The following is an article written for the Georgetown Hoya. For more information go to www.thehoya.com
“Georgetown is as Catholic as you want it to be,” a returning student told me during my first days here last week. This was, mostly, welcome news.
Like many other students I know, I have an uneasy relationship with the faith in which I was raised. As a gay American, I have often felt unwelcome in the Catholic Church and in Catholic schools. I cringe every time I come across the pope’s description of homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered.” I struggle to suppress anger when devout Catholics, discussing homosexuality, instruct others to “hate the sin, love the sinner” — the operative word here being “hate.”
Still, on my own accord, I matriculated at a Catholic college before transferring to Georgetown — another Catholic college. My friends from high school often looked at me in disbelief when I discussed my undergraduate plans (“You’re going where?”). I took their concerns seriously, but I enrolled anyway.
The horrific news last year of widespread child abuse among priests throughout Europe seemed to confirm the apprehensions of my friends. Why would any progressive, tolerant person want to be a part of an organization that had demonstrated such monstrous corruption? It’s a good question, which my old boss, Melinda Henneberger of PoliticsDaily.com, answered well in a column last year, discussing her decision to remain in the Catholic Church.
“There I am and there I will stay,” she wrote. “Why? Well, to return to the world of politics for a comparison, say you were a lifelong Democrat who had learned that those running the [Democratic National Convention] had betrayed your trust in just about every way you could think of. You’d be angry, yes, and I wouldn’t want to be the poor guy trying to get you to open your wallet for the next cycle. But would their perfidy turn you into a Republican? No, you’d keep right on living life as a Democrat because that’s who you are. In the end, it is not about them.”
In the end, of course, it’s not about them. Catholicism is defined by the millions who practice it, not the Vatican, whose reprehensible response to the abuse crisis and whose divisive teachings on social issues — from contraception to homosexuality — have long since repudiated its moral authority.
There is, to be sure, a significant amount of work to be done, starting at the college level. This October marks the one-year anniversary of a string of hate crimes in which three students at Georgetown were assaulted after being called homophobic slurs. In 2008, after vigorous advocacy from students, Georgetown finally established the LGBTQ Resource Center — only after the administration repeatedly denied funding for LGBTQ groups and many years after other leading American universities had set up similar organizations.
It’s no secret that homophobia still pervades campus culture. Last week, I was spending time with a friend in a freshman dorm, playing a video game (reluctantly). We all chose our onscreen characters, which were about to race each other in a four-person dash. A friend selected a strange-looking virtual competitor and received an instant, good-natured snipe from across the room: “Everyone knows that one’s gay!”
But despite the reprehensible actions and misguided teachings of the Catholic Church, and the remaining lack of tolerance here on campus, I would not want to attend college anywhere else. I knew when I enrolled at Georgetown that the most appealing quality of the university was its Jesuit tradition, which maintains that students should use their education to become “men and women for others.” Listening to University President John J. DeGioia’s remarks at convocation this year, which urged students to view education in the context of global poverty, was enough to convince any skeptic that Georgetown is a place where most students use Catholicism as a force for social change, rather than one for division and discrimination.
The Catholic Church has a long way to go. But the chance to receive an education that incorporates the Jesuit commitment to social justice outweighs, by far, the drawbacks that accompany going to a Catholic college.
To be a Catholic, one does not have to embrace the dogmatic patriarchy of the Vatican. As Nicholas Kristof pointed out last April in The New York Times, there is another Catholic Church worth fighting for, made up of largely unsung heroes — from organizations like Catholic Relief Services, which saves lives every day around the world, to the nuns and priests in the Congo, who work tirelessly to feed children and provide basic health care.
As long as we keep this church alive — a church that works for equality and for improving the lives of the world’s poorest citizens — we can all be proud to call it our own.
Peter Fulham is a sophomore at Georgetown University.
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