H*yas for Choice and United Feminists’ announcement that they were undertaking a joint campaign to pressure Georgetown into changing its reproductive rights policies has upset or confounded a number of students.

Now, members of several Catholic groups on campus have responded with a letter to President John DeGioia in support of the University’s current policies, in which they aim to refute the arguments made by HFC and UF that a Jesuit University can and should provide contraceptives, comprehensive sexual education in its medical facilities, and allow for greater dialogue about related topics.

“The students who are currently advocating this ‘Plan A’ campaign fail to understand our identity; they use terms such as ‘Catholic,’ ‘Jesuit,’ and ‘cura personalis’ without a basic understanding of their significance. Although perhaps not grounded in a willful ignorance, their argument nonetheless demonstrates a thorough and pervasive hostility for Georgetown as a Catholic institution rooted in the rich tradition of the Society of Jesus,” the letter states.

Here’s the full letter, which was sent to Vox by Georgetown Academy Editor David Gregory (COL ‘10):

Dear President DeGioia,

It has come to our attention that United Feminists and H*yas for Choice have recently submitted an open letter to your office and the University community at large. We are writing in response in order to point out the errors within their campaign and thought process. We do this not to over-dramatize this issue – which has resurfaced on a regular basis over the past two decades – or to belittle the University’s competency with regards to handling this campaign. We simply write to support our beloved University’s ideals and identity, which inhere within every facet of Georgetown’s operations and campus life.

The students who are currently advocating this “Plan A” campaign fail to understand our identity; they use terms such as “Catholic,” “Jesuit,” and “cura personalis” without a basic understanding of their significance. Although perhaps not grounded in a willful ignorance, their argument nonetheless demonstrates a thorough and pervasive hostility for Georgetown as a Catholic institution rooted in the rich tradition of the Society of Jesus. They advocate for “dialogue,” yet fail to engage in true dialogue given their ignorance of Catholic Social Teaching; there can be no dialogue without preliminary understanding, only empty accusations.

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In a new study that has conservative Catholic groups very alarmed, Georgetown researchers are reporting that Catholic students who attend Catholic Universities are not much more likely to support Catholic teaching than their counterparts at non-Catholic colleges and universities.

The Bulletin—”Philadelphia’s Family Newspaper”—writes:

“The [Georgetown University Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate] study largely confirms a 2003 study released by The Cardinal Newman Society, which found significant declines in students’ support for Catholic moral teaching on abortion, marriage and sexuality after four years at a Catholic college or university. The declines were generally greater at non-Catholic private and public institutions.

“According to the CARA report, 16 percent of students at Catholic colleges and universities become more pro-life and more convinced of traditional marriage, whereas 31 percent become more supportive of legal abortion and 39 percent embrace same-sex ‘marriage.’ Only 7 percent increase attendance at religious services, while 32 percent reduce attendance. Eight percent of Catholic students leave the Catholic faith while attending a Catholic institution.”

CARA researchers also found that attending Catholic college has no statistically significant effect on students’ support for abortion, the death penalty and same-sex marriage. “Students report some improvement in attending religious services (not necessarily Catholic), reading about religion and spirituality (not necessarily Catholic) and deeming it ‘important to improve the human condition’—a concern that is presumably shared outside the Catholic faith,” The Bulletin writes.

“Catholics should be alarmed by the significant declines in Catholic practice and fidelity at many of America’s Catholic institutions,” Patrick Reilly, President of The Cardinal Newman Society shown above with the Pope, said when the finding were presented at the annual conference of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

“Everyone expects a Catholic college to be markedly different from a secular one. Students should be inspired to embrace and deepen their Catholic faith, not negotiate around Catholic moral teaching.”

There are a lot of reasons why students get pumped to go to school in the District—the career opportunities, the inflated sense of self-importance that comes with attending school in the nation’s capital—but Kieran Raval (COL ‘13) was excited that D.C., unlike his hometown, had a Catholic church which offered Latin Mass.

“Personally I’m pretty attached to the traditional Latin Mass. I prefer it. So when I came to Georgetown I was excited about this church, in Chinatown,” Raval said. “But then I talked to some freshman who liked the Latin Mass, too—and I was surprised to find that, especially among freshman.”

Raval saw the opportunity to attend traditional Catholic Mass, which the Second Vatican Council virtually eliminated when it authorized Masses celebrated in the vernacular in the 1960s, without having to get on the Red Line. Now, Georgetown will be host to the first traditional Mass in a while. On Thursday, February 11, at 8 p.m., students will gather in the Copley Crypt to hear Father Murphy give every part of the Mass except for the homily in Latin.

A traditional, or Tridentine Mass will probably be held at the same time and place every other week from then on, Raval said.

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CC to GU: You sure you’re Jesuit?

CatholicCulture.Org reported last week that the former president and CEO of two Planned Parenthood branches now works as a low-level Georgetown administrator at the nursing school. (Well, kind of. They mistakenly reported that she taught at the NHS.)

But in its bizarre ‘gotcha’ series on Jesuit institutions that have connections to Planned Parenthood, Catholic Culture is not finished with Georgetown yet. Its writers have found two more Georgetown faculty with Planned Parenthood ties, these two having served as legal counsel for PP. From the site:

Professor Peter J. Rubin, according to his web page, “served as counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court for, among others, Dr. Timothy Quill and two other doctors in Vacco v. Quill, a challenge to the constitutionality of New York’s ban on physician assisted suicide, and Planned Parenthood in Rust v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court challenge to the abortion ‘gag rule’ imposed in the 1980s upon family planning clinics that received federal funding.”

Professor Julie E. Cohen, who has taught at Georgetown since 1999, was a “member of pro bono team that represented Bay Area Planned Parenthood affiliates in abortion clinic access litigation” from 1992 to 1995, according to her curriculum vitate.

CatholicCulture.org, a Catholic news and commentary site, is in the midst of a series on Catholic schools that point their students toward careers with Planned Parenthood. And in their digging, they turned up something about an adjunct instructor at Georgetown’s School of Nursing and Health Studies that they found interesting—before she worked at Georgetown, Roberta Geidner-Antoniotti worked for Planned Parenthood.

According to her curriculum vitae (download it here), Geidner-Antoniotti was President and CEO of the Mahoning Valley Planned Parenthood from 1990 to 1997, where she increased increased donor loyalty and giving and patient numbers. She held the same job from 1998 to 2000 with Planned Parenthood’s Maryland branch and was an acting project manager with Planned Parenthood Federation of America in the interim.

More recently, she was the CFO of the Whitman-Walker Clinic and has won a host of public awards. At Georgetown, Geidner-Antoniotti is involved with strategic planning and execution.

Geidner-Antoniotti is not trained as a medical doctor (she has a master degree in applied sociology) and does not hold a seem to hold a teaching position at Georgetown, but that didn’t seem to matter to Dr. Jeff Mirus, CatholicCulture.org’s president, who wrote an excoriating editorial to accompany the news piece.

“Any association of this type on the part of a Catholic university is, of course, reprehensible, but it adds insult to injury that the woman in question, Roberta Lynn Geidner-Antoniotti, teaches in the nursing program,” he wrote. “Apparently Georgetown is in the forefront of the contemporary redefinition of health care to include murder.”

At its latest meeting, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to form a task force to look into what actions the group could take to increase its oversight of  Catholic colleges and universities, according to the Associated Press.

Although the details are a bit fuzzy because the meeting was held behind closed doors, Chicago Cardinal Francis George told the AP that the task force will be researching what church law says about the bishops’ authority over schools.  George said that the task force is part of a broader investigation of which groups can legitimately call themselves Catholic.

The Conference of Bishops isn’t the only group taking a look at the issue. The Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, a group Georgetown is a member of, will also be looking at the question of bishops’ authority at its January meeting.

Last night, students and faculty gathered in McNeir auditorium to discuss something that isn’t usually talked about at events sponsored by the Office of Campus Ministry: hooking-up.

In the first of a four-part series on “The Sacred and the Sexual,” Donna Freitas (COL ‘94), author of Sex and the Soul and an assistant professor of religion at Boston University, discussed her findings about the impact of “the hook-up culture” on students’ spirituality.

Freitas defined hooking-up as any kind of intimacy in which the encounter is transitional or temporary and involves shutting off one’s emotional side in order to engage in purely physical activity.  She said  her research shows that students are participating in the hook-up culture not because they enjoy it, but because it’s a norm they feel obligated to conform to.

In a survey she conducted of nearly 600 students, 41 percent reported negative feelings about hooking up (and used descriptors like “used,” “dirty,” “empty,” and “disgusted”), 23 percent expressed ambivalence and 36 percent said they were more or less fine with it.  While those numbers don’t seem too skewed, Freitas said there were very few students who were really positive about hooking up—those who said they were fine with it were really lukewarm.

“Living in the context of hook-up culture made them feel exhausted and empty and spent,” Freitas said.

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The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington provoked quite a stir this week when it announced that it would abandon its contracts with the city unless the D.C. Council changed its proposed same-sex marriage bill.  The church says that the bill could force it to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, so they would no longer be able to provide the charitable services they currently offer.

Patrick Deneen (left), an associate professor of Government at Georgetown and director of the Tocqueville Forum, hosted a chat on the Washington Post’s website yesterday to explain and defend the Archdiocese’s decision.

Deneen spent a large part of the chat trying to re-frame the issue as the church being forced into giving up business relations with the city:

I think the basic premise of the Post’s story requires clarification. The premise of today’s story was that the Catholic Church was threatening to cease to provide charitable services if the law legalizing gay marriage is passed. In point of fact, it is the DC government that would cease to license or contract with the Church unless the Church conformed to a definition of marriage that violates its faith tradition.

Without a set of broader legal exemptions allowing for the Church to remain faithful to its definition of marriage, it will cease to be permitted by the City to provide the contracted and licensed services that it has for well over a century. The Church’s fundamental desire in this controversy is to continue its desire and freedom to serve.

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John Sweeney: Lovable labor leader, or enemy of Catholic doctrine?

Next Thursday, Georgetown will be giving an honorary Doctor of Law degree to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney for his dedication to fighting for better working conditions and human rights for workers. Sounds like some harmless, feel-good ceremony, right? Not to the Cardinal Newman Society.

The conservative Catholic organization which is “dedicated to renewing and strengthening Catholic identity at America’s 224 Catholic colleges and universities,” caught wind of our plans yesterday and called for Georgetown to rescind the honor.

Why the hubbub? The Cardinal Newman Society believes the AFL-CIO’s pro-gay marriage and pro-contraception stances are at odds with Catholic doctrine and should disqualify Sweeney from receiving an honorary degree from Georgetown:

“The Catholic bishops have made it abundantly clear that Catholic universities are not to publicly honor leading opponents of Catholic moral principles, said Patrick J. Reilly, President of The Cardinal Newman Society (CNS). “We strongly urge Georgetown to uphold its Catholic mission and rescind the honor to John Sweeney.”

According to Georgetown’s Director of Media Relations, the University disagrees with CNS’s condemnation. In an email Pino writes:

This criticism is totally unwarranted. Georgetown University awards honorary degrees based on an individual’s distinguished accomplishments over the course of his or her career. Throughout his career, John Sweeney has championed the needs of working people, demonstrating his commitment to principles of Catholic social teaching such as social justice and social equality.

Read the rest of Pino’s response after the jump!

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Yesterday, Georgetown President John DeGioia sat down with WAMU 88.5’s Kojo Nnamdi to chat about the University and its relationship with the Georgetown neighborhood.

DeGioia covered some perennial issues, like being the first lay president of Georgetown, the relevance of a Jesuit education, how Catholic Georgetown students are and fostering intereligious dialogue.

However, he also made his first public comments about the brouhaha over the IHS symbol that was covered during President Obama’s April 14th speech in Gaston Hall:

I can’t emphasis enough how unfair a criticism of the Obama administration this was … When the advance team came in to set up the podium and the background for the speech, what they typically do is set up a blue screen behind the president with American flags. That had the result over covering up one symbol.

The room that that lecture was held in probably has more religious iconography than any room in the city of Washington. it is the most beautiful, but anyone who would doubt the location of that talk being in a Catholic and Jesuit university would have only of had to hear the president’s words himself. In his speech he drew analogies from the Sermon on the Mount. So of all the criticism we have received in recent years, I thought that one was the most unfair.

More about DeGioia’s thoughts on being a good neighbor after the jump!

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