OPINION: Are there any practicing Catholics leading St. Mary’s College?
A Catholic college that wanted to let males share dorm rooms, locker rooms, and bathrooms with females is moving forward on its next terrible idea – inviting a pro-abortion president to keynote its graduation ceremony and awarding her an honorary degree.
St. Mary’s College, a women’s college, planned to let gender-confused men enroll, until the local bishop intervened. But the college’s leadership apparently remains devoid of any practicing Catholics. As a result, Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, will speak at graduation.
“A self-professed practicing Catholic, the 73-year-old Irishwoman has been a long-standing advocate for access to abortion and so-called same-sex ‘marriage,’” the National Catholic Register reports. She (pictured) also opposes infant baptism, a core teaching of the Catholic Church.
The news has drawn criticism from the Loretto Trust, an alumni group that seeks to keep the Catholic college, well, Catholic.
The letter points out that McAleese said she wants to spend her retirement pushing against the Catholic Church’s opposition to female priests and to homosexual unions.
“What else I am going to do in retirement except make myself useful in that regard,” she said in 2020.
(I don’t know, organize fundraisers for orphans? Plant a garden? Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church, possibly for the first time? There are 5,000 options).
“To bestow an honorary degree upon an individual who has so persistently and publicly attacked Catholic doctrine is an unambiguous betrayal of Saint Mary’s College’s Catholic identity,” the Loretto Trust wrote in a letter to university President Katie Conboy. “It sends a scandalous message to students that one can actively oppose Church teachings while still being celebrated by a Catholic institution.”
The situation is also a “grave scandal” according to the letter. The Loretto Trust wants to see the invitation rescinded.
President Conboy has apparently learned very little from her decision to consider allowing crossdressing men to sleep in dorm rooms next to actual females. St. Mary’s College, like its counterpart the University of Notre Dame, continues to struggle to find outspoken Catholics to be real leaders. Leaders may be Catholic, so I’m not doubting the faith of priests in leadership, but they aren’t leading in the sense of fighting for truth and what is good.
Instead, the universities embrace secular liberal ideology that is in direct contradiction to the Catholic Church. If they won’t change, may they suffer the same fate as other liberal Catholic universities like University of Portland and DePaul University – a loss of money and massive cuts to personnel.
MORE: Northwestern class is ‘anti-Christian bigotry,’ Catholic group says
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Former Irish President Mary McAleese is interviewed on a late night show; The Late Late Show/YouTube
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