Over the past decade Notre Dame has become The Vagina Monologues’ poster school. As Dr. Lawrence Cunningham, a former chair of the Theology faculty, has lamented, the Vagina Monologues “has become a kind of code word to identity Notre Dame.” He does not exaggerate. In a Wall Street Journal feature interview of April 12, 2008, “Rev. John J. Jenkins, Catholicism, Inc.,” Naomi Riley Smith reported:
Father Jenkins recently made headlines with his decision to allow the college to sponsor a performance of Eve Ensler’s ‘Vagina Monologues” during the week leading up to Easter. He is not the first Catholic college president to accede to campus demands for this play, but his nod of approval is deeply symbolic.
Similarly, in a “must read” examination of this and related issues in a Catholic World Report cover article, “Father Jenkins’ ‘Creative Contextualization,’” the noted scholar and author (and Notre Dame graduate) Dr. Thomas S. Hibbs observed:
“[A]t Notre Dame, the furor over The Vagina Monologues . . . has been more heated than at any other Catholic institution, perhaps because so few Catholic institutions allow such performances.”
These reverberations suggest that the issue involves a good deal more than speculation as to what adverse consequences might result from the performance of a single play, no matter how repellant in tone and hostile to Church teaching. And indeed it does. The importance of this issue arises from four considerations unrelated to debates about whether this play’s performance might cause harm on campus:
- First, the intense faculty opposition to Father Jenkins’s initial disposition to withhold approval of a play so antagonistic to fundamental Catholic principles has revealed a decree of secularization hitherto unsuspected by many outside university precincts.
- Second, Father Jenkins’s reversal of his initial disposition in the face of faculty opposition raises for many a question as to how he will deal with even stronger faculty opposition on the much more important issue of faculty hiring.
- Third, by “having turned a...tawdry piece of mediocre art into a defining litmus test for academic freedom and issues of Catholic identity,” as Dr. Hibbs has put it, Father Jenkins has set a precedent under which it is hard to imagine any realistic limits.
- Finally, Father Jenkins’s dismissal of Bishop John M. D’Arcy’s repeated and considered objections opened a breach with the Church that was widened by last year’s cancellation by fifty bishops of a campus conference on account of the play – an event we describe below – and has now reached truly fearsome proportions because of the University’s honoring of President Obama.
Here is what has happened during the course of this controversy:
Although this play is performed annually on the campuses of hundreds of secular colleges and universities, it has gained little traction at Catholic institutions, as Dr. Hibbs noted. The small group of Catholic institutions hosting the play peaked at 32 out of about 230, and it has shrunk to but 15 as criticism has mounted.
In 2003, for example, the Rev. David Tyson, C.S.C., now the C.S.C. Provincial for the Indiana Province and then President of the University of Portland, declared, “In conscience, I cannot approve of [the play’s] performance on campus." And recently the President of Catholic University, the Very Reverend David O’Connell, C.M., characterized the play “as a symbol each year of the desire of some folks to push Catholic campuses over the edge of good and decent judgment," and declared, "Sooner or later, someone has got to simply say ‘enough.’" For more detail, see The Vagina Monologues on Catholic Campuses, and for extensive coverage, see The Cardinal Newman Society.
The reason for this resistance to the play is evident from its text. While the play’s full measure can be taken only by reading it in its entirety, we have provided a summary in Description of The Vagina Monologues. Most of the monologues of any length are extraordinarily explicit accounts by women of highly charged sexual episodes, typically but not exclusively lesbian intercourse (including seduction of a minor) and masturbation. Perhaps the most telling testimony to the play’s character and intended effect comes from the author herself, who, on the first page of her introduction to the 2001 edition, boasted of having experienced “thirty-two public orgasms a night" while performing the roles.
In short, the play is, and is plainly intended to be, a celebration of the joys of sexual gratification through actions gravely immoral in the eyes of the Church.
To be sure, not everyone reads the play this way. For example, a Notre Dame professor, writing in the May 8, 2006 issue of the Jesuit magazine America, declared that the “overarching goal" of the play is the “combating of violence against women." This is the theme of the play’s apologists. But it is a transparent fiction. No disinterested viewer would be able to subordinate the ubiquitous sex scenes to the relatively few devoted to violence. Strip the play of its sex scenes and little remains.
Notwithstanding protests, the play was performed by Notre Dame students on campus annually during the four years preceding Father Jenkins’s presidency. At first, it seemed that his accession would mark the end of the play. In impressive January 2006 addresses to faculty and students, Father Jenkins explained why he thought continued sponsorship of the play was “problematic." The play, he said, “contains graphic descriptions of homosexual, extra-marital heterosexual, and autoerotic experiences," and “even depiction of seduction of a sixteen year-old girl by an adult woman," in “portrayals [that] stand apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the view that human sexuality finds its proper expression in the committed relationship of marriage...." Moreover, he said, “the repeated performances of the play and the publicity surrounding it" suggested endorsement, or at least neutrality, by the University respecting these themes of the play.
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