination, said the school falsely claimed that she had agreed to retire at the end of the school year.

She sued the school in U.S. District Court in Pasadena, California, on charges including violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The court ruled in the school’s favor.

Citing Hosanna-Tabor, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned the lower court ruling and held the lower court had erred in concluding Ms. Morrissey-Berru was a “minister” for purposes of the ministerial exception.

The Supreme Court ruled in Hosanna-Tabor that a religious school can claim a ministerial exception to a discrimination charge under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The case involved a teacher, Cheryl Perich, who also taught secular subjects and held the title of “Minister of Religion, Commissioned.”

In the second case decided Wednesday, Kristen Biel, who had worked for about a year and a half as a lay teacher at St. James School, a Catholic primary school in Los Angeles, was allegedly discharged because she had requested a leave of absence to obtain treatment for breast cancer. The school contended her termination was based on poor performance.  The 9th Circuit again overturned the lower court’s ruling and decided in the late Ms. Biel’s favor.

In overturning both decisions, the majority opinion delivered by Justice Samuel Alito said, “Although these teachers were not given the title of ‘minister’ and have less religious training than Perich, we hold that their cases fall within the same rule that dictated our decision in Hosanna-Tabor.

“The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission.

“Judicial review of the way in which religious missions discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way that the First Amendment does not tolerate,” said the ruling, which provides background on the issue dating back to 16th Century English and American colonial law.

The majority said the Hosanna-Tabor ruling is applicable, even though the women in the recent cases did not hold the title of minister. “What matters, at bottom, is what an employee does.  And implicit in our decision in Hosanna-Tabor was a recognition that educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission of a private religious school,” the ruling said in reversing the 9th Circuit rulings and remanding them for further proceedings.

Concurring opinions were issued by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said the majority reached its result “even though the teachers taught primarily secular subjects, lacked substantial religious titles and training and were not even required to be Catholic.
“In foreclosing the teachers’ claims, the Court skews the facts, ignores the applicable standard of review, and collapses Hosanna-Tabor’s careful analysis into a single consideration: whether a church thinks its employees play an important religious role.

“Because that simplistic approach has no basis in law and strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protections, I respectfully dissent."