By CHRISTOPHER MANION
After our story last week on the compulsory genderfication of Notre Dame’s class of 2026, I dropped a line to Mr. John Johnston, who works at the school’s Gender Relations Center. The Center is evidently very busy these days, so I asked Mr. Johnston some pretty simple questions — about the annual budget for the GRC — staff salaries and benefits, facilities, and programs. With Notre Dame’s tuition and fees amounting to over seventy-seven thousand dollars a year, I wondered how much of that sum was devoted to the Center’s work.
I received a speedy reply from Mr. Dennis Brown, longtime University Spokesman: “this is not information that we share,” he wrote.
Curious. The administration has made such a big deal out of its defiance of fundamental Catholic teaching about sex, marriage, and family, you’d think they’d want to brag about how much money, effort, and manpower they’ve poured into the campaign.
Uh-oh.
OK, “personpower”? “Peoplepower”? “Humanpower”?
Yes, it’s a challenge when you’re trying to change reality.
But the university has bravely done its best to bypass the pestering fact that there are only two sexes — you know, “male and female He created them” (Genesis 5:2). And the task clearly calls for new ideas. After all, facts often grind the creative juices to a halt at the very moment that college freshmen need them most!
So these days, “gender” has replaced “sex” in the Fighting Irish Lexicon of Woke, and the neologism has been enshrined for quite a while — the Gender Relations Center was founded in 2004.
Since then, a look at the record would suggest that the university has been racing to implement the “Mystery Passage” that Mr. Justice Kennedy coined in Planned Parenthood v. Casey thirty years ago: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and of the mystery of human life.”
Creative juices indeed!
But the problem goes back even further. According to University Provost John McGreevy, Notre Dame in the 1960s suffered from a “mediocrity” that today’s Notre Dame has left in the dust. And clearly the major defect of that benighted era was the absence of a “Sex Relations Center” on campus.
We didn’t have rainbow flags in those days, but the seeds had been planted — and unhappily, Notre Dame provided fertile ground.
In 1967, a group of Catholic educators, led by Notre Dame President Theodore M. Hesburgh, met at Notre Dame’s retreat center in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin. There they formally declared their independence from the Catholic Church.
Alas, their motives were less than noble. Just two years before, LBJ’s Omnibus Education Act had opened the floodgates to federal funding of higher education, and Catholic colleges wanted a place at the government trough.
In a 2007 Wanderer interview, Archbishop Raymond Burke zeroed in on Land O’Lakes as a central catalyst of decline in Catholic education at Notre Dame and fard beyond. “So much was undone,” he said, “and there’s a mentality [ that] entered into the universities by which those people who dedicated their lives to Catholic education believe that they could not be an excellent university and at the same time be faithful to the Church’s teaching and discipline. That is a fundamental error, and it takes a lot to undo it.”
Notre Dame quickly adopted a lay board of trustees. Being no longer a “religious” institution, it could receive federal money. In the years since, that sum is in the billions.
A year later the other shoe fell when numerous Notre Dame faculty and religious roundly denounced Humanae Vitae. In that prophetic document, Pope St. Paul VI warned of the consequences of embracing The Pill and the contraceptive mentality that celebrated it: “human beings — and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation — need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect . . . is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.”
“If a person can violate the natural integrity of the moral act with moral impunity,” said Dean William J. Kenealy, S.J., of Boston College Law School two decades before HV, “then I challenge anyone to show me the essential immorality of any sexual aberration.”
Today’s Notre Dame has proven him right. Entering freshmen are ordered not only to embrace sexual sin, but to be their allies.
“Americans have exhausted the cultural capital stored up by believing Christians and Jews who came before them,” Notre Dame Law Professor Gerald Bradley writes. And yet, he continues, “A Catholic ministry must always bear acute witness to moral truth, and never lead people to act immorally.”
Is Notre Dame exhausted?
Why Not?
In those pre-Woodstock years, Notre Dame students had “mock conventions” each in presidential election season. In 1968, while I was slaving away for California Governor Ronald Reagan, Chuck Nau was Bobby Kennedy’s campaign manager. On his dorm room wall hung a huge poster picturing a thoughtful Bobby contemplating his favorite campaign slogan:
“You see things and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?’ ”
Bobby had borrowed the line from George Bernard Shaw — a fact his fawning biographers generally acknowledge. What they don’t mention is its origin: it comes from Shaw’s 1921 play, Back To Methuselah. Bobby actually borrowed his beloved slogan from Shaw’s Satan.
Satan offers the eternal lie — “Ye shall be as gods” — to tempt Eve to reject God, His creation, and His commands. Satan promises Eve that she can create a better world all by herself, out of her own imagination — which she could continually create anew as easily as a serpent sheds his skin.
Bobby Kennedy parroted Satan’s line verbatim. And in his PP v. Casey opinion, Justice Kennedy enshrined it.
But even the socialist Shaw knew it was a blasphemous lie. The serpent was offering Eve the megalomania of Marx’s dialectic, a bloodthirsty dagger of denial and destruction aimed at the heart of Christendom, the Incarnation, and all of reality.
Socrates recognized long ago that the tyrant longs to impose his worst nightmares during his waking hours. The tyrant, then and now, owes no obedience to Jefferson’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” because, you see, they don’t exist. Those were Jefferson’s dreams, not Kennedy’s.
That was then, and this is now. We can all be just as free as Satan! We can create our own reality, conforming perfectly to our vision of whatever Hell on earth we want to live in.
Please recall that Satan’s temptation succeeded. It did then, and it does now.
Notre Dame’s “Pastoral Plan for the Support and Holistic Development of GLBTQ and Heterosexual Students at the University of Notre Dame” states that individuals who experience same-sex attraction are called to chastity because, “All must learn to govern their passions in disciplined ways on the road to lasting freedom.” “The call to chastity,” it continues, “is God’s invitation for all to be in loving relationship with others according to the demands of the moral virtues.”
And to accept that invitation, Notre Dame students must be “Beloved Friends and Allies” of those who have succumbed to Satan’s call to sexual perversion.
By telling them the truth?
Not a chance.
Professor Bradley says, “by now Americans have exhausted the cultural capital stored up by believing Christians and Jews who came before them.”
Why must the same go for Notre Dame?
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