Catholic School Forces Anti-Gay Teacher To Quit Facebook After Celeb Pressure

A New Jersey Catholic high school suspended a theology teacher and ordered her to take down her personal Facebook page after celebrities drew attention to an anti-gay post she’d written, MyCentralJersey.com reported Friday.

Patricia Jannuzzi, a teacher at Immaculata High School in Somerville, N.J., wrote earlier this month on Facebook that gays “want to reengineer western civ into a slow extinction,” according to MyCentralJersey.com.

That post caught the eye of “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Greg Bennett, who graduated from Immaculata in 2004 and is gay. He took a screenshot of the post and tweeted it to his 165,000 Twitter followers on March 8:

This nightmare dumpster human taught me in high school, and still teaches there. Keep it classy, Immaculata pic.twitter.com/CD9m6WlwOP

— Greg Bennett (@GreggyBennett) March 9, 2015

As the pressure built, actress Susan Sarandon shared a letter her nephew, a gay Immaculata alumnus, had written criticizing Jannuzzi, his former teacher.

“High school is a tough time anyway,” Sarandon wrote Wednesday in a Facebook post, which had 5,500 likes as of Monday afternoon. “Students don’t need teachers making it even more difficult.”

That same day as Sarandon’s post, the school released a statement saying that it had “mandated that the teacher involved permanently deactivate her public Facebook page.”

And on Friday, the school announced that it had placed Jannuzzi on administrative leave.

“As a school community, we respect, profess and uphold the teachings of the Catholic church on the sanctity of marriage, but we are also a community that follows the example of Jesus Christ in welcoming all people,” the school’s director and principal said in their joint statement. “These postings, which were quickly removed at our request, were completely inconsistent with our policy and position as a Catholic Christian community.”