UPDATE:
See the write up on this in the Detroit News.
When pro-life students at the largest Catholic university in America set out to recruit others to their cause, they probably didn’t expect a Catholic cleric to brand them bigots for it.
But that’s what DePaul University’s president the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider seemed to do in a recent note to Chicago’s Blue Demons.
[…]
____ Originally Published on: Oct 25, 2016 @ 02:31
I want everyone to know this name:
Father Dennis Holtschneider
He is President of DePaul University.
This is from the Washington Times:
Catholic university prohibits ‘Unborn Lives Matter’ posters on campus
The nation’s largest Catholic university told a group of pro-life students that it could not display posters reading “Unborn Lives Matter,” lest they provoke the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a letter to the College Republicans, DePaul University president Father Dennis Holtschneider said the posters contained “bigotry” veiled “under the cover of free speech,” the Daily Wire reported. [?!?]
“By our nature, we are committed to developing arguments and exploring important issues that can be steeped in controversy and, oftentimes, emotion,” Mr. Holtschneider said in the letter. “Yet there will be times when some forms of speech challenge our grounding in Catholic and Vincentian values. When that happens, you will see us refuse to allow members of our community be subjected to bigotry that occurs under the cover of free speech.”
Citing the university’s Guiding Principles on Speech and Expression, he said the poster “provokes the Black Lives Matter movement” and therefore needs to be redesigned.[So, he’s a coward.]
The prohibition of conservative speech is becoming routine at DePaul.
Last August, the DePaul Young Americans for Freedom were prohibited from inviting Ben Shapiro to the Chicago campus. The administration cited security concerns.
And after protesters stormed the stage at his May lecture, Milo Yiannopoulos was told that he could not return to DePaul for a followup performance the following month.
Mr. Holtschneider denounced Mr. Yiannopoulos as a “self-serving provocateur” who is “unworthy” of university discourse.
Everyone… Holtschneider… Dennis Holtschneider… Fr. Dennis Holtschneider of DePaul University.
Are you thinking about a school? Think again. Are you a donor or alumnus? Express your thoughts to the school’s president.
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I can’t blame him for not wanting a second dose of Milo Yiannopoulos if he were indeed protecting a Catholic environment. Milo is very vulgar with his in-your-face homosexuality, though he is supportive of conservative government.
Regarding Fr. Holtschneider, I added a prayer for spineless priests to my rosary years ago. How did we go from dying over a pinch of incense to wet-noodle-wimpiness?
Catholictrad beat me to it. The “enemy of my enemy is my friend” only goes so far. We owe Milo prayers, not a venue.
It’s a shame Fr. Holtschneider can’t publicly expound upon the reality of abortion in the US, which, according to statistics , does pose more of a threat to black American children than it does to white American children :
Abortion and Race
. . . And this snippet from a Priests For Life article – Civil Rights for the Unborn
Black lives do matter – Damn straight ! . . . and nowhere is this more import/critical, than it is in the womb . . .because if Black lives don’t matter in the womb, they will never have a chance to matter anywhere else.
(Maybe someone could send Fr. Holtschneider a gift of Mystic Monk coffee and suggest that he drink a couple of strongly brewed cups while reconsidering his response to “Unborn Lives Matter.”)
I am not sure what is bigoted about Unborn Lives Matter. It seems pretty inclusive. Does Fr. Holtschneider claim that blacks are not born? His logic escapes me. Does he think the pro-life people are mocking blacks? Did they say All a Unborn Lives except Black One matter? His logic escapes me.
The Chicken
Masked Chicken – I’ve been following the goings on at DePaul ever since the Milo incident. It would seem that Fr. Holtschnieder’s logic is that free speech must be shut down on campus unless it follows the far left-wing agenda of himself and the other extreme liberals on campus. DePaul seems to think that the BLM movement and other liberal minded students need to be coddled and protected from the big, old, meanie conservative thinkers on campus. It is absolutely stomach turning if you have seen all the details.
Catholictrad – Fr. Holtschnieder is not, indeed, protecting a Catholic environment. DePaul has no Catholic environment. He is protecting a liberal, molly-coddling, leftist campus that can’t take any opinions opposing their own. Milo is very vulgar, but that is not why he was dismissed. He was shut down because he was conservative. DePaul doesn’t mind anti-Catholic vulgarity. They don’t want free speech and open-minded discourse. Which, by the way, is what we have been told forever is the ideal of the university – a place where all ideas can be discussed freely. Isn’t that why conservatives have had to put up with all kinds of crazy and sinful things being done and said on college campuses all these years? Welp, can’t have that anymore!
The student group should immediately send a letter to the president apologizing for any materials which may have mistakenly been construed as bigoted and make clear that was the opposite of what was intended. As a further expression of their sincerity, those students should arrange a panel discussion with Doctor Alveda King – niece of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Doctor Clenard H. Childress Jr. and Walter B Hoye II at their university. An alumnae dinner could be held to honor the panel at $ per plate, proceeds to help with travel, accommodations, speaking fees, etc. These students should humbly invite the president of the university to lead the panel discussion. If he should decline, he should at the very least be given a seat of honor at the discussion and dinner and be thanked for his involvement.
Where can I buy tickets?
While it is not bigotry, I do think that saying “Unborn lives matter” is a bad tactic because it is taking a left wing cause and creating a copycat slogan through word substitution. Kind of like Christian rock. I’m looking at you, Life Teen Mass!
Make sure to leave a seat of prominence reserved for the good father, in case he’s running late.
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Re: Vincentian, here’s a repeat of what I posted elsewhere:
One of the common ways of portraying St. Vincent de Paul is to show him holding one of the foundling infants that his orders and lay donors rescued and cared for.
From St. Vincent de Paul, by Emmanuel de Broglie. Translated by Miriam Partridge.
“It is said that one day, when coming back from giving a mission on the outskirts of Paris, Vincent de Paul saw a man occupied in the horrible work of mutilating a newborn baby, so as to make it a means of livelihood to himself by exciting the pity of the public. Filled with horror and compassion, Vincent snatched the poor little creature from his persecutor, and carried him in his own arms to a house in the Rue St. Landry, called La Couche, where children, left exposed and deserted in the street, were taken in.
“The sight that met his eyes there increased his dismay; two or three hundred children of different ages were literally heaped up anyhow in pestilential holes, looked after only by one widow, helped by two servants. It is terrible even to think of the lot of these unhappy little ones, thus left in the highways, at the street-corners, under the church porches. They either died of hunger, or fell into the hands of scoundrels who sold them, or purposely maimed them, in order that later, they might beg from the charity of passersby.
“…The children collected together in the house which was supposed to be an asylum for them, were not much better off. They died of hunger, and were drugged with laudanum when they cried; none survived excepting those that the so-called nurse, who was supposed to take care of them, sold as substitutes for lost children, or to be passed off as the real offspring of their purchaser. They did not fetch a high price — fifteen or twenty sous, as a rule.
“The heart of the Christian priest was full to bursting at the spectacle of these horrors (which were vouched for as true by Vincent de Paul himself)… Departing for once from his usual reserve, he took the first steps himself. He brought some of the Dames de Charite [lay donor supporters] to La Couche and showed them what was going on. It was quite enough to touch them to the quick. They longed to be able to adopt all the unhappy little creatures, who were literally dying of pestilence – the greater number without baptism. But the means at their disposal were limited, and they were obliged to begin by ransoming twelve drawn by lot… The Daughters of Charity looked after them…
“Such in 1638 was the humble beginning of the work for foundling children.”
Within two years, the king gave them an abandoned castle to use. Within ten years, the work had progressed to the point that there were 4000 children under his organization’s care, and no money to keep them. St. Vincent de Paul made an impassioned speech to his charitable supporters.
“Become their judges! Their life and death are in your hands! … It is time to pronounce their sentence, and to decide… They will, infallibly, die if you abandon them.”
The ladies responded, and somehow the work scraped through.
On a later occasion, St. Vincent de Paul was criticized by one of his order members for having spent money donated to his Congregation on the support of the foundlings.
St. Vincent replied, “May God pardon the weakness that makes him thus turn away from the sentiments of the Gospel. Oh! What wretched faith to think that Our Lord, Who promises to repay a hundredfold what is done for Him, will be less good to us for having sought the welfare of poor children like these!
“Since that merciful Savior said to His disciples, ‘Allow the little children to come to Me,’ can we, without going against Him, reject or abandon them when they come to us?”
DePaul has ceased being a Catholic university for quite some time now. Funny that a university that offers LGBTQ studies would keep Milo out. This University needs prayers as well as the wolf in sheep’s clothing, Fr. Holtschneider.
Also, DePaul doesn’t know Latin, unless there’s some subtlety I don’t know about.
See, their library just acquired a book with the inscription “Ex Libris Ludovici de Marillac,” and they claim that means it belonged to St. Louise de Marillac. But… it sounds more like it belonged to a Louis de Marillac — Ludovicus, Ludovici. I suppose one could have a male name as a sister or even baptismally, or one could decline Ludovica like Iuno… but why?
It’s also possible that it’s known that Louise inherited all of some Louis relative’s books, but that’s not how the press release reads.
And sure enough, there was a Louis de Marillac at that time who was a doctor of the Sorbonne, a prior, and a pastor. His home became a seminary, and he also built houses for monks. Sounds like a worthy fellow who might own a Sacramentary.
Black lives do not matter, not when the black abortion rate in urban centres is approaching 70% abortion versus 30% live births. So, Unborn Lives Matter should resonate with Blacks.
What I think is amusing is that the W. Times refers to Holtschneider as *Mr.* Holtschneider rather than *Fr.* Holtnscheider or even Rev. Holtschneider.
I am not sure if this is simply their jounalistic style sheet (refusing to use the title “Fr.” as some kind of anti-Catholic thing) or an unintentional commentary on the priesthood of a man who would not even bother to defend the unborn.
I suspect the former, but ….
I agree a Catholic University shouldn’t be hosting Yiannopoulos. He got that one right.
Solution: place on placcard: “Materi Nata Sit”
They’ll be clueless.
Sad to see what has happened to DePaul. A place once attended and revered by family and friends. Father also fails at logic when he suggests ULM negates BLM. Not only are black babies disproportionately targeted for and actually aborted in the US, as others have pointed out. It takes nothing away from BLM, but rather I think the students are seeing the fight for unborn lives as an equal if not related matter of human or civil rights. Simply put, you can tell Father is not objective when he reads ULM as an attack on BLM, instead of an honoring of (arguably the true meaning of) black lives, from womb to tomb.
It appears Fr. Holtschneider is stepping down at the end of the academic year due to the Yiannopoulos incident. Pray that the next president is more up to the task of running a Catholic University.
http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/depaul-university-president-stepping-down/
Ari Cohn of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education had a sort of third-quarter round-up (with further background) last month entitled, “Is DePaul America’s Worst School for Free Speech?”:
https://www.thefire.org/is-depaul-americas-worst-school-for-free-speech/
How interesting that Fr. Holtschneider is so worried about an organization originally financed by ATHEIST, socialist George Soros that openly talked about killing policemen-some stating that they
wanted to kill white cops in particular. In fact, we actually saw policemen killed as a result of their rhetoric making claims that were later proven untrue. They have also destroyed stores and property that did not belong to them with very little consequences. The protesters were/are paid while innocent people’s livelihoods are destroyed .
On the other hand the pro life group using Unborn Lives Matter only wanted to save ALL innocent
unborn lives. We have no common sense left in this politically correct left leaning college environment that has been allowed to grow and used to indoctrinate students.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/16/hacked-soros-memo-baltimore-riots-provide-unique-opportunity-reform-police/
NBW said:
“DePaul has ceased being a Catholic university for quite some time now. Funny that a university that offers LGBTQ studies would keep Milo out.”
Exactly. The real problem is he has conservative views and is using this tour to point out how free
speech is disappearing on college campuses. You may not like how he is doing that but the point
needs to be made to open closed eyes and ears in our culture. I am old enough to remember
the left lecturing us years ago about how college was all about free speech and experiencing and hearing differing ideas when they were bringing in socialist, communist leaning lecturers and professors. Well-they certainly succeeded because I recently saw an article saying conservatives make up only about 10% of the professors teaching on college campuses today. It shows. Now they do not want the same thing to be allowed with conservative ideas. Amazing isn’t it? One of the
wikiLeaks Podesta(Clinton campaign manager) emails talked about the dumbing down of our education systems and how that had helped them at some point(win elections) but were not sure it would work in this election. If the very corrupt Hillary Clinton(and Bill) is elected I would say that it is still a very successful strategy. That says a lot about who they are.After all Hillary told a group
of bankers that you need a “public policy”(meant for the uneducated) and a “private policy” (what she really is going to do).
Professor Jonathan Cohen, former Head of their Department of Mathematics had this to say, in the comments to report on this at Inside Higher Ed: “I recently retired from DePaul after 27 years and I can say without hesitation that DePaul has a nasty habit of suppressing views which are considered ‘too conservative’. The university president is being disingenuous when he says that DePaul only forbids speech that is intended to wound.
“There is an activist core of faculty and administrators who believe that the purpose of education is to impose a set of liberal talking points on its students. This is done through its hiring practices, both academic and administrative, its curriculum development, its regulation of student groups, and when pushed, through the outright suppression of contrary views.
“The university president is quoted above as follows ‘As we experienced last spring, it’s not difficult to agree that there is a difference between a thoughtful discussion about immigration and a
profane remark about Mexicans scrawled in the quad, or between a panel on racial climate and a noose — a powerful symbol of violence and hatred — outside a residence hall. In both recent cases, the first, we encourage; the second, we abhor.’ With all due respect, this quote is a perfect example of a straw man argument. No group was asking permission to chalk up the sidewalk with bigoted slogans or place nooses in residence halls. What has been banned is Ben Shapiro who expresses conservative positions and a poster that borrowed its phrasing from the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ to express opposition to abortion.”
KateD,
One could add to that panel Dr. Alan Keyes, who, not so many years ago, ran a decidedly pro-life campaign against an infanticidal Illinois state legislator aspiring to the U.S. Senate, Mr. B.H. Obama.
I disagree with many commenters about Milo. I am a huge fan, and I’ve watched many of his lectures. He uses his struggle with same-sex attraction as a weapon against liberals, who demand that gay people believe and act certain ways. Milo is a practicing Catholic, and he is a self-described Benedict XVI fan. He is ardently pro-life, no exceptions, and pro-traditional marriage. Ig you look past his on-stage persona, as I have, you will see that he’s has his finger on exactly what’s wrong with America and why the Church is the answer.
FWIW, I’m a 30-something woman in the news industry. Milo is the best thing to happen to the media in decades.
I know for a fact that, when a nominal Catholic was made head of a large Chicago foundation, he troubled to find that the organisation funded the fake “Catholics for Choice”. (He did not mind funding pro-abortion groups, it just bothered him that this one claimed to be Catholic.) So he consulted Fr Holtschneider and asked whether a Catholic could, in good conscience, advocate for abortion. Fr H said “Yes.” So several further grants, hundreds of thousands of dollars, went out to support the declared enemies of the magisterium thanks to Fr H.
I too like Milo. I don’t agree with everything he says but there is a lot I do agree with e.g. Islam. Milo comes from a Catholic family and says that he is still a Catholic. If he is actively homosexual he is not a practising Catholic. That said he is the only person I have heard to praise the Catholic attitude to homosexuals:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLTGeS4VM5o
Bolt Report – 11:31 – Christianity is touted as a faith that is anti-gay…..
.Milo ..when homosexuality was against the law the one institution which would take them in, ask them not to practise because they [Catholics] disagreed with the sin but love the sinner…in my experience Christians and in particular Catholics – which is how I was raised – have nothing but compassion, sympathy and respect and understanding for people who are struggling , as they see it, with sim
If Mezentius is a thief, a murderer, a real estate fraudster, a married man sleeping with his intern, a supposedly remarried man sleeping with a woman he falsely calls his wife, and/or a man sleeping around with other men… but he goes to Mass most Sundays, he’s a practicing Catholic. But he’s living in mortal sin, of course!
If Mezentius is a man of upright morals who has defected to a Protestant church, and genuinely does not know that it’s wrong to miss Mass, he may be living in a state of grace, but he’s surely not a practicing Catholic.
Bad people can be practicing Catholics. Not very good practicing Catholics, mind you; but there you go.
Pray for Fr. Holtschneider. And maybe make up a bunch of posters with enveloping flames and maybe a peeking malebolge in the corner, with the logo “Cowardly, craven, aeviternal lives matter, too, Father …”
Wryman says:
While it is not bigotry, I do think that saying “Unborn lives matter” is a bad tactic because it is taking a left wing cause and creating a copycat slogan through word substitution.
Maybe the sign should have said: Unborn Black Lives Matter.
Suburbanbanshee says:
If Mezentius is a thief, a murderer, a real estate fraudster, a married man sleeping with his intern, a supposedly remarried man sleeping with a woman he falsely calls his wife, and/or a man sleeping around with other men… but he goes to Mass most Sundays, he’s a practicing Catholic. But he’s living in mortal sin, of course!
Although “practicing Catholic” is a colloquial rather than technical phrase, I think it includes more than just weekly attendance at mass.
Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider attended the Vincentian seminary in Northampton, Pennsylvania, and was ordained in 1989. The next year the seminary closed, was then used as a retreat center, and finally sold to the Archdiocese, who also used it for retreats. Last year it was sold to a private developer who plans to use it as a wellness center and a wedding venue.
Meanwhile, the SSPX is building a big new seminary in Virginia, and the FSSP already has built one.