Bishop Kevin Rhoades via Facebook
CV NEWS FEED // Bishop Kevin Rhoades confronted a Catholic women’s college over its recent decision to accept “transgender” applicants.
The president of Saint Mary’s College, Dr. Katie Conboy, announced last week that the Notre Dame, Indiana college would accept males who claim to be female, referring to them as those “who consistently live and identify as women.”
Rhoades blasted the decision. “I urge the Board of Trustees of Saint Mary’s College to correct its admissions policy in fidelity to the Catholic identity and mission it is charged to protect,” he wrote in a November 27 statement.
Rhoades heads the diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend where Saint Mary’s is based.
He further urged the college to “reject ideologies of gender that contradict the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church regarding the human person, sex and gender.”
“Every Catholic institution has the duty to uphold the truth of the Gospel and to accompany with love all who struggle to accept and live the Church’s teachings,” he wrote.
Despite the college’s decision being “a matter of important Catholic teaching,” Rhoades noted that he was not consulted before the policy change. He wrote that he felt compelled to address the matter as the local bishop.
“In this new admissions policy, Saint Mary’s departs from fundamental Catholic teaching on the nature of woman and thus compromises its very identity as a Catholic woman’s college,” he wrote:
To call itself a ‘women’s college’ and to admit male students who ‘consistently live and identify as women’ suggests that the college affirms an ideology of gender that separates sex from gender and claims that sexual identity is based on the subjective experience of the individual. This ideology is at odds with Catholic teaching.
Pope Francis and the ‘Transgender’ Issue
Rhoades observed that Conboy’s letter quoted Pope Francis on the importance of love “but does not mention the Holy Father’s continual rejection of gender ideology.”
While the president of the college referred to Francis in the decision, Rhoades argued that the pope has reaffirmed Church teaching on sexuality repeatedly and “has criticized various forms of gender ideology.”
Rhoades quoted Francis’ argumentation against transgenderism in Amoris Laetitia. “It needs to be emphasized that ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated,’” the pope wrote:
It is one thing to be understanding of human weakness and the complexities of life, and another to accept ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality. Let us not fall into the sin of trying to replace the Creator. We are creatures, and not omnipotent. Creation is prior to us and must be received as a gift.
Building on that argument, Rhoades added: “The sex of a person is discovered, not assigned. It is God who creates human beings as male or female.”
Rhoades further cited Francis’ analysis in the encyclical Laudato Si, in which he wrote:
The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine human ecology… It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it.”
Love and Truth United
Rhoades acknowledged that while Saint Mary’s may pledge to “promote love,” “it does not do so authentically when it separates love from truth.”
To this point, he noted Francis’ teaching in his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, in which he wrote: “Love requires truth. True love, on the other hand, unifies all the elements of our person and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great and fulfilled life.”
Rhoades also referenced Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, in which the late pontiff wrote that “only in truth can charity be authentically lived.”
Rhoades observed that the final synthesis report at October’s synod affirmed that the “unity of truth and love” can be achieved through the “accompaniment” of others in their burdens.
“We must stand in loving solidarity with all our brothers and sisters, including those who identify as transgender. However, such solidarity in love does not mean affirming an understanding of sexual identity that is not true,” Rhoades concluded:
It does mean affirming every person’s dignity as a human person created in the image and likeness of God and as a brother or sister in the family of the Church or in the human family.
The desire of Saint Mary’s College to show hospitality to people who identify as transgender is not the problem. The problem is a Catholic woman’s college embracing a definition of woman that is not Catholic.
