Table of Contents
The most fundamental terms associated with the family — “woman” and “man” — cannot survive undistorted when Jesuit schools mix Critical theories into Catholic Social Teaching.
Part 1: The Re-education of the Straight Male
Less than a decade after redefining — and neutering — the institution of marriage to enable husband to marry husband and wife to marry wife, adults continue to sow confusion into the lives of children with the pretense that “man” and “woman” are somehow difficult terms to define.
Parents with students in Jesuit schools have good reason to be wary.
The Jesuit Schools Network began with a pro forma recognition of the “Catholic principle that every person is charged with the Divine, created in the image and likeness of God” when it revised its Domain 5 secondary school standards, which incorporated Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as Jesuit antiracist core values (DEI+A).
In practice, it is apparent that many Jesuit educators deem the “image and likeness of God” to be non-binary and gender fluid.
Standard 13.2, requiring training in antiracism and bias for educators and students, includes this related criterion: “All school personnel work to eradicate barriers between and among people such as misogyny, homophobia, and gender and socio-economic stereotyping and discrimination.”
This elaboration of antiracist/implicit bias training suggests that the primary, though not exclusive, target is the heterosexual male. Its most revealing term is gender.
Antiracism is always intersectional, compelling the acceptance and affirmation of all identities associated with gender and sexuality as well as race. “To truly be antiracist is to be feminist,” says the apostle of antiracism, Ibram X. Kendi. “Homophobia cannot be separated from racism. They’ve intersected for ages,” he declares. “To be queer antiracist is to understand the privileges of my cisgender, of my masculinity, of my heterosexuality, of their intersections.”
With the Jesuits enmeshing Catholic Social Teaching with DEI+A, “what is a man?” and “what is a woman?” are questions whose objectively true answers cannot survive the identity politics gauntlet.
No institution has been unaffected by the ongoing effort of Critical gender and queer theorists to dismantle reality. Student athletes with male genitals compete, shower, and dress with female athletes; Disney eliminates the terms “boys and girls” and “ladies and gentlemen” from their theme parks, “adding queerness” to their programming wherever they can; federal bureaucrats and legislators replace “mothers” with “birthing persons.” The word “queer,” no longer a pejorative, now signifies resistance to anything considered normative involving sex and gender.
Social media, television, and film disseminate like candy an assortment of identities arising from gender and queer theories to children, their easily manipulated audience. Educational institutions, instead of combating the cultural onslaught, join in, justifying the identity parade with the honey of diversity and inclusion.
Civilization’s bedrock institution – the family – established by God when He created man and woman (2203, Catechism of the Catholic Church) is under direct attack. Despite Catholic teaching that marriage and the family are the “central social institutions of society,” the Society of Jesus has aligned itself with the Critical ideologues who – “thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” (Matthew 16:23) – undermine them both.
Although God is not the author of this disorder (1Corinthians 14: 33), the Jesuits find God in all things, even truth “queered” by the “father of lies” (John 8:44).
Part 2: Jesuit Educators Open Up the Pandora’s Box
Before postmodernism poisoned the Academy, the term gender was almost exclusively associated with the classification of nouns as masculine or feminine in the grammars of language.
Now, gender is a Critical social justice term defining one’s personal identity – one’s essence. Gender is, we are told, a spectrum of attributes, behaviors, and roles “socially constructed” as either masculine or feminine. In Critical theories, a person’s gender and a person’s sex are distinct entities that may — or may not — correspond.
Everyone is expected to learn and use the personal pronouns corresponding with someone’s gender identity. Ignore how absurd this is. Ignore the travesty of language, of clarity and coherence. Know this instead: to misgender someone is a mistake, if quickly corrected; a sure sign of bias and a potential hate crime, if not.
The male and female God created has morphed into the label assigned to you at your birth based upon your genitals. Gender identity is so powerful that a person can choose to peel the assigned label off and put on the other one. Critical theories require no Creator.
This primacy of the personal will toward self-creation recognizes no limitations. All is permitted, for the gender you construct becomes your personal “truth” about yourself, reason and logic be damned.
By adopting the Academy’s gender terminology, Jesuit high schools open up a cultural Pandora’s box.
Why would a Catholic school need — or want — to adopt the secular postmodern application of the term gender? Are the terms male and female neither diverse nor inclusive enough for a Catholic school?
Are both masculine and feminine attributes so bereft of sufficient natural diversity that an ever-expanding array of gender identities must be acknowledged and experienced in all their mutable varieties at – to name just four examples – Scranton Prep in Pennsylvania, Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, Jesuit College Prep in Dallas, and Marquette University High School in Milwaukee, all of which include gender in their diversity statements?
Jesuit educators could affirm Catholic teaching regarding gender as expressed in the 2019 document by the Congregation for Catholic Education, Male and Female He Created Them: Toward a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education, which reminds us that Christian anthropology has its roots in the Book of Genesis 1:27. God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
But they don’t.
Jesuit educators could publicly state, as Pope Francis does, that gender theory “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”
But they don’t.
Gender theory perceives sexual identity and the family as “subject to the same ‘liquidity’ and ‘fluidity’ that characterize other aspects of postmodern culture, often founded on nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants….” To deny “the male-female duality of human nature” is, says Pope Benedict, to make the person an abstraction who “chooses for himself what his nature is to be.”
Jesuit institutions could inform parents before accepting their tuition dollars that Jesuit schools are Catholic and not secular schools, that they educate girls and boys created in the image of God, not fluid identities based upon how one feels. Jesuit schools could make it clear that they teach all students to treat their peers as Jesus would – virtuously, with love and compassion for each – but they will neither endorse nor facilitate the prevailing culture’s lies.
But the Society of Jesus is decidedly not countercultural.
Does there exist a limiting principle within DEI+A beyond which the culturally au courant Jesuit school will not go?
No.
Part 3: Jesuit Higher Education As the Model for Its High School Siblings
Instead, Jesuit colleges and universities model for Jesuit secondary schools an academic culture under the influence of a philosophy alien to the formation of genuine community. One Jesuit campus after another reveals itself as fractured, students seeking security and comfort within a refuge of sameness and approbation, its administrators and bureaucrats speaking and writing in a language foreign to everyday living.
Fairfield University, the self-described “Modern Jesuit Catholic University” in Connecticut, has a “safe, affirming” gender-inclusive housing option for LGBTQ+ students and all “whose gender identity and/or gender expression do not conform to the gender binary.” All students at Fairfield are to “model behavior that reflects a positive value and respect for gender as a non-binary construct” since human beings are “not necessarily male or female as ascribed by their assigned gender at birth.”
The Office of Student Life at Loyola University Maryland, “aware that the binary-gendered structure of our residence halls do not always provide an ideal living environment” for students who “identify as LGBTQPIA+, non-binary, genderfluid, and/or genderqueer,” offers All-Gender Housing for students wishing to “create a roommate group comprised of all genders” that functions as a “queer-affirming living environment that seeks to eliminate, within the space, the stressors of cisgenderism and heterosexism.”
Gonzaga University in Spokane, living out its mission of human dignity and cura personalis, provides Gender-Inclusive Housing for gender diverse students wishing to live with others “who affirm and support their gender identity.” The school also offers LGBQ+ housing options for its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer students who want to be “matched with roommates who share or affirm their sexuality.” While Gonzaga (like Fairfield) says it “does not support students in relationships living with one another,” Gonzaga’s Housing and Residence Life “does not inquire” about the relationship status of any of its students.
Santa Clara University, Seattle University, Kansas City’s Rockhurst University, and Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s University are four other Jesuit schools with gender-inclusive housing that mirrors the self-segregating islands of public higher education.
At one with the cultural zeitgeist, Jesuit students select their preferred pronouns. Loyola Marymount University students add their chosen name, gender identity, and preferred pronouns to personal information pages. Gonzaga provides similar opportunities, as does Cleveland’s John Carroll University, Milwaukee’s Marquette University, Buffalo’s Canisius College, and the College of Science and Engineering at Seattle University.
The Jesuit mission of cura personalis – care for the whole person – has become cura identitatae, care for the student’s intersecting group identities.
Part 4: Campus Fortifications for the Unfortified
The claim that diversity and inclusion are an institution’s strengths belies the weakness engendered. How is strength of character developed by shielding yourself — your intersecting identities that apparently form who you are — from the sometimes difficult but necessary reality of learning to live with human beings?
To encourage students to segregate themselves by identity not only shows how deeply shallow the concept of “being inclusive” is at Jesuit universities, it underscores how intellectually unadventurous and fearful such a community has become.
Instead of guiding students in prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, administrators and educators emphasize keeping college-age students supported and protected. From whom? Other students whose applications Jesuit universities have scrutinized and accepted? Are Jesuit schools enrolling monsters?
While high school graduates in the 20th century charged beaches under continuous enemy gunfire and negotiated the mines and ambushes of jungle trails, our 21st century high school graduates navigate their next four years within the sheltered cloister of the Academy — and still they need protection?
Jesuit schools even set up safe spaces, as Fairfield does, so that LGBTQ+ students and their allies “can engage in discussion, education, advocacy, and awareness…free from discrimination, ignorance, bigotry, and harassment.”
They create Safe Zone Training, as St. Louis University does, to shed “light on the systemic use of heteronormativity and cis-normativity” on the campus and build “support systems for the LGBTQ+ community and its allies.”
They create a Bias Reporting System, as Marquette has, which makes it possible for any “students who have felt offended or hurt” to report bias-related incidents. Georgetown University’s bias reporting system includes “trained professionals” from eight separate bureaucratic offices across campus.
At John Carroll, a bias-related incident is defined as any “verbal or physical act that manifests as prejudice or intolerance” directed at any person, group, or property because of a “real or perceived” identity. Such an incident, we’re told, is not actual discrimination or a crime or even anything that must “unreasonably interfere” with the person’s life, nor does it have to be anything that will necessarily “create an objectively hostile, intimidating, or offensive” environment to be considered bias-related.
Translated from bureaucratic jargon, a bias-related incident at John Carroll can be anything done or said by one person that another person does not like. I am offended: something must be done.
Granting — for the moment — that implicit bias exists and is far more prevalent than explicit bias, what logically follows is that no social interactions among students or between students and faculty occur without bias.
Those who create bias reporting systems function in the netherworld of subjectivity, where the accusers with their biases and the investigators with their biases and the leadership with their biases will sit in final judgment on the biases of the accused.
What kind of madhouse community is this?
One without grounding in the virtues.
Part 5: The Jesuit College Preparatory Life
When students year after year are inundated with training in diversity, implicit bias, and micro-aggressions, it ought be no surprise that they lack the mental and emotional discipline and strength that training in the cardinal and theological virtues supply. The virtues, however, are at best relegated to the back of the school bus while the DEI+A core values command the best seats.
Jesuit high schools are preparing their students for college “life”: the “reality” in which a child “assigned” the label girl at birth can be transformed into a boy whenever her feelings reveal “his” – or “their” – true identity.
Is it possible that the Society of Jesus is using “misogyny” and “homophobia” to fight something else, what the postmodern Academy calls “toxic” masculinity?
The logic of gender DEI demands that Jesuit high schools shield their students from “hurtful” truth: sex is not an identity assigned at birth; God created human beings male and female; gender cannot be divorced at will from biological realities.
Like their college counterparts, Jesuit high schools offer clubs that set apart groups based on identities considered “marginalized.” That these preliminary safe spaces must be established in Catholic schools indicates how unanchored to the classical virtues Jesuit education has become and how vulnerable, therefore, the Jesuit community is to an ideology that separates identities into victims, who must be protected and affirmed, and victimizers, who must be transformed into allies.
Brebeuf Prep in Indianapolis, adopting the Critical secular vocabulary, formally pledges never to discriminate against students or faculty based upon a person’s “gender identity.” The school provides an “Anonymous Alerting Portal” to report “unfair treatment” related to, among other things, “gender expression.” Its Gender-Sexuality Alliance has hosted a Pride Week for the school, a five-day “celebration of visibility” that included “sharing experiences at school relating to sexuality and the gender spectrum, both positive and negative.”
The Gender and Sexuality Alliance at Walsh Jesuit in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, is, according to its adviser, “a space for students who identify as queer or an ally,” the Alliance bonding the LGBTQ+ community and educating “cisgender male” students to help eliminate bias and garner allies. The club has conferenced with the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a well-funded political advocacy organization promoting LGBTQ issues K-12, whose model policy for school administrators states that information which “may reveal a student’s gender identity” ought not be shared with parents or guardians unless legally required or unless the student permits it.
Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois, which also organizes an Alliance for “our LGBT students and their allies,” has co-sponsored, for two consecutive years, a Young Girls of Color Symposium with Chicago’s progressive K-12 academy, the Frances W. Parker School. Providing “brave and necessary spaces for participants to explore and celebrate their identities,” the 2021 program included workshops for both middle school and high school girls on the “intersectionality of our identities in all facets of our lives,” with #Intersectionality/Queer Women of Color” one of its hashtags. Adult presenters, including those from Loyola, helpfully supplied their personal pronouns.
Cincinnati’s Xavier High featured Dr. Andy Buechel in “Understanding Allyship and LGBTQ Terminology 101” during a Hands Across Campus assembly. Author of That We Might Become God: The Queerness of Creedal Christianity, Dr. Buechel, who applies queer theory to the Incarnation and the Catholic-Christian tradition, is an example of how Xavier and its X-cceptance Club discusses “gender and identity inside the Catholic, Jesuit teaching” that calls students to be men and women for others.
In a Catholic community forming “men and women for others,” does Christian solidarity thrive by adopting the prevailing culture’s secular language and practices, which segment the school population according to gender and sexuality, as well as race and ethnicity? Have public school institutions proven to be so successful in establishing solidarity and strengthening community that Jesuit schools find it wise to do as they do?
For teenage boys and girls, with all their natural differences, to know they live in a loving and caring — though necessarily imperfect — community is a proper aspiration of any Catholic school, a mission that can be accomplished without creating clubs that are, in essence, identity bastions.
Forming a cohesive Jesuit community of men and women for others begins Day One for all freshmen, and continues daily until they graduate, intellectually competent and committed to doing justice. Catholic educators, even Jesuit ones, need no secular models.
Your parents know we are a Catholic school. We are of every color and ethnicity God in His majesty has created. Whatever the sexual feelings we develop over time, we remain children of God. No one here is to be abused or bullied or mistreated for any reason. Because we are fallen creatures, no one here is without sin, no one here will forever refrain from sin. All of us here must seek forgiveness from God, and we must learn to forgive our brothers and sisters as we ask them to forgive us.
We must understand from the first that a Jesuit school does not teach victims, nor does it countenance making anyone a victim. That is not what virtuous people do, and we will learn to be guided by the virtues.
Here at Jesuit we laugh a lot — with each other; we revel in the Beauty and Truth and Goodness that God has given us. Here at Jesuit we are not disparate identities, but brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. Here at Jesuit, we do not live by lies.
Part 6: Dysphoria and the Imago Dei
In his book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, Ryan Anderson reminds us that the root of gender is “gen,” from which comes generate and generation. Since being a man and being a woman are “bodily, biological realities,” gender cannot be objectively separated from sex. A “healthy culture,” says Anderson, “does not attempt to erase our nature as male or female embodied beings.”
Prior to 2012, the tiny sliver of the population (less than .01 percent) afflicted with gender dysphoria, the “severe and persistent discomfort in one’s biological sex,” was a phenomenon restricted almost entirely to boys, says Abigail Shrier in Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. But in the decade since, we have seen a “sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as ‘transgender,’ and for the first time it is girls who comprise the majority.”
Shrier appreciates how “a radical gender ideology taught in school or found on the internet” influences adolescents. Often pushed as an “anti-bullying” measure, it becomes a “pretext” for political indoctrination regarding sexuality and gender.
Bullying is bad behavior: a Catholic school steeped in the cardinal and theological virtues does not need DEI+A to train students how to treat one another, nor to ensure consequences. However, when ideological values replace core virtues, what constitutes bullying metamorphoses: statements of fact or opinion countering the culturally-sanctioned narratives become hurtful and threatening.
If Jesuit schools are living up to the logic of gender diversity and gender inclusion and not just virtue-signaling, its adults can no longer presume the identities of their students. A student’s personal pronoun preferences will have to be acknowledged and affirmed. Jesuit English departments must teach students that “they, them, and their” refer to a single person too.
Since the revised standard declares homophobia and misogyny barriers to be eradicated as well, what constitutes misogyny and homophobia should be made clear to everyone, including parents and alumni who pay the freight.
Can a student or teacher respectfully and publicly affirm traditional Catholic teaching regarding marriage and homosexual acts in a setting where anyone – including someone gay like myself – may be within earshot? Or is the Catechism of the Catholic Church as triggering these days as Huckleberry Finn?
Do the Jesuits fear that parents are raising sons who hate women and will mistreat them? Will “anti-racist/anti-bias training” at Jesuit high schools impel participants to fess up to their unconscious homophobia and misogyny? Will there be confessions of heterosexual privilege and episodes of male-shaming?
Is it possible that the Society of Jesus is using “misogyny” and “homophobia” to fight something else, what the postmodern Academy calls “toxic” masculinity? Like the Academy, does the Society believe it necessary to transform the masculine, redefining “man” as well as “woman,” in order to further our emerging genderqueer non-binary utopia?
When a junior at an all-boys Jesuit school expresses each day his evolving gender through appearance and mannerisms that identify him as the “she” he feels he is, when he asks to be called by “her” new name and new pronouns, when he begins “her” hormone therapies, today’s Jesuit school must live by its current secular DEI+A values, where Christian compassion for a human being’s dysphoria is transformed into affirmation and acceptance of that person’s self-created identity.
Adrift in the subjectivity and confusion besetting our postmodern age, the Jesuits are queering the imago Dei through gender DEI. No longer able to avow without reservation what God creates in His image, Jesuit high schools now join its universities in discerning how incomparably nuanced the Word is.
What is a man? What is a woman? What could possibly be the answers at a Jesuit school, which supports and validates the diversity, equity, and inclusion of all gender identities?
We can soon say goodbye to the all-boys Jesuit High.