Remember Bishop Pates: Confused Atheist Schoolteacher Fired on his Watch

Bishop Pates was sent to Des Moines Iowa and was very controversial as an Auxiliary Bishop in St. Paul, Minnesota, here,

A week after the Fox visit, Auxiliary Bishop Richard Pates visited St. Joan of Arc to formally install Fr. DeBruycker as pastor. According to The Wanderer, Bishop Pates assured parishioners that “Fr. DeBruycker has the full support of Archbishop Flynn.” In confirmation of this, Archbishop Flynn himself (along with Bishop Pates) paid a visit to St. Joan of Arc on May 24, 2006, to preside at the funeral Mass for Fr. Harvey Egan, former pastor of St. Joan’s. Fr. Egan is the founder of their famous and controversial “gym Mass.”

To date Saint Joan of Arc still holds meetings and hosts events that either explicitly or implicitly attack Catholic teaching, here.

Despite his earlier career as a serious wreckovator at St. Ambrose in Eagan, Minnesota and at Resurrection Parish in South Minneapolis, he's forging a new role for himself. He's already dealt with unruly teachers before, here. Iowa, being a home of much liberal judicial activism is a challenging place, an interesting place to test the Church's strength against the unwieldy and oppressive power of the state.

Despite Bishop Pates earlier reticence to defend Catholic teaching, indeed, his efforts to undermine it, he is now acting in an unaccustomed role as a defender of Catholic Truth:

A Catholic teacher from Fort Dodge has been fired because of a Facebook survey in which she said she did not believe in God.

Abby Nurre, 27, was hired last summer as an eighth- grade math teacher at St. Edmond Catholic School. In August, she responded to a Facebook members' poll in which she was asked whether she believed in God, miracles or heaven.

In response, Nurre answered, "No." Her answers then became part of her Facebook autobiography page, which was accessible only to her designated "friends."