A Midwest all-women's Catholic college has reversed its plan to admit trans-identifying men.
St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, planned to admit trans students the next academic year.
The Board of Trustees approved the policy in June 2023, and President Katie Conboy said she announced "an update" at a presemester event in August, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Conboy took office in June 2020 issuing a "strategic plan" that commits the college to "achieve a culture of human dignity and solidarity" by creating an "office for Student Equity" and a "space to support LGBTQ+ students."
However, following a backlash from conservatives, the school changed its mind, at least for now.
Though "we viewed it as a reflection of our College's commitment to live our Catholic values as a loving and just community, we clearly underestimated our community's genuine desire to be engaged in the process of shaping a policy of such significance," Conboy and the board chair wrote in a Dec. 21 email, the Journal reported.
Earlier this month, National Catholic Register publisher Michael Warsaw called on Conboy and the board of trustees to resign.
"A breach of trust of a different sort has taken place at Saint Mary's College in Indiana. And the damage it's caused at the all-women Catholic school, located next door to the University of Notre Dame, is so serious and irreparable that the consequences ought to be just as severe: President Katie Conboy should resign, along with the entire board of trustees," Warsaw wrote Feb. 15 in National Catholic Register.
The planned policy change not only would have undermined 180 years of school tradition, it would have gone against centuries of church teaching, assistant editorial page writer Nicole Ault wrote in a recent Journal column.
"What alarmed me about the policy is the fact that it was not in accordance with the school's foundations" or "basic" Catholic principles, Macy Gunnell, a St. Mary's sophomore, told The Journal.
It was Gunnell, and junior Claire Bettag, who helped spread the word about the school's plans. They put up posters across campus that quoted Genesis 1:27: "Male and female he created them."
Hundreds of people joined a Facebook group, started by a parent, to express concerns about the new policy. A petition calling for the administration to reverse course received more than 21,000 signatures
"Saint Mary's departs from fundamental Catholic teaching on the nature of woman and thus compromises its very identity as a Catholic woman's college," Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend wrote in a Nov. 27 statement.
St. Mary's College has admitted women only since the Sisters of the Holy Cross founded the college in 1844.
Under Conboy, an online catalog shows that the school's curriculum includes courses called "Queer Theology" and "Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies." The intent is to "promote spiritual offerings from the world's diverse faith traditions."
The university also has opened an LGBTQ+ Center on campus and installed Franciscan Rev. Daniel Horan, an academic and author who promotes gender ideology, as the head of the college's Center for Spirituality.
Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.