This is the article that appeared in the June 2024 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release, here.
The Catholic Church is opposed to segregation, homosexuality and gender ideology. Yet many Catholic colleges and universities are holding graduation ceremonies that segregate students on the basis of their sexual identities.
St. John’s University in Queens, New York has long had a reputation of being a solid Catholic institution. When we learned that it was holding a Lavender Graduation this year (for the second consecutive time), we sought to learn how common this is on Catholic campuses. For the uninitiated, Lavender Graduation ceremonies exclusively honor homosexual students and those who mistakenly believe they belong to the opposite sex.
What we found would surprise many Catholics.
We randomly chose 40 Catholic colleges and universities, from various geographic regions, to see if they have a separate graduation ceremony for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. We found that 20 did and 20 did not. (The list is available on our website.)
In 2006, St. Mary’s College of California was the first to have a Lavender Graduation. Three years later Georgetown and the University of San Diego followed suit.
Segregated graduation ceremonies at non-Catholic colleges and universities are nothing new: Harvard has long segregated on the basis of race (a win for the KKK) and Columbia intentionally divides students by holding a wide variety of segregated graduations. The commitment these Ivies have to separating students on the basis of ascribed and achieved statuses is outstanding.
But for Catholic institutions of higher learning to promote segregation—on the basis of sexual identity no less—is astounding: they are not only in open defiance of Catholic moral theology, they are working to undermine the work of Pope Francis. Consequently, these schools are virtually indistinguishable from secular colleges and universities. In short, these are rogue Catholic entities.
Bill Donohue once asked a well-known Jesuit priest if he could tell him the difference between Georgetown University and George Washington University. He knew what Donohue meant. He just stared at Donohue.
If students can’t come together on graduation day, there is no reason to continue the fiction that colleges are a community. They are not. Welcome to the New Apartheid (with a sexual twist).
