Michael O’Loughlin tours DePaul, the nation’s largest Catholic university and the first to offer a minor in gay and lesbian studies:
Part of the reason in creating the minor was to explore challenging subjects in an academic setting, explained the Rev. James Halstead, the chair of DePaul’s religious studies department. A priest for more than 36 years, Halstead said that the president’s office asked that the minor include a religious, philosophical, or ethical component.
Halstead believes that Catholic universities are precisely the places where great moral questions should be debated. “The obligation of a teacher is to maintain a classroom ethos and atmosphere in which all points of views can be respectfully heard,” he said. Students may dismiss the bishops’ teaching on homosexuality as erroneous, but his job as a professor, he said, involves offering an explanation of texts, not indoctrinating his students.
When I asked what he thought about the critics who questioned DePaul’s Catholic identity because of the minor and various LGBT student groups, Halstead lamented …. “To measure the Catholic identity of a university by asking if it has a LGBT program or not, Jesus, help us all. Do people really think that’s at the heart of Catholic Christianity? To me, it’s just not.”
Instead, he wishes that Catholic schools were judged on how well students answer the “deep questions” such as where they come from and what it means to be human, all in the search for truth. “Truth really is a process of emerging, in goodness and beauty, friendship and love,” he said. “Rational people can figure this stuff out. Reason, enriched by faith, is going to reveal truth.”
O’Loughlin also gets a great quote from another Catholic academic and priest, Paul Crowley:
What the world really needs to hear, and what we so deeply need to hear, is a message of loving mercy and inclusion, rather than judgment. The language of “objective disorder” has proved to be very problematic, to say the least. On one level, all that LGBT people in the Catholic Church are asking for is an affirmation of who they are as human beings, people whom God loves. If you say anything like this in church, people come up to you and say, ‘Thank you Father for being so courageous!’ Well, it’s not courageous, it’s just the Gospel!
I remember going to Notre Dame for the first ever talk there about homosexuality in its history.
The LGBT group was not allowed to put up posters or publicly advertize the event, and when they did, the group was abolished by the faculty. A broader student body had to sponsor the talk. But it was one of the more riveting evenings of my life: the auditorium so full they had to add another one with a video feed. I spoke about natural law arguments about homosexuality and based my critique on agreement with that church doctrine arguendo. The place jumped at the chance to discuss this; a couple of priests even came out in the question-and-answer session. No one was uncivil; no one was attacking the church. I felt and feel I am defending the church when I point out that its doctrines on homosexuality make no sense on their own terms or are uniquely designed to target one group in society in ways the church would never do with any other. We have ceased to be Christians on this issue. Or rather stopped believing in the core notion best summed up by: “In essential things, unity. In doubtful things, liberty. In all things, charity.”
I believe in dialogue – not yelling – on this. And one of the greatest injuries inflicted on the church by the last Pope was his shutting down of even any discourse on the subject – and several others. The most intellectual of Popes enforced anti-intellectualism with a relentlessness that bordered on hysteria. I hope that’s over now – because reason can help faith and can bring the whole church family closer together. And that combination – of faith and reason – is what keeps Catholicism alive.
(Photo: Frederick Florin/Getty)
The Dish 