“Catholic” – It Means Whatever You Want

I am wondering what the rank and tenure committee at DePaul were smoking when they came up with this.

From the Cardinal Newman Society:

DePaul Professor Teaches Homosexual Politics, Defended Pedophile Incident

A professor at DePaul University in Chicago, who is currently teaching the course “Creating Change: Contemporary GLBT Politics” and helped pioneer DePaul’s Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies programs, is something of a celebrity in pedophilia circles for her 1979 article downplaying the damaging effects of childhood homosexual activity with an adult.
Elizabeth “Beth” Kelly, PhD, professor of women’s and gender studies, has taught at DePaul since 1992. In 2010, then-Chicago Mayor Richard Daley named Kelly head of the city’s LGBT advisory council. That council has since been abolished by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“If someone had told me 30 years ago that in 2010 I would be tenured and promoted to a professor as a publicly professed lesbian at the country’s largest Catholic university, I would not have believed them,” Kelly told the student newspaper, The DePaulia, in 2010.
She was hired by DePaul despite writing a 1979 article that reported glowingly of her own sexual relationship with a great-aunt when she was just a child. The article, “On woman/girl love, or Lesbians do ‘do it,’” reportedly appeared in the Gay Community News on March 3,1979, but is not available online. It has been excerpted at length on numerous websites and in publications including the pro-pedophilia book, Paedophilia: The Radical Case, by author Tom O’Carroll. That book is available on the IPCE website, which describes itself as “a forum for people who are engaged in scholarly discussion about the understanding and emancipation of mutual relationships between children or adolescents and adults.”

[…]

A catholic university.

If you can stand it, read the rest there.

I looked at the page of the prof.  Good grief.

A sample:

COURSES TAUGHT

  • WGS 300 Feminist Theories
  • WGS 332/432 Creating Change: Contemporary Lesbian and Gay Politics
  • WGS 354 Contemporary Knitting: [Knitting! Who knew?] Gender Craft & Community Service
  • WGS 395 Senior Seminar
  • WGS 326/PSC 363 Women & Law
  • LGQ 150 Intro. to LGBTQ Studies
  • PSC 217 Women and U.S. Politics
  • WGS 338/438 Sexual Justice: Lesbians, Gays, and the Law
  • Queer Pioneers
  • ISP 200 Sex and Power in U.S. Politics

Nothing but the best 'c'atholic educaiton at DePaul!

AREAS OF INTEREST

  • Feminist Theory
  • LBGT Politics
  • Critical Theory
  • Women and Politics
  • Queer Theory
  • Global Gender Issues
  • Democracy and Educaiton

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS

  • “Three Lives: Conversations on Solidarity and Difference”, with Frida Kerner Furman and Linda Williamson Nelson. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005
  • “A House Made of Words: Class, Education, and Dissidence in Three Lives”, John Freeman-Moir and Alan Scott, eds. “Yesterday’s Dreams: International and Critical Perspectives on Education and Social Class”, University of Canterbury Press , 2002
  • [Poor Goldilocks!  Who knew?] “In Goldilocks’ Footsteps: Exploring the Discursive Construction of Gay Masculinity in Bear Magazines,” with Kate Kane, Eric Rofes and Sara Miles eds. “Opposite Sex: Lesbians and Gay Men Writing About Each Other’s Sexuality”, New York University Press, 1998
  • Probably not what she drinks.

    “Grounds for Criticism: Coffee, Passion, and the Politics of Feminist Discourse”, in Lois Lovelace Duke, “Women in Politics: Outsiders or Insiders?”, rev. ed., Prentice-Hall, 1995 and 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall, 1998

  • “Education, Democracy, and Public Knowledge”, Westview Press, 1995 Recipient of Michael Harrington Award for Best Book published in 1995 from New Political Science Section of the American Political Science Association.

What is completely absurd in this weird landscape we are wandering through, like victims of a Salvador Dali painting, is that the Vincentians who run DePaul can do whatever the hell they want at the largest catholic university in these USA, but if you – or some small religious order – want to have Holy Mass in the older, Extraordinary Form, you have to grovel and submit samples of DNA from the back of your neck.

UPDATE:

My friend the Motley Monk offers his take HERE.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in One Man & One Woman, Our Catholic Identity, Pò sì jiù, The Drill, You must be joking! and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

34 Comments

  1. acardnal says:

    Just one of many so called experts with letters behind their names who are brain washing our children.

  2. LarryW2LJ says:

    This is like living in The Twilight Zone.

  3. Magpie says:

    Fr Z, you always make me laugh. Thank you so much for your blog and your whimsical humour!

  4. incredulous says:

    It’s the same old Adam and Eve story. Satan is using women to corrupt weak men and society.

    Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle.
    Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
    May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;
    and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
    by the power of God
    cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
    who prowl throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

  5. Theodore says:

    The remarkable Dennis Prager has written that “most American parents and/or their child are going into debt in order to support an institution that for four years, during the most impressionable years of a person’s life, instills values that are the opposite of those of their parents.” This is just another example of this.

    http://www.dennisprager.com/what-kids-now-learn-in-college/

  6. Angie Mcs says:

    Some years ago, when we were college shopping with our youngest, we toured DePaul. It has some beautiful old buildings which blend in with its upscale brownstone neighborhood. As we walked through the refurbished library, we noted a lonely cross up on the wall, and not much else to incidate that this “was” once a Catholic University. We walked into the Prayer Room, where a Buddha took precedence at the front. A cross stood somewhere in a corner, as well as a smattering of other religious symbols. Of course, the course offerings, which you list, Father, mean more than these things, as they shape the mind. . But the university didnt seem to offer a truly Catholic place to retire and pray. It was as if these symbols were just remnants of days past. Speaking of Catholic universities, I read somewhere that the head of the Religous Studies Dept. of Loyola in Chicago was attending a seminar on various sexual/ lesbian literature. How ironic that the administrators of these schools cannot draw the lines anymore, with whom they choose to teach or the curriculum. Catholic parents who care about their faith must be hard pressed these days to find a school worthwhile and respectful towards Our Lord and His Church’s beliefs.

  7. RJHighland says:

    Your last comment Farther is spot on. The Friars of the Immaculate are gutted by the Vatican for worshiping in the norm of the Church for nearly 2000 yrs. The SSPX for maintain the traditions of the Church are now professed to be in schism by the Vatican for not wanting to accept unclear aspects of Vatican II that have created the atmosphere for this type of garbage in “Catholic” Universities. There are two different faiths in the Catholic Church one is Catholic one is not, the problem is the Vatican seems to be on the side of the one that is not and viamently against the one that is. I pray the Church leadership gets its act together. On another note, one Cardinal is seen at the protest against same sex marriage in Rome, one. He was just removed from his post and he believes in refusing communion to true heretics and schismatics. Will the real Catholic Church please stand-up!!!

  8. jflare says:

    When I reviewed the original article, I saw a comment about how she’d had a lesbian experience (or several) between the ages of 8 and 11. After this, she writes about how a person can “know” about their sexuality in spite of social norms.
    So..it appears to me as though we have a lady being celebrated for her..lesbian ideas..whose inspiration arguably comes about from having been abused sexually before age 10..by her aunt.

    T’would seem that if you’re a cleric with possible gay tendencies, you’re thrown in prison for even a hint of sex misconduct, but if you’re a lay woman with similar inclinations..well, you may inspire a PhD!
    No wonder people have so much trouble discerning what’s moral and what’s not…..!

  9. OrthodoxChick says:

    Gotta love the title she publishes. I guess anything passes for scholarly work these days: “Queer Pioneer”. What will she title her follow-up, “Little House on the Fairy?”

    Good grief.

    Fr. Z's Gold Star Award

  10. Wow. Just wow.

    With a CV like that, I would have expected her at Fordham with the rest of the dissidents and weirdos. Guess she’s too mainstream for them.

  11. Eugene says:

    “the Vincentians who run DePaul can do whatever the hell they want at the largest catholic university in these USA, but if you – or some small religious order – want to have Holy Mass in the older, Extraordinary Form, you have to grovel and submit samples of DNA from the back of your neck.” – could not agree with you more Father, and that sums up the tragedy of the state of our church today…the hatred towards traditional beliefs and practices within and without the Catholic church will be the world’s undoing…May God open all hearts and minds but especially those of our Shepherds.

  12. Eugene says:

    @ RJHighland “There are two different faiths in the Catholic Church one is Catholic one is not, the problem is the Vatican seems to be on the side of the one that is not and viamently against the one that is. I pray the Church leadership gets its act together. On another note, one Cardinal is seen at the protest against same sex marriage in Rome, one. He was just removed from his post and he believes in refusing communion to true heretics and schismatics. Will the real Catholic Church please stand-up!!!” – spot on with your statement…I am adding to my daily prayers that Cardinal Burke be elected Pope in the next Conclave. The man has guts, does not care about being politically correct only defending truth and beauty and is a true Shepherd.

  13. Johnno says:

    Sadly I don’t expect anything at the Vatican to change until we elect a Pope who knows how to use the internet, thus giving him a broad range of access to voices outside the treasonous circle of vipers that otherwise surround him.

  14. Clinton says:

    There are 244 colleges and universities here in the US that claim to be Catholic.

    The Cardinal Newman Society makes an annual report of Catholic colleges it recommends.
    I’d say it bases the list on very fair criteria– do the theology faculty have a mandatum
    as required by Ex Corde Ecclesiae, does the college have Masses available, etc. etc.
    All the reasonable things one would expect from a college calling itself Catholic.

    This past year, only 28 of those 244 colleges met the criteria to make their list.

    I’m not saying we should throw in the towel on Catholic higher education in this country, but
    we’ll certainly never fix the problem until we admit that 90% of these so-called ‘Catholic’
    colleges have become simply expensive, decadent frauds.

  15. lmgilbert says:

    Thirty years ago now, in 1984, I was a student in DePaul’s School of New Learning and the rot had already set in. To fulfill a requirement I signed up for a course in human sexuality. By the end of the first class the aura of chaste mutual respect that obtains between Christian men and women had been utterly dispelled and we were looking at each other in some alarm. Had we suddenly become sexual objects in each other’s eyes? Since I wanted to go to Heaven, I dropped the class.

    Prominent among the laicized priests who constituted the Theology department was John Dominic Crossan, later of Jesus Seminar fame. His unbelief was no secret then, and in the course of the seminar I took with him on Apocalyptic Literature he said many things that would undermine the faith of his students. For example he spoke of walking through OHare airport and being accosted by people who asked him if he had been born again to which he responded, “No, it worked just fine the first time, thank you very much.” And so on, class after class.

    Again, this was thirty years ago, and in the ensuing years of continual moral and intellectual collapse, I am unaware of any archbishop of Chicago alerting the faithful of the city that DePaul is no longer a Catholic university, or warning them to keep their children away from it.

    What is the point, after all, of having a guard dog if he will not bark? But then again we have been away from the city for a few years and may have missed something.

  16. Bob B. says:

    Where is the bishop?
    The majority of teachers and principals where I live all have gone to a specific catholic university in the area (the education department has a noticeable tendency to hire only these people). The Lavender graduations, SSM support and pro-abortion “tendencies” of this university are obvious and public. It’s small wonder that yet another generation will not know what the Church teaches and why.

  17. JamesM says:

    So, this woman was abused as a child by a paedophile within her own family.

    I wonder if it caused any lasting damage?

  18. Cathy says:

    Why can they do “whatever the hell they want”? The more I hear about these things, the more I want to throw up. I recognize that everybody expects the pope to do something about this, but, I keep wondering why the bishops and the heads of religious orders are not held responsible and accountable for these situations. I don’t get it. The Archdiocese of Chicago has issued a statement regarding claims about sexual abuse by priests, and you have a “catholic” university professor lauding her own experience of being abused as a minor child in glowing terms. On the one hand, great reparations are made for the sin, on the other hand, employing a university professor paving the way for this grave sin to be “normalized”.

  19. NBW says:

    How can you have a whole list of courses on one vapid, boring and immoral subject? Amazing.
    I think Pope Francis should be sending Fr. Volpi to shut down Depaul rather than the FFI.

  20. Wiktor says:

    “Educaiton” that sounds Greek? but what is this “??????????”? :-)

  21. Priam1184 says:

    Ah yes, Feminist Theory, Critical Theory, the “Politics of Feminist Discourse (thank you Michel Foucault for that way overused last word), etc. etc. Takes me back to the days when I was studying the social sciences at the University of Minnesota more than a decade ago. Essentially what all of that nonsense boils down to is this: your parents hate you, your civilization was founded as a criminal enterprise, there is no God so worship yourself instead, and despair. And all that from a ‘catholic’ university. Veni Domine Iesu!

  22. Hibernian Faitfhful says:

    Actually they were smelling the smoke of the Deceiver.

    Extra Prayers are needed for those in authority at “c”atholic Higher Education. First thing to do is to reject the heretical Land-O-Lakes Statement (http://consortium.villanova.edu/excorde/landlake.htm), which, by any rational and reasonable understanding is a repudiation of the original concept of university education as articled by the One True Church, pushed by Father Theodore Hesburgh in his earthly quest for money regardless of the moral implications of its origin, remember he worked with the Rockefeller Foundation one of the largest proponents of Eugenics and the ungodly cultural of death. In return he has received over 100 “honorary” degrees – the modern equivalent of thirty pieces of silver.

    See: http://www.churchmilitant.tv/platform/index.php?ssnID=162&vidID=ciax-2011-07-22 and

  23. Supertradmum says:

    There is a witch teaching in the theology department of St. Ambrose University. She advocates women’s rights, of course. Bishops gave up their powers to lay boards years ago in so many of these universities. I highly recommend a book a friend sent me over 13 years ago when I was in conflict with such people as Kelly. It is by far the best book on the history of the secularization of religious based universities in America. I read it in 2000, but it is worth the read.
    And, yes, I know Burtchaell’s background but he is a hefty, worthy scholar.

    http://www.amazon.com/Dying-Light-James-Tunstead-Burtchaell/dp/0802844812

  24. Cathy says:

    Supertradmum, I don’t think a bishop can simply say that he gives up authority unless he tenders his resignation as bishop. Whether he is a member of a board or not, he has an authority by his office over all that proclaims as being Catholic within his diocese as well as the duty to rightly exert his authority.

  25. wmeyer says:

    I looked at the prof’s page. The picture put me in mind of Pat, from SNL. Sexually ambiguous in appearance.

  26. Priam1184 says:

    @Clinton Yes we should throw in the towel. Not to run away defeated but simply to acknowledge the truth. Most of these colleges and universities are no longer in any way Catholic, and are in fact barely even ‘c’atholic, and they haven’t been for a very long time. They are some of the leading proponents of evil ideas in this society and culture: Georgetown, Notre Dame, Gonzaga, Marquette, Depaul , the list goes on and on. There is no way to save them as they are short of a divine miracle. It would be nice if a bishop of one of these dioceses would one day, in conjunction with the Holy See, strip one of them of the right to call themselves Catholic but I am not going to hold my breath. They are leading the way as our society and culture go careening down the path to destruction. We need to do what we can to save the souls of individuals but we should have no problem letting Depaul University die.

  27. Scott Olsson says:

    This is a great example of why Catholics ought to adopt an orthodox Catholic school and start donating. There are great Catholic schools out there, and we need to support them.

    pax,
    Scott

  28. Kathleen10 says:

    The horse is out of the barn and has trotted down the road and out of sight. Let’s face it folks. This is the way the world now rolls. We are in a Bizarro World, and it’s going to be rough from here on in. I would turn blue waiting for most Bishops to say anything. While I would of course welcome it, it’s not going to happen often enough. They have been been too silent too long, and it is all but lost. Personally, I draw a big, fat, red line on the sexual assault of children and these vile, disgusting sub-humans who propose that sexual assaults on children are a “good and healthy” thing. I cannot abide these horrible perverts. We must never give in on this. We must never call it anything but what it is, the most sickening perversion possible, and the perpetrators are exceedingly disgusting and vile. Homosexuals who propose these demonic actions against children must be taken seriously. One of the slogans is “If it’s not by eight (years old) it’s too late”. The horrible truth is, it’s a recruitment tool. Once you have corrupted a child’s experience and thinking, you may have “won them over” to homosexuality. That is the horrible “hope”. That is why homosexuals adopting children is a nightmare. God help all children.
    DePaul should be contacted, since we are thus far still able to provide a dissenting opinion on these matters. Spread the word when we can, about the true nature of these “Catholic” universities. We must firmly, definitely, and aggressively, state our opinions on the very concept of sexual activity between a person under 16 and an adult. Consent laws are the first line of legal attack. We must watch for it and pounce on it if we see it. That would be a time to organize, gather signatures, speak out, write letters, and do whatever it takes to contain these monsters, these predators, who sense opportunity and are now crawling out from under rocks to have their illness sanctioned and glorified.

  29. St Donatus says:

    Oddly, a year and a half ago I came back to the Catholic Church because of these types of terrible situations. I know, what kind logic was I using. Well, look at it this way. If the Catholic Church were a country, it would have disappeared no later than 400 ad. For example, what country would make a set of rules, then not enforce them, not even encourage them to be enforced, teach against these rules, have terrible leadership, have no army, and last any time at all. Well the Catholic Church is like that country. When there are almost no Bishops or priests who teach about sin, hell, purgatory, and when the do teach, it is only about love, forgiveness, and understanding, what do you expect. Love, forgiveness and understanding are just a part of the message Jesus had. He mentions Hell in some form or another many more times than he mentions love, or forgiveness or understanding. Today, understanding is code word for accept and or promote sin.
    What organization would persecute some of its greatest leaders such as Joan of Arc, John of the Cross, and Padre Pio and yet remain in existence after 2000 years.

    Yet it is still here and has over a billion adherents. Now that is a TRUE MIRACLE. No doubt God does bless the Catholic Church, it is the sinful men who run it that are the problem.

    Thank God for priests like Father Z that teach us and support us in our efforts at getting to heaven.

  30. OrthodoxChick says:

    I refuse to let this all get to me today. A gold star from my favorite priest and the debut of season 5 of Duck Dynasty tonight @ 10pm. Now that’s a tough combo to beat. As Phil Robertson would say, “Father, thank you for another good day on planet earth.”

  31. Genesispete says:

    I’m not sure what is a Catholic university nowadays; however I do know what they are not, and DePaul is clear not.

  32. BLB Oregon says:

    I don’t think she drinks any kind of coffee. That woman is nothing but LBGT Kool-Aid.

  33. MarkG says:

    I find it strange that people here use name calling with disparaging terms for groups they don’t agree with.

  34. jimr45 says:

    Having received my BA and MA from DePaul many years ago, ok a few decades, I have sent an email about this matter to 2 addresses at DePaul commenting about my shock. I also included a link to this blog and a link to The Motley Monk’s article on the web.

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