The insults to the Catholic Church at supposedly Catholic universities will always infuriate me.
Notre Dame’s “Reproductive Justice: Scholarship for Solidarity and Social Change” speaker series is the latest abomination at the school.
“Trans Care + Abortion Care: Intersections and Questions” on March 20 aims to address “the intersections between trans care and abortion care.” It’s sponsored by the Notre Dame Gender Studies Program and the Reilly Center for Science, Technology & Values, along with the Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Center for Social Concerns, the Institute for Latino Studies, the Departments of American Studies, Anthropology, English, Film, Television & Theatre, History, Political Science, and Sociology.
St. Mary’s College, a Catholic college also based in South Bend, IN, is involved with its Gender & Women Studies. I blogged last week about St. Mary’s straying from Catholic teaching.
Speaker Ash Williams, a transgender man, is an abortion doula in North Carolina. Williams described his job as helping people get “the best abortion they can have.”
Williams had surgical abortions in 2016 and 2018. Williams has a tattoo of the manual vacuum aspiration on their arm. Williams loves using the vacuum because “it’s one and done. It’s quick.”
Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, is the other speaker. She authored the book Histories of the Transgender Child, which argued that transgender children are nothing new.
Things are so bad at Notre Dame that a group of Notre Dame alumni and supporters formed the Sycamore Trust. They’re “concerned about Catholic identity at the university.”
Notre Dame alumnus and Sycamore Trust president William Dempsey told CNA: “We have a series that so far has been dedicated to opposing the Dobbs decision and promoting the pro-choice position, as opposed to the Catholic position, at one of the leading Catholic universities in the country.”
Notre Dame’s policy in the 2006 Common Proposal of Chairs of the College of Arts and Letters and then-president Father John Jenkins states that “academic departments and their chairs the responsibility to provide a forum for multiple viewpoints and, where relevant, ‘appropriate balance’ to present Catholic views.”
Dempsey noted the series doesn’t have any “panelists who have explained the Catholic Church’s position on abortion and responded to what’s been said by the opponents of Church teaching.”
In November 2021, National Review dissected the battle Catholics at Notre Dame are fighting against “woke” Catholicism. Mary Frances Myler, editor-in-chief of the independent paper The Irish Rover, blasted the university for failing “to apply the fullness of the Catholic tradition to its handling of gender-identity issues on campus.” The campus newspaper, The Observer, attacked Myler with student letters labeling her piece as hate speech. One student couldn’t believe Myler used the pronouns she and her to address the Church.
After the dispute between the papers, a sign saying “There is Queer Blood on Homophobic Hands” appeared on campus with clippings from both papers with “pictures of people nationwide who identify as queer and have been killed or committed suicide.”
The sign also named the student journalists, faculty, and alumni who support Catholic teaching on homosexuality. The perpetrator(s) circled their names in red, implying they were responsible for those deaths.
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