Another Catholic university doing all it can do to undermine the ideas upon which it was founded:Xavier University, a Catholic and Jesuit institution of higher learning located in Cincinnati, Ohio, hosted what it calls “Queer Week” from March 30 to April 3 in 2009, according to the university’s website.The university said that the purpose of the event was to “embrace and celebrate the use of queer as an inclusive, unifying socio-political term for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, straight, transsexual, intersexual, gender queer, or anyone else who supports the equality of all identities and expressions.”
Catholic universities were founded to inform the culture with Catholic values, not to thumb their noses at those same values.
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3 comments:
I tried a post earlier; it vanished. I hope it wasn't trying to tell me something.
There seems to be a constant struggle between conservatives and liberals in the church. A lot of Protestant history can probably summarized as the history of conservatives fleeing the churches after liberals have made a mess of them. My own denomination, for example, the PCA, is an offshoot of the PCUSA once it had become too liberal for many tastes. In that big tent we call the Catholic Church, apparently, the two factions are simply doomed to co-exist.
I think theology itself is essentially a conservative undertaking, with its appeals to authority and dogma. So there is no mystery why conservatives are attracted to the church. What attracts liberals? Not the theology -- the contribution of liberals is essentially to undermine it. Perhaps its the uses to which they envision putting all that authority, and money. For whatever reason, they are attracted, and so they have pretty much taken over the mainstream American denominations.
Liberals are much better "organization" people than conservatives, and (in accordance with Pournelle's Ironclad Law of Bureaucracy) they usually wind up running things. Once they take over, the church forgets about teaching theology and starts preaching liberal social philosophy instead, very theology-lite or even theology-free. This eventually drives off the conservatives and their money, who run off to form new churches and denominations. Then, to complete the life cycle, the church dies and the liberals have to chase after the new churches, for the cycle to begin anew.
But this is my Protestant perspective. I'm not a studied observer of the Catholics, but I see some obvious analogies. Weren't the Jesuits once the most theologically strict and conservative factions in the Church? This seems analogous to the United Church of Christ, once a bunch of rock-ribbed Puritans, now essentially Common Cause in choir robes.
Lee,
I agree with a lot of what you say here. But I think you underestimate the conservatism in the Church. Benedict, after all, is no liberal, nor are the people with which he has surrounded himself. And you need to look at the kind of people that are replacing the aging liberal bishops. They are stalwart conservatives.
The recent leadership change in the American Council of Catholic Bishops is, I think, one measure of how far along this process of the reconservatization of the Church is.
You also have to consider that it is the American Church that is most infected with liberalism, but that the American Church is only a small part of the worldwide church.
Also, you will notice that converts to Catholicism seem to be almost exclusively conservative. Liberals are mostly people who have grown up in the Church.
I need to brush up on my history of the Jesuits, but they seem indeed to have been theologically conservative in their early history.
Homophobia is an idea well worth undermining. As far as undermining worthwhile values, the finger should be pointed first at those who protected child molesters, starting with the former head of the Inquisition himself.
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