The Brebeuf Prep Scandal And Jesuit Schismatics

By MICHAEL ARATA

(See The Wanderer dated July 25, 2019, p. 1 for an earlier article on this topic by Michael Arata.)

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“The instruction and education in a Catholic school must be grounded in the principles of Catholic doctrine; teachers are to be outstanding in correct doctrine and integrity of life,” and “no school is to bear the name Catholic school without the consent of competent ecclesiastical authority” (Canon Law 803, §2, §3).

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Having taken some classes at Cincinnati’s Xavier University in the 1970s, I still receive periodic communications from the school. A recent Xavier notice announced “Alumni Weekend 2019,” including among “highlights” a gathering hosted by the “LGBTQIA+ Alumni Community.”
The abbreviation stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Intersex, Asexual.” The plus sign represents all the other sexualities and genders which activists have already fabricated or may contrive in the future. Xavier’s “LGBTQIA+ Alliance” meanwhile conducts such events as a “Bisexual Visibility Day,” “HallowQueen Drag Show,” and “ThanksGAYving.”
Below the Alumni Weekend announcement was an “About Us” thumbnail which characterized Xavier as “a Jesuit Catholic university.”
In context, the double qualifier can be seen as suggesting that Jesuits represent some odd, divergent branch of Catholicism. And in fact, many or most of the nearly five dozen U.S. high schools and 28 colleges/universities operated by Jesuits seem to be participating in the concoction of a schismatic new sect, organized in substantial part around open rebellion to Church teaching regarding homosexual acts, “same-sex marriage,” and weird notions of gender multiplicity.
Thereby, they advance a counterfeit brand of Catholicism, an as-you-like-it kind of church, essentially a new Protestant denomination.

The Brebeuf Case

Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School in Indianapolis is another recently conspicuous example. Layton Elliott, a male math teacher there, “married” Joshua Payne, a male German teacher at crosstown Cathedral High School, in July 2017. They identify themselves with the compound surname Payne-Elliott.
As this article was written, the public Payne-Elliott “Honey-
fund.com” wedding-registry page remains posted online. It suggested monetary gifts to help underwrite the pair’s “dream honeymoon” Caribbean cruise, including everything from a “spa for two” to a “carbon offset.”
That webpage (and/or other reference) evidently made its way to Indianapolis Archbishop Charles Thompson. Whatever the informational source, and sometime before October 2017, the archbishop became aware of the “same-sex marriage under civil law,” according to a report by Brebeuf’s student newspaper just last month.
After nearly two subsequent years of patient, behind-scenes discussion regarding the impermissibility of the Payne-Elliott arrangement in a Catholic educational context, and citing Catholic-school teachers’ responsibility to act as ministers and models of Church teaching, Archbishop Thompson finally declared in June that Payne-Elliott teaching contracts could not be renewed.
Cathedral High administrators, directly under archdiocesan control, grudgingly complied, and denied contract renewal to Joshua Payne-Elliott. He then sued the archdiocese, alleging contract interference, and also filed a discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. First Amendment protection of religious institutions, along with existing case law (including the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2012 Hosanna-Tabor decision) should result in dismissal of both actions.
Jesuit-controlled Brebeuf instead defied Thompson’s determination, and extended Layton Payne-Elliott’s employment. Brebeuf President William Verbryke, SJ, asserted that the archbishop’s ministerial behavior requirements would apply only to Brebeuf’s “president, the principal, campus ministers [and] religion teachers.”
Archbishop Thompson decreed accordingly that Brebeuf can no longer legitimately call itself “Catholic.” Canon Law, cited in relevant part as an introduction to this article, backs the archbishop.
Fr. Brian Paulson, SJ, provincial of the USA Midwest Province Jesuits, wrote in response to Thompson’s decision: “Our disagreement is over what we believe is the proper governance autonomy regarding employment decisions which should be afforded a school sponsored by a religious order.”
Paulson said further that Brebeuf Jesuit “respects the primacy of an informed conscience of members of its community when making moral decisions.”
Paulson is leading Brebeuf’s appeal to the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education. He may be relying on Canon Law 806 §1, which states that a bishop’s “prescripts which pertain to the general regulation of Catholic schools” are valid also for schools directed by religious institutes (like the Jesuits or other orders) †“without prejudice, however, to their autonomy regarding the internal direction of their schools.”
If so, that interpretation ignores the earlier-mentioned stipulations of Canon 803, along with Canon 806’s prior sentence: “The diocesan bishop has the right to watch over and visit the Catholic schools in his territory, even those which members of religious institutes have founded or direct.”
In other words, the “internal direction” of Catholic schools should not violate fundamental Catholic precepts.
And the Catechism of the Catholic Church answers Paulson’s citation of “informed conscience,” stating among other related admonitions that “assertion of a mistaken notion of autonomy of conscience, rejection of the Church’s authority and her teaching” are among the sources “of errors of judgment in moral conduct” (n. 1792).
Brebeuf Jesuit — where 2019-2020 tuition and fees total $18,875, and where only half the student population is Catholic — has unfortunately been training gender-sex revolutionaries for some time. The present “same-sex marriage” conflict is just one illustration of the extent to which Catholic teaching has been compromised there.

“Jesuit Values”?

The September 20 edition of Brebeuf’s student newspaper carried an editorial addressing the school’s conflict with Archbishop Thompson, written by two senior-year students. They stated that “Brebeuf’s community embraces Jesuit values, . . . from its community service requirements and diversity dialogues to its thought-provoking religion classes.”
Likely relying on what they heard in such Brebeuf sessions, and 180 degrees out of phase with reality, the student editorialists said that Archbishop Thompson’s “reasoning behind the incident is misguided and does not even reflect the values of the faith tradition he represents.” His alleged fault was in “focusing on the minute details of the Bible and of his faith tradition, blindsighted to the more significant message laid out around them.”
The so-called “minute details of the Bible” are inconvenient to Brebeuf’s position, so the Jesuit-indoctrinated student writers claimed: “Religious texts tend to be lengthy, containing minute details that throw interpreters off course and obscure the true meaning behind the stories they tell and the lessons they give.”
St. Paul, closer by nearly 2,000 years to Catholicism’s original faith traditions, was both concise and clear, however, in his characterization of those who participate in homosexual acts: “God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity” (Romans 1:26-27).
Sounds like Someone foresaw the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the other disease vectors which particularly and tragically affect those involved in homosexual activity. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops itself presents St. Paul’s warning in Ministry to Persons With a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care, a 2006 statement.
“Same-sex marriage”? Even who-am-I-to-judge Pope Francis, quoting then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s related 2003 statement, says “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family” (2016: Amoris Laetitia, n. 251).
The Pope’s remarks on transgenderism are consistent morally with those on “same-sex marriage.” Speaking to Polish bishops in July 2016, Pope Francis expressed alarm with the fact that “children — children! — are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex,” and characterized such dangerous propaganda as “ideological colonization.”
But Brebeuf has its own “Gender-Sexuality Alliance,” and annually sends students to the Jesuit-sponsored “Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice” — wherein 2018’s attendees could hear from radical speakers about “feminist” organizing, “white privilege,” “LGBTQ inclusion,” “intersectionality” of “trans womxn.”
America magazine editor-at-large, homosexuality apologist/propagandist, and “Ignatian Q Conference” favorite James Martin, SJ, was a keynote speaker. He’ll be there again at this year’s “Teach-In,” November 16-18.
Individual speakers at the event are encouraged to indicate their pronoun preferences, including not just “He/His” and “She/Hers” but also “They/Theirs,” “Ze/Hirs,” and “Other,” with a fill-in blank for the last category.

Brebeuf’s Vatican Appeal

Martin “tweeted” in June that “the targeting of LGBT employees must cease, and Brebeuf and the Midwest Province are here standing with the marginalized. This is the most Catholic thing that they could do.”
Those two sentences manage to implement five of six strategies outlined by two homosexual activists in “The Overhauling of Straight America” (Guide magazine, November 1987): desensitize the public; “portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers”; “give protectors a just cause”; “make gays look good”; and “make the victimizers look bad.”
Martin repackages all of that in seemingly Catholic wrapping.
The sixth and final step recommended in “Overhauling” was to “solicit funds” to enable an intensive multimedia campaign, also outlined in the article, to help implement the first five steps.
Martin met with Pope Francis on September 30, and came away saying he’d shared “the joys and hopes, and the griefs and anxieties, of LGBT Catholics and LGBT people worldwide” with Francis.
And as both LifeSiteNews and The Wanderer have reported, Martin met the next day with Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi and Fr. Friedrich Bechina, respectively the prefect and undersecretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the group considering Brebeuf’s appeal. “I was happy to bring LGBT voices to this warm meeting and very grateful for their openness to dialogue,” said Martin of this latter meeting.
Last February, the same congregation issued Male and Female He Created Them, a criticism of modern “gender theory” and its perverse manifestations in educational settings. The document touched also on marriage, saying that gender activism “has led to calls for public recognition of the right to choose one’s gender, and of a plurality of new types of unions, in direct contradiction of the model of marriage as being between one man and one woman, which is portrayed as a vestige of patriarchal societies.”
It notes further that if students listen to teachers, “it is because they are witnesses” not just of words but of attitudes and behaviors.
Martin apparently took issue with the Male and Female document. Published reports do not indicate whether Brebeuf Prep was also specifically part of Martin’s Vatican conversations, but that additional discussion probably occurred. A week earlier, Fr. Verbryke, Brebeuf’s president, had reported learning “that the Congregation for Catholic Education has decided to suspend the archbishop’s decree on an interim basis, pending its final resolution” of Brebeuf’s appeal.
Both Verbryke and Archbishop Thompson’s office noted that such temporary suspensions are common, and do not indicate the tenor of a final decision.
But there is certainly reason to be concerned with the direction which the Congregation for Catholic Education may take now. Pope Francis appointed Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich to the group in 2017, and added Newark, New Jersey’s Cardinal Joseph Tobin in June of this year.
Cupich and Tobin have both been sympathetic to homosexualist politics.
And LifeSiteNews reported in 2018 that Tobin had temporarily housed Francesco Castiglione, a young Italian “beefcake” actor, at his residence.
Tobin also “tweeted” a late-night message to an unidentified recipient, saying “Nighty-Night Baby, I love you.” Some of Newark’s faithful believe the “tweet” was intended for the Italian actor. Apprised of the message’s unintended public visibility, Tobin deleted it and claimed it was meant for one of his sisters.
Meanwhile, Brebeuf Prep is already doubling down. School administrators have promoted Layton Payne-Elliott from assistant track coach to boys’ head track and field coach.
“He also helps to moderate the Brebeuf Jesuit Gender-Sexuality Alliance,” said the school’s Athletic-Department announcement.
One wonders: what is such an organization doing in an ostensibly Catholic high school? Oh, wait; . . . it’s a Jesuit Catholic high school.
And quite justifiably, Archbishop Thompson says the place needs to drop the term “Catholic” altogether from its self-descriptive material.