Of the many other symptoms of secularization that could be listed, three are sufficiently striking to warrant special mention: the honoring of President Obama, the Queer Film Festival, and the platform of, and University involvement with, an organization of women faculty, “Watch.” We here describe briefly the significance of these matters and provide links to more detailed accounts.
Notre Dame’s conferring an honorary degree upon President Obama and featuring him as the 2009 Commencement Speaker despite his unrelenting and extreme pro-abortion policies is far the most prominent incident. We have already described the inspiring actions of students and their supporters in opposing this action (Notre Dame Commencement: As It Should Have Been), and we will devote our next newsletter to a comprehensive examination of this disheartening episode. We offer here a few brief comments:
This action by the University opened a startling breach between University and Church when 83 cardinals, archbishops, and bishops joined Notre Dame’s own bishop, the Most Rev. John M. D’Arcy, in condemning Notre Dame’s action, which violated a unanimous 2004 policy statement by United States Conference of Catholic bishops. As the U.S. News & World Report put it: “It's hard to recall another time when as many U.S. bishops publicly denounced a domestic political development as spoke out against Obama's May appearance at the University of Notre Dame.
Catholic laity overwhelmingly agreed with the bishops. In a Rasmussen poll, “By a 60% to 25% margin, U.S. Catholics say the university should not award an honorary degree to the president.”
In contrast, on campus, the great majority of the faculty applauded Father Jenkins’s action. Thus, both Administration and faculty joined in this action that has seriously undermined Notre Dame’s hard-earned reputation as a Catholic university. Their evident purpose – to enhance the secular reputation of the University no matter the impact on Catholic identity – is identical to the ambitions that have led to the transformation of the faculty.
Beginning in 2004 and continuing annually until this past year, the University hosted a film festival organized by students with departmental sponsorship that featured movies with homosexual and lesbian themes. It was provocatively billed in the first years the “Queer Film Festival,” and while more euphonious titles were later substituted, the nature of the festival was unchanged.
We discuss elsewhere in detail this episode, together with the important issues it raises with respect to the way in which the University deals with the Church’s teachings on homosexuality and homosexual acts. As we report, so far as we can tell the University repeatedly presses upon students the moral obligation to treat homosexuals with charity and justice, but mutes the Church’s declaration respecting the immorality of homosexual sexual relations.
As to the film festival itself, while students did not organize another festival this past year, they may do so again any time unless Father Jenkins reverses his and Father Malloy’s determination that this event is appropriate for sponsorship at the University. But in any case the significance of the event is unaffected whether or not the festival reappears. That significance rests upon two considerations:
First, Father Jenkins approved the annual festival despite his concern that “a Catholic view of sexual morality is not adequately represented.” Second, even this restrained and ineffective criticism was too much for many members of the faculty. Forty-two of them, “including three Department Chairs, 20 professors, and two Professors Emeritus,” reportedly not only “wrote Father Jenkins about their concern that his address contributed to a climate of hostility to gays and lesbians” but also “called on President Jenkins for a public apology."
These are not the marks of either a leader or the faculty of a robustly Catholic institution.
We have reported elsewhere in detail on the content and significance of the materials on a website, Watch, sponsored by a number of prominent Notre Dame women faculty and directed at other women faculty, particularly newly arrived scholars. The highlights are these:
First, Watch recommends as resources every major pro-abortion organization and some lesser ones besides.
Second, the organization urges women to promote the hiring, not simply of more women, but of “more gay and lesbian faculty.”
Third, in the Gender Studies program, issues respecting homosexuality are taught, not from an orthodox perspective, but rather from “secular and alternative Catholic” perspectives.
Finally, and very significantly, while the organization is "unofficial," it is furnished University Internet support, and what it says appears to carry implicit University approval. The organization's website address bears a nd.edu domain and uses the official Notre Dame favicon (i.e., an icon in the browser address bar); it uses the university's electronic mailing list resources to communicate with its members; and the materials are copyrighted by the University.
This is especially distressing because this University involvement seems plainly to collide with its published policy respecting the use of University Internet resources and despite our calling the matter to the attention of the Provost. The University’s Responsible Use Policy states: “University computing resources are to be used exclusively to advance the University’s mission of education, research, and public service.” Use that is “inconsistent with the University’s Mission” is prohibited.
The warning signs of a University well on the secularization path through the transformation of its faculty-based culture are inescapable to those who care.
The homosexual film festival raises issues bearing upon the relationship between the homosexual issue and secularization that are important but also sufficiently complex as to demand a more thorough examination than we have so far been able to give them. We will provide here preliminary comments and enough of the pertinent facts to suggest the nature of the problem.
Because of Father Jenkins’s concern, while the film festival has continued as an annual event, it l has been significantly modified. It had been publicized for its first two years as the “Queer Film Festival,” which naturally, and we assume designedly, generated a good deal of publicity. The festival featured such questionable elements as a panel discussing gay marriage that included a nun, Sister Jeannine Grammick, who had been enjoined by the Vatican from publicly speaking on homosexual issues, together with the film In Good Conscience that documented her refusal to be silenced. Terrance McNally's film Corpus Christi which depicts Jesus and his disciples as modern-day homosexuals, with Judas seducing Jesus on prom night, was another entry, and Mr. McNally another speaker. See The Observer 2/14/05.
In his January 2006 statement, Fr. Jenkins criticized the festival’s title as “seem[ing] to celebrate homosexual activity” and took note also of the “concern that...a Catholic view on sexual morality is not adequately presented.” Since then, “Queer” has disappeared from the title and different adjectives have been used in an attempt to advertise in a less confrontational but still unmistakable way that the focus is homosexuality and lesbianism. However, the considerably more important flaw identified by Father Jenkins – the absence of an explanation of the Church’s teaching – has evidently not been remedied.
Whatever cosmetic changes have been made, the problem is not merely that a principal message of the festival is doubtless the moral acceptability of homosexual sex, but, even more, the annual repetition of the production. While exhibiting, say, “Million Dollar Baby” could hardly be questioned simply because it portrays euthanasia in a sympathetic light, staging a group of movies with that theme year after year could certainly be criticized.
Significantly, Father Jenkins’s restrained remarks, which reflected the Church’s position, were too much for many members of the faculty. Forty-two of them, “including three Department Chairs, 20 professors, and two Professors Emeritus,” reportedly not only “wrote Father Jenkins about their concern that his address contributed to a climate of hostility to gays and lesbians” but also “called on President Jenkins for a public apology.”
This expression of outrage over Father Jenkins’ remarks is a striking illustration of the sort of indifference, even hostility, to the those teachings with which we are concerned and that we have already discussed in connection with the faculty ferment over the threat to The Vagina Monologues.
In any case, the film festival itself is only one element, and a relatively minor one, in the complex of challenging issues that arise in today’s Catholic university because of changing societal mores together with the presence of a significant number of openly homosexual students. “The debate” over these issues “has reached a fevered pitch at the nation’s Catholic universities,” reports an author who visited Notre Dame and a number of other campuses. (Riley, God on the Quad, p. 182.)
The University has so far declined to recognize a “GLBT” club, but The Progressive Students Alliance includes homosexual issues in its broader agenda. GALA is the organization of homosexual and lesbian alumni of Notre Dame and St. Mary’s.
The principal organization at Notre Dame dedicated to homosexual issues is the Core Council for Gay and Lesbians. The Council is composed of eight students, “a majority of whom are gay, lesbian, or bisexual,” and four administrators, and is charged with “identifying the ongoing needs of gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual students, and... implementing campus-wide educational programming on gay and lesbian issues.” Its activities include promoting the annual National Coming Out Day and Solidarity Sunday, an annual event celebrated each year “at all Masses” on campus in order to “highlight our community’s Spirit of Inclusion for gay, lesbian, and bisexual students.” At the Masses, rainbow ribbons are handed out and students are encouraged to display them “on backpacks, briefcases, and office and dorm doors.”
At the opening of the school year, the Council hosts a reception for entering students so that they can meet student Council members and learn about resources available to homosexual and “questioning” students, including those concerned about “being ‘out’ on campus.” The Council publishes information publications such as Myths about Homosexual Persons, in which students are advised, for example, that “there is no such thing as a gay lifestyle,” and, correspondingly, that “[p]romiscuity has nothing to do with one’s sexual orientation.” (Without wishing to appear tendentious, we note that studies dramatically contradict the latter assertion. For more information, see Gay Report and Statistics On The Homosexual Lifestyle.)
The similar publication on Common Questions advises that “human beings cannot choose to be either gay or straight”; that “[s]ince homosexuality is neither a disease nor an illness, there is nothing to ‘cure’”; that the Church “distinguishes between homosexual orientation and homosexual activity,” teaching that the former is neutral but that the latter is “sinful”; that, however, “[u]ltimately the individual conscience is inviolable”; and that the Council provides a program for persons to explore “these complex theological and moral issues.”
From these materials, and more, it appears that the University is making a determined effort to insure that homosexual students are treated with respect and without discrimination, as the Church’s teachings require. What is not clear is whether an equally resolute effort is being made to explain unambiguously both the substance of, and the reasons for, the Church’s teaching respecting the immorality of homosexual sexual acts. Experience on other Catholic campuses shows that the risk of an administration’s muting the doctrine respecting homosexual acts is far greater than that of subordinating the injunction respecting charity and justice, and there seem to us to be more than a few signs of that development in the materials we have cited.
This is a subject worth our further and continued examination.
