Posted on February 7, 2014

Fired Again!

AR Staff, American Renaissance, February 6, 2014

Frank Borzellieri Fired

The Catholic Church continues to mistreat Frank Borzellieri. For the second time in three years, the Church to which he has dedicated his life has fired him from a job for which he was eminently qualified. In 2011, without so much as a hearing, a Catholic school fired him because of his honest writings — written many years earlier — about race. His latest employer has now fired him for a second time, having learned that a different Catholic had fired him in the past. Again, with no hearing or discussion.

As Mr. Borzellieri explained to American Renaissance, “They didn’t want to hear my side of the story. They have no interest in truth or righteousness; they care only about political correctness.”

The first time Mr. Borzellieri was fired was in August 2011 by the Archdiocese of New York. In the 1990s, he had written a lively column for a chain of New York City weekly newspapers, frequently touching on race and immigration. He also spoke to several AR conferences. He later collected some of his columns into books sold on Amazon.com and other web sites.

Before it hired Mr. Borzellieri in 2006, the Archdiocese officially reviewed his books. Monsignor Michael Hull, who has the title of Censor Librorum, which means “censor of books” in Latin, officially determined that Mr. Borzellieri’s books did not violate Catholic teaching. Mr. Borzellieri was promoted twice, eventually becoming principal of a Catholic elementary school.

After several years as principal, the New York Daily News ran a scurrilous article about Mr. Borzellieri, and he was fired the next day — for the very same writings the Church had approved. The archdiocese lied outright, claiming it never knew about the books it had officially sanctioned.

Mr. Borzellieri’s original story is told in a video interview with Jared Taylor, an article in American Renaissance, and an article by John Derbyshire.

Last November, DuBois Central Catholic School in DuBois, Pennsylvania, hired Mr. Borzellieri as headmaster. The school desperately needed leadership, and by its own admission, it had hired the “the right man.”

Mr. Borzellieri did not tell DuBois Central that he had been fired from his previous job. He even went through a legal name change so as to make a fresh start. “Look,” he says, “I was under no obligation to reveal what happened to me in New York. I had done nothing wrong. I was a victim. If I had told them in advance, there is no chance that they would have hired me.”

On five separate occasions, Mr. Borzellieri told potential employers what had happened in New York. Twice, it was when he was on the verge of being hired by a Catholic school. “I laid everything out for them,” he says. “I was completely upfront. In one case my invitation was revoked. They were willing to throw away the $700 they had already paid for my flight.”

The other incident was equally revealing:

I decided to email all of the information to the priest in charge of hiring, and asked him point blank if it was worth my making the six-hour drive to upstate New York for the interview.

He replied very thoughtfully, saying he had read all my links, adding, ‘It seems a great injustice was done to you. As a priest it is my job to right a wrong.’

But then he went on to say he didn’t want to deal with the situation, and wished me good luck. In other words, I may have been wronged but someone else would have to right the wrong.

Mr. Borzellieri points out he was not dishonest with the people at DuBois. His resume, two master’s degrees, and his references were all legitimate, as was his new legal name. Everything he said about himself was true. The usual background checks by the FBI and the state police naturally turned up nothing. In Mr. Borzellieri’s view, he simply withheld information about a political controversy that had no bearing on his qualifications for the job.

Frank Borzellieri receives the Excellence in Leadership Award for School Administration from St. John's University.

Frank Borzellieri receives the Excellence in Leadership Award for School Administration from St. John’s University.

“There is nothing illegal about a legal name change,” he points out. “I even told them my birth name was ‘Borzellieri’ and that my father had shortened it for business–which he did.”

Mr. Borzellieri does not know how the school found out about his past, but he first heard about it from one of his references. She, of course, had known about his name change, and had given a recommendation over the phone to the people who hired him. She called Mr. Borzellieri to tell him that the DuBois superintendent had just called to ask why she had “lied” during the earlier call.

When the superintendent asked her why she had lied, she explained that she had not lied at all. She had been asked if Mr. Borzellieri was a good man and she told him the truth.

The next day, Mr. Borzellieri was fired without a chance to say anything in his own defense.

“The tragedy of it,” he says, “is that they were willing to hurt their own school. I was everything they wanted, and was moving things in a positive direction. Now they are leaderless but oh so politically correct.”

Mr. Borzellieri has an impeccable record as an educator and always got excellent reviews. No one ever complained that he mistreated anyone because of race, even when he was dean of discipline at St. Barnabas High School in the Bronx. He was always popular with students, who were mostly non-white. When Mr. Borzellieri was fired the first time, black and Hispanic students wrote statements of support. Last year, when one of his Hispanic former students was killed in a traffic accident the girl’s father asked him to give the eulogy.

After he was fired, Mr. Borzellieri spoke with two employees of DuBois Central Catholic School who told him he was doing a great job as headmaster. One said, “We all felt lucky to have you. I simply could not believe the story I heard.”

Another employee told him, “The students loved you and you were working very hard. The school is set way, way back by losing you.”

Mr. Borzellieri is again out of a job. He has student loans, a mortgage, no medical insurance, and no job. Please contribute to him:

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His books are available here.

The photo at the beginning of this story was taken when Mr. Borzellieri was hired at DuBois Central. The caption noted “how fortunate the school community is to welcome a new leader with such significant experience in a quality Catholic education.”