By MICHAEL ARATA
“What’s the difference between a Jesuit and a Catholic?”
That 1998 question-box submission in my wife’s Confirmation-prep class drew much laughter at the time, especially from the good and faithful assistant pastor who served as class adviser/answer man.
But the question has continuing relevance now. The Society of Jesus, the Jesuits — once renowned worldwide for educational institutions of great intellectual and moral depth — became notorious instead for radical notions of “social justice” and “liberation theology.”
(Observing similar aberrations at Saint Mary’s College, a local De La Salle Christian Brothers institution in northern California, my wife wrote editorially that “social justice has been transformed in left-wing Catholic circles from Christian charity to crypto-communism — taking ‘from each according to his [bureaucrat-assessed] ability’ and handing over ‘to each, according to his [bureaucrat-determined] need’.”)
By way of background: four U.S. Jesuit universities were signatories to 1967’s infamous “Land O’Lakes statement,” organized by Notre Dame President Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, to declare independence of Catholic universities “from authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
The four Jesuit institutions represented were Boston College, Fordham University, Georgetown University, and St. Louis University. Fr. Vincent O’Keefe, SJ, assistant general of the Society of Jesus, and Fr. Felipe MacGregor, SJ, rector of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, were also among other signers.
So was now-disgraced and laicized Theodore McCarrick, then president of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico.
In 1990, Pope (now St.) John Paul II effectively repudiated “Land O’Lakes” in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, proclaiming that Catholic universities were “to maintain communion with the universal Church and the Holy See,” including local diocesan bishops. Catholic universities were/are also to “contribute to the Church’s work of evangelization.”
Further, were problems to arise, “the local Bishop is to take the initiatives necessary to resolve the matter. . . .”
Meanwhile, the Jesuits had already largely taken another road trip, traveling far down the as-you-like-it “sexual-liberation freeway,” with its increasingly popular off-ramp to homosexualism and transgenderism.
By 2002, George Neumayr was writing that “were Ignatius of Loyola alive today, the Jesuit order he founded wouldn’t ordain him. His once-formidable society is now a corrupt club for homosexual dilettantes and anti-papal dissenters.”
So these days, many or most Jesuit colleges and universities, accompanied by places like Notre Dame, have scandalized their faithfully Catholic alumni and local populaces at large, with “pro-choice” board members and graduation speakers, dissident or overtly heretical theology departments and guidance offices, campus-sponsored “LGBTQ” activist organizations and tenured professors, drag shows, and more.
During 2013-2017, the Cardinal Newman Society, which labors mightily to push allegedly Catholic colleges into faithful conformity with the identity they claim, compiled a 124-page summary of “Catholic Identity Concerns at Georgetown University” alone, a PDF document which can be found readily by searching that title.
High Schools Also Infected
Speaking of “Catholic” identity, college-level deviations from same have percolated down into ostensibly Catholic high schools, including many Jesuit schools.
So we come now to Indianapolis Archbishop Charles Thompson’s declaration in June regarding two “same-sex married” archdiocesan schoolteachers. As two previous Wanderer articles reported, one of the schools involved complied with Thompson’s decree; the other did not.
More is now known, including the names of the two teachers and at least one of the social media sites with which they publicized their “marriage”: Joshua Payne, a Cathedral High German teacher, had “married” Layton Elliott, a Brebeuf Prep math teacher, in July 2017.
Their public “Honeyfund.com” registry suggested monetary gifts to help underwrite their “dream honeymoon” Caribbean cruise, including everything from a “spa for two” to a “carbon offset.”
After two years of discussion regarding such public announcements and their negative impact on Catholic education, with behind-scenes archdiocesan requests ultimately rejected, and citing Catholic-school teachers’ contractual responsibility to act as ministers and models of Church teaching, Archbishop Thompson finally declared that Payne-Elliott contracts could not be renewed.
Cathedral High administrators, directly under archdiocesan control, grudgingly complied. Joshua Payne-Elliott then sued the archdiocese, alleging contract interference, and filed a discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Constitutional precepts and case law (including the Supreme Court’s unanimous 2012 Hosanna-Tabor decision) say those actions should go nowhere.
When Jesuit-controlled Brebeuf instead defied Thompson’s assessment regarding Layton Payne-Elliott, the archbishop’s correct, prudential finding under Canon Law precepts 801 and 803 was that Brebeuf can no longer legitimately call itself “Catholic.”
The Jesuits are contesting that conclusion, so far within Church frameworks. Fr. Brian Paulson, SJ, provincial of the USA Midwest Province Jesuits, wrote on June 20 that with his own support, Brebeuf Prep “respects the primacy of an informed conscience of members of its community when making moral decisions.”
That, along with Brebeuf’s rejection of diocesan authority over school-personnel and policy decisions, was supposedly enough to justify retention of the school’s homosexually “married” teacher.
But as the Catechism of the Catholic Church observes, “it can happen that moral conscience remains in ignorance and makes erroneous judgments,” and “when a man ‘takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin’…the person is culpable for the evil he commits” (n. 1790, n. 1791).
And like many U.S. Jesuit schools and colleges, unfortunately, Brebeuf — where 2019-2020 tuition and fees alone will hit $18,875 — has long been training gender-sex revolutionaries. The present “same-sex marriage” conflict is merely one illustration of the degree to which Catholic teaching has been compromised there.
“Ignatian Values”?
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, homosexuality apologist/propagandist, and “Ignatian Q Conference” favorite James Martin, SJ, was a keynote speaker.
In 2017, Brebeuf’s fall play was The Laramie Project. Described by homosexual playwright Moises Kaufman himself as a “faux documentary” which “scores a direct hit on audience emotions,” the production portrays reactions to homosexual college student Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder.
A Mormon leader, endorsing normal heterosexual marriage, appears insensitively off the page. A Bible-believing Baptist minister seemingly morphs into crazy “God Hates Fags” Fred Phelps….
As commentator Camille Paglia, herself a lesbian, observed, “Shepard’s death was immediately transmogrified into a moral parable of sweet, saintly gay boy set upon by bigoted thugs and crucified for his homosexuality. . . .
“Hate-crimes legislation — . . . a fascist intrusion into constitutionally protected, dissident thought — would not have protected Matthew Shepard, whose assailants were low-rent outlaws and whom the bombastic excesses of gay activism lulled into a false sense of security about the world…, where the stalker can suddenly become the prey.”
Among skewed website resources apparently recommended to Brebeuf students in connection with the Laramie production were those of several homosexual-activist outfits, including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
Cincinnati Connections
Fr. Bill Verbryke, SJ, Brebeuf’s president as of July 2018, previously occupied the same role during 1991-2001 at Cincinnati’s St. Xavier High School — just 120 miles away, and like Brebeuf, a Jesuit institution. As a St. Xavier alumnus myself and 1970s chemistry instructor/swim coach there, I wrote a year 2000 magazine article exposing that school’s ready accommodation of homosexual interests, including formation of an all-male dance club.
St. Xavier’s December 17, 1999 student newspaper had featured a front-page “press release” announcing a website for the so-called “St. X Ally Network,” which had been initiated by two homosexual 1999 graduates “to serve gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning students at St. Xavier High School.”
The two expected the site to provide “resources to help make St. X more and more gay-inclusive by raising awareness and understanding of gay issues.”
The advertised website, inactive after a few years, supplied links to numerous other sites which disregarded or scorned Church teaching, and included a link to a homoerotic “webzine” for teens.
The same newspaper issue carried a crude satire of “pious Christians,” a staff editorial fretting about “sexism” at St. Xavier, and a nearly 1,200-word article by a self-identified “pro-choice” student complaining of a pro-life presentation by the Teen Life Coalition of Cincinnati, whose nurse-psychologist leader spoke “the cloying and condescending words of an obstinate preacher,” so far as the young writer was concerned.
Homosexual issues had simmered for several years at the school, with a student being the one to take on editorially a teacher (and co-moderator of the all-male dance club) who’d complained of residual “homophobia” at the school despite annual religion-class appearances by a speaker representing Parents, Friends, and Family of Lesbians and Gays (P-FLAG), overtly opposing Catholic teaching.
Things seemed after year 2000 to calm down for a time. But by 2015, St. Xavier had invited back one of the two 1999 “St. X Ally” promoters as a speaker. Now a university “LGBT Equity Center” associate director calling himself “agender” (no established gender) and referring to himself with plural pronouns “they” and “them,” he spoke at the school’s “Ignatian Values Day” on “inclusive leadership.”
At Brebeuf, meanwhile: In a June 20 statement to parents, students, and donors, and writing on behalf of the school’s Board of Trustees, Verbryke along with Brebeuf’s present and incoming board chairmen insisted that Brebeuf’s “identity as a Catholic Jesuit institution remains unchanged” — despite Archbishop Thompson saying otherwise.
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).
Francis is himself a Jesuit, of course. And he sounds like one when he comments on world government, immigration issues, and wealth redistribution.
But his remarks on the subject of transgenderism are consistent morally with those on “same-sex marriage.” Speaking to Polish bishops in July 2016, Pope Francis expressed his dismay that “children — children! — are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex,” and characterized such dangerous propaganda as “ideological colonization.”
Meanwhile, Jesuit schools and colleges continue down the brimstone path, laboring defiantly to normalize homosexualism and transgenderism, and demonstrating that there really is a significant doctrinal and devotional difference between machine Jesuits and faithful Catholics.
As I wrote in 2001 to an elderly Jesuit at Cincinnati’s Xavier University: the homosexualist invasion of once-upon-a-time genuinely Catholic institutions is one of the more destructive attacks ever mobilized against the Church. . . . But like dangerous somatic pathogens, the heretics will always be there; and it is only when the body’s immune-response resistance is compromised that serious diseases take over.
So hurrah now for Archbishop Thompson and other faithful bishops and priests, for their courageous, countercultural leadership in upholding genuine Church teaching! See Thompson’s summary of the issues involved:https//
www.archindy.org/archbishop/press-2019-faq.html.
Postscript
There really is a “gay” agenda. Readers can review its cynically destructive six-step outline by looking up “The Overhauling of Straight America.” Much of the scheme has already been perpetrated.
Ronald Bayer’s book-length Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis reveals the back story on the American Psychiatric Association’s dishonest normalization of homosexuality.
And a comprehensive research summary of the realities of sexuality and gender dysphoria is available at:https://www.thenewatlantis.
com/publications/number-50-fall-2016.
One of that report’s authors is Catholic psychiatrist Paul McHugh, Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The Courage apostolate (https://couragerc.org) offers the authentic Catholic response to same-sex attractions.
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