Bro Christian Matson / Facebook
CV NEWS FEED // The Lexington-based hermit who identifies as a “transgender” man has committed a deception both against the Church and herself, argued accomplished Catholic scholar Anthony Esolen in a recent op-ed.
In May, the hermit, identified as Brother Christian Matson, born Nicole Matson, was reportedly going to announce that she is “transgender” on the feast of Pentecost. The Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, confirmed the announcement in a statement on May 21. As CatholicVote previously reported, the diocesan statement used male pronouns when referring to Matson.
The statement also read that Bishop John Stowe, the bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, “accepted his (Matson’s) profession and is grateful to Brother Christian for his witness of discipleship, integrity and contemplative prayer for the Church.”
In a July 2 op-ed for Crisis Magazine, Catholic scholar Anthony Esolen commented that Matson’s actions have been contrary to truth.
“For many years, she has practiced a deception upon the Church, saying she was what she was not,” Esolen wrote:
I will grant that she was practicing a deception upon herself at the same time, so that when by her dress, her hair, and her voice-forcing she said to others, implicitly, “I am a man,” a part of her mind could allay any queasy conscience, saying, “Be quiet—I really am a man, so there.”
Esolen is a widely accomplished Catholic author, scholar, and translator. According to his LinkedIn profile, Esolen is the author of over 30 books, a distinguished professor of Humanities at Thales College in North Carolina, and a faculty member at Magdalen College in New Hampshire.
He has penned thousands of articles for various Catholic publications, translated Dante’s Divine Comedy, and been a senior editor of “Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.” He holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In his July 2 op-ed, Esolen highlighted that from the beginning, God created human beings as male and female, which is a reality that humans cannot change.
“We recognize that reality; we should accept it as a gift,” he wrote, noting that it is not a reality that is interior and elusive to visible perception.
“No, the reality is humbler, and far more beautiful than any phantasm of an individualistic imagination,” he continued. “Adam is a boy. Eve is a girl.”
To look down on this truth would be to look down upon the “flesh and bones” of the human beings themselves, Esolen implied.
“It is high time we recovered a sense of that beauty,” he concluded: “The mystery is not in what some poor soul, unfortunately muddled, dreams up about what he or she ‘really’ is. The mystery is before our eyes: that there should ever be creatures so beautiful as boys and girls, men and women, in the first place.”
