A Catholic teacher has been fired and banned from the profession for two years after taking part in pro-family and anti-COVID measures rallies.
Nelsi Pelinku, an Austrian teacher whose parents immigrated from Albania, told LifeSiteNews that he was fired from his teaching job in a public school in the federal state of Salzburg in August 2023 after the school found out that he attended several rallies between 2019 and 2022, including the pro-family March for the Family, protests against the draconian COVID-related measures, and anti-mass-migration rallies. The events in question all took place before Pelinku was a teacher at the school.
Pelinku believes he was ousted from his job for his worldview, which goes against the mainstream leftist hegemony. He also stressed that his convictions are based on his Catholic faith.
“I am convinced that this LGBT agenda, which is now being pushed in the West in Europe, including in schools, is simply not good for the human soul, but that the traditional teachings of the Church are what is good for the human soul,” he told LifeSiteNews.
In 2022, Pelinku was “doxxed” on a website run by a far-left group that shared photos of him at the rallies and called for his firing at St. Michael Secondary Music School in Lungau, Salzburg. After the school principal learned about the site, she commissioned the left-wing, state-funded organization DÖW (Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstands) to conduct a report on Pelinku and issue a judgment on whether he publicly displayed “fascist, anti-Semitic or racist ideas.”
The DÖW report claimed the March for the Family and a protest against a “drag queen story hour” that Pelinku attended have an “openly homophobic agenda.” The report also suggested that the Catholic teacher was a “far-right extremist” because he attended multiple anti-immigration rallies organized by the Identitarian movement.
However, the DÖW also stated that none of Pelinku’s actions violated the freedom of opinion or speech in Austria.
After the report, Pelinku was fired from his job several months later. In the termination letter, viewed by LifeSiteNews, the educational directorate of Salzburg named several reasons for the teacher’s dismissal, among them that Pelinku criticized some of the teaching methods used in the school, such as the “team teaching” format.
Another reason was that the teacher ripped up a leaflet of the “homosexual initiative” that was displayed in the school. Pelinku told LifeSiteNews that he was furious because the organization offered to come into the school and “teach” children about LGBT issues and that they wished to be alone with the students without a supervising teacher, even though that would be illegal in Austria. Pelinku apologized to the principal for ripping up the leaflet. However, he stressed that he did not change his position on the matter.
The letter of dismissal furthermore claimed that the teacher suggested to a group of students that solar radiation could turn them “gay.” Pelinku said that this was a lie, and the students who made the claims made contradictory statements in the court after court proceedings. The allegation was therefore found not credible by the judge.
The educational directorate also claimed that Pelinku had displayed “public behavior contemptuous of press freedom” by using an umbrella to block the sight of leftist photographers at some of the rallies he attended. Photos taken by these leftist activists are often used to denounce and “doxx” participants, as happened in Pelinku’s case.
The dismissal letter also claimed that the Catholic teacher showed the “White Power” hand sign (commonly known as the “OK” sign) at some of the rallies. Pelinku said that the hand gesture is commonly used as a joke. He himself has darker skin than the average European, and his parents were immigrants from Albania. Even the notoriously left-wing Anti-Defamation League (ADL) states in an article that the use of the “okay” hand gesture as a sign of white supremacy was a “hoax by members of the website 4chan” in 2017 that subsequently became “a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals.”
Pelinku sued the federal state of Salzburg for wrongful termination. In its verdict on July 11, 2024, the court found that the teacher was within his rights according to the freedoms of speech and assembly contained within the European Convention of Human Rights and Austrian constitutional law and that there was no serious breach of his duty as a teacher. Therefore, the court found the termination of his employment was unjustified.
The educational directorate of Salzburg appealed the decision, and the appeal was upheld by the second-instance court for a technical reason. After his dismissal, Pelinku applied to two public schools run by the state of Salzburg and stated in his application that his employment at the St. Michael Secondary Music School had ended on August 31, 2023. The court found that this meant the teacher had implicitly accepted his dismissal as legitimate, forfeiting his right to sue for wrongful termination.
Having lost the case, Pelinku now has to cover around 24,000 EUR (24,752 USD) in legal fees and cannot work as a teacher in public schools in Austria for two more years.
The Catholic teacher said that his faith carried him through the tough times of the past two years.
“I can highly recommend praying the rosary to everyone,” he said.
Visit this donation site to help the Catholic teacher cover his legal fees of 24,000 euros due to his unjust firing.