Tattoos are no reason for a Catholic school to exclude someone

Charlotte Tumilty, a 26-year-old mother of two sent home on her first day as a teaching assistant at a Catholic school in Hartlepool because of her tattoos, is exactly the sort of young person the Church should embrace. At my most adorned, I had 14 piercings and five tattoos. No-one at my supposedly conservative church in Oxford batted an eyelid when I came back from university covered in metal – although one priest did joke about his fear we’d get tangled up (I had five lip rings) when he gave me Communion. I loved the fact that my church – like, to their credit, my family – didn’t care what I looked like. So I can only imagine how Ms Tumilty felt when a member of staff at the school in Hartlepool allegedly told her “it's a strictly Catholic school a