Post by td128 on May 19, 2019 7:51:14 GMT -5
Transgender rift between Holy Cross, Bishop McManus?
By Mark Sullivan
Telegram & Gazette Staff
Posted May 18, 2019 at 7:00 PM
Bishop McManus, who plans to skip Holy Cross commencement, aims retort at deans who called his transgender remarks “hurtful, offensive”
WORCESTER - The fallout continues from a recent address by Worcester’s Roman Catholic bishop on transgender identity and on Catholic colleges’ upholding of traditional church teachings, exposing an apparent rift between the College of the Holy Cross and Bishop Robert McManus.
Two of Holy Cross’ top administrators, in a message to the campus community on May 13, described Bishop McManus’ recent talk on transgenderism as “deeply hurtful and offensive to many members of our community.”
The statement went out to the campus under the names of Margaret Freije, provost and dean of the college, and Michele Murray, vice president for student affairs and dean of students.
The college’s Jesuit president, the Rev. Philip Boroughs, was not listed as a signatory, but a separate letter he wrote to the Telegram & Gazette criticizing the paper’s coverage of the bishop’s address was quoted in its entirety. The letter was published Friday in the Telegram & Gazette.
The spokesman for the college, John Hill, was asked via email this past week if Rev. Boroughs shared his top administrators’ view that the bishop’s talk had been “deeply hurtful and offensive.” Mr. Hill did not acknowledge the question or respond.
Bishop McManus will not be participating in Holy Cross’ 173rd Commencement exercises this Friday, having turned down an invitation to do so weeks before he gave his recent address, according to a diocesan spokesman.
Bishop McManus also did not attend last year’s commencement at Holy Cross, in an apparent break from tradition at the most prominent Catholic college in the diocese.
Asked about the Holy Cross administrators’ statement describing his talk as “deeply hurtful and offensive,” the bishop responded on Thursday:
“If certain members of the Holy Cross community find this to be hurtful and offensive, then perhaps the college should present clearly what Catholicism teaches regarding Christian anthropology and human sexuality.”
Speaking at a Catholic health care conference held at Holy Cross on May 7, Bishop McManus said transgenderism poses troubling challenges to church institutions as well as modern culture.
He said that while people who consider themselves transgender are children of God who are to be treated with love, dignity and compassion, transgenderism represents a sharp departure from Catholic understandings of the human person and natural moral law.
That departure, he said, is rooted in theological heresy as well as unsupported science, and presents significant spiritual as well as societal dangers.
Bishop McManus offered pointed commentary on Catholic colleges upholding Catholic teaching in this area. This might have been taken as criticism of the Jesuit college that provided the venue for the conference.
Holy Cross hosts what it bills as the world’s first Digital Transgender Archive, an online clearinghouse for transgender history. The archive’s founding director, K.J. Rawson, an associate professor of English at the college, is a transgender person and a rising young faculty star whose image is featured prominently atop the English Department’s webpage.
The term “transgender” refers to people whose gender identity or expression does not match their sex, as in the case of a transgender person who is biologically male but lives and identifies as a woman, or is biologically female but lives and identifies as a man.
Transgender identity is at the heart of Mr. Rawson’s scholarly work. At his faculty website he describes the Digital Transgender Archive as a central part of his current scholarship “at the intersections of rhetoric, LGBT studies, digital media, and feminist and queer theory.” Mr. Rawson has declined to comment.
His 2010 Syracuse University doctoral dissertation was titled “Archiving Transgender: Affects, Logics, and the Power of Queer History,” and his recent work has appeared in journals including Transgender Studies Quarterly, Radical History Review, and QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking.
A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2012, Mr. Rawson was awarded tenure in 2018. The provost and dean of the college, Ms. Freije, is listed at the Digital Transgender Archive site among the project’s “tremendous” supporters.
Some traditionalist Catholics have objected. The ultratraditionalist Tradition, Family and Property movement, at its TFP Student Action site, claimed nearly 17,000 signatures on a 2017 online petition to Rev. Boroughs to shut down the archive, which the group described as “a hub that broadcasts pro-transgender literature and activism, promoting unnatural sin.”
Bishop McManus has been at odds with the college in the past over what he has perceived as departures from Catholic orthodoxy.
Last year he described as “offensive and blasphemous” an article by a Holy Cross religious studies professor that compared Christ to a “drag king” with “queer desires” whose death on the Cross had sadomasochistic overtones.
In his remarks at the May 7 conference, Bishop McManus did not mention Holy Cross or its promotion of transgender studies by name but was pointed in his comments on colleges that, in his view, stray from their Catholic moorings in the name of diversity.
“When a college tries to promote diversity and inclusion by contravening the very clear Catholic moral and social teachings, we have a severe problem,” he said. “In reality, according to church law, no institution in a diocese or archdiocese can call itself Catholic without the public approbation of the local bishop. And the bishop also, when he becomes convinced that a college is going in such a direction that they have in point of fact abandoned the Catholic identity, the bishop has the canonical right to remove that Catholic identity.
“I believe in truth in advertising. When you say you’re a Catholic institution, then be that,” he said. “The families that send their children to Catholic colleges have every right to expect that their children’s faith is going to be edified and built up ... by the instruction they receive in philosophy and theology.”
The T&G asked Bishop McManus afterward if Holy Cross was representative of the trend he had described. Is Holy Cross, he was asked, still Catholic? “Yes, very much so,” he said.
Asked by the T&G this past week to respond to the Holy Cross administrators’ description of his talk on transgenderism as “hurtful,” Bishop McManus responded Thursday in an email relayed by a diocesan spokesman.
“My talk at the College of the Holy Cross to the Catholic health care workers at their annual conference held at the college was presenting what is taught by the Catholic Church, moral teaching that was affirmed by the Holy Father himself in 2017 in his address to the Pontifical Academy for Life,” Bishop McManus said.
“The talk also cited medical and psychological professionals, such as Drs. Paul McHugh and Lawrence Mayer, whose scholarly research support this teaching. My presentation was not directed at any individual person, and I began and ended by underscoring a fundamental Catholic moral teaching that demands that we treat every person with respect, dignity and compassion, including those who consider themselves transgender.
“If certain members of the Holy Cross community find this to be hurtful and offensive, then perhaps the college should present clearly what Catholicism teaches regarding Christian anthropology and human sexuality,” he said.
Diocesan spokesman and chancellor Raymond Delisle said Bishop McManus had declined an invitation to this year’s Holy Cross Commencement exercises “weeks before the recent conference.”
Mr. Delisle did not provide a reason the bishop planned to skip this year’s graduation exercises or why he had missed last year’s, in the wake of the controversy over the scholarly article by professor Tat-Siong Benny Liew, holder of an endowed chair in New Testament Studies at Holy Cross, that referred to “queer desires” in Christ’s Passion.
Videos of the past Holy Cross Commencements archived at the college’s website show Bishop McManus offering the benediction at exercises each year from 2013 to 2017. He did not appear in the 2018 video.
College spokesman Mr. Hill did not respond to a query from the T&G asking why the bishop had stopped attending Commencement exercises.
Holy Cross, administered by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, was founded in 1843 and is the oldest Catholic college in New England.
By Mark Sullivan
Telegram & Gazette Staff
Posted May 18, 2019 at 7:00 PM
Bishop McManus, who plans to skip Holy Cross commencement, aims retort at deans who called his transgender remarks “hurtful, offensive”
WORCESTER - The fallout continues from a recent address by Worcester’s Roman Catholic bishop on transgender identity and on Catholic colleges’ upholding of traditional church teachings, exposing an apparent rift between the College of the Holy Cross and Bishop Robert McManus.
Two of Holy Cross’ top administrators, in a message to the campus community on May 13, described Bishop McManus’ recent talk on transgenderism as “deeply hurtful and offensive to many members of our community.”
The statement went out to the campus under the names of Margaret Freije, provost and dean of the college, and Michele Murray, vice president for student affairs and dean of students.
The college’s Jesuit president, the Rev. Philip Boroughs, was not listed as a signatory, but a separate letter he wrote to the Telegram & Gazette criticizing the paper’s coverage of the bishop’s address was quoted in its entirety. The letter was published Friday in the Telegram & Gazette.
The spokesman for the college, John Hill, was asked via email this past week if Rev. Boroughs shared his top administrators’ view that the bishop’s talk had been “deeply hurtful and offensive.” Mr. Hill did not acknowledge the question or respond.
Bishop McManus will not be participating in Holy Cross’ 173rd Commencement exercises this Friday, having turned down an invitation to do so weeks before he gave his recent address, according to a diocesan spokesman.
Bishop McManus also did not attend last year’s commencement at Holy Cross, in an apparent break from tradition at the most prominent Catholic college in the diocese.
Asked about the Holy Cross administrators’ statement describing his talk as “deeply hurtful and offensive,” the bishop responded on Thursday:
“If certain members of the Holy Cross community find this to be hurtful and offensive, then perhaps the college should present clearly what Catholicism teaches regarding Christian anthropology and human sexuality.”
Speaking at a Catholic health care conference held at Holy Cross on May 7, Bishop McManus said transgenderism poses troubling challenges to church institutions as well as modern culture.
He said that while people who consider themselves transgender are children of God who are to be treated with love, dignity and compassion, transgenderism represents a sharp departure from Catholic understandings of the human person and natural moral law.
That departure, he said, is rooted in theological heresy as well as unsupported science, and presents significant spiritual as well as societal dangers.
Bishop McManus offered pointed commentary on Catholic colleges upholding Catholic teaching in this area. This might have been taken as criticism of the Jesuit college that provided the venue for the conference.
Holy Cross hosts what it bills as the world’s first Digital Transgender Archive, an online clearinghouse for transgender history. The archive’s founding director, K.J. Rawson, an associate professor of English at the college, is a transgender person and a rising young faculty star whose image is featured prominently atop the English Department’s webpage.
The term “transgender” refers to people whose gender identity or expression does not match their sex, as in the case of a transgender person who is biologically male but lives and identifies as a woman, or is biologically female but lives and identifies as a man.
Transgender identity is at the heart of Mr. Rawson’s scholarly work. At his faculty website he describes the Digital Transgender Archive as a central part of his current scholarship “at the intersections of rhetoric, LGBT studies, digital media, and feminist and queer theory.” Mr. Rawson has declined to comment.
His 2010 Syracuse University doctoral dissertation was titled “Archiving Transgender: Affects, Logics, and the Power of Queer History,” and his recent work has appeared in journals including Transgender Studies Quarterly, Radical History Review, and QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking.
A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2012, Mr. Rawson was awarded tenure in 2018. The provost and dean of the college, Ms. Freije, is listed at the Digital Transgender Archive site among the project’s “tremendous” supporters.
Some traditionalist Catholics have objected. The ultratraditionalist Tradition, Family and Property movement, at its TFP Student Action site, claimed nearly 17,000 signatures on a 2017 online petition to Rev. Boroughs to shut down the archive, which the group described as “a hub that broadcasts pro-transgender literature and activism, promoting unnatural sin.”
Bishop McManus has been at odds with the college in the past over what he has perceived as departures from Catholic orthodoxy.
Last year he described as “offensive and blasphemous” an article by a Holy Cross religious studies professor that compared Christ to a “drag king” with “queer desires” whose death on the Cross had sadomasochistic overtones.
In his remarks at the May 7 conference, Bishop McManus did not mention Holy Cross or its promotion of transgender studies by name but was pointed in his comments on colleges that, in his view, stray from their Catholic moorings in the name of diversity.
“When a college tries to promote diversity and inclusion by contravening the very clear Catholic moral and social teachings, we have a severe problem,” he said. “In reality, according to church law, no institution in a diocese or archdiocese can call itself Catholic without the public approbation of the local bishop. And the bishop also, when he becomes convinced that a college is going in such a direction that they have in point of fact abandoned the Catholic identity, the bishop has the canonical right to remove that Catholic identity.
“I believe in truth in advertising. When you say you’re a Catholic institution, then be that,” he said. “The families that send their children to Catholic colleges have every right to expect that their children’s faith is going to be edified and built up ... by the instruction they receive in philosophy and theology.”
The T&G asked Bishop McManus afterward if Holy Cross was representative of the trend he had described. Is Holy Cross, he was asked, still Catholic? “Yes, very much so,” he said.
Asked by the T&G this past week to respond to the Holy Cross administrators’ description of his talk on transgenderism as “hurtful,” Bishop McManus responded Thursday in an email relayed by a diocesan spokesman.
“My talk at the College of the Holy Cross to the Catholic health care workers at their annual conference held at the college was presenting what is taught by the Catholic Church, moral teaching that was affirmed by the Holy Father himself in 2017 in his address to the Pontifical Academy for Life,” Bishop McManus said.
“The talk also cited medical and psychological professionals, such as Drs. Paul McHugh and Lawrence Mayer, whose scholarly research support this teaching. My presentation was not directed at any individual person, and I began and ended by underscoring a fundamental Catholic moral teaching that demands that we treat every person with respect, dignity and compassion, including those who consider themselves transgender.
“If certain members of the Holy Cross community find this to be hurtful and offensive, then perhaps the college should present clearly what Catholicism teaches regarding Christian anthropology and human sexuality,” he said.
Diocesan spokesman and chancellor Raymond Delisle said Bishop McManus had declined an invitation to this year’s Holy Cross Commencement exercises “weeks before the recent conference.”
Mr. Delisle did not provide a reason the bishop planned to skip this year’s graduation exercises or why he had missed last year’s, in the wake of the controversy over the scholarly article by professor Tat-Siong Benny Liew, holder of an endowed chair in New Testament Studies at Holy Cross, that referred to “queer desires” in Christ’s Passion.
Videos of the past Holy Cross Commencements archived at the college’s website show Bishop McManus offering the benediction at exercises each year from 2013 to 2017. He did not appear in the 2018 video.
College spokesman Mr. Hill did not respond to a query from the T&G asking why the bishop had stopped attending Commencement exercises.
Holy Cross, administered by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, was founded in 1843 and is the oldest Catholic college in New England.