A Drag Show At Notre Dame Is Still A Drag Show

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Introduction

In this bulletin we describe two events marking Notre Dame’s continuing embrace of LGBT culture, one recent and one coming. The earlier event was Notre Dame’s celebration of June as Pride Month, and the coming event is a drag show the Film, Television, and Theatre Department (FTT) plans to stage in November.

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The Drag Show

In its first edition of the fall semester, the Irish Rover published an investigative report on the FTT’s course “Drag on Screen,” which will include a drag performance in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on November 3.

The course is being taught by Professor Pamela Wojcik, Chair of the Department and former Director of Gender Studies.

Professor Wojcik told the Rover that she hopes to “give students knowledge about an art form that has been misdescribed” and that the symposium accompanying the drag show will be “about efforts to ban drag.”

The event has four co-sponsors: Gender Studies, the Departments of Music and American Studies, and the Initiative on Race and Resilience

We don’t know what “misconceptions” about drag shows Professor Wojcik intends to dispel, but the widespread view that these shows are overwhelmingly a symbol of LGBTQ culture and a promotion of its agenda is no misconception. “Drag shows typically occur at LGBT pride parades, drag pageants, cabarets, carnivals, and night clubs,” and drag queens are “most typically gay cisgender men (though there are many drag queens of varying sexual orientations and gender identities).”

As to Film & Theater, it is worth recalling our report earlier this year describing the homosexualization of Shakespeare in productions in which Hamlet and Cyrano de Bergerac were cast as lesbians and university-approved posters of two Shakespearean male characters kissing were displayed throughout the campus.

See also our Postscript below about how dramatists at Notre Dame are extensively rewriting Shakespeare “to advance [gender] equity.”

To its credit, just this past March the university barred a talk and performance by a prominent drag queen proposed by the graduate business school’s LGBTQ club. The Rover reported that the FTT drag show does not appear yet on the Performing Arts Center calendar of events. Perhaps one may hope the last word has not yet been spoken. (The email addresses for Father Jenkins and Provost McGreevey are jjenkins@nd.edu and provost@nd.edu.)

Notre Dame Celebrates Pride Month

On June 1, the nation’s bishops called upon Catholics to 

Join us in honoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus this June, a time to deepen our devotion to His endless love and mercy.

That same day, Notre Dame embraced Pride Month instead.

Displaying a photo showing a LGBTQ+ rainbow linking the Basilica of the Sacred Heart to the Blessed Virgin atop the Golden Dome, Notre Dame declared:

Happy #PrideMonth! We celebrate all LGBTQ+ identities and reaffirm our commitment to being a welcoming, safe and supportive place for ALL members of the Notre Dame family. We see you. We’re glad you’re here. You are an important member of our community.

This is the second time the University has put its name to the event that has become the most prominent means for mobilizing worldwide support for same-sex marriage and gender theory and the full range of other homosexual and transgender demands. As Father Paul D. Scalia observed recently in The Catholic Thing,

[T]he rainbow flag – a political symbol – infects everything during June: stores, churches, schools, city hall. Even baseball. For years, ballparks have sponsored “Pride Night.”  That was bad enough. Today’s secular canonization of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at Dodger Stadium simply reveals Pride’s latent prejudice and intolerance.

Notre Dame first joined this mass celebration of homosexuality and gender malleability in 2021, but when June of 2022 passed unremarked by the University, we hoped the administration had thought better of the stance it should take.

Instead, Notre Dame has fallen back into lockstep with its aspirational peers (YaleHarvardColumbia, Duke and the like), with Notre Dame honoree President Biden (on same-sex marriage, “we etched a simple truth into law:  Love is love”), and with most of the nation’s secular leadership in business and culture.

And fallen out-of-step with the Catholic Church.

NDAA and Pride Month

Pride Month, Gender Theory, and Notre Dame

With the recognition of an LGBTQ+ alumni group, ARC-ND, in Pride Month 2021, the Notre Dame Alumni Association set the stage for promotion of same-sex marriage and gender theory by an official university organization. We have described how the NDAA insured this outcome by collaborating with the same-sex married leadership of the unofficial Gay & Lesbian Alumni Association of Notre Dame and St. Mary’s (GALA) and appointing as president of ARC the same-sex married president of GALA.

It was unsurprising, then, as we have reported, that the first official ARC event was a celebration of champions of same-sex marriage and gender theory. Nor a surprise that the NDAA promoted June as Pride Month in 2022 and 2023.

There is one new element in this year’s University Pride Month announcement – the emphasis on “celebrat[ing] all LGBTQ+ identities.”

This is evidently a short-hand ratification of the administration’s acceptance of gender theory with its bewildering array of gender identities from “aporagender” through “Ipsogender,” “omnigender,”  “tumtum,” and  “winkte” to “xenogender.”

All this, as we have perhaps tiresomely pointed out, is inarguably contrary to Church teaching.

(Those of you who watched, in person or online, the talks by Professor Gerry Bradley of the Law School and Sycamore board member Kathy Kersten at the June Sycamore Trust breakfast heard comprehensive and compelling descriptions of the infirmity and noxious character of gender theory. More on those presentations soon.)

Nevertheless, gender theory has been embraced at Notre Dame at the highest level.  Readers of our bulletins will recall our report on last August’s indoctrination  of freshman in gender theory by the Vice-President of Student Affairs, Rev. Gerald Olinger, C.S.C. 

Father Olinger did not respond to an Open Letter by over 2,000 alumni and other members of the Notre Dame family seeking an explanation, and accordingly Bill Dempsey wrote Father Jenkins to determine whether Father Olinger spoke for the University.

Father Jenkins did not respond, whereupon Bill wrote him that he inferred Father Olinger’s presentation reflected University policy.

Father Jenkins has remained silent, nor has any other university spokesperson distanced the university from Father Olinger’s repudiation of Church teaching.  

From The Sacred Heart of Jesus to Pride Month

We could not find any report of a response by Notre Dame to the bishops’ request to join in honoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  This is especially lamentable because of the special place devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus holds in the history of the University and of the CSC Order.

Blessed Basile Moreau, who founded the Order in 1837, consecrated it to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This consecration was reflected in the dedication of the spiritual centers of the University to the Sacred Heart: first, the 1852 wooden Church of the Sacred Heart, and then the current Basilica of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, in which Mass was first celebrated in 1875. Then there is the statue of the Blessed Heart that stands in its rightful place in front of the 1865 Main Building.

In a letter Father Sorin addressed to his fellow priests on June 20, 1876, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, shortly after the fire that destroyed the Main Building, he announced a “new Novena in honor of the Sacred Heart” and exhorted: 

More than ever, let us place our hopes and prayers and needs in the Sacred Heart-the primary Patron of our Congregation….and whilst our glorious and loving Patron is failing us in nothing, let us not fail first in duty, but endeavor to deserve an increase of blessings.

Conclusion

In his 2007 annual address to the faculty, Father Jenkins said:

To fulfill our mission, our distinctive Catholic character should inform all endeavors of the university.”

Indeed.

Postscript

Diversity, Equity And Inclusion Visit Shakespeare​​

Notre Dame’s 50/50 Shakespeare Project “aims to advance equity” in the world of Shakespeare by changing roles and transferring lines to achieve a substantially equal male-female balance.

Thus, in the recent production of Hamlet, Ophelia has the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy; Horatio, Bernando and Francisco are cast as women; and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are cancelled.

Praising this re-formation of Hamlet and anticipating criticism, Notre Dame’s Shakespeare scholar Dr. Peter Holland declared:

But I say, if we don’t continue to remake Shakespeare, there’s no point in doing Shakespeare.

Take that, Will!

Let us know what you think in the comment section below.

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Oremus

Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. (1 Cor 3:18-19)

O God our Father, Eternal Wisdom and Love, You have created us in Your own image and likeness, and called us to live in humble obedience to You and according to the order which You have established to govern the universe. You sent Your Son, Wisdom Incarnate, to save us from sin and to reconcile us to You and to one another. He established the Church to be a saving witness of Wisdom and Love, Goodness and Truth to a rebellious world. We implore You to dispel the darkness that surrounds us. May all who have rejected the truths of creation, seeking to replace Your design for the human race with one of their own, be awakened to the destructive folly which passes for wisdom in this age. Enlighten us all by the Truth which sets us free and grant that we may courageously embrace the scorn and contempt of the wise of the world so that we may joyfully share in the Wisdom of God. Through the intercession of Notre Dame, our Mother, we make our prayer in the Name of Jesus, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.

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