Our Lady of Guadalupe v. Morrissey-Berru: Ruling and Aftermath

In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, decided July 8, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that two Catholic elementary school teachers could not sue their schools for employment discrimination because their jobs included teaching the faith. The decision widened the First Amendment’s “ministerial exception,” which bars courts from second-guessing a religious institution’s employment decisions about people who carry out its religious mission. After this ruling, a formal title of “minister” and specialized theological training are no longer required; what controls is what the employee actually does.¹

The Two Teachers Behind the Case

The Court consolidated two lawsuits from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Both involved lay teachers at Catholic elementary schools whose contracts were not renewed, and both alleged the reason had nothing to do with religion.

Agnes Morrissey-Berru taught fifth and sixth grade at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach. Her contract required her to “model and promote” the school’s religious mission. She taught religion daily from a church-approved curriculum, prepared students for Mass, confession, and communion, led prayers, and joined liturgical activities. In 2014 the school moved her to part-time, and in 2015 it declined to renew her contract, citing difficulty adapting to a new reading and writing curriculum. She sued under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, alleging she had been pushed out to make room for a younger teacher.²³

Kristen Biel taught fifth grade at St. James School in Torrance beginning in the 2013–2014 school year. Her contract also required her to integrate Catholic faith into her teaching; she taught religion four days a week and participated in prayer and monthly Mass. In April 2014, she told her principal she had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer and needed time off for surgery and chemotherapy. Weeks later, the school told her it would not renew her contract, citing classroom management. She sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Biel died on June 7, 2019, during litigation, and her husband Darryl Biel was substituted as the party representing her estate.⁴⁵

In each case, the district court granted summary judgment to the school on ministerial-exception grounds. In each case, the Ninth Circuit reversed, concluding that neither teacher held a religious title, had specialized religious training, or held herself out as a religious leader.⁶

The Ministerial Exception Going Into the Case

The doctrine came from the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2012 decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, which held that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses bar the government from interfering with a religious institution’s choice of its ministers. The teacher there held the formal title of “commissioned minister.” The Court identified four considerations that pointed toward applying the exception in her case: her formal title, the religious substance behind it, whether she held herself out as a minister, and her job duties. The Court expressly declined to adopt a “rigid formula.”⁷⁸

That open-endedness left lower courts unsure how to handle employees who lacked a clerical title but performed religious work. The Ninth Circuit treated the four Hosanna-Tabor considerations as something close to a checklist, and because Morrissey-Berru and Biel failed three of them, it let their cases proceed.

What the Supreme Court Held

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. The Court reversed the Ninth Circuit and ordered summary judgment reinstated for both schools.⁹

The core holding rejected the checklist approach. The four Hosanna-Tabor considerations were relevant but not required; no single one—title, training, self-identification, or duties—was mandatory. Instead, the majority applied a functional test. In Justice Alito’s words, “What matters, at bottom, is what an employee does.” A teacher at a religious school who is responsible for educating students in the faith, guiding them to live by it, and joining in religious activities is performing “vital religious duties” and falls within the exception.¹

The majority gave two reasons for loosening the title and training requirements. Requiring a formal “minister” title would impose a Protestant-inspired model of church structure on faiths, including Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, that organize themselves differently. And demanding specific theological credentials would force courts to decide what religious training is enough, an inquiry the First Amendment was designed to avoid. A religious institution’s own account of an employee’s role in its mission, the Court said, carries significant weight.²

On the facts, the Court found that Morrissey-Berru and Biel performed essentially the same religious functions as the teacher in Hosanna-Tabor: daily religious instruction, sacramental preparation, prayer leadership, and liturgical participation. Their contracts required them to model and promote the Catholic faith, and their performance was evaluated partly on religious criteria. The First Amendment therefore barred the courts from reviewing the schools’ decisions not to renew their contracts.¹

Thomas’s Concurrence

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, wrote separately to argue that courts should simply defer to a religious organization’s “good-faith understanding of who qualifies as its minister.” In his view, any secular attempt to weigh whether an employee’s role is sufficiently religious is itself a theological judgment. The schools’ handbooks and contracts, he said, showed a sincere belief that the teachers held ministerial roles, and that should have ended the inquiry.³

Sotomayor’s Dissent

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented. She argued the majority had turned a carefully limited doctrine into something close to “general immunity” for religious employers. Neither Morrissey-Berru nor Biel held a religious title, had theological training, or presented herself as a religious leader. By covering them, Sotomayor wrote, the Court stripped “thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protections” against discrimination based on age, disability, race, and other characteristics.²

The dissent also faulted the majority’s handling of summary judgment. At that stage, disputed facts are supposed to be viewed in the light most favorable to the party opposing the motion, meaning the teachers. Sotomayor argued the majority instead accepted the schools’ characterization of the teachers’ roles as definitive, giving religious institutions a way to insulate themselves from antidiscrimination law by asserting that any employee performs religious duties.¹

What the Decision Means for Employees and Institutions

Before the ruling, an employee at a religious school without a clerical title or theological training had a plausible argument that the ministerial exception did not reach her. After the ruling, the controlling question is whether her actual duties involve carrying out the institution’s religious mission. That shift gives religious schools broad protection against discrimination claims by teachers, even when the alleged reason for termination is entirely secular—age, disability, and similar grounds included.³

Documents matter more than they used to. Mission statements, faculty handbooks, and employment agreements describing an employee’s religious responsibilities can be dispositive evidence that her role is tied to the school’s religious purpose. For a teacher considering a discrimination suit, the contract she signed and the religious duties written into her job description are now often the first things a court will look at.

How Lower Courts Have Applied the Ruling

Since 2020, courts have extended the exception to a range of positions beyond classroom teachers, with mixed results. A parochial school principal was covered in Rehfield v. Diocese of Joliet in Illinois. An assistant director of music and worship was covered in Koenke v. Saint Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania. Going the other way, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in DeWeese-Boyd v. Gordon College found that an associate professor of social work was not a minister, noting in part that the school had tried to recharacterize her role as ministerial after the fact. Purely support positions such as custodians and bookkeepers have generally been held outside the exception, but positions like coaches and staff attorneys remain unsettled.³

Some state courts have resisted a broad reading. In Woods v. Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission (2021), the Washington Supreme Court questioned whether the exception should apply to attorneys working for a religious nonprofit.¹⁰

Scholars have questioned whether the functional test really avoids the entanglement the Court worried about. A Harvard Law Review case comment argued that requiring judges to assess whether an employee’s duties are sufficiently tied to a religious mission may itself force theological judgments about which positions are important to the church’s spiritual and pastoral work.¹¹

Where the Boundaries Are Still Being Tested

The doctrine’s reach continues to be contested. In McRaney v. North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (5th Cir. 2025), the Fifth Circuit extended the related “church autonomy doctrine” beyond employment discrimination to bar tort claims, including defamation and tortious interference, arising from a religious organization’s internal staffing decisions. The court reasoned that even the process of judicial inquiry into those decisions could impinge on First Amendment rights.¹²

In Union Gospel Mission of Yakima Washington v. Brown (2026), the Ninth Circuit held that church autonomy protects a faith-based organization’s ability to hire co-religionists even for non-ministerial roles, provided the decision rests on sincerely held religious beliefs tied to the organization’s mission.¹³

A pending test of the exception’s outer limits is now before the California Supreme Court. In Lorenzo v. San Francisco Zen Center, the court agreed in February 2026 to decide whether the ministerial exception categorically bars wage and hour claims by a minister against a religious organization, or whether courts must first determine whether the specific claim touches an ecclesiastical concern. The California Court of Appeal had held the exception does not automatically shield a religious employer from minimum wage and overtime obligations when the dispute raises no issue of faith, doctrine, or internal governance. The state high court’s answer could set an important limit on how far the doctrine reaches into labor law.¹⁴

1
U.S. Supreme Court. Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, Opinion
2
Cornell Law Institute. Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru
3
Harvard Law Review. Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru
4
U.S. Supreme Court. St. James School v. Biel, Petition for Writ of Certiorari
5
Slate. Supreme Court Religious School Discrimination Case
6
Metropolitan News-Enterprise. Ninth Circuit Ruling in Biel v. St. James School
7
Oyez. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC
8
University of Chicago Law Review. Clarifying and Reframing the Ministerial Exception
9
SCOTUSblog. Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru
10
Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Post-Our Lady of Guadalupe Lower Court Application
11
Harvard Law Review. Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, Case Comment
12
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. McRaney v. North American Mission Board
13
Holland & Knight. Religious Institutions Update
14
California Supreme Court. Lorenzo v. San Francisco Zen Center