By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
John Lyon, a retired professor and university administrator with many years of experience, has agreed to share with readers of First Teachers portions of a letter he sent to the administration and board of trustees of the University of Notre Dame. Lyon is an alumnus of the university. His letter addresses the document issued by Notre Dame that established its “Pastoral Plan for the Support and Holistic Development of GLBTQ and Heterosexual Students.”
Lyon argues that Notre Dame is attempting “to negotiate an impossible geometry between the square of Church teaching and general natural law argument about homosexuality, and the circle of pastoral care for the aberrant. To complicate the negotiation, it takes place against the background of our national Donnybrook involving various legislative and judicial enactments regarding homosexual ‘marriage’ as a civil right.”
Lyon calls our attention to Notre Dame’s pastoral plan, which, in the university’s words, is “the creation of a recognized Student Organization designed to provide peer-to-peer support, direct service opportunities, and friendship for GLBTQ students and their heterosexual allies,” along with “the creation of a committee to advise the Vice President for Student Affairs on relevant matters, and the hiring of a full-time Student Development Professional in this area.”
Professor Lyon stresses his “concern for and love of the University” and that his “purpose in writing is to suggest a few procedures or principles of appropriate action at the University regarding agitation by partisan ideological groups whose orientation and agendas are tangential at best to the scope and nature of a Catholic university. ‘Homosexual Rights’ organizations would be among such groups.”
Lyon makes clear that he has no objections to Notre Dame “appropriately exerting its pastoral care for such once-persecuted or neglected minorities.” But he insists that a Catholic university, when doing that, has a responsibility to keep its Catholic identity in mind: “If there is such an entity as the Catholic Church, even if it is only a legal fiction, it has an at least semi-definite form or structure, some principles of operation, and a stated purpose. Assuming for the time being that the University has an at least quasi-legal relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, then it would seem incumbent on the University administration to issue with some immediacy an unequivocal statement of support for the Church’s traditional and regularly iterated position on homosexuality.”
If it fails to do so, “the university will not only lose face…it will lose its identity and thereby what remains of its credibility.”
Lyon expresses regret over Notre Dame’s missed opportunity: “The University might well have turned the national conversation around had it taken a principled position, and stuck to it. It apparently chose not to do so.” Lyon fears that Notre Dame may be part of the vanguard leading the Church into the same situation it now faces regarding its teaching on contraception. “It may be a truism that the Church has never been able to get the ‘hay’ of Humanae Vitae down to the horses in the pews. The consequences of this, however, have led to a basic dishonesty, with fearful consequences for the Church. On the one hand, we hear what ‘the Church teaches…,’ on the other, its parish clergy, while ritually forgiving nominal penitents, excuse their behavior.”
Lyon asks us to consider the implications: “Should the Church now appear to the faithful to be similarly schizophrenic on the issue of homosexual attraction, teaching one thing while pastorally setting the nature of the orientation aside and coming to excuse consummation thereof, the Church’s credibility would fall even further. The faithful would conclude that the Church doesn’t really know what it is talking about. On the one hand, the Church claims to know what human sexuality is for, what its formal and final causes are; on the other hand, the ‘confessing,’ that is the pastoral Church, recognizes that the teaching Church’s claims are existentially unbearable, and acts as Quixote did in a celebrated passage, and sets the prisoners free.”
The result? “Inevitably, the specter of nominalism arises. Marriage becomes a mere flatus vocis, an empty set, a verbal fig leaf to cover the reality of hormonal chemistry. ‘Marriage’ will be a word evacuated of meaning. Its essence will evaporate. . . . And with its essence will go the derivative concept of natural law, and with the deconstruction of natural law will go the species’ attempt at rational ordination of human activities, not the least of which will be sexual activities. And into the vacuum created by the demise of rational ordination in human activities will move sheer willfulness, arbitrary action. We shall find ourselves then, with some irony, in a primitive form of society, and not just as individuals, in which life will be, to paraphrase Hobbes, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Lyon points to the “the stark alternatives that face the Church. If it maintains its ‘rigorist’ position on marriage, orthodox Catholics will become a barely tolerated minority in a secular society tending rapidly toward democratic totalitarianism. They will become the Western equivalent of Dhimmis in Islam.” On the other hand, if the Church “abandons its rigorist stance it will have to admit that it has for some time been wrong in its central moral intuitions, its deductions from revelation (‘male and female He created them . . .’), bolstered by nature and nature’s law. There will be no such things as intelligible essences, and the Church will collapse as a teaching body and become a mere consolatory institution.”
Lyon asks an intriguing question: How will Notre Dame, now that it has taken this stance on homosexuality, “deal with a civilly ‘married’ homosexual student couple? With a Muslim with the prescribed limit (4) of wives? Spousal benefits for all four? Graduate housing for all four?”
The Church at Notre Dame, writes Lyon in closing, “seems to be certain about what it needs to do at the present moment in order to fulfill its pastoral mission to a particular closeted minority. But what it needs to do in this area may not be exhausted by Notre Dame’s perception of this responsibility. The very institution of marriage is under as serious a siege as ever it has undergone, and marriage equality and the recognition of homosexual rights are central columns in this attack. It would have been ever so good to have seen some slight attention to this matter of context paid by Notre Dame’s leaders.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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