This essay was previously published at Catholic World Report July 27 under the title “The Serious Problems with the ‘Radical Inclusion’ Delusion.” I am posting it, with some changes, here at my Substack in anticipation of the October Synod, which opens this week in Rome.

The Synod 2021-24 is constructing Jesuit Father James Martin’s bridge. 

The authors of the Instrumentum Laboris (IL) for October’s Vatican gathering have embedded an acronym that derives from and embraces the sexual revolution: LGBTQ+.  While it claims to serve as a “prophetic witness to a fragmented and polarized world,” the Synod is, in fact, collaborating with the prevailing culture’s divisive, identity-based ethos. 

Because “LGBTQ+ Catholics” are, we are told, among those who do not “feel” accepted or included in the Church, the Synod “will create spaces” where “LGBTQ+ people” and others “who feel hurt by the Church” no longer “feel” invisible and unwelcome.

LGBTQ+ refers to the “limitless sexual orientations and gender identities used by members of our community,” as the political advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign, explains. Incompatible with reason and faith, the acronym signifies the culture’s belief that persons — like gods — have complete dominion over their own bodies and sexual faculties.

Even accustomed as we are to the separation of Americans into identity groups, that a Synod of the Catholic Church refers to baptized human beings in this manner should be a big deal. 

A designation without any limiting principle seeds the synodal path with the instability and self-indulgence of a culture in the invasive grip of queer and gender theories. No assembly selects LGBTQ+ to modify Catholics unless ulterior motives are afoot — and they are. 

The Radical Inclusion of LGBTQ+ in Church Discourse Is a First Step

“Respect,” says Fr. Martin in Building a Bridge, “means calling a group what it asks to be called.” The collective voice heard by Fr. Martin originates in secular identity politics, and “what it asks to be called” is, as Carl Trueman explains, fundamentally incoherent. 

To differentiate Catholics by sexual desires and gender identities intentionally positions these features as integral to our nature as persons created in the image and likeness of God. This queering of the imago Dei aims, over time, to “enlarge” the boundaries of Church discourse, “making room” in the Catholic tent for the types of nuance that have destabilized norms since Eden.

The IL itself points in this direction when it calls for a “renewal of language” used by the Church so that the “richness” of its tradition becomes more “accessible and attractive to the men and women of our time, rather than an obstacle that keeps them at a distance.” 

As is all too common today, assertions — in this case, about Catholic tradition and teaching — are treated as facts. In the Synod, as in the culture, feelings, rather than virtues, are authoritative. When a radically inclusive prelate declares that “the Catholic community contains structures and cultures of exclusion that alienate all too many from the church or make their journey in the Catholic faith tremendously burdensome,” he cedes sovereignty to sentiments. [italics throughout mine]  

The jargon of “structures and cultures of exclusion” obfuscates reality: in a culture rapidly dismantling standards and norms, what alienates “all too many” is a Church that counters the culture. That the sacred deposit of faith does not accommodate “all too many” behaviors celebrated by secular society is now a personal affront.

I am a child of God who has been baptized Catholic: the universal identity of all Catholics. That I am a man sexually attracted to other men neither detracts from nor adds to the truth to which the Church must always bear witness.

To allege that Church discourse is an “obstacle” keeping me, or any other Catholic, “at a distance” or that its doctrines make our faith journey “tremendously burdensome” mimics a culture that nurtures weakness to maintain a steady supply of useful victims. To insist, as our famous American Jesuit does, that a Catholic leader’s assumption when encountering any LGBTQ+ person “must be that you are meeting someone who has suffered and may still be suffering” debases individual human dignity, turning each person into an object of pity.

Christians are called to live, albeit imperfectly, truly radical lives: to deny the self, pick up the cross, and follow Jesus Christ. It is by His grace — and His mercy — that we are lifted up each time we fall. As Catholics, we need strong priests who confidently and lovingly illuminate the Word and thus fortify our resolve, which the world all too artfully undermines.

The Next Step Is Normalizing Disorder

LGBTQ+ epitomizes objective disorder, its Q+ a constant of confusion and illogic into which a Church thus incorporating it falls. 

At present, synodal documents referring to our “brothers and sisters” in Christ exclude our “other siblings in Christ,” a logically-necessary addition to the community of the baptized. The phrase acknowledges our Q+ Catholics — the non-binary, the genderqueer, and the gender-fluid among them— and has been utilized by radically inclusive theologian Fr. Dan Horan, OFM.

The Synod’s evident eagerness to promote the baptismal dignity of women collides with its call for greater inclusivity of LGBTQ+ Catholics, some of whom reject their “sex assigned at birth,” a mendacious phrasing integrated by definition into the acronym. Since any consideration of “women’s inclusion in the diaconate” will have to encompass biological males who identify as women (trans women), so too the priesthood must be opened to biological females who identify as men (trans men).

To do otherwise denies the baptismal dignity of LGBTQ+ Catholics.

A radically inclusive Church can never clearly say what a man or a woman is lest Genesis offend, and will most certainly feel compelled to revamp discourse that “marginalizes” homosexual activity. 

Such a Church, like the culture it emulates, requires sensitivity readers. The language of sections 2357-59 of the Catechism is, I am told, harmful and a disservice to those of us who are gay.  We are perceived as men without chests, too overwhelmed by our desires to grasp rationally the truth that same-sex inclination is “objectively disordered” and homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law.” 

Any changes in Church discourse made here will lead to revisions elsewhere. The subsequent section 2360, for example, concerns the “Love of Husband and Wife,” which declares — exclusively, problematically, and without apology — that “sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman.” 

As the gnostic queer theology espoused and currently taught at a number of Catholic institutions takes root, our conception of “ordered” will broaden. To be sure, discerning theologians shall eventually locate both sodomy and mutual masturbation within the totality of God’s design.

An American cardinal attending the October Synod already argues that the Catholic tradition that “all sexual acts outside of marriage constitute objectively grave sin” focuses the Christian moral life “disproportionately” on sexual activity.

Yes, Catholic doctrine is an inconvenience 60 years into a sexual revolution. And chastity — a life-long training in self-mastery — does appear anachronistic in a culture that revels in unconstrained self-gratification. However, reality — the plague of social pathologies arising from that revolution’s success — objectively documents why, for humanity’s sake, the focus of Catholic tradition remains clear-eyed and crucial.

The past decade of queer transformations within mainstream Protestant churches offers Catholics a preview. The worldwide Anglican communion has passed the breaking point. From transgender clergy to non-binary bishops, in a radically inclusive church, the center cannot hold. 

Is a Synodal Path That Bypasses the Family a Good Path to Take?

We are six decades into a sexual revolution that has devastated the institutions of marriage and family. What says the Synod?

The synodal path not only steers clear of the readily apparent social and cultural wreckage but avoids truth — including the prophetic Humanae Vitae — in its embrace of objective disorder.

The triumph of the LGBTQ+ agenda has created a pied piper culture, enticingly packaged in rainbow colors, that informs children that husbands marry husbands, wives marry wives; that affirms the fantasies of kids claiming they were “assigned” the wrong sex; that demands girls share their formerly private spaces with boys; that compels lessons in sexual orientation and gender identity as early as kindergarten, and adds “queerness” wherever children can be reached. What says the Synod?

Why does a Synod specifically promoting co-responsibility within the Church ignore the vital social role of the mother and father, who together have society’s only essential co-responsible task: bringing forth new life, protecting and educating their offspring, and raising them as Christians? 

High percentages of lay men and women, we are told, have been involved in the Synod.  However, a reading of synodal documents indicates its lay participants have included very few parents with recent first-hand experience changing diapers; bandaging cuts and scrapes; reading stories to sleepy heads; readying youngsters for school; and monitoring the culture’s efforts to bypass Mom and Dad through television, internet, classrooms, and social media. 

Instead, we “hear” the authorial expertise of universities, its academics and activists perceiving the institutional church as a type of secular government, its laws and structures onerous, its catechetical discourse triggering. 

Something is amiss.

In the North American document, for example, Catholics are encouraged to “imitate Mary.” Why? Because, the authors tell us, Mary “continually said ‘yes’ to the invitation to contribute to the building up of the Kingdom of God.” 

Left unsaid is Mary’s indispensable contribution, her Yes to motherhood. How does this omission happen in a Catholic gathering?

In that document — where the leadership role of women in the church is of such paramount concern to most everyone involved — the role of mother and wife in the domestic church is not addressed. Nor is the role of father and husband. Likewise, in the Vatican’s Instrumentum Laboris. 

As in the culture, so too in the Synod.

Where is the Catholic Church, the Defender of Marriage and Family, at This Moment of Social and Cultural Collapse in the West? 

In large part, that Church will be found in Africa, where some 20 percent of the current worldwide Catholic population resides, where churches are filled on Sundays, and where children are brought into the world male and female, as God has created them.

Africa’s synod chose to dispense with the Vatican-suggested theme — Isaiah’s Enlarge the Space of Your Tent — because of the tent’s association with the chaos of warfare, flight, and displacement. Instead, the Church in Africa selected as its theme The Family of God. “The family,” says their document, “is an important structure in the promotion of the synodal Church and demands pastoral care that focuses on marriage and family and their challenges in present-day Africa.”

At the invitation of Pope Francis, Fr. Martin is participating in this fall’s Synod, along with the four American cardinals who contributed affirming blurbs to Building a Bridge. 

I do take heart that the Synod will also be hearing many individual voices from Africa, where the family is treasured, the threats to it are appreciated, and the Catholic Church remains a sign of contradiction.

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The Silence of the Shepherds

Catholic bishops know that families are raising children in the midst of a rapidly accelerating cultural-sexual revolution with no apparent limiting principles. 

The parental duty to educate children with Christian values is subverted daily by an unprecedented home invasion of cultural decadence via technology and the schools, often beginning in the earliest grades. Catholic bishops, who seek to promote “the common good,” surely realize that our common bonds as citizens have been shredded, that a fundamental societal sense of the good is no longer shared. 

Our public discourse has been fractured and refashioned by the radically subjectivist Critical theories of a postmodern Academy culture that equates truth with power: whoever controls the narrative – the discourse – determines what is true.  

Postmodernism’s rejection of objective truth and knowledge, its skepticism of reason itself, places it in direct opposition to what Pope John Paul II calls “the responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth.”

Unfortunately, parents who wish to send their children to a college or university devoted to truth cannot rely on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for guidance. 

The USCCB currently maintains on its website only a simple listing of every degree-granting institution. Lacking any distinguishing annotations or commentaries, the listing suggests that all schools mentioned are equally and truly Catholic at the core.  While this does not help families, it does benefit the leadership of academic institutions that have relied on the diplomatic reticence of the bishops to disguise their free fall into unabashed secularism. 

The bishops know better. They have a pastor's responsibility to tell Catholic parents the unvarnished truth: many Catholic institutions do not merit the name.

Since those institutions are not going to change – not anytime soon– the bishops must confront parents with reality, no matter how disturbing it is.

Without affecting the independence of any academic institution, they can do the following now.

• The bishops know which Catholic colleges and universities currently support and follow Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the 1990 Apostolic Constitution for Catholic Universities promulgated by Pope John Paul II.  Annotate the list, indicating those schools that accept and abide by that constitution. 

• The bishops know which Catholic professors of theology at Catholic schools have asked for and received an academic mandatum, acknowledging that what is being taught in their classes is “within the full communion” of the church. Identify which Catholic theologians at which schools have a mandatum.

• The bishops can identify how many credit hours of distinctly Catholic theology and philosophy each institution requires for graduation. Is it 9 hours? 6? 3? None?

• Since such colleges and universities must retain a Catholic identity, the bishops can state both the percentage of each school’s teaching faculty and the percentage of its trustees who are baptized Catholic. 

These tasks do not rely on promises of cooperation from schools that ignore Ex Corde Ecclesiae nor a polite tone of dialogue between bishops and school officials, the lackluster result of the USCCB’s ten-year review of the Application of Ex Corde Ecclesiae. They require gathering data from readily available sources.

And there is one more critical piece of information about which bishops have a pastoral responsibility to inform Catholic parents.

• The USCCB can examine the core curriculum at each Catholic institution, objectively assessing the degree to which the school’s core advances the common good through a dialogue of faith and reason embodied within a Catholic Intellectual Tradition devoted unreservedly to truth.  Then make that core information readily available for all to see.

Common Contempt Rather Than Common Good 

Catholic universities and colleges claim to promote the common good as part of their mission.  That claim is too often a sham.  Fr. James Martin reveals why.

In Building a Bridge, he observes in passing the frayed nature of our social and political climate. “Not too long ago,” he recalls, “opposing factions would often interact with one another and work together for the common good… a quiet courtesy and tacit respect prevailed. Now all one seems to find is contempt.”

Fr. Martin’s observation points to a deficiency at United States universities, not just Catholic ones. Our schools no longer educate students to be citizens of our nation; they, instead, prepare students for global citizenship, an oxymoronic illusion. 

Students who graduate from an American university without having studied the Constitution and key ideas from the Federalist Papers, including Madison’s Federalist Paper #10, remain fundamentally ignorant about the country in which they live.  We pay for this ignorance.

In a core course offering a practical foundation for living as an adult citizen in this country, students examining #10 would discover a brilliant mind, aware that the causes of faction are “sown into the nature of man.” They might begin to appreciate how rare in the history of the world is our republic, the form of government the Founders established in order to control for the natural effects of faction.

This academic dereliction of duty reminds us of another: the Founders, cognizant of human nature, understood that self-government requires a virtuous people, for without “sufficient virtue,” as stated in Federalist #55, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

Graduating young adults untrained in virtuous habits and educated into ignorance about their nation helps explain why contempt for others, including other Americans, is most likely to be found not in our town and village squares but in the Academy.

Fr. Martin’s concern in Building a Bridge is not about factions per se – that was Madison’s concern – but about the opposition to his faction. His, after all, is the anointed perspective of respect, compassion, and sensitivity. 

He contends our lack of unity arises from the development of “echo chambers” created by social media and news channels “in which one’s worldview is barely challenged.” But technology in a society still free accentuates the contentious nature of a pre-existing estrangement. 

The echo chamber is, in practice, an apt description of postmodern American higher education, the source of our disaffection.

Politically, culturally, and spiritually, the 21st century college campus is a bureaucratic fortress of identity-based diversity, equity, and inclusion that nurtures intellectual conformity by determining what is and is not acceptable discourse. Under the hegemony of Critical theories, the Catholic campus too becomes a collective of safe spaces, its students living in the adolescent comfort of never having a single belief challenged.

Nothing appears amiss when the Vice Provost of Global Engagement at Boston College, theologian James F. Keenan, SJ, “others” critics of Critical race theory as “racists and white supremacists” in order to shame by analogy Catholic bishops concerned about the dangers of Critical gender ideology. It does not surprise when Fordham’s professor of Theological and Social Ethics, Fr. Bryan Massingale, manipulates a 69-second incident to pillory a woman already facing public scorn. Why? So white people can face “hard truths” about their “privilege.” The university is a reservoir of contempt for human beings whom academics have never met. 

The Catholic university – unless demonstrably countercultural – resides harmoniously within that DEI echo chamber, which is not “consecrated without reserve to the cause of truth.” 

Take my alma mater, Xavier University, the home of the Musketeers, as a prime example.

The Xavier University Way

The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habits into stable sentiments. The Chest, Magnanimity, Sentiment: these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.  C. S. Lewis The Abolition of Man

At Xavier, the belly rules. 

Established as The Athenaeum in 1831, what became St. Xavier College in 1840 under the Jesuits, and then Xavier University in 1930, has found itself in the 21st century in the midst of an existential nervous breakdown. 

Xavier’s loss of confidence in itself as a Catholic institution is recorded in its lengthy institutional examen of 2014, “Seeking Integration and Wisdom: The Xavier Way.” 

Skeptical of the old verities, embarrassed by its past, Xavier appears manifestly unmoored by its philosophical collapse into postmodernity: “What values should guide us? Who are we? To what will we hold ourselves accountable? How do we maintain a robust Jesuit Catholic identity while also integrating all persons into our community? How do we grapple with the difficult, important issues of our times?”

That Truth, Goodness, and Beauty possess a permanence accessible to and valuable for all persons and issues is never considered. Doubting the contemporary efficacy of habits formed by the theological and cardinal virtues, Xavier turns to intangible “Ignatian values” that “embody a method” for re-engineering the person. 

The Xavier Way flounders under the burden of an immoderate ambition. 

Rather than help students acquire essential knowledge across a broad range of subjects, knowledge the young must first grasp if, later in their lives, they are to “grapple” rationally, rather than viscerally, with “difficult, important issues,” Xavier has consecrated itself unreservedly to their metamorphosis.

Stimulating “growth and transformation in the hearts, minds, imaginations, and wills” of its students becomes the search for “no less than the healing and transformation of our society and our world.” 

The hubris might astonish were it not the coin of the postmodern Academy, as certain of its moral rectitude as it is untethered from reality. 

The discerners are unable to imagine a more modest aim – “the development of the intellectual abilities of its students in their pursuit of truth,” for instance, a previous Xavier objective in a less visionary time. And why should they?  Students arrive on campus as identities bearing personal truths, which would be disrespectful and insensitive to challenge.  Pandering avoids the hassle of teaching substance.

Laughably, D’Artagnan himself emerges as the lodestar of The Xavier Way: “Our Unity Within Our Diversity Is Our Strength.”  The banality points to the barrenness of Xavier education.

Gone is a university's primary expertise: “to impart a superior body of knowledge to its students and to help them acquire power to think clearly and penetratingly.” 

Gone is a university unashamed of “developing the other characteristics of the ‘true and perfect Christian’ – strong moral character, intelligent appreciation of beauty, sound physical health, and appropriate social attitudes and habits.” 

The “true Christian,” who “thinks, judges, and acts in accordance with right reason illumined by the supernatural light of the example and teaching of Christ,” has been replaced by an “ethos of inclusivity” wherein the self-identified believer or non-believer is –

antiracist.

The 2014 Xavier Way – unencumbered by the habits of mind the virtues instill – becomes an easy institutional mark. After the death of George Floyd, the university, unable to withstand the “passionate intensity” of the moment, swerved in unison with the Academy toward an “antiracist culture” and its incoherent “model of inclusive excellence.” 

The DEI tsunami so erodes the foundation, what remains is a ruin: Xavier, the Antiracist University. 

Faculty make their pedagogical and curricular decisions based on their contribution “to diversity-related and antiracist teaching and learning.” 

Bias Action and Response Teams and Bias Education and Advocacy Teams form a Ministry of Love to “build a campus climate free from racial bias, harassment, and discrimination.” 

The institution levels itself through a “racial equity lens,” the university’s elaborate DEI infrastructure enforcing the identity-based orthodoxy through its offices, councils, centers, and “self-identified white” allies.

Xavier’s declaration of antiracism – announcing the institution can never be “not racist” – solidifies the university’s contempt for un-anointed humanity. 

D’Artagnan’s school subscribes to an all-encompassing worldview that considers any opposition to or disagreement with it prima facie evidence of racism. Its current mission statement, touting itself as “an inclusive environment of open and free inquiry” is a lie. A university claiming to offer a liberal arts education has joined forces with an ideology opposed to the tenets of classical liberalism.

The Xavier Antiracist Way entails a 24/7 immersion in what Ibram Kendi calls “persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” These are Jesuit values of discernment and reflection on steroids, the Marxist praxis that converts Kendi’s “radical reorientation of consciousness” into action.

Its dogmatic assertions about whiteness, privilege, unconscious biases, and racist structures accepted on faith alone, the antiracist culture denies free will, attributing all disparities in achievements to an overriding systemic cause, which must be alleviated by intentional race-based discrimination. 

Because it is intersectional, antiracism undergirds Fr. Martin’s bridge, which BIPOC and LGBTQ identities cross as they “heal and transform” and ultimately queer Catholicism at Xavier.

Lavender graduations, drag shows, safe zone training, pronoun resources, and Campus Pride illuminate Kendi’s ethos of inclusivity: “To be queer antiracist,” declares the author of the urtext, “is to understand the privileges of my cisgender, of my masculinity, of my heterosexuality, of their intersections.” Xavier’s Office of Student Involvement is Creating a Safer Space, where students at a Catholic institution are told sex is “assigned at birth,” that the “whole person” includes a mixture of identities – “gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, sexual attraction, and romantic attraction” – all of which “are flexible and can change over time.”

The antiracist institution trains its students to “see” with diverse lenses that stimulate the political appetites of the identity-obsessed: racial, ethnic, feminist, queer, post-colonial lenses; lenses of disability and body positivity.  

Xavier graduates the global “citizen” as Visceral Man.

Xavier Is Not Catholic at its Core

After four years and $250,000 at Xavier, what does a student receive? 

A credential and a “woke” consciousness.

Rather than establishing a common base from which students aspire toward the good for their lives and communities, the Xavier core is hollow, the aspiration without the effort. 

The core “revolves around…Jesuit values” – reflection, discernment, cura personalis, solidarity and kinship, service rooted in justice and love, and magis (seeking the greater good). Intrinsically subjective in nature, these values infuse the “insubstantial pageant” at the heart of Xavier’s transformative purpose. 

In ancient times – say, 60 years ago  – all Xavier graduates would have studied the same liberal arts subjects in their core curriculum. Self-confident educators followed a curricular path, “developed and revised through four hundred years of experience,” that established a concrete foundation for all students – in mathematics, natural sciences, language, literature, history, social studies, philosophy and theology – before they pursued a major.

Xavier’s 83 credit hours included 18 in philosophy, three of them in logic, and 16 in theology (eight in Catholic theology, eight in Christian Culture).  

In contrast, today’s core at Xavier is a buffet of electives totaling 48 hours. A model of academic postmodernity in practice, Xavier liberates its students from the chains of an imperfect heritage, heretofore an educator’s duty to bequeath to future imperfect generations.

Conveniently professor-friendly, the current core “significantly reduces the total credit hours required” so students are free to take even more electives, most of which are specialized fragments of personal interest to the educator. 

Like elective surgery anywhere, what you pay for at the Xavier buffet is not essential. Any electives will do. 

• Theology

There is no requirement that any student at Xavier take Catholic theology. Students take two theology courses, neither of them necessarily Catholic.

All students take THEO 111 Theological Foundations, an ecumenical study of “human and religious faith, especially the Christian faith,… the diversity of world religions,... issues connected with religious diversity and global responsibility … with different ways of reading scripture and tradition (that) affect issues of gender, class, race, violence, evil, and sin.”

Fostering “students' understanding of socially significant issues” from a variety of perspectives is the purpose of THEO 111 and the core’s three other Ethics/Religion and Society courses. 

When social significance – transitory, often partisan, easily manipulated – becomes the formative material, rather than truth, the worth of any course, even the potentially challenging PHIL 100, is suspect. Students will graduate unequipped for the weighty eventualities of life, reality itself not readily conforming to campus perspectives about social significance.  

The other course is a “theological perspectives” elective, the diversity of options a sign of the department’s “inclusive excellence”: the Church after Vatican II, Theology & Animals, Islamic Philosophy & Theology, Black Theology, Liberation Issues & Theology, World Religions & Environment, US Catholicism: Past & Present, Women & Early Theology, The Challenge of Peace, Buddhist Christian Exploration, and African Spirituality. 

• History

Doing its part to graduate “citizens” of the world, the History Department’s “signature contribution” to the core is a “particular topic in global history.”

Studying Western civilization the Catholic church was instrumental in building? Nope. Studying the nation the Founders forged? Forget about it. At Xavier, students indulge themselves in a single “historical perspective.”  History of Native American Health will suffice, as would Britain: Sherlock to BritPop, or Women in the American West, or Immigration to America, or Africa’s Past Our Future, or Latin America: Cortes to Castro.

• English Composition and Literature

Instead of 12 credit hours in English composition and literature, texting-savvy freshmen need take only three hours of composition or three of rhetoric.

Then there’s the core’s Literature and the Moral Imagination. Theme-based by instructor preference, each class has students look at a variety of moral and ethical issues from a literary basis. Fall 2023’s themes include Diversity and Identity, Literature of Diversity, Transformations, and Apocalypses and Revelations, the latter “apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction offer(ing) insight into current events” and, of course, identity.

In other words, what is likely a student’s first – and perhaps only – encounter with literature at Xavier is not an opportunity to teach students how to read classic literary works for the pleasure they provide, for a deeper understanding of human nature, and for an appreciation of their beauty in form and language. The purpose is to glean from the story its social significance, an attempt meriting, per Twain, prosecution or banishment.

An encounter with Crime and Punishment or Moby Dick also stirs the moral imagination, but they demand of their first-time readers and their teachers both humility and sweat.

• The First-Year Seminar

All freshmen begin their first year with the semester seminar that “establishes a solid foundation” for a core designed to transform their “hearts, minds, imaginations, and wills.”

Reflecting the personal interest of the professor-mentor in charge, the seminars divide freshmen into small groups formed by 20 or more different themes, enough choices to attract, like flies to honey, eager initiates to the circumnavigation of Ignatian values. 

The professor is – theoretically – guiding students “to think about the evolution of (their) vocation and (their) aspirations to contribute to the world” in seminars such as these:

• The Art of Expression: Cultivating Creativity for Balance, Growth, and Community “examines various roles of artistic expression in society: healer, teller of hard truths, voice of solidarity, and catalyst for social change. Students will study and research examples of art movements, engage with local artists, and create individual works of art.”

• History of Xavier “explores … Xavier’s historical connections to slavery. Amidst national debate about what to do with Confederate monuments, how to make sense of the brutal killing of George Floyd, and what the recent events at the Capitol signify, Xavier has been wrestling with some heretofore untold aspects of the school’s past…. This course is an invitation to join the discussion.”

• The Lives of Black Women and Girls: “incredulous reactions to Meg Thee Stallion’s accusation that a Black man shot her are part of an epistemic framework in which Black women and girls are perceived to be unworthy of protection, their bodies disposable, and their truths undermined or deemed inconsequential to a racist, patriarchal, misogynoiristic, homo/transphobic, and ableist U.S. regime. This course will employ a Black Feminist framework to make legible the interdependent forces that imperil the lives of Black women and girls, including Black trans women.” 

The first-year seminar encounters students when they are at their most vulnerable: they lack the intellectual armament that nurtures rational thinking and logical argumentation, an academic preparation not conducive to Xavier’s purpose.  

A World “Charged with the Grandeur of God”

Fr. Thomas G. Savage, SJ, the formidable cigar-smoking chairman of the English Department, introduced me to the language of the sublime when I attended Xavier. His was a demanding, uncompromising pedagogy, his mission to guide his students into territory unfamiliar to us: awe.  Under his tutelage, I was trained to enter directly into and engage with the world imagined by the poet, the universe of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, John Keats’ odes, and the “dappled things” of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnets. He fed my young soul with the nourishment of Beauty. 

Fr. Savage knew the educator’s role: not to transform my will but to guide me toward an understanding of my nature as a man created by God with free will, the transformation of which is not the purview of a university. 

As we are creatures of the Fall, the calling of the Catholic educator is the enrichment of his students’ appreciation for what is always true and good and beautiful within a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” Fr. Savage had his opinions, I’m sure, on socially significant issues – but I never encountered them when he taught the Survey of British Poetry.

Nor did I discover the opinions of Dr. Karl Wentersdorf, my professor for a year-long course in Shakespeare and a semester class in Chaucer. To this day, I can hear his singular voice reading aloud passages from Henry IV, Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, The Tempest; and reciting in its original Middle English the Prologue of Chaucer’s tales — each rendering becoming a revelation.

Both Savage and Wentersdorf enfolded me in delight, “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

Xavier’s current English Department enfolds its captive audience in platitudes. 

The professors, parading “the Jesuit values of solidarity and kinship,” commit themselves to “anti-racist action.” They “whole-heartedly assert that Black Lives Matter.” They tell students that literature “builds empathy and understanding,” that language “moves people to action and justice.” 

Adolescent drivel.  If the purpose is to build empathy or take action, propaganda is the Xavier prof’s métier.

The poet, says Faulkner, writes about the “truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” The English professor’s calling necessitates helping a student learn how to read so as to penetrate the very heart of a poem or story. 

An English major at Xavier is no longer required to take a course in Shakespeare but is compelled to take two joy-sapping courses in Literary Criticism and Linguistics. In the unlikely event Xavier students encounter The Brothers Karamazov or Middlemarch, Paradise Lost or King Lear, they will first be retrofitted with the suitable Critical lens through which to “see” the book.

Like the university itself, the educators in this department are alienated from their true vocation. They  – and Xavier – are propagandists now, sloganeers, apparatchiks educating into ignorance their students, most graduating orphaned from truth, bereft of beauty, dispossessed of faith.

Xavier’s demise is self-inflicted. Nor is it alone.

You can read Fr. Martin’s Bridge, Pt. 1: Crossing into Critical Queer Catholicism here.

“How far your eyes may pierce I can not tell: Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.” King Lear Act 1:4:368-69 Albany to Goneril

Fr. Martin, who normally assigns the superlative designation to LGBTQ Catholics as a whole, has recently raised to premier victim status the T, declaring transgendered persons “surely the most marginalized group in the church today.” 

The buzzword marginalized, springing from Critical theories, is one of many that flows trippingly from the tongues of those who – like Fr. Martin – “pierce” the church through a Critical lens and see a heteronormative institution that excludes and oppresses those with differing sexual and gender identities. 

Fr. Martin often tells us Jesus “continually reached out to those who felt ignored, excluded or marginalized.” But lepers, the destitute, prostitutes, tax collectors, thieves, Samaritans, and others were social outcasts in fact. The persons “on the margins” whom Jesus encountered enjoyed none of the political and financial support of Judea’s social and cultural institutions.

Of course Jesus welcomed all into His embrace as the church is always called to do; but there is no record that He lied to any in order to make them feel included.

No matter how mercifully stated, truth – in the judgment of Fr. Martin –  “marginalizes.”

He finds “the worst kind of marginalization” in Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington, VA, whose Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology states that “no one ‘is’ transgender.” This statement, according to Fr. Martin, represents “the worst kind of discrimination and the worst kind of hatred” because it declares that “someone doesn’t exist.” 

Did the bishop lie? 

No. His statement is in accord with reality: both in church teaching that “a person is created male or female” and in biological fact that a person's identity as male or female is “a truth reflected in every cell of the body.” 

The bishop failed a test.

The quotation marks around “is,” indicating that a person’s subjective “truth” is not the truth, are “pierced” by Fr. Martin into an insult: in failing to affirm a person’s feelings, Bishop Burbidge has failed to cross the Jesuit’s bridge of respect, compassion, and sensitivity.

Fr. Martin’s identity allies at New Ways Ministry claim the bishop’s document “relies on trans-negative church teachings and right wing sources…(and) wholeheartedly endorses the gender complementarity theology at the core of LGBTQ oppression in the church, going so far as to claim, ‘Sexual difference is at the heart of family life.’”

“Going so far as to claim…”?

Considering “sexual difference (being) at the heart of family life” an extreme idea shows how deeply incorporated Critical queer and gender theories have become in certain segments of the church. While respect, compassion, and sensitivity must be hallmarks of our Christian interaction with others, they become, by avoiding truth, buzzwords that place in peril our children.

The bishop’s catechesis is a true and truly compassionate document – and necessary in a time when children are at grave risk. 

What is new in our times…is the growing cultural acceptance of the erroneous claim that some people, including children and adolescents, are ‘in’ the ‘wrong body’ and therefore must undergo ‘gender transition,’ either to relieve distress or as an expression of personal autonomy. … At its core, this belief in a ‘transgender’ identity rejects the significance of the sexed body and seeks cultural, medical, and legal validation of the person's self-defined identity–an approach called ‘gender affirmation.’

What are we as Catholics to affirm about the body? Is the “body a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God” (1Cor: 6-19-20)? Or have we come to believe that this temple is our own and mutable, a construction of the self? 

How Far Does a Postmodern Jesuit’s Eyes Pierce?

“What is new in our times” is what Critical theories – assertions, not empirical facts – regarding sex, gender, and sexuality have wrought in our culture. 

We are living in a transgender moment, as Ryan Anderson calls it in 2018’s When Harry Became Sally.  Queer and gender theorists believe “the real self is fundamentally separate from the material body” while insisting, in a queered cura personalis, that “transforming the body is crucial for personal wholeness.” 

The ideology, Anderson explains, promotes a “radical subjectivity in which individuals” are free “to define the truth as they choose,” thus incapacitating reason to affirm a lie: sex is “assigned at birth.”

Those most certainly wounded by the queering of our culture – children, adolescents – do not have the benefit of Fr. Martin’s advocacy. The Critical lens through which he “pierces” the world distorts their plight to preserve the integrity of theory.

In May 2022, Fr. Martin published a lengthy essay, “The Church and the Transgender Person: A Pastoral Approach” at Outreach, an LGBTQ Catholic resource he established under the auspices of America media. In its 6,000 words, Fr. Martin, upset with church shepherds who have not crossed his bridge, misses the forest. 

For the past decade or so, parents have been facing an unprecedented phenomenon, “rapid onset gender dysphoria”: their children are rejecting the sexed bodies God has given them and seeking to replace them with the bodies they feel they ought to have. 

Yet Fr. Martin focuses almost exclusively on adults who made decisions as adults to become a trans man or trans woman. He wields their genuine “decades-long feelings of deep dissatisfaction with their gender” as a shield to avoid confronting the mental-emotional contagion affecting children unshielded from postmodern Critical influences.

Missing the Forest

Since only 0.6% of people identify as transgender, according to a 2021 Gallup Poll, Fr. Martin wonders why so many bishops are suddenly instituting policies that become “condemnations of ‘gender ideology’” and what he claims are “sweeping restrictions on transgender people.”

Did he examine the poll he cites? The small 0.6% total for the entire adult population 18 and over is in fact a 200% increase in those who usually identify as transgender. Why the increase? The 0.6% includes a highly unusual 1.2% of millennials (those born between 1981 - 1996) and 1.8% of Generation Z (those born between 1997 - 2017) who describe themselves as “assigned” the wrong sex at birth. 

Also new – and completely ignored by Fr. Martin – is that, prior to a decade ago, the very few cases of gender dysphoria (historically closer to 0.1% of the populace) occurred almost entirely among boys. The unprecedented rise in dysphoria is now occurring primarily, and for the first time, in girls. 

“Before 2012, there was no scientific literature on girls ages 12 - 21 ever having developed gender dysphoria at all,” observes Abigail Shrier, whose 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters is not cited by Fr. Martin anywhere in his essay. “For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those with dysphoria, they constitute the majority.”

Even the mainstream media is finally catching on, but it took three reporters from Reuters to discover recently what Shrier has been vilified for uncovering almost three years ago: The United States has seen “an explosion in recent years in the number of children who identify as a gender different from what they were designated at birth.”

Fr. Martin does link to a commentary (behind a paywall) discussing Dr. Lisa Littman’s research of parents whose teens insist their “gender identity didn’t match their sex, although they’d shown none of the common prepubescent signs of” gender dysphoria. Dr. Littman’s work, covered extensively in Shrier’s book, has survived strenuous efforts to suppress it. 

Even as he admits – parenthetically – that “the number of teens who identify as transgender has been on the rise in the past few years,” what he stresses is that “most transgender adults say they were not influenced by external forces, peer pressure, or media encouragement, much less ‘gender ideology.’”

He cites Boston College moral theologian James F. Keenan, SJ, who discusses his “transformative” listening experiences with transgendered adults, none of whom ever mentioned “gender ideology.” Fr. Keenan’s conversations occurred 20 years ago. 

Yes, each transgender adult known by Fr. Martin and Fr. Keenan “rejects the idea that ‘gender ideology’ is behind their experiences.” But unlike those adults, trans millennials and Generation Z are students of the postmodern Critical Academy, who have also been deeply involved with social media and their many influencers and gurus, such as Chase Ross and Alex Bertie. 

Jesuit fathers are protecting a theory when it is children who are in danger, boys and girls somehow convinced the very bodies with which God has blessed them are mistakes.

Gender-Affirming Bridge to the Gold Mine

When Fr. Martin references an NBC report that three major medical organizations have concluded “gender-affirming care is medically necessary for transgender youth and is backed by decades of research,” he does not note the report’s contradiction.

There have been no “decades of research” involving “youth” because both the “explosion” in children identifying as transgender and the gender-affirmation model of treatment are recent. 

Critical theories have penetrated the major institutions, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Aaron Sibarium, in observing this ideological takeover of the professions, reveals that four members of a six-person committee created in 2016 by the AAP to support children with gender dysphoria were working in pediatric gender clinics that prescribed puberty blockers to patients as young as 10 and cross-sex hormones to patients as young as 14. Its 2018 policy statement endorsing gender-affirmative care was written by a single doctor, Dr. Jason Rafferty, and apparently not “reviewed by anyone else at the organization.” 

During a November 90-minute Grand Rounds “Caring for Gender-Diverse Youth,” presented by the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Dr. Rafferty discussed child-friendly graphics used as teaching tools: the Genderbread Person, the Gender Unicorn, and the Gender Book, which he uses with children and whose authors are self-identified as “queer and trans folks.” 

Though many factors are always in play, the rise of rapid onset gender dysphoria is a Western phenomenon that coincides with the dissemination into the cultural bloodstream of the Academy’s Critical queer and gender theories. A 2022 Gallup poll shows almost 21% of Generation Z now identify as LGBT, with 2.1 % (instead of 1.8%) now saying they are transgender.

In 2007 there was one pediatric gender clinic in the United States, says Shrier; today, we have hundreds. Planned Parenthood itself now offers transgender services in over 200 of their offices. Children's hospitals are actively involved in gender transition surgeries. The lack of curiosity from the Society of Jesus about a growth industry pertaining to children suggests the order’s apostolic preference to promote a “healthy and safe environment for children” is less virtue than signal.

Affirming a 15-year-old’s feelings that she is born in the wrong body is a lucrative endeavor. Critical theories are gold. 

Is Gender-Affirming Care Cura Personalis?

Gender-affirming care is attractive to those who believe feelings must be affirmed in order to be respectful, compassionate, and sensitive. 

Shrier explains that “mental health specialists must affirm not only the patient’s self-diagnosis of dysphoria but also the accuracy of the patient’s perceptions.”  The therapists must agree that a male patient with gender dysphoria who identifies as a girl really is a girl. They use the child’s new name and new pronouns; the gender journey has begun.

Once affirmed, puberty blockers are the next step, Lupron being the most common drug provided. Lupron’s original purpose, says Shrier, was for the chemical castration of sex offenders. The FDA has never approved it for halting healthy puberty. 

As Abigail Favale points out in her book The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, the gender-affirmation model is a “mass-scaled, unassessed experiment” on children’s healthy bodies and healthy genitals. Children given blockers almost always move on to taking cross-sex hormones and thus “never go through puberty.” This leads to permanent sterility while it “arrests critical brain and bone development.” 

Top surgeries (double mastectomies) and bottom surgeries (vaginoplasty, phalloplasty and metoidioplasty) become a next step for those who feel they were born in the wrong body and whose feelings are affirmed by adults.

Has Fr. Martin, who insists the church must “listen” to the transgendered, listened to Helen Kerschner, who has detransitioned?  Advocates of compassionate care should be, she says, “noticing the sweeping demographic change and exponential increase” in those transitioning and “inquire openly into what is causing it.” 

Has Fr. Martin listened to Chloe Cole, who detransitioned after undergoing years of puberty blockers and an irreversible double mastectomy when she was 15?  She recalls being 11 when body image issues and exposure to gender content online pushed her dysphoria toward affirmative care.

Version 8 of the Standards of Care by WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health) recommends that “in almost all situations, parental/caregiver consent should be obtained” before affirmative treatments are initiated except “when caregiver or parental involvement is determined to be harmful to the adolescent.” Who makes the determination as to how and when “parental involvement” becomes “harmful” is not stated, but many school administrators have decided they can and should.

The draft of these new guidelines, issued in September, had included minimum age recommendations: age 14 for receiving estrogen or testosterone, age 15 for allowing minors to have mastectomies, and vaginoplasty and hysterectomy at age 17. But negative reaction led to some last-minute excisions of specific ages, leaving those decisions up to the professional judgment of the clinicians. WPATH President Marci Bowers, a transgender surgeon, told the New York Times that “reinstituting the young age recommendations will require ‘a better political climate.’” 

Fortunately, some health care officials – in Europe –  are greeting these updated standards of care skeptically. The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare – questioning the reliability of WPATH’s scientific evidence and noting the increasing number of detransitioners – has put an end to treatments that affirm a child’s self-diagnosed gender identity.

Serious problems have recently been revealed concerning the two Dutch studies of 2011 and 2014 that were primarily responsible for launching the gender-affirming model of treatment for young people. Those studies reported “only the best-case scenario outcomes” and failed “to properly examine” the risk of “the radical, irreversible nature of ‘gender-affirming’ medical and surgical interventions.” 

However, research into both the rise in gender dysphoria among adolescents and the gender-affirmative model of care is not always appreciated. The moral theologian Fr. Keenan cites – approvingly – physician-scientist Jack Turban, who is skeptical of any studies “asking what determines someone’s gender identity,” suspecting anti-LGBTQ purposes. He believes transgender children must be affirmed. “It’s time we celebrate that and move on.”

Curiosity was once an essential attribute for all doctors and scientists, but the quasi-religious nature of Critical theories compel the curious to pass a politically correct test before being taken seriously.

Is there any limiting principle to cura personalis, the care for the whole person? Or does cura personalis necessitate affirming adolescent feelings at all costs? 

The Bridge from Judith Butler to Queer Theology 

Educational institutions combining cura personalis with a commitment to gender diversity, equity, and inclusion – which Jesuit colleges and universities do – follow a gender-affirming model. 

Fr. Martin may not trust the institutional church on questions regarding gender, but a theologian he does trust is Fr. Daniel Horan, OFM, who, like Fr. Keenan, denounces the term “gender ideology” as used by Catholic prelates. Fr. Horan says the term is a political “rallying cry” for “discrimination and (a) defense of (an) inexcusably outdated” Christian view of the genesis and nature of man, a “static, universal Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology.” Its usage “is deployed in Catholic circles to cause grave harm to people already made vulnerable in an unjust society.”

Because “those who invoke ‘gender ideology’ generally don't know what they are talking about” and are “right-wing,” Fr. Horan suggests the church listen to leading scholars on the subject of sex and gender, scholars like Judith Butler, to whom he links. 

Butler, who goes by the pronouns they/she, is a self-identified non-binary lesbian and the most influential queer theorist in the Academy. Among her publications are Undoing Gender and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Her assertions regarding sex and gender are at home in any school’s office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Butler insists gender theory “is neither destructive nor indoctrinating.” It simply “calls into question the repressive dogma that has cast so many gender and sexual lives into the shadows.” 

She invokes feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, whose assertion “one is not born a woman but becomes one” has inspired subsequent academicians. Although Beauvoir never denied the biological reality of sex, Butler manipulates her idea to do so.

“Nothing about being assigned female at birth determines what kind of life a woman will lead and what the meaning of being a woman might be. Indeed, many trans people are assigned one sex at birth, only to claim another one in the course of their lives. And if we build on the logic of Beauvoir’s ‘existentialist’ account of social construction, then one may be born a female, but become a man.”

What is female and male, says Butler, ought never be considered fixed identities. Even the “biological complementarity of the two sexes” is a social fiction maintained through discourse. 

The Butlerian assertion that sex is assigned at birth comes from queer theory’s devious manipulation of the medical term known as intersex – a range of congenital conditions, as Favale explains, that “disrupt the development of sexual characteristics,” some of which (but not all) may create an outward ambiguity about the sex of the person, which doctors strive to resolve.

That intersex people exist has no bearing on the binary, says Favale, because biological sex is “constitutive of the whole person.” The human body is structured to produce either large sex cells (ova), making the body female, or small sex cells (sperm), making the body male. This two-fold distinction between large and small gametes is universal and stable. There is no third gamete nor a spectrum of possible gametes.  

The sex binary is, says Favale, the “necessary foundation for the continued transmission of human existence,” to whose defense the Church is called. 

Citing both Butler and Susannah Cornwall, professor of constructive theologies at the University of Exeter, Craig A. Ford, Jr., at St. Norbert’s College, calls it a “fiction” that “human sex manifests as a simple binary of male and female.” 

Concerned that the church’s teaching about human nature “excludes sexually queer identities as more or less pathological,” Ford seeks to construct a theology “queer enough to be able to challenge both gender essentialism and gender complementarity.” 

Dr. Ford writes on topics at the intersection of “queer theory, critical race theory, and the Catholic moral tradition.” His Ph.D. dissertation at Boston College, Foundations of a Queer Natural Law, was directed by Fr. James F. Keenan, S.J..

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You can read Fr. Martin’s Bridge, Pt. 2: The March of the Gender Unicorns here.

A company of Catholic academics and their allies aim to queer Catholic doctrine regarding Christian anthropology, marriage, and the family by transforming Catholic discourse.

Under the influence of postmodernism’s Critical theories, these Catholics – “thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” – divide the church community into identity groups. To achieve what diversity, equity, and inclusion has already accomplished in our public discourse, they exploit the Christian call to be respectful, compassionate, and sensitive in order to change how the institutional church talks and writes about sex, gender, and sexuality.

As James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose explain in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity, in Critical theories the individual exists only at the intersection of “the identity groups to which the person in question simultaneously belongs.” Comprising an intolerant identity-based social justice ideology, Critical theories blur all “boundaries between the objective and subjective.” Reality being a “product of our socialization and lived experiences, as constructed” by language, judgments based upon reason, objective knowledge, and universal truth become taboo. 

It is Critical Queer Theory that utilizes language as the means for breaking down, undermining, and dismantling norms. In CQT lexicon, to queer anything is to “cast doubt upon its stability, to disrupt seemingly fixed categories, and to problematize” any binaries within them.

Queer theory, which encompasses gender theory, liberates the human being from constraints, challenging the legitimacy of any discourse considered normative and, therefore, oppressive. Queering is, then, an “unmaking of any sense of the normal.” 

Since there is little that is more normal than the traditional family, this places the Catholic Church – whose discourse makes it the Defender of Marriage and Family – in the direct line of attack.

Any universal idea emphasizing our common humanity is scorned within queer theory.  Science itself is suspect: “there can be absolutely no quarter given to any discourse – even matters of scientific fact – that could be interpreted as promoting or legitimizing biological essentialism.”  The bureaucratic scientific and medical establishments have already surrendered. 

Bringing the discourse of Christianity into identity compliance is vital. Mainstream Protestant churches are conforming.  The Catholic Theological Society of America, an organization of Critical Catholic theorist-theologians, is on board. Various European prelates – such as Bishop George Bätzing, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, and Jesuit Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich –  are taking advantage of the current synodal path to pressure the institutional church in this direction.  American prelates employ the jargon of Critical newspeak, asserting that the church’s oppressive “structures of exclusion” and “patterns of marginalization” wound various identities, including LGBTQ Catholics.

This identity-based sensibility is embraced by contemporary Jesuits. Their universities nurture it. The Jesuit School Network is guiding their secondary school educators toward the same end. 

Few Catholics promote this political project of transformation within the institutional church more sincerely – and astutely – than Fr. James Martin, the thoroughly postmodern Jesuit, who in 2018 asserted that the “most marginalized person in the church” is the LGBTQ Catholic. “There’s no question” about it, he said.

Caesar’s Bridge

Because I am a Catholic who is gay, I have an interest in Fr. Martin’s voluntary ministry to LGBTQ Catholics, a ministry with friends in high places.

His ministry emerged when he published in 2017 the first edition of Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity. [Fr. Martin, whose ordinary ministry is the media, now employs LGBTQ in his most recent writings, the Q representing the re-claimed Queer.]

The central argument of Building a Bridge transforms the church from a universal body of believers into a political body divided into identity groups with grievances – in this case, the secular identity involving “sexual orientation and gender.”

A “great chasm..has formed” between the institutional church and the LGBTQ community, whose members have “felt hurt … unwelcomed, excluded, and insulted,” declares Fr. Martin. Because it has made these Catholics “feel marginalized,” the church bears the “primary responsibility” for constructing a bridge of “dialogue and reconciliation” based upon “respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” [Italics in direct quotations throughout this series are mine.]

For church leaders to show “respect” for the group of Catholics whose sexual orientations and gender identities have been “invisible” to it, Fr. Martin says the church must address the group the way it “asks to be called.” 

“People have a right to name themselves,” he says. Of course, the “people” naming us are the elite leadership of political organizations, such as GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. 

No person is LGBTQ. The LGBTQ Catholic, the “most marginalized person in the church,” does not exist. This formulation of intersecting sexual and gender identities bears no relation to the imago Dei. It does, however, represent a political alliance of convenience that is, as Carl Trueman observes, logically incoherent. The sexual orientation of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals is, like that of heterosexuals, rooted in the sex binary, the existence of which is denied by trans men, trans women, and sundry gender identities.

Fr. Martin’s example of “respect” is bunk, but even bunk can serve a serious purpose.  As more bishops use the acronym, the desired effect is achieved. A group of Catholics, distinguished from the fold by same-sex attraction and gender identity, are recognized by a Church speaking as Caesar speaks. 

Bridge of Transformation

In a queered church, it becomes insufficiently respectful for me to be acknowledged as a person created in the image of God unless my individual humanity is modified. I must be “named” with a group identity, and talked about with an adolescent sense of respect, compassion, and sensitivity. 

In the new rules of discourse, compassion and sensitivity, as well as respect, can only be demonstrated through affirmation and acquiescence. Fr. Martin repeatedly asks the institutional church to “listen” to LGBTQ Catholics without stating its Critical theory corollary – listening is transformative because it changes the listener; if transformation has not occurred, neither has listening. 

Fr. Martin’s chasm does not exist in the Catholic church, which is our bridge to salvation. What does exist is a group of Catholics who want the church to redefine sin and thereby embrace the secular mores of the State, and who “other” any opposition to their goals as hate.  

His ministry is closely aligned with New Ways Ministry, a “Catholic outreach that educates and advocates for equity, inclusion, and justice for LGBTQ+ persons, equipping leaders to build bridges of dialogue with the Church and civil society.” Fr. Martin was its 2016 Bridge Building Award recipient.

Firmly antiracist in its “support of BIPOC communities (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color),” whose liberation is “an integral aspect of our work for LGBTQ equality,” New Ways advances “an intersectional understanding of gender identity and sexuality.” Enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter, which seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” New Ways advocates for marriage equality and is sympathetic to the centering of queerness in any Catholic discussions of sex and the family.

What he calls a chasm is a political creation, shaped within an ongoing sexual revolution, egged on by Critical theorists whose intent is to dismantle the most oppressive of power structures: the family – and its major defender, the most significant Christian institution remaining that, thus far, refuses to bend.

His bridge implants within the church the identity politics responsible for the recent rapid acceleration of that revolution. 

The Bridge-Builder Ignores the Earthquake

In the introduction to his book’s second edition, Fr. Martin addresses why, in its first, he omitted any discussion of same-sex marriage and homosexual relations: He wants Building a Bridge to focus on areas of commonality – dialogue and reconciliation – because “not everything has to be about sex.”

The “stance” of the church, he explains, and the stance of LGBTQ Catholics on these topics are simply “too far apart”: same-sex relations are, says the church, “impermissible,” but for LGBTQ Catholics “same-sex relations are part-and-parcel” of our lives. 

That Fr. Martin refers to church doctrine on these matters as a “stance” is a tell. Political organizations, responding to popular feeling, have stances on issues of the day: the Catholic church has doctrine rooted in objective truth.

Because Fr. Martin avoids truth, his book pulls the reader away from reality into an illusion: Nothing especially unusual has been taking place in society; what is remarkable is the hostility of those who oppose what has been taking place. 

The reality is that we witnessed the successful queering of the institution of marriage a mere two years before the 2017 publication of Building a Bridge. What does it tell us about his bridge that the architect ignores a social earthquake of such magnitude?

It is foolish not to appreciate this revolutionary change in the secular institution of marriage. Marriage has been neutered: it is fundamentally sterile and without any immutable limiting principle. Its aftershocks continue.

In the half-decade following Obergefell vs. Hodges, Merriam-Webster, Collins Dictionary and the Macmillan Dictionary no longer mention man and woman in their definitions of marriage. Dictionary.com references the two sexes only when defining an altogether new subcategory, “opposite-sex marriage.” 

Children now grow into adulthood unmoored from the historical reality of an institution as it existed for thousands of years. Husbands now marry husbands; wives now marry wives. Secular marriage ratifies a legal partnership of the present, its connection to society’s future – to children – no longer implied.

Simultaneously, woman and man are being redefined. Among the official definitions for woman in the Cambridge Dictionary is “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they [sic] may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year for 2022 is woman because the word, dominating the cultural conversation, “reflects the intersection of gender, identity, and language.”

Maia Kobabe Wrote a Book About Eir Path to Coming Out to Eir Family

Our language’s grammar is reduced to nonsense to appease the adolescent sensibilities of people unable to cope unless the world conforms to their feelings. Adults inform children they can choose their own pronouns, even make up entirely new pronoun forms. Teachers are being required to use them. 

Fr. Martin justifies this, suggesting to ordinary folks – and Catholic school leadership – that the refusal to use someone else’s preferred pronouns is “offensive, insulting, and shaming” and compromises the “safety” of LGBTQ people. According to Fr. Dan Horan, a Franciscan theologian much recommended by Fr. Martin, this refusal is “unchristian and sinful.”

Fr. Horan, who is co-teaching a year-long course in Queer Theology – you do realize there is such a theology? – at St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame, finds it disgraceful “that so many of those who self-identify as Catholic use our faith tradition to reject and erase the self-identities of our sisters, brothers and other siblings in Christ.”

What to my “unchristian” ear is bizarre phrasing – “other siblings in Christ” – exhibits sensitivity for the self-creators, who “are” non-binary or gender-fluid or, in some other sense, queer.

God is not the author of this confusion, nor is the institutional church, despite Fr. Martin’s belief that, through its discourse, it is “contributing to division.” The church should be “a sign of unity…in all times,” he says, even as he divides its members into political identities.

Was God’s command regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil a sign of division or one of unity?  Fr. Martin does not say. But when Eve was told, “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods,” I imagine she was being addressed by the world’s first queer theorist.

Is “I Do Not Challenge Church Teachings” a Lie? 

Whether or not Fr. Martin rejects the church’s teachings on marriage and sexual relations has puzzled some Catholics, perhaps because his writing style possesses a studied elusiveness that provides him plausible deniability. 

In the second edition’s chapter regarding “sensitivity,” Fr. Martin decided to add the three paragraphs (2357 - 2359) from the Catechism regarding Chastity and Homosexuality. 

Does he use this renewed opportunity to explain Church teaching? No. 

Instead, he highlights what he regards as the insensitivity of the church’s “hurtful” discourse, which “needlessly offends” when it declares that a homosexual inclination is “objectively disordered” and that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,... (and) contrary to the Natural Law.”  

He concludes by mentioning a comment from the mother of a gay son about the Church’s discourse: for a 14-year-old gay boy to “read language like that…could destroy him,” she says. 

Catholic discourse, you see, is violence. It wounds. It nurtures bullies. It leads to suicide.  

Using emotional blackmail is standard practice when logic and reason give way to subjectivity. Seeding guilt is effective when your audience includes adults who fear being judged bigots more than they fear lies, and especially effective when your audience includes impressionable teenagers.  

He introduces this sensibility in his article in America that more fully elaborates “official church teaching on homosexuality,” foregrounding the suffering of LGBTQ people: many believe “God hates them,” many are “tempted to suicide because of their sexual orientation,” and many “feel that their own church has rejected them.” 

But before proceeding to Church teachings on homosexuality, Fr. Martin inserts a personal parenthetical comment: “As a Catholic priest,” he tells us, “I have also never challenged those teachings, nor will I.”

The Bad Teacher

Priests are the church’s front-line teachers in matters of faith and dogma. 

But any teacher – even a non-believer – can present information that imparts the “what” of specific church doctrine. 

When an English instructor guides his students through Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, he is not simply presenting the words. The duty of a teacher is to light a pathway into the play’s beauty – its poetry and form – so that the reader’s understanding of human nature and the world is thereby enriched. A good educator is able to do this when he has the necessary skills, when he demonstrably loves the work, and when he believes that teaching it has immense value for his students. 

Fr. Martin has the skills. But he is convinced church discourse concerning homosexuality is “unnecessarily cruel” and insensitive to “what might hurt or offend someone.” He does not love the work he teaches.

Educators are called to teach the true, the good, and the beautiful. This demands of them a deep appreciation for the judgments of our cultural, intellectual, and spiritual predecessors who have built a civilization. If we cannot guide subsequent generations into this rich heritage, we leave them unable to distinguish between what feels right and what is right.

Fr. Martin fails to mention that the language regarding homosexuality exists within the Catechism’s consideration of the Sixth Commandment, which itself lies within an unfolding tapestry of catechesis regarding our vocation as human beings participating “in the light and power of divine Spirit.” By our reason and free will, we are called to find perfection “in seeking and loving what is true and good” despite our nature bearing “the wound of original sin.” We are, as a result of the Fall, inclined toward evil and subject to error, but through Christ, we are delivered “from Satan and from sin.” (1702 - 1708)

In Church tradition, the Sixth Commandment encompasses “the whole of human sexuality,” which is “ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman.” It is in marriage that “the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion.” (2360) It is in this Commandment that all of us are reminded of our vocation to chastity, “the successful integration of sexuality within the person.” (2337) 

Respect, Compassion, Sensitivity, and Sodomy

But let’s say the language is changed. 

Instead of being “objectively disordered” or “intrinsically disordered,” perhaps the church describes my homosexual inclination and the homosexual acts in which I engage as “differently ordered.” Or perhaps, as the German bishops concluded in a recent Synodal document, my homosexual acts could be considered “not intrinsically bad.”

If homosexual acts are not “disordered,” then God must have ordained them. If they are “not intrinsically bad,” then God must have designed them as good. And since they are part of God’s order or goodness regarding human sexuality, we should have no objection to discussing those “differently ordered” or “not intrinsically bad” homosexual acts. 

If sodomy is part of God’s design, are anal and oral sex simply nuanced forms of complementarity? What about mutual masturbation of the genitals?  Catholics who support “marriage equality” need not be reticent: Explain how two men having homosexual relations function as “ministers of the design established by the Creator.” 

Even now, some Catholic theologians recommended by Fr. Martin, such as Craig Ford at St. Norbert’s College, are developing a more queer natural law theory that would holistically enfold within natural law the sexual inclinations and actions of LGBTQ Catholics. 

A change in language in one area of teaching, of course, ripples across others. Respect, compassion, and sensitivity per the new rules of discourse require the church to reconsider its “stance” on the blessings of same-sex unions. 

For the church to maintain that “sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman” (2360) is micro-aggressive and hurtful, especially as these words immediately follow its teachings regarding homosexuality, an insulting juxtaposition unmentioned by Fr. Martin. That discourse will have to change.

The Fourth Commandment’s descriptions of marriage and the family are neither inclusive nor equitable: to say that a “man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family” (2202) and that this “Christian family is a communion of persons” who “in the procreation and education of children…reflects the Father’s work of creation” (2205) is heteronormative.  This doctrine must be queered.

Catechesis regarding the Sacrament of Matrimony (1601 - 1666) cannot remain unaffected. A conjugal love that “aims at a deeply personal unity…open to fertility” can, if nuanced by theologians, surely encompass sodomy as a metaphorical allusion to fertility.

But let’s say that Church discourse remains as is because it is True. 

The Church tells me my homosexual inclination is objectively disordered. Well, what is actually offensive about that to me or any other believing Catholic? 

I know God created us male and female. That is objectively true. I know that He created the two so that one completes the other when united as one flesh. I know that this design is essential for life, to the protection of which the Church is always called.  I know that this order is essential for our survival as a species. 

What could be more Good and Beautiful than such a design? It has been celebrated in the most glorious works of art – painting, literature, sculpture, music and song – since mankind began creating art. What is not to love about this design? 

Am I supposed to feel forever wounded because my otherwise ordered gifts don’t include the ordered sexual inclination most men possess?  Yes, it can be painful for any kid not to be like “everyone else,” but it is not a calamity. Nor is such pain necessarily of any greater weight than any other person’s. All human beings suffer; suffering is not a competitive event.

A disordered inclination does not separate me or anyone from God or His design. His blessings have provided numerous other gifts ordered to His love and the world He has created for us. My sexual attraction to other men, even when acted upon, does not estrange me from reconciliation with God. We are fallen creatures. We sin, and though sin is not part of God’s design, His love for us is. His graces abound.  

It does not help teenagers for educators – adults – to lie to them, nor to nurture the self-pity and sense of victimhood to which adolescents are naturally prone. Fornication is a challenge for heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. Mercy does not require a different discourse because the orientation of Catholics like myself is not ordered to the conjugal love between a man and a woman. Politics does. Mercy requires love and truth. And humor, too. 

The institutional church is quite aware that the practice of chastity is “an apprentice in self-mastery,” which is “a long and exacting work.” It “presupposes renewed effort throughout life,” efforts that are “especially intense…when the personality is being formed” during teenage years. 

Self-mastery, which ought to be everyone’s quest, arises from training in the virtues which, per C. S. Lewis, forms the chest.  Our sins against chastity are simply that — sins – and Catholic educators have a duty to instill in their charges an understanding that sin is real, that sin we will, and that over time, through reason and free will, we can master much of our inclination to sin. 

Fr. Martin’s concerns about language in Church doctrine exist within a Critical paradigm that raises the subjective – our feelings – to the level of truth. At its heart lies the devious assumption that human beings who are LGBTQ are so enfeebled by suffering, so wounded by incessant bullying, so weakened of character that they are unable to grasp the logic and beauty of God’s Word. 

The Church bars no one from entering. It places no one on the margins. It respects each individual Catholic’s free will and reason.  It expects its members to fall – repeatedly. And it provides the richness of the Sacraments by which we, as fallen human beings, may reconcile with God, receive His graces, and be led to eternal salvation. 

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An increasingly hysterical white woman with her dog in Central Park; the black man recording her behavior with his phone: The 69-second video of that Memorial Day incident went viral, flared up for a week or two, then retreated into the general chaos of the summer of George Floyd, whose fatal encounter with police in Minneapolis happened later that evening. 

The confrontation of two unrelated people with the surname Cooper – Amy and Christian, a birdwatcher – inspired a renowned Jesuit educator, Fr. Bryan Massingale, to write an essay.

In that brief video, says Fr. Massingale, Amy Cooper “holds the key” that explains “how our culture frames whiteness and folks of color…how race works in America.” 

His essay, “The Assumptions of White Privilege and What We Can Do About It,” illustrates the contemporary Jesuit approach to forming graduates committed to “doing justice.” White students are to acknowledge the privilege that makes them complicit in systemic racism and, as reparation for their whiteness, must become actively antiracist. Unless that happens, a Jesuit grad who is white remains racist.

Sacramento’s Jesuit High School faculty, staff, and administration discussed the essay’s contents within a week of its June 4, 2020, publication in the National Catholic Reporter. It was shared with teachers at Fordham Prep as the next school year commenced. It remains recommended reading for schools in the antiracist Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

To appreciate the depth and breadth of Catholic Social Teaching’s entanglement with Critical Race Theory in the Jesuit school, Fr. Massingale’s essay is a good place to start.

Author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, Fr. Massingale is the paragon of today’s culturally enlightened Jesuit educator. A scholar-activist ordained as a priest in 1983 (though not a Jesuit), he has taught at both Marquette University and Fordham University, where he is presently a professor of Theological and Social Ethics, and holds the James and Nancy Buckman Chair of Applied Christian Ethics.  His illustrious career is well described at the Ignatian Solidarity Network.

As he explains in a video conversation with Randy Pedro, Fordham Prep’s Director of DEI, Fr. Massingale has been conducting – and guiding students through – “difficult conversations” about race throughout his career.

When Jesuit educators lead students in such discussions, teachers like Fr. Massingale frame the conversations and define the terms. 

All Jesuit teachers, according to revised Standard 14.2, help students develop “habits of reflection and social analysis” that lead them to become advocates for social change. That Jesuit educators have developed such “habits” for themselves we must accept as a given.

They are to model “the art of genuine listening and discourse,” per revised Standard 13.4, so that student discussions “promote equitable deeper understandings of different backgrounds and perspectives.” In Critical theory, “discourse” aims to compensate for disparities in power. It refers to the ways things can be talked about. People with dominant identities (in this case, white students) must learn new boundaries of speaking (and writing) so that what they say does not offend or slight those with marginalized identities. 

Debate is not a priority in such discourse. Affirmation, acceptance, approval, and agreement are.

The standard’s “Reflection Questions” – reflecting Critical theory principles –  ask Jesuit educators to consider the “formal and ongoing ways (they) listen to the experience of all students, especially Black, Indigenous, and students of color.” This reference to the BIPOC hierarchy of victimization is common in DEI+A identity politics, with black students given pride of place. We are to “listen” to all “experience,” but “especially” to the BIPOC “experience.” 

Why “especially”? Because the BIPOC experience is the “lived experience” of oppression, of those identity groups marginalized systemically by the dominant white identity group.  It is through “lived experience” that we “know” what is true — or as Shelby Steele observes, what we know is “poetic truth.”

The poetic truth “disregards the actual truth in order to assert a larger essential truth that supports one’s ideological position.” Poetic truths take “license with reality and fact.” They work by “moral intimidation rather than by reason, so that even to question them is heresy.”

The audience for Fr. Massingale’s essay – which “I assume (and hope) will be white” – could just as well be a classroom of students, who are to understand Amy Cooper – and themselves – through the author’s “lived experience” as a black man in America.

Amy Cooper’s Scarlet W

“It has never been easy to be black in America,” he begins. “Still, the past few months have pushed me to depths of outrage, pain and despondency that are unmatched in my 63 years of life.”

He cites Covid-19’s inequitable adverse effects on people of color, the killings of Armaud Arbery, of Breonna Taylor, and of George Floyd in the litany of horribles that  “weighs on my spirit.” 

But it is one particular event, although “not the most heinous,” that provokes Fr. Massingale’s examen.

Here is the video.

Here is the way Fr. Massingale summarizes it.

After a black man tells her to obey the posted signs that require her to leash her dog in a public park, she tells him she's going to call the police "and I'm going to tell them that there's an African American man threatening my life." Then she does just that, calling 911 and saying, "There's a man, an African American, he has a bicycle helmet. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog." She continues, in a breathless voice, "I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble [a wooded area of Central Park]. Please send the cops immediately!" This despite the fact that Christian Cooper's camera records the events and shows that he made no threatening moves toward her, spoke to her calmly and without insult, and kept his distance from her the whole time.

In short, she decided to call the police on a black man for nothing more than politely asking her to obey the park's rules. And made up a lie to put him in danger.

Narratives are the bedrock of all Critical theories. The more striking the narrative, the more it stirs emotions, the more politically useful it is.

Fr. Massingale reiterates the journalistic narrative formed within 48 hours by the New York Times. Christian Cooper’s camera shows us that he did “nothing more than politely” ask her to obey the park’s rules. And then – like the wife of the owner of Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, or a young Mayella Ewell – Amy Cooper puts his life “in danger” with a lie.

From 69 seconds in a woman’s life, Fr. Massingale derives 20 assumptions of white privilege that manifest how deeply whiteness and white supremacy are “absorbed” by white people “just by living.” 

“She knew what she was doing,” says Fr. Massingale.  “And so do we. We understand her behavior.”

Amy, he says, “assumed that she would have the presumption of innocence,” and that Christian, being a black man, “would have a presumption of guilt.” She “assumed that her race would be an advantage,” and that “his race would be a burden” once the police arrived. She “assumed that she could exploit deeply ingrained white fears of black men…to keep a black man in his place.” She “assumed that if he protested his innocence against her, he would be seen as ‘playing the race card,’” and that “no one accuses white people of playing the race card when using race to their advantage.” She “assumed that the frame of ‘black rapist’ versus ‘white damsel in distress’ would be clearly understood by everyone: the police, the press and the public.” She “assumed that a black man had no right to tell her what to do…(and) that the police officers would agree.”

“I am not a mind reader,” says Fr. Massingale, but “without these assumptions, her words and actions – her lies – make no sense.” 

Within hours of the video's worldwide exposure, Amy had been doxxed – her home address, phone number, employer, and email were all over the internet. A crowd gathered in front of her apartment. She lost her job the next day: “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton,” declared her now-former employer.  The rescue agency took back her dog. 

By the end of the second day, she called a news station and issued an abject apology for her behavior. Then the pariah left town, the epitome of the entitled white woman, the “Karen.”

Our Ignorance Matters Too

The narrative that galvanizes Fr. Massingale’s discourse does not, however, align with the reality of the incident, which began long before Christian Cooper started recording.

Using “current events” as a springboard for an essay, a “courageous conversation,” or an “uncomfortable discussion” about race in a classroom has at least one major pitfall, which Jesuit educators, like their public school counterparts, overlook – or ignore – to the detriment of all their students.

What don’t we know? 

That is the first question involving a “current event” that ought to be addressed by any educator (or his students). 

But when one is in the “depths of outrage,” what we don’t know is likely not entertained.  And when the aim is for the greater good – a society challenging white privilege – bypassing questions that might expose one’s ignorance is a mere byproduct.

A few words from a current event – “Hands up, don’t shoot!” – ignite passions that stamp the narrative about it as indisputably accurate. We “know” those words were said.  Only after many months of investigation did federal and state officials admit that Michael Brown had never uttered those words, or anything like them, when he kept moving toward the police officer.

A video that goes viral has a built-in trap. We see through a single lens what occurs within a specific span of time. Context is missing.

Based upon a viral portion of the video of Covington Catholic boys, we “knew” white privilege explained their “hostile” treatment of a peaceful “Indian elder.” One conservative publication – joining the mainstream media and many Catholic priests and prelates heaping obloquy on the red-capped teenagers – embarrassed itself with an article comparing the boys’ actions to Roman soldiers spitting on the Cross, an article the editors have since disappeared. 

What we don’t know should prevent a rush to judgment about human behavior. To admit we do not know enough – and may not know for a long time – requires patience and humility, attributes learned with difficulty and strengthened through continuous training, necessary even for future saints. To decide that we “know” because our “lived experience” confirms it only requires an ideology. 

When Fr. Massingale joined in the media pile-on of Amy Cooper, he too converged on her white identity and “othered” the human being he had never met. 

And what does it matter if Fr. Massingale and the “newspaper of record” are wrong about important facts? What happens then? 

Nothing. The narrative they created remains. The social justice point has been made. Class is dismissed.

The Narrative Builds a Scaffold for Amy

“We don't want to admit,” asserts Fr. Massingale, “that present in Central Park that morning was the scaffolding of centuries-long accumulations of the benefits of whiteness. Benefits that burden people of color. Benefits that kill black and brown people.”

This is standard Critical theory analysis – and prevailing Jesuit dogma.

Present in Central Park that morning were two people. That’s it.  Amy, with her dog, and Christian, the birdwatcher taking a video. Their dispute was another in an ongoing series of disputes between Christian, to whom a park rule mattered, and dog owners who disregarded the rule. 

Whatever scaffolding exists in this video appeared only after the video goes viral.  The media, well-versed in the Critical race theory narrative, rapidly constructed the scaffold.  But a Jesuit teacher formally positioned Amy on its platform as a symbol.

Fr. Massingale – priest, teacher, ethicist – exposes before his audience Amy’s privilege, the outward sign of the “disturbing interior disease” that is white supremacy.

It wasn’t until a year later that journalism occurred. Kmele Foster, co-host of The Fifth Column podcast and co-founder of Freethink media, investigated what happened prior to the video. His investigation provides perspective – and context – on both Amy’s and Christian’s actions.

The report by Megan Phelps-Roper for the Substack site Common Sense with Bari Weiss appeared on August 3, 2021, as “The Real Story of the ‘Central Park Karen.’”  It is accompanied by a podcast in which Weiss interviews Foster, an interview that serves as a warning for all of us who teach.

Here is what Fr. Massingale did not know:

• Disputes between Christian and other dog owners had been ongoing.

Long-existing tensions between dog people and birders in parts of Central Park mirrored the more recent friction between New Yorkers who wore masks there and those who didn’t. 

Although the media never mentioned it, a few days before his dispute with Amy, Christian spoke at a recorded community meeting about the “super ugly” situation between dog walkers and birders in the Ramble and Strawberry Fields, where the rules prohibit unleashed dogs. 

Christian had been making videos of people with unleashed dogs well before his encounter with Amy.  He had developed other tactics designed to make dog walkers comply with leash rules; for example, he always carried dog treats in a fanny pouch as part of his compliance strategy. He had, by his own admission at the meeting, earned “my rep as a dog-hater,” which “serves me well in the park.” 

At the meeting, Christian also stated that he wanted more police presence in the park to address the problem of dog-owning rule-breakers.  Lack of policing, rather than too much, was for him a problem.

• Amy is not the first person to feel threatened by Christian’s tactics.

Before his encounter with Amy, Christian had been in confrontations with other dog owners. He had “been assaulted twice so far this spring, people actually putting their hands on me, which really surprises me, because I am not a small guy.” 

One dog owner, Jerome Lockett, who is himself black, stated in an affidavit (here at Exhibit A) that he had been approached “aggressively” by Christian, who shouted, “You need to leash your dog! They can’t be off-leash in here.” 

When Lockett ignored the shouts, Christian, “gripping” the “helmet attached to his side,” attempted to “lure” Lockett’s dog away with treats. Lockett pushed Christian away from his dog.

According to Lockett, Christian can be “threatening with his body language and screaming.” He revealed that “two fellow dog owners have had similar situations with this man, but don’t feel comfortable coming forward because they’re white. They think they’ll be seen as some ‘Karen’ or whatever.” 

Others who encountered Christian describe “eerily similar” details, says Foster: his yelling at people about their unleashed dog, his luring of the dog with treats while gripping a helmet that made people “feel threatened about their safety or the safety of their dog.”

• Christian wrote a Facebook post about his confrontation with Amy before the video went viral.

Within hours of the incident with Amy, Christian wrote about his encounter on his Facebook page.

He told her, “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.” Then, he called to the dog – “Come here, puppy!” and pulled out the “dog treats I carry for just (such) intransigence.”

The New York Times buried the exact words of Christian’s threat near the end of its major 2,500 word “inside story” article two weeks later. 

• Amy’s Camera Eye and Ear

Amy hears Christian’s threat. She sees the treats and the helmet. As the video starts, Amy, her leash in one hand, has grabbed her dog with the other to keep it away from the treats. 

When she looks up, she sees Christian recording her, which, Amy says in an interview with Foster, confuses her “because I’m clearly getting ready to leash my dog.” Once the recording begins, she says, Christian’s “whole demeanor changes”: his “dominant” voice suddenly goes from angry to meek.

As we hear Amy speaking to the 911 operator, she becomes more and more frantic. What we do not hear is the operator’s voice, nor the awful connection, which turned the call into a fiasco of frustration. What we also do not hear is Christian’s tone of voice prior to turning his camera on. 

• Amy Crosses a Red Line

She is white, though, and he is black, and she said something that violates the prevailing culture’s rules if you are white. 

She said quite clearly to Christian, “I am going to tell them (the cops) there is an African-American man threatening my life!”  She crossed a line. She referred to the man’s race, and that can only mean one thing. 

Anyone who disagrees with his 20 assumptions about Amy, says Fr. Massingale in his Fordham Prep conversation, must “come up with another explanation” for why she immediately referenced his race.

Fr. Massingale assumes she had no reason to feel threatened. Amy is not – for him – a female alone in an isolated area of the park suddenly confronted by a much larger man with a bike helmet, who is yelling at her about a dog, telling her she wouldn’t like what he’d do if she didn’t comply, then taking out treats to lure her pet away from her.

Fr. Massingale assumes that Amy is playing the role of “white damsel in distress” without considering whether any event from her past might be influencing her behavior.  He is ignorant of the “lived experience” of a woman who, when she was 19 in college, “was the victim of a sexual assault.” He does not imagine this possibility. 

Based on the experiences of other dog walkers with Christian, is it possible that Amy was genuinely fearful?  Unlike Jerome Lockett, she is female. Unlike Christian, she is not practiced in the tactics of confrontation concerning dogs.

Had she been color-blind, she would have waited until the 911 operator asked for a description before she uttered the tell-tale words.

Instead, she acknowledged an identity and brought it to the fore. 

Antiracists – who mock the notion of a white person claiming to be color-blind, who declare that the refusal to see race is a refusal to see racism, who demand color-conscious policies to create racial equity, who laser-focus on identities –  label Amy’s behavior as racist because she violates the permissible boundaries of discourse.

Perhaps, having no Jesuit teacher to educate her, she is untutored in the Critical “art of discourse.” To be color-conscious when stating your intention to inform the police is offensive, evidence of “callous indifference” to black life.

Antiracists make the prevailing culture’s rules: A person must see color but can not verbalize color unless that verbalization meets pre-approved racial equity benchmarks. In this incident she did not check her privilege, its whiteness embodying a mortal threat to a black body.

Amy’s Redemption — and Your Child’s — Awaits the Antiracist Baptism

This does not mean she's a bad person. Plenty of good people remain unconsciously racist, oblivious to their white privilege until they transform their consciousness through antiracism/anti-bias training. 

She’s not someone who would, as Fr. Massingale writes, “vote for or support a president who is blatantly racist, mocks people of color, separates Latino families and consigns brown children into concentration camps.” No, she’s a good person, Fr. Massingale tells Fordham’s diversity director. We “know” this, he says, because “she voted for Hillary.” 

But all “good” Catholics must be willing, he states, to face the “uncomfortable truths” of their complicity in systemic racism. They must see themselves in Amy Cooper and “sit in the discomfort this hard truth brings. Let it become agonizing. Let it move you to tears, to anger, to guilt, to shame, to embarrassment.”

Ever since the summer of 2020, Jesuit high schools, following their university siblings down the public school path of antiracist wokeness, have wrapped their self-proclaimed “structurally racist” institutions in a self-flagellating moral superiority. 

Fr. Massingale is the ideal teacher for the Jesuit school, for he models both the “habits of reflection and social analysis” and the “art of discourse” that directors of DEI+A in all Jesuit schools applaud. 

White people must change – must challenge “the assumptions of white privilege that sustain Amy Cooper’s universe.” Active antiracism must be “embraced” as a “fundamental requirement of Christian discipleship.” Then, says Fr. Massingale, we can “create a new society…where all lives truly do matter because black lives finally will matter.” 

How will Jesuit educators make this happen? In their schools, of course — with your children.