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In everyday conversation, the word “they” is commonly used in place of the grammatically correct personal pronoun “his” or “his or her.” It’s considered old-fashioned to utter a sentence such as “Someone forgot his keys.”
But when a “newspaper of record” that presents itself as a paragon of truth and correctness prints a sentence such as the following, many people would look to make sure they read it correctly:
“I hadn’t been treated like a human being by Christians in a very long time,” they recalled. That began their path back to the church.
The excerpt is from a May 17 article by New York Times religion reporter Ruth Graham about how some “conservative” Christians are now more accepting of transgender people than their churches are.
The Times’ decision to accept any personal pronoun that a person has adopted – even if it results in a reader asking “Are they talking about one person or more than one?” – is a small example of the confusion that often accompanies today’s debates about gender and sexuality.
Now, a Catholic university has announced a new program that aims to counter that confusion.
“I would say one of the most fundamental confusions that creates some of the biggest problems in our society and culture today is a very basic confusion about what it means to be a human person who is a man or a human person who is a woman,” said Kevin E. Stuart, Ph.D., at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas.
Stuart, director of the university’s Nesti Center for Faith & Culture, spoke during the launch of a Master of Arts program in Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies. The program aims to equip students to “speak the truth in contexts where many are afraid to do so.”
Which science?
That truth is challenged everywhere. The day the program was announced, May 21, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill that prohibits health professionals from performing “gender-transition” surgeries, prescribing puberty-blocking drugs and overseeing hormone treatments for patients under 18. Immediately, the transgender executive director of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter said that “clear data and medical opinion” support those practices, and that there is “an uncited science” behind the bans.
UST sees its new program as arming graduates with the science – as well as the anthropology, philosophy, and theology – needed to help society recover its traditional understanding of the human person. Some, speaking during Tuesday's video conference, reflected on personal experiences that formed part of their motivation for being part of the effort.
Stuart said that when he was a headmaster at a Catholic high school, he saw teenagers “feeling the ground shifting beneath them” when it came to society’s understanding of gender. He said he felt it was important to not only form them directly but “form the people who form them – be they teachers, administrators, medical professionals, parents, counselors, the whole range of people who are the trusted adults in the lives of our children.”
Leah Jacobson, program coordinator for the Nesti Center, who will be running the new MA program, said that as a campus minister at the University of Minnesota years ago it “was really eye opening and really troubling to see the the most faithful of the students on our campus, having been catechized many of them for many years through their church religious education programs, or even through Catholic high schools, arrive at adulthood knowing very little about the realities of marriage, family, gender difference.”
Jacobson, who is married and is the mother of seven, became a lactation consultant in 2010.
“In the last 14 to 15 years, watching even the language change in the field, and the confusion and the ambiguity that's been kind of allowed to permeate, it's just an important time, I think, for us in the Church to provide clarity and charity and truth,” she said.
Programs proliferating
The university says the new venture is the first MA degree in the world that “offers the riches of Church tradition and an authentically Catholic philosophy and theology of the human person” in the field of gender and women's studies.
But it is not the only Catholic program seeking to address gender ideology. For several years, Mary Rice Hasson has directed the Person and Identity Project, an initiative that educates and equips parents and faith-based institutions to promote the truth about the human person and counter gender ideology. Lately, she has been giving a six-lecture online course for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, Gender Ideology: What Catholics Need to Know.
Hasson, the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., will headline a conference on Man, Woman, and the Order of Creation at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, October 24–26, 2024. Other speakers are Francis X. Maier, senior fellow of the EPPC’s Catholic Studies Program; Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, fellow and director of the EPPC’s Bioethics and American Democracy Program; Dr. Paul Vitz, senior scholar emeritus at Divine Mercy University and professor of psychology emeritus at New York University.
The Ruah Woods Institute in Cincinnati, which promotes the Theology of the Body, also will feature Hasson at the Gender and Sexual Identity Virtual Conference August 5-8. The conference will look at the psychological, medical, legal, anthropological and pastoral aspects of the issue.
"We want this program to be healing"
The MA program at the University of St. Thomas consists of four certificate programs and specialization areas: Sexuality and Gender, Catholic Feminism, Women’s Health and Wellness, and Gender and Family Policy. Students can begin by simply doing a certificate program. If they decide to do more, they can work their way up to completing the 30-credit MA.
Classes will be taught live online so that students can participate from anywhere. The final capstone course includes an in-person immersive experience in Houston with fellow students, faculty, and leading speakers to enhance the personal aspect and networking opportunities.
The program, according to the UST website, “will bring the depths of the Catholic intellectual tradition to bear in examining the effects secular feminist theories have had on women's health care practices, law, education, family policy, and the culture at large. Through a grounding in Catholic anthropology, history, and science, students will learn to cut through modern ideologies, to identify good arguments, and to craft pastoral and policy strategies to promote the full flourishing of men, women and children. Implementing Pope John Paul II’s call for a ‘new feminism,’ (Evangelium Vitae, n.99), this program explores the rich historical contributions of Catholic women and proposes an alternative to the secular model for understanding sex and gender.”
Specific courses include:
–Human Person: Body and Soul, which philosophically and theologically grounds the understanding of sex, gender, and human sexuality within the metaphysics of human personhood;
–The Science and Social Science of Sex and Gender, which asks whether the causes of sexuality and gender are genetic or environmental, examines the effectiveness of various interventions, and looks at the comorbidities and other risks associated with various sexual identities;
–Transgenderism and Public Policy, which examines the law related to transgenderism and the ramifications transgender policy has on civil liberties.
Professors in the program include Erika Bachiochi, a Catholic legal scholar and Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision; Abigail Favale, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and author of The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory; Pia de Solenni, a moral theologian, ethicist, and cultural analyst; Dr. Marguerite Duane, a board-certified family physician and Executive Director of FACTS about Fertility, an organization dedicated to educating medical professionals and students about the science supporting fertility awareness-based methods, and others.
Jacobson, the author of Wholistic Feminism: Healing the Identity Crisis Caused by the Women's Movement, said during the video conference,
“To me success is going to be measured in our student's ability to charitably articulate the Church's teaching in a way that is not divisive. We want this program to be healing."
The program will welcome students for the first time in the Fall of 2024.
