Maine's funding ultimatum: Catholic schools, public money, and the formation question

On July 2, 2026, the First Circuit sided with the state of Maine, leaving in place the funding conditions St. Dominic Academy, of the Diocese of Portland, had challenged through a request for injunctive relief against the school's LGBT-related nondiscrimination obligations.[^1] Maine may now withhold public funding from Catholic schools that refuse to facilitate student gender transitions, decline to require staff to use opposite-sex pronouns for students, or decline to publicly affirm student gender identities. The court reasoned that 'combatting sexual-orientation and gender-identity discrimination' is a 'legitimate governmental pursuit' and that conditioning publicly funded schools on compliance with those rules 'rationally relates' to that pursuit.[^1]

The ruling follows Carson v. Makin, the 2022 Supreme Court decision holding that Maine could not exclude religious schools from neutral student-aid programs on the basis of their religious exercise. Adèle Keim, an attorney with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty representing St. Dominic Academy, told EWTN News that Maine had altered its funding policy specifically ahead of the Carson decision to add the gender and sexuality nondiscrimination requirements, knowing those requirements 'would be a red line for the schools that had been suing the state.'[^1] Keim contends the appeals court decision conflicts with Carson and with the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, and has indicated the school may petition the Supreme Court.

The appeals court did grant partial relief: Maine cannot dictate faith-related hiring practices or religious expression rules on campus. On the nondiscrimination policies themselves, however, the court found the schools have 'no constitutional protection.'[^1]

What the court's framing leaves out

The legal question before the court was narrow: does compelling a funded school to affirm student gender identities rationally relate to a legitimate state interest? The court said yes. That framing does not reach the prior question: what kind of institution is a school, and what is it actually doing when it forms students?

The Second Vatican Council's Gravissimum Educationis (1965) offers a direct answer. A true education 'aims at the formation of the human person in the pursuit of his ultimate end and of the good of the societies of which, as man, he is a member.'[^2] Catholic schooling is ordered to that end from the outset. The council described Catholic schools as institutions whose 'proper function is to create for the school community a special atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity, to help youth grow according to the new creatures they were made through baptism.'[^2] That Gospel ordering is the architecture of the school's formation, not a supplement to its academic mission.

The Aparecida document (2007), the final text of the Fifth General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishops, presses the point further. Christian education means 'educating toward a project of a human being in whom Jesus Christ dwells with the transforming power of his new life.'[^3] The values transmitted in any school form 'an ordered constellation, whether explicitly or implicitly,' and if the ordering has Christ as its foundation and terminus, the education is genuinely Christian — if not, 'it may speak of Christ, but it runs the risk of not being Christian.'[^3]

This is a claim about the internal logic of Catholic Christian formation: remove the Christological order from the school's anthropological premises, and what remains may use Catholic vocabulary while forming students toward a different account of the person.

The anthropological conflict

Maine's nondiscrimination requirement asks Catholic schools to publicly affirm student gender identities, including identities that conflict with the school's understanding of the human person as created male or female, bodily and spiritually unified, ordered toward an ultimate end that transcends the self's self-report.

Publicly affirming a student's gender identity as authoritative is a substantive anthropological act: it locates the authority for personal identity in the individual's self-report rather than in the body-soul composite that Catholic anthropology holds to be prior. The court left that conflict unadjudicated, ruling only that the state's interest in nondiscrimination rationally relates to requiring the affirmation. What it set aside is whether requiring the affirmation also requires the school to teach, institutionally and publicly, an account of the person it holds to be false.

The parental dimension

The Carson decision rested on the principle that a 'neutral benefit program in which public funds flow to religious organizations through the independent choices of private benefit recipients' does not violate the Constitution.[^1] Parents who choose Catholic schools for their children are, at least in part, choosing the anthropological formation on offer. A funding condition that requires the school to publicly contradict that formation on the precise questions that most distinguish Catholic Christian education from secular alternatives selects against the schools' distinctiveness at the point where it is most theologically significant.

Formation under pressure

The legal proceedings continue. Keim has indicated a Supreme Court petition remains possible, and the Becket Fund's argument that the appeals court decision conflicts with both Carson and Mahmoud v. Taylor provides a basis for further review. Whatever the courts ultimately decide, Catholic schools in jurisdictions with similar funding structures face the same structural choice: accept public money with state-prescribed anthropological affirmations attached, or decline the money and remain free to form students according to their own account of the person.

The Second Vatican Council was clear that the Church 'must be concerned with the whole of man's life, even the secular part of it insofar as it has a bearing on his heavenly calling,' and therefore has 'a role in the progress and development of education.'[^2] Catholic schools are the institutional expression of that role. When public funding arrives attached to conditions requiring those schools to publicly endorse an anthropology they hold to be mistaken, the question reaches beyond school finance. It becomes a question of whether schools that form students toward their ultimate end can do so in the public square at all.

References

[^1]: Payne, D. (2026, July 9). Federal court: Maine Christian schools receiving public funding must follow gender, sexuality rules. EWTN News. https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/federal-court-says-christian-schools-receiving-public-funding-must-abide-by-gender-sexuality

[^2]: Second Vatican Council. (1965). Gravissimum educationis: Declaration on Christian education. Vatican Polyglot Press.

[^3]: Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean. (2007). Aparecida: Concluding document, nos. 331–333. CELAM.