Church employees sacked for opposing female clergy

[Tiriol]

Meanwhile, in Finland, as reported by Helsingin Sanomat.

Dispute over female clergy leads to first sackings of church employees

The long-standing dispute within the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church over the ordination of women has led to the first cases in which church employees have been sacked for their opposition to female pastors. Previously church workers have only been suspended for a given term.
The Langinkoski parish in the southeast of Finland has now terminated the contracts of two youth workers for their refusal to cooperate with clergywomen.
According to the Kotka-based newspaper Kymen Sanomat, the Parish Council decided on the dismissal of the employees on Tuesday evening.

The reason given for the sackings was that in spite of warnings, the youth workers had refused to take part in services in which a woman pastor delivered the sermon, served communion, or was involved in the liturgy.
The paper writes that in spite of being told not to, the workers in question had used material that they had drawn up themselves in their work with young people in their early teens.
Langinkoski vicar Jukka Lopperi told Kymen Sanomat that the grounds for dismissal were discrimination and that the decision was the product of a conflict that had lasted years.

The Lutheran Church and organisations within the church that are opposed to the ordination of women issued a joint expression of a desire for cooperation last week.
According to the statement the “parties want to work together so that nobody in the church will suffer discrimination on the basis of their gender, conviction, or view of who should be entitled to ordination”.

In 2007 a female pastor in Hyvinkää desisted from taking part in a service when a visiting clergyman from a conservative faction of the Lutheran Church refused to work at the altar with her.
The issue went to court, and led to a fine for discrimination.
The Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church approved the ordination of women in 1986.

It was about time that the church officials finally got fed up with this. Go ahead, leave the church and form your own and DON'T anoint women as priests, you have every right to do so; but don't try to force that opinion on the main church and discriminate against those women who have already been anointed. I hope that this will become more widespread.

[Edi]

Good fucking riddance to these asshats. The church has been playing nice with them for far too long, up to and including the Tuomiokapituli (an ecclesiastical body that handles church internal matters that don't belong to the jurisdiction of secular courts, such as internal disciplinary actions).