The questions focused on how candidates would handle issues affecting L.G.B.T. Americans should they be elected president.

How faith-based employers could be affected by a ruling in favor of L.G.B.T. employees remains to be seen. More than 20 states and Washington, D.C., have passed job protections for L.G.B.T. people.

“How do we treat those things which are sacred? We treat them with care, dignity and respect. The church calls us to do that with our mortal remains as well.”

In an email sent Monday to the Brebeuf school community, William Verbryke, S.J., the school’s president, wrote, “We have just learned that the Congregation for Catholic Education has decided to suspend the Archbishop’s decree on an interim basis, pending its final resolution of our appeal.”

Among the dozens of priests named in new lawsuits is at least one bishop, the Most Rev. Howard Hubbard, who led the Diocese of Albany from 1977 to 2014. He is accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing a 16-year-old in the 1990s.

The near-term hardship “won’t hit for a week or two,” Bishop Kopacz said. But “as time goes on this month, there’s going to be some real crises.”

Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School is appealing a decision by Archbishop Charles C. Thompson to strip it of its Catholic name because of its refusal to part ways with a teacher in a same-sex marriage.

“It saddens me to see Baltimore severely denigrated by President Trump,” the archbishop said. “Baltimore is near and dear to my heart. It is hometown to more than half a million people.”

“This has been a difficult and contentious week in which darker spirits seem to have been at play in the people’s house,” Father Conroy said. “In your most holy name, I now cast out all spirits of darkness from this chamber, spirits not from you.”

Father James Martin was among the religious leaders testifying to members of the Helsinki Commission, which monitors human rights worldwide, about a surge in reported hate crimes.