The Catholic Church, including its leader, has recently sent some mixed signals about its views on the LGBTQ agenda and lifestyle.
But this week the traditionalists in the faith chalked up a win.
On Thursday, St. Mary’s College in Indiana, an all-women’s college near Notre Dame, announced that it was abandoning a new policy of accepting enrollment by biological men who identify as women.
The backlash at St. Mary’s was so fierce that college President Katie Conboy did something that was not done by Bud Light, Target, the U.S. military, and others that sustained criticism for abandoning traditional values on gender identity: apologize.
According to conservative media reports, the 179-year-old school announced in November that it would begin accepting trans women as students in fall 2024.
That came after Conboy had created the advisory President’s Task Force on Gender Identity and Expression earlier this year.
But following the November announcement, a “mass outcry” erupted, the Post Millennial noted, led in part by Bishop Kevin Rhoades, who oversees Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese.
Despite Pope Francis’ recent writing that some liberals interpreted as an endorsement of blessings for same-sex unions, the Catholic Church condemns homosexuality and transgenderism as grave sins, and rejects gay marriages as an affront to biblical and moral principles.
Rhoades noted this in denouncing St. Mary’s Board of Trustees for adopting the new policy.
In a message to his diocese, the bishop wrote that the college did not even seek his perspective before implementing the change. Moreover, the policy invoked some of what Francis has said about love and tolerance, Rhoades wrote, but completely ignored “the Holy Father’s continual rejection of gender ideology.”
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“To call itself a ‘women’s college’ and to admit male students who ‘consistently live and identify as women’ suggests that the college affirms an ideology of gender that separates sex from gender and claims that sexual identity is based on the subjective experience of the individual,” Rhoades said. “This ideology is at odds with Catholic teaching.”
“The new admissions policy at Saint Mary’s College erroneously suggests that ‘woman’ is a purely social category that anyone, regardless of sex, can inhabit,” the bishop added, also objecting to the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” Sex “is an innate and recognizable aspect of our embodied nature. …The sex of a person is discovered, not assigned. It is God who creates human beings as male or female.”
“The desire of Saint Mary’s College to show hospitality to people who identify as transgender is not the problem. The problem is a Catholic woman’s college embracing a definition of woman that is not Catholic,” Rhoades said.
In her email to students on Thursday, Conboy bizarrely tried to claim that the initial decision was a “reflection of our College’s commitment to live our Catholic values as a loving and just community.”
But the blowback from, as Conboy noted, “many voices responding to us from many places and perspectives” could not be ignored.
“Some worried that this was much more than a policy decision: they felt it was a dilution of our mission or even a threat to our Catholic identity,” Conboy wrote.
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“Moreover, we clearly underestimated our community’s genuine desire to be engaged in the process of shaping a policy of such significance. As this last month unfolded, we lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity.”
“For this,” she added in the email, “we are deeply sorry.”
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