A Catholic women’s college with historic ties to the University of Notre Dame is reversing its recently announced decision to admit men after alumna, clergy, and parishioner backlash.
In November, Saint Mary’s College announced it would allow men who identify as woman to enroll at the college for the fall 2024 school semester, the Notre Dame student newspaper The Observer first reported. After weeks of uproar over the gender-inclusivity move, which critics said conflicted with the college’s Catholic mission, St. Mary’s shared Thursday that it would revert to female exclusivity.
“This has weighed heavily on our minds and in our hearts,” President Katie Conboy told the Daily Signal in a statement. “There have been many voices responding to us from many places and perspectives. We have listened closely, and we have heard each of you.”
The welcoming of men into the campus community, Conboy said, was viewed as a fulfillment of, rather than deviation from, St. Mary’s Catholic mandate. But many vehemently disagreed.
“Some worried that this was much more than a policy decision: they felt it was a dilution of our mission or even a threat to our Catholic identity,” she added. “Moreover, we clearly underestimated our community’s genuine desire to be engaged in the process of shaping a policy of such significance. As this last month unfolded, we lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity. For this, we are deeply sorry.”
“Taking all these factors into consideration, the Board has decided that we will return to our previous admission policy,” she said. “Although this has been a challenging time for our community, we believe that the College should continually grapple with the complexity of living our Catholic values in a changing world.”
Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, who presides over the Catholic churches and institutions within the diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in Indiana where St. Mary’s is located, played a pivotal role in lobbying the school to abandon its activism.
“It is disappointing that I, as bishop of the diocese in which Saint Mary’s College is located, was not included or consulted on a matter of important Catholic teaching,” Rhoades wrote in a November statement.“In this new admissions policy, 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.”
“To call itself a ‘women’s college’ and to admit male students who ‘consistently live and identify as women’ suggests that the college affirms an ideology of gender that separates sex from gender and claims that sexual identity is based on the subjective experience of the individual,” he said.
In 2019, the Vatican published a report titled “Male and Female He Created Them” holding that gender ideology, which teaches that sex is fluid and changeable, is an affront to God’s natural design for human beings.
Pope Benedict XVI, the predecessor to Pope Francis, warned in 2012 against the emerging idea being embraced by western nations that gender is a construct.
“The very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question,” he said in an address on Christmas of that year.
Claire Ath, who graduated from St. Mary’s in 2018, told the New York Post that hundreds of alumna formed a coalition, even withdrawing donations, to put pressure on the administration to return to the traditional admission standards.
“The desire of Saint Mary’s College to show hospitality to people who identify as transgender is not the problem,” Rhoades said. “The problem is a Catholic woman’s college embracing a definition of woman that is not Catholic.”
While not Catholic, other women’s colleges have blazed the trail for inserting the gender craze into admission’s policies. In March, the student body at Wellesley College, a women’s college, passed a ballot initiative that granted new recognition to women who identify as men and overhauled gendered language they deemed potentially offensive. The school had already welcomed men who “consistently identify as women” as well as females who identify as non-binary, beginning in 2015.