Thoughts on Our Jesuit Inheritance, Part I

Two summers ago, there was a display of lamppost banners around the Hoval, each one advertising a value related to Holy Cross’ Jesuit identity. At the top of each banner was the phrase: “Jesuit Heritage.” It did not say “Jesuit values,”  “Jesuit mission,” or “Jesuit identity.” The word heritage may mean a few different things, but it certainly suggests something received from the past [1]. It may or may not refer to something still living. A man may speak of his “Catholic Heritage,” but this does not guarantee that you will see him at Mass next Sunday. The question, then, is whether this inheritance continues as a living identity, a decorative heirloom, or something in between. Is Holy Cross “Jesuit,” or merely “raised Jesuit?”

The word “Jesuit” is often thrown around at Holy Cross, but there is not a clear understanding of what it means, especially as it relates to our college. If you asked a member of our community a hundred or even fifty years ago what made Holy Cross a Jesuit college, they probably would have looked at you strangely and replied, “Why, the Jesuits, of course!” Today the answer is not so obvious. One needs only to walk from Loyola to Ciampi, then to the new Jesuit residence to get a visual impression of the decline in the number of actual Jesuits who live at Holy Cross. The average student interacts with Jesuits rarely, if at all. We no longer have a Jesuit president, and few Jesuits remain in administration. There are only a handful of Jesuit professors, mostly in Religious Studies. And perhaps most surprisingly, only one out of our dozen chaplains is a Jesuit. This should not be surprising, considering our Church’s vocation shortage, but it makes the answer to our question much less obvious. Our “Jesuit-ness” is no longer incarnate in the collared figures who walk around our campus. It is now more abstract; we cannot point to it. We must recognize first, then, that it is unclear what makes a college “Jesuit” if not Jesuits, and that we are at risk of losing whatever that is.

What does Holy Cross herself have to say? The “Jesuit, Catholic Tradition” section of our website [2] identifies three ways “we honor the Jesuit legacy” (again, suggesting the past). They are: “humanistic studies,” “solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised,” and “a diverse community of participants.” These are good and desirable things. They surely do flow from the Jesuit charism and tradition. But they cannot be what makes Holy Cross Jesuit; non-Jesuit colleges are just as capable of these things. Do we do them better? Maybe. But they are exterior. They are what we do, not who we are. They are, in soteriological language, Holy Cross’ “works.” Just as we are not saved by works [3], we are likewise not “made Jesuit” by them either. Holy Cross is made Jesuit by its faith, none other than the Catholic Faith, expressed through the particular Jesuit charism.  

It may seem obvious to some, but the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus) are a religious order within the Catholic Church. As a clarifying note, this means that “Jesuit” has a narrow meaning that does not apply to us students or the wider college community, despite the applicability of broader categories like “Jesuit charism.” More importantly, this means that Jesuits exist in the context of the Catholic Faith, and any identity that is not properly Catholic cannot, by definition, be a Jesuit identity. This means that when Holy Cross departs from the Catholic Church (not only in explicit matters of faith but also in ethical matters), it separates itself that much from its Jesuit identity. This is not to say that non-Catholics are or should be unwelcome at Holy Cross, but merely that any institution whose core is not Catholic cannot be Jesuit. With this in mind, I do not think it is controversial to say that Holy Cross largely departs from the Catholic Church on matters of faith in thought and practice, and a still larger portion departs on ethical matters. Insofar as this is the case, Holy Cross can only pretend to be authentically Jesuit. The name “Holy Cross” is not enough, our statues of saints are not enough, and the fact that many of our students grew up going to Catholic school is not enough when we are not Christians. As long as we are not Christians, our Jesuit heritage remains merely that, heritage.

But is that it? Shall we use the Jesuits rolling in their graves in our cemetery to power the PAC? Shall we Catholics be content complaining as Holy Cross becomes increasingly “progressive,” increasingly secular, and thus less Jesuit? Shall we be cynics, satisfied with our laughter when our friends and family ask, “So is your school, like, really religious?” A pessimist may say yes, but pessimism is not Christian. Any Fenwick Review writer could write a long and provocative article about all the ways Holy Cross fails to be authentically Catholic and thus fails to be Jesuit. Maybe that is necessary. But it is not enough. What we need is to identify where Holy Cross lives out its Jesuit Charism well, and work to strengthen these points. We need to claim our Jesuit inheritance. We must participate in and promote the sacramental life of the Church at Holy Cross. We must adopt authentic Ignatian modes of prayer. We must preach the Gospel. We must pursue academic excellence, and scholarship which seeks truth and advances the cause of faith, rather than subversion. We Catholics must live in such a way that reveals the fruits of the Jesuit charism so that Holy Cross will see what it means to be authentically “Jesuit.”

Endnotes

[1] The OED defines Heritage as “the condition or state transmitted from ancestors.” Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “heritage (n.), sense 4,” June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5778821977.

[2] “Jesuit, Catholic Tradition,” College of the Holy Cross, accessed November 5, 2024, https://www.holycross.edu/about-us/jesuit-catholic-tradition. 

[3] According to the Council of Trent, session six, canon 1: “If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.”

The Crisis of Meaning at Holy Cross

I have been a student here at Holy Cross for four years. I have lived and breathed this campus for four years of my life. I have been immersed in various classes, social groups, campus events, and way too many Thirsty Thursdays at Weagle. Even after all this immersion, I still do not know what it truly means to be a Holy Cross student. 

However, I do know that I have been inundated with a lot of slogans that tell me what it means to be a Holy Cross student. According to these slogans, a Holy Cross student must be “a man or woman for and with others,” who always seeks “magis” and “cura personalis” above all else. By themselves, these slogans are pretty good. Who is opposed to being a “man or woman for and with others?” Are we going to be men and women for ourselves? Or cura personalis? Are we really just going to care for one aspect of ourselves to the detriment of the rest? Nonsense. The vast majority of people, even those outside Jesuit-sponsored institutions, intuitively understand that these things are good and important. 

These slogans allow Holy Cross to escape from answering the big question of “what does it mean to be a member of this community.” The administration uses these amorphous statements as a substitute for answering the tough questions posed at the beginning of our mission statement. These questions, which you might have glanced at in Montserrat (which, by far, is one of the most misguided programs at Holy Cross), are very good. In order to live the good life, we must figure out “how to find meaning in life and history” and “what are our obligations to one another.” It is impossible to live a truly human life without answering these questions.

The sad fact is that Holy Cross has made these questions, which lie at the heart of the College’s current mission statement, impossible to answer. They have made them impossible to answer because, above all else, Holy Cross has made the institutional decision to become a corporate institution. 

You might be asking what is the difference between a corporate institution and an educational institution. Well, for starters, a corporate institution seeks above all else the minimization of conflict, the maximization of the endowment, and the growth of the administrative bureaucracy. Can anybody with a straight face tell me that these goals are not the main goals of our administration? 

An educational institution does not seek these things. These goals, while sometimes important for the survival of the institution, are not the telos of an educational institution. To Holy Cross, these three corporate prongs are our final end. We have no greater end. Our end is not “in hoc signo vinces” or “ad maiorem Dei gloriam,” but rather it is “make sure that we soothe the concerns of alumni (whether they are progressive or conservative; old or young; white or non-white) enough that they are still willing to remember us, and the endowment, in their will.”

This corporate model has inevitably hurt the student body because it has produced an administration that is fundamentally incapable of giving students anything more than amorphous, relatively subjective, and undefinable slogans. For example, can anybody really define for me what it means to be “a man or woman for and with others?” Or, does it just mean whatever I want it to be? 

The scariest consequence of the administration’s corporate approach to institutional management is that they have entrusted these questions to people who fundamentally disagree with the mission of our college: the progressive academic.

Our faculty, composed mostly of very kind and overly generous people, is also stacked with dangerous ideologues. The faculty, by and large, has proposed solutions to these fundamental questions, but many of these solutions are inhuman and drastically opposed to the traditional mission of our college. Their solutions are not grounded in claims of Truth, but rather you will hear plenty of variants of “the truth is whatever you want it to be,” “objective truth does not exist,” or “just live your (undefined, subjective, and constantly transforming) truth, babe” from them. 

By grounding their answers in these morally relativistic terms, they have fundamentally destroyed the student body’s ability to answer these questions. Every man, woman, and child who labored to answer these questions in generations past would have been unable to answer them without resting them on solid, morally secure foundations. However, the progressive academics have intentionally destroyed this capacity in order to fulfill their ideological goal–the transformation, and thus destruction, of the liberal arts and humanities.

The modern academic is not a traditional academic, rather they are ideological conquistadores intent on colonizing the liberal arts and humanities in an attempt to “decolonize” and deconstruct them. In their opinion, one does not become a “man or woman for and with others” through living lives of charity and faith; rather, one only becomes a “man and woman for and with others” through actively working to dismantle “systems of oppression” and “recentering” social structures both on and off campus (ideas that would have been very foreign to Ignatius, Fenwick, and Arrupe).

The question remains: what can we, people who are opposed to this ideological colonization and believe that the administration is weak-kneed, do about this institutionally existential crisis? 

The answer is honestly not much. Holy Cross has made the active decision to become an Amherst College with a pretty chapel. No amount of complaining, arguing, or writing op-eds in The Fenwick Review will change this fact. As a result, somebody has to lay out a plan for institutional recapture, and the good thing is that, unlike the progressive academic, we do not have to start from scratch. The plan for institutional recapture has been laid out since 1843.

The plan is evident in our campus’ architecture. Holy Cross was built by men who believed in the good, true, and beautiful. And so, they built a campus that corresponded to all that is good, true, and beautiful. There is no greater example of such a building than Dinand Library. Dinand, an intentionally imposing neoclassical structure, tells that our mission is “ut cognoscant te solum deum verum et quem misisti Iesum Christum.” Institutionally, we exist in order for students to be able to “know you, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you sent.” That is our mission. 

Holy Cross also knew that one can only truly know Christ and live this mission through the liberal arts and humanities. One can only truly be immersed within this tradition by studying “religio, philosophia, ars, literae, historia, scientia, medicina, jus.” These disciplines “nourish youth [and] delight old age.” They make us human. They answer these fundamental questions posed in our current mission statement. The works, conquests, and ideas of men such as Aquinas, Benedict, Bellarmine, Columbus, Copernicus, Dante, à Kempis, and Justinian (whose names are all prominently featured in the Main Reading Room) are examples of individuals (and there are many more, including modern, female, and non-Western figures) who show us what it means to be truly human and Christian. These figures have engaged in the Great Conversation through studying and participating in the triumphs and failings of our civilization, the liberal arts, and the Church. They are the models that our administration and faculty should point us toward.

Holy Cross, like much of our world, is in a crisis of meaning. We are unable and unwilling to answer the fundamental questions posed by our very institution because our current corporate administration acts primarily out of fear. As a result, they leave these human questions to the province of ideologues whose intent seems to be the destruction of the institution itself. However, this story does not have to end with Ignatius wishing that the cannonball hit his head instead of his leg, rather Holy Cross can go “ad fontes.” Holy Cross can return to the sources of her heritage, her very self, as evidenced through her very campus. There, she will find the answers that she poses to herself; there, she will be able to tell her students what it truly means to be a member of this college.

How the Humanities Died

In his 1954 inaugural lecture as the first chair and professor of “Medieval and Renaissance English” at Cambridge, C.S. Lewis says that, though it is not within his power to treat the whole field, “this appointed area must primarily appear as a specimen of something far larger, something which had already begun when the Iliad was composed and was still almost unimpaired when Waterloo was fought…I shall be unable to talk to you about my particular region without constantly treating things which neither began with the Middle Ages nor ended with the end of the Renaissance. In this way I shall be forced to present to you a great deal of what can only be described as Old European, or Old Western, culture” [1]. I think C.S. Lewis would lament the absence of this “Old Western culture” in many Holy Cross humanities classrooms. In many of our literature classes, students emerge uneducated on the culture and history out of which classic pieces of writing were produced. Instead, they emerge with knowledge of how to manipulate these works to fit their own purposes. I hope to offer my opinion as a student of English and Spanish literature, informed by the thoughts of C.S. Lewis, as to why it seems plausible that the humanities are declining and criticized for not being serious areas of study.

My first reason is that many teachers and students have lost the ability to relate to the past. As a result, we miss the invaluable opportunity that literature gives us to engross ourselves in a different world and a different mentality. One example of our disconnect is our failure to understand the religiosity of our predecessors. Lewis notes: “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not” [2]. The post-Christian character of many academics makes it difficult for them to pick up on religious references in classic pieces of literature which in turn diminishes their students’ understanding of the material. Jeffrey Knapp, author of Shakespeare’s Tribe, mentions: “On the level of practical criticism, secularist readings of Renaissance plays have failed to explain some of the most prominent recurring plots, themes, and character types in the plays, or even to notice the existence of such recurrences” [3]. We speak a different language now; we quickly pass over Shakespeare’s many references to Doomsday because we have lost the sense of its gravity and meaning, a meaning that Christians throughout the ages would have understood. Because of this lost sensibility, we begin to lose access to the mind of Shakespeare.

As a result of our ruptured relationship with the past, many classes attempt to discuss pieces of classic literature from a time period distinct from our own through the use of modern critical lenses without teaching much about the traditions and cultures from which these pieces emerged.

Some have preserved this lost art. To illustrate what I mean, I will cite an example from a class with a professor who has maintained this ability to have a healthy relationship with the past. In my class Shakespeare’s Contemporaries, the professor posed a question to the class: “Who has thought today: am I going to Heaven or Hell?” The class was silent. He responded, “The Elizabethans thought about that every day.” Through a jarring question, we were transported to a time distinct from our own. However, this class was an exception. In many other classes, we would have focused on class struggles, perception of women, questions of identity and sexuality, etc. Accordingly, we would likely have brought modern presumptions into our study of history’s best literature so that we were no longer studying history or literature at all but learning how to manipulate the material to fit our own agendas.

Learning about and immersing ourselves in the past does not enslave us to it. Lewis argues, “I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past” [4]. I think we as students are becoming bound to a fairly recent past by only learning to work with modern presumptions. I fear that our literary education is equipping us with the ability to perform one, low-level party trick: do shallow, unhistorical criticism of great literature. This subjectivity and infinite malleability diminishes the seriousness of the humanities: we become the stereotype of literature majors who do not have to do work (because reading our own opinions into literature does not often require reading the literature), who go to class and just talk about their feelings, and who write nonsense, and as long as the professor agrees with our nonsense, we get an A. 

The seriousness of the humanities is regained when we remember that reading great pieces of literature and immersing ourselves in the ideas of great authors enrich our minds. By applying various modern critical lenses onto literature and reading our own ideas into it, “we are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves"[5]. I think we would do well to follow Lewis’s advice and, when studying literature from the Old Western tradition, to immerse ourselves in this tradition: “Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.” [6]. Then we can escape the danger of meeting only ourselves, and maybe then we can meet people like Cervantes and Shakespeare.

Endnotes 

[1] C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 11-12.

[2] Ibid., p.5.

[3] Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), p.2.

[4] Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, p.4.

[5] Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 85.

[6] Ibid., p.19.

Where are the rights for student journalism?

Like the United States Constitution, Holy Cross’s Community Standards provide students important guarantees of some very important rights. These include “access to ideas, facts and opinions, the right to express ideas and discuss ideas with others, and the right to “expression of opinion, which includes the right to state agreement or disagreement with the opinions of others and the right to an appropriate forum for the expression of opinion.” I encourage all students to familiarize themselves with these rights (and the Standards more broadly), and to think about the ways that they are exercised every day on campus.

But students who thoroughly review the Standards will not find specific protections for student journalists such as the students who manage and write for The Fenwick Review, The Spire, and The College Street Journal, or for literary publications like fósforo and The Purple. It might be said that such outlets are protected by students’ rights to access ideas, but such a phrase seems to indicate the right of students to read such publications, rather than the right to produce them. Student journalists exercise their rights to express their opinion, and these publications are certainly the “appropriate forum” in which to do so. But the United States’ 232-year experience with the First Amendment has consistently demonstrated that the freedom of the press can only be sustained when the rights of the press are clearly and positively delineated. Might it be an improvement to clearly state such journalistic rights in Holy Cross’s Community Standards?

For instance, a student’s right to express their opinion in an appropriate forum is clearly met by the publication of these journals. Would that right be infringed upon if freely-distributed copies of such appropriate fora were systematically destroyed? This happens more often than you might think. Last year copies of Keene State College’s student newspaper The Equinox were stolen. The culprits—caught on camera—were members of a sorority who were angry about an article investigating violations of the campus masking policy at sorority parties. In 2020, members of Virginia Commonwealth University’s student government association stole copies of the student-run Commonwealth Times because they were upset about an article exposing a “toxic” environment in student government.

This may happen so often because press opponents believe that, because these campus publications are free, they can be taken with impunity. The reality is that the theft of newspapers—even those freely distributed—is an attack on press freedom. Often, however, colleges turn a blind eye to such de facto censorship, and student journalists are understandably reluctant to involve the police in such matters--though it is their right to do so. Students should not have to go to such lengths in order to defend their rights. Colleges should demonstrate their support for the freedom of the press by explicitly prohibiting newspaper theft on campus. Indeed, colleges are among the few places where free distribution of physical newspapers remains a central element of the media landscape, and for this reason alone should ensure that such outlets receive special protection.

It is also unclear that student journalists on campus are protected from prior restraint on what they publish. Again, this happens more often than you might think. At Quinnipiac University, The Quinnipiac Chronicle was prohibited from publishing a series of articles on—get this—university efforts to censor student publications. The University claimed that “student leaders…are expected to generally be supportive of university policies”--a policy that makes a mockery of the notion of freedom of the press. The University of North Alabama fired the advisor of its student newspaper when student journalists investigated the sudden and unexplained banning of a professor from campus.

I’m unaware of anything like this happening at Holy Cross. As advisors to this publication, Prof. Greg Burnep and I have made clear to the editors that they should never allow anyone—including their advisors—to exercise prior restraint on the publication of any article.  Colleges as a whole should make similar pledges--to refrain from censoring student publications. Without such explicit protections, student journalists remain uncertain about what might happen if they did.

Finally, like students everywhere, student journalists are in danger of having their rights delimited by inappropriate exploitation of the university’s disciplinary processes. At Brandeis University, student journalists were charged with privacy violations when they published quotes from speakers at a rally—even though their comments were made publicly. At the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, a professor filed an official gender discrimination complaint against a student paper because of a satirical article suggesting that the university was planning to build a vagina-shaped building. After a months-long investigation, the student satirist was cleared, but one would wonder if they would dare risk another such investigation, or if they were subtly told that future investigations might take into account the fact that they had been accused previously. In Supreme Court parlance, this is called a “chilling effect” on press freedom because journalists are discouraged from writing about subjects that they fear might upset others.

In cases like this, members of the student press are effectively censored via a bait-and-switch tactic that exploits disciplinary procedures designed to ensure student safety, or prevent gender discrimination, or regulate behavior. Knowing that censorship is frowned upon, press opponents instead claim that constitutionally-protected content violates policies that are technically unrelated to content. Colleges should recognize such charges for what they are—a violation of the rights of both authors and readers of student journalism. They can take a stand against this by explicitly affirming the rights of journalists, and clarifying that people who don’t like what they read in the papers should take up their pens rather than filing formal complaints to punish journalists individually.

In an age in which journalists globally are under threat from a variety of regimes, everyone should renew their care for freedom of the press. And if you care about freedom of the press, you should care about freedom of the student press. This isn’t because every student should be comforted by what every publication will say. It is because a community without a free press lacks a valuable tool for holding power-wielders of all sorts in check. But perhaps more important for college campuses, student journalism forces the community to face ideas that are not on the official agenda, or absent from syllabi, or taboo in residence halls. Student journalists, in this way, fulfill the College’s  Mission Statement call for us to “join in dialogue about basic human questions.” That is a purpose worth enshrining in college policy. 

Holy Cross Must Ban Pornography

Aylo, the parent company of the pornography giant Pornhub, was recently sued by victims of sex trafficking for the tenth time in the last three years [1]. These victims claim that Aylo knowingly uploaded videos of their sexual assault for profit. These two hundred and fifty-seven victims, mostly high-school and college-aged women, state that these videos were products of sexual coercion and published without their consent. 

Sadly, these women are not the only victims of the porn industry’s continuing cycles of violence. Millions of men, women, and children worldwide have become victims of sex trafficking, sexual assault, rape, trauma, and despair due to the proliferation of internet pornography. These individuals often remain stuck in cycles of sexual and physical violence, experience high rates of suicidality and post-traumatic stress disorder, and have their lives destroyed by the effects of pornography. 

Pornographers know that their industry causes death, despair, and destruction for countless individuals, and they are still willing to perpetuate this violence for profit. However, this does not mean that the College of the Holy Cross needs to continue tacitly supporting this industry of injustice, sin, and violence. 

The College of the Holy Cross allows pornography to be easily accessed through the school’s WiFi servers. While Holy Cross limits access to other websites on its networks, users can easily access these pornographic websites that continue to profit from the trafficking and exploitation of other human beings. By allowing these websites to be accessed on the school’s WiFi networks, Holy Cross fails to fulfill its mission, which asks members of the campus community to consider “what is our special responsibility to the world’s poor and powerless?” [2]. Our special responsibility is not to further the exploitation of vulnerable people by the pornography industry, but rather it is to take a moral stand by installing pornography filters on the college’s WiFi servers. The administration of the College of the Holy Cross must install filters that ban internet pornography, as pornography demeans human life, harms our student body, and is inherently contrary to the college’s mission. 

Habitual drug consumption leads to massive changes in one’s actions, personality, and lifestyle. An addict’s reality becomes distorted, and chemical changes in the brain make the person different than they once were. Pornography, like all other drugs, changes people for the worse, as it teaches one to devalue the beauty of human life. Researchers have found that eighty-eight percent of the top viewed pornographic videos contain physical violence, and around fifty percent of these videos contain verbal assaults [3]. Men who frequently consume pornographic material are less [4] likely to hold egalitarian views on women and significantly more [5] likely to commit dating and sexual violence. Pornography distorts sexual reality, and it reduces people into sexual objects. Sex becomes a purely physical and transactional relationship in which one person fulfills another’s momentary needs while forgoing their emotional and spiritual well-being. A pornographic view of human sexuality devalues our common humanity, as people are now viewed by others as objects to acquire rather than human beings to intimately love. 

Pornography is not an abstract worry that does not affect those of us who live and work on Mount St. James, rather it affects every person who calls our campus home. Recent studies show that fifty-six percent of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine admit to watching pornography within the past year, and almost eighty percent of them have watched it within the last month.  Sixty percent of daily pornography users feel isolated or lonely, over seventy-five percent of daily users feel self-conscious or insecure about their appearance, and only twenty-six percent feel satisfied with their sex life. Pornography also impacts the formation and flourishing of relationships [6]. Pornography has been linked to difficulty in maintaining sexual arousal, feelings of sexual inadequacy, lower levels of relationship trust, lower levels of communication, and even higher rates of infidelity in relationships [7]. 

This crisis affects our student body–and if you do not think so just listen to most conversations between men on campus behind closed doors. But this article is not meant to shame people who watch pornography, rather it is to sound the clarion call that the student body of Holy Cross needs the college’s administration help to solve this issue. We cannot change the culture of our campus without the administration’s help. These issues affect every student on this campus. Every student’s personal life, relationship with their peers, and social life are all negatively affected by pornography’s presence. If our campus is truly full of “men and women for and with others,” then we cannot be a campus that allows this drug, which isolates, destroys relationships, and changes one’s perspective on the other sex, to be easily accessible through the school’s WiFi.

Easily accessible internet pornography is also contrary to the college’s mission as a Catholic institution sponsored by the Society of Jesus. Our mission statement claims that our institution is “linked with an obligation to address the social realities of poverty, oppression, and injustice in our world” [8]. Reality shows us that pornography exacerbates poverty, oppression, and injustice for those who participate in pornographic videos, and it oppresses the souls of those who indulge in it. Pornography also undermines the college’s commitment to “the service of faith and justice” [9]. Our shared Catholic faith has consistently seen pornography as an evil that destroys human dignity, hurts the souls of all involved, cheapens love and the marital relationship, and continues a grave injustice against our fellow man. If we actually were committed to serving faith and justice on our campus, then it would be obvious that pornography must be banned.

The College of the Holy Cross claims to be an institution that “recognizes the inherent dignity of all human beings,” but our actions do not show that [10]. Holy Cross perpetuates injustice against its students, the broader community, and mankind by allowing easy access to pornography. This institution has the ability to change the culture of the campus from the top down, and it successfully has changed it before. In this case it can do so again. The college’s administration talks a good deal about creating a just campus environment that advocates against injustice in all of its forms, but anyone can obviously see that there is much more work to be done. However, this time Holy Cross can truly commit to creating a campus culture of men and women who stand for and with each other by installing pornography filters on our WiFi networks. If we want to remain true to our mission, then there is no other option.

Endnotes

[1] Breccan F. Thies, “Pornhub hit with 10th sex trafficking lawsuit,” The Washington Examiner, October 4, 2023, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pornhub-hit-tenth-sex-trafficking-lawsuit.

[2] College of the Holy Cross Mission Statement, https://www.holycross.edu/about-us/mission-statement.

[3] Bridges AJ, Wosnitzer R, Scharrer E, Sun C, Liberman R., “Aggression and sexual behavior in best-selling pornography videos: a content analysis update,” Violence Against Women, 2010 Oct;16(10):1065-85, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20980228/.

[4] Hald, G.M., Malamuth, N.N. and Lange, T., “Pornography and Sexist Attitudes Among Heterosexuals”, Journal of Communication, 63: 638-660, (2013), https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12037.

[5] Rodenhizer, K. A. E., & Edwards, K. M., “The Impacts of Sexual Media Exposure on Adolescent and Emerging Adults’ Dating and Sexual Violence Attitudes and Behaviors: A Critical Review of the Literature,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 20(4), 439-452, https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838017717745.

[6] Daniel Cox, et al., “How Prevalent is Pornography?,” The Institute for Family Studies, May 3, 2022, https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-prevalent-is-pornography.

[7] Naomi Brower, “Effects of Pornography on Relationships,” Utah State University, April 2023, https://extension.usu.edu/relationships/research/effects-of-pornography-on-relationships. 

[8] College of the Holy Cross Mission Statement.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Vincent Rougeau, “A Community and a College for All,” Email, August 24, 2023.

Modernity’s Maternity: Janice Chik Breidenbach’s “Philosophy of Motherhood”

We all have mothers. We grow and develop in our mothers’ wombs, and then they carry us into the world. How maternal relationships affect our lives after birth varies among individuals, but our preborn development is a universal experience. Our mothers shape our reality from conception. They are our first human connection. What do we know about motherhood? We understand perfectly the biological development of a child in the womb, but we possess limited psychological and philosophical research about this process, and about the continuation of that connection after birth. Janice Chik, professor of philosophy at Ave Maria College in Florida, seeks to unravel the deep and unexplored philosophy of motherhood. At her talk at Holy Cross on March 28, she posed two questions: why is the study of motherhood untouched by philosophers, and why is motherhood so unpopular today?

Chik gave three reasons for the lack of philosophical work done on motherhood. She suggested first that because motherhood is subjective, it may be challenging to universalize mothers’ different experiences and develop a cohesive study. Motherhood is extremely personal and evokes radically different responses from everyone. The second possibility she raised, in a half-joking manner, is that most philosophers tend not to be mothers themselves, so motherhood is not of any interest to them. The philosophers that mention motherhood portray it negatively. Chik cited Plato’s Symposium, a Socratic dialogue that places Socrates in a drinking party making social commentary and debating with fellow Athenians. Socrates’ character Diotima distinguishes between a biological pregnancy and a “pregnancy” of ideas, the latter of which is far superior. It is good to impregnate women, Diotima argues, because in this way we can pursue immortality through perpetuating our lineages. However, it is even better to “impregnate” young men with wisdom and learning, because ideas are more immortal than people. We should note that Diotima is the only female speaker in all of the Platonic dialogues. Philosophy trumps motherhood. The third reason Chik supplies is slightly more extreme: some thinkers, such as the modern feminist philosopher Jeffner Allen, suppose that motherhood is “dangerous to women” and contributes to the “annihilation of women” because it further compels them into patriarchal domination. Allen argues that we should abandon motherhood altogether.

Arguing for motherhood’s philosophical essence, Chik contended that the diversity of experience among mothers contributes to the richness of motherhood. In contextualizing and relating these different experiences, we can reach a common conclusion about its psychological and philosophical importance. She then expounded Aristotle’s claim that we are “rational animals.” Our nature, as she observed, prepares us well for motherhood. Like all animals, we grow and nourish our young. However, we also have the benefit of reflecting on that relationship. Why shouldn’t we attempt to understand motherhood beyond its biological nature, especially since we are not limited to our biological nature? Finally, Chik referenced modern metaphysicist L.A. Paul, who argues that motherhood is a “transformative experience.” We ought to explore phenomena that can pull us out of our current state of life into something completely different, that turns our self-orientation inside-out.

L.A. Paul also argues that we cannot know what our own experience of motherhood will be like. She states in her book Transformative Experiences that modernity calls couples to deeply consider what outcome parenting will have on their happiness. Modern parenting guides pose a number of factors to spouses, many of which are about personal satisfaction and finding meaning in one’s life. Chik suggested that modernity’s notion of self-seeking and self-realization clashes with maternity, which is humanity’s most intimate and arguably most selfless relationship. Modernity seeks to free human beings from the bounds of nature in order to achieve total self sufficiency. Motherhood’s essence contradicts this goal. It involves four unchangeable, biological facts: conception between a man and a woman to create a life, gestation, childbirth, and breastfeeding. Motherhood cannot progress past nature because it is nature: it is one of those stubborn, unchangeable facts about humanity that binds us to our brute-selves.

Chik referred to “three C’s” of modernity that compete with motherhood: control, commodification, and careerism. The first principle, control, insists that women must regulate and minimize motherhood, or else they are not equal to men. We control human life and our destiny. We have agency, and we have knowledge of our agency. Motherhood thrusts us out of control. Women have physical limitations that we didn’t invent, like lactation and pregnancy. We can’t control the baby’s development in the womb. After birth, we can’t control if our baby cries in public. We must care for it anyways, and it will not understand if we scold or attempt to correct it. Chik argues that this lack of control is good. Motherhood humbles us and it reflects the reality of human beings. It shows us that we cannot have complete control over our lives. It makes us more willing to embrace people who may inconvenience us, and it reminds us to love the helpless and bothersome. Chik then highlighted the beauty in pregnancy’s passivity. She referenced Josef Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture, in which Pieper argues that culture is most fruitful when human beings are able to be at rest, when they do not push themselves to constantly labor and toil. She likens this receptivity to pregnancy. Catholics hold that God shares his transcendental qualities, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, with humanity as divine gifts: they require no action from our end besides a simple “yes.” The woman has no action in the benefits she reaps from being pregnant, nor does she initiate the emotional connection between herself and her child. She is the “creative artist” of her child, providing its environment and forming it, but she herself has no control over this process.

The second “C” of modernity that conflicts with motherhood is commodification. Children are reduced to their commercial value, emphasizing costliness and greatly decreasing their appeal to prospective parents. Chik aptly pointed out the absurdity of attempting to place a monetary value on new life. Modernity tends to place babies in a parasitic framework, especially within pregnancy: babies are seen as thieves of mothers’ resources. Scientifically, pregnancy is actually quite beneficial to the mother. It increases levels of estrogen and androgen, improving hair growth and shine. Studies have shown that it improves blood levels and increases oxygen, which boosts metabolism. Popular thought likes to perceive mothers as being sacrificial. On the other hand, Chik countered, motherhood has mutual psychological and spiritual benefits for the mother and the child.

The third “C” is careerism. Careerism asserts that our identity isn’t relational: it’s found in our wage-related work. It also affirms again that women have to be in the working world in order to be equal to men. Chik remarked that the denigration of motherhood is not strictly a modern idea. Since ancient times, careers have been considered better labor than motherhood. After all, motherhood does not provide sick days or health insurance. Rather, motherhood participates in the act of Creation. Like Christ’s love, it houses the homeless. It may seem oppressive to some, but in reality, it is a participation in divine grace.

In response to these three ideas, Chik stated that we must reorient ourselves to the theological. Motherhood involves the production of an immortal soul. No other station in life can do this. She likened the experience of pregnancy to the Eucharist: it is the offering up of one’s body for another. It is a totally selfless and life-giving vocation that accepts the earthly stranger and submits to God. For many women, motherhood is the “fiat” that transforms their lives. It unites them with Mary in her “yes” at the Annunciation that set the events of salvation into motion. It further joins them with Christ’s love for God the Father in His passion. It is transformative and philosophical and glorifies the nature of womanhood. As Catholic philosopher Alice von Hildebrand once said, “woman by her very nature is maternal – for every woman, whether married or unmarried, is called upon to be a biological, psychological, or spiritual mother — she knows intuitively that to give, to nurture, to care for others, to suffer with and for them — for maternity implies suffering — is infinitely more valuable in God’s sight than to conquer nations and fly to the moon.”

An SGA Exposé

Our friends at The College Street Journal released an article taking a look at the Student Government Association budget in an earlier issue. Because of the confines of being an economic journal, they limited their assessment and purely gave the facts. I would like to expand further on the facts that they presented and looking at those facts, it is apparent that the SGA budget is bloated with funding to groups that are not accessible to the majority of students, that is crowd funded by the mandatory student activity fee. Moving beyond finances, the general attitude towards race, ethnicity, and identity related student organizations presents the pinnacle of college liberal white savior behavior. I would like to make it clear that this is not a judgment on the groups that are receiving the money as I have no issue with their existence or their monetary claims, or the SGA members who composed it who I am sure mean well, but rather the long standing culture and precedent that college liberalism has come to be. All information here is publicly available and no rules were broken to receive it. This is an exercise in the democratic process and transparency that SGA desperately needs.

The SGA budget is rife with strange monetary allocations to groups one probably would not expect to be funded by SGA. The most abhorrent of the budget allocations though comes from that spent on what SGA calls multicultural student organizations (MSOs) and identity based organizations (IBOs). Of the $705,522 allocated to recognized student organizations (RSOs), $129,100 is allocated to these MSOs and IBOs. While that may seem small in comparison, the total RSO budget includes groups like CAB, Purple Key Society, Purple Patcher, and the Spring Break Immersion Program who have a higher function than what most would consider a club, putting on large events and high cost activities like the spring concert, 100 days ball, the yearbook, and subsidizing spring break trips. Without the $333,000 these groups receive, the RSO budget is only $372,522. Excluding the $15,000 Pride receives as the only IBO, 31% of the real RSO budget is dedicated to groups based on race and ethnicity yet, according to collegefactual.com, only 22% of Holy Cross students are students of color. While some may say that these numbers are close enough, it is also important to note that members of these clubs also get to enjoy the budgets of other clubs that are not based on personal characteristics, while students who are not of the specific minority groups do not.

The issue I have with the SGA budget is not with the existence of these groups, as I fundamentally believe that most clubs that are not outwardly hateful or obscene should have a space on campus, rather my issue arises with the allocation of funds to groups that are not accessible to the student body as a whole. While I understand that most of the events that these groups often use their money for are technically available for all students, students that are not members of these groups most often do not attend these events by MSO and IBO groups because they perceive these events as meant to be spaces for these minorities, and the respectful populace of Holy Cross students will most often respect that. Additionally, the language in the public space of these groups indicate that they are meant to foster community among the specific race or ethnicity, leading to non-minority students wanting to lend those groups their space. Members of these groups should be entitled to do with their time what they please, and that means that they can congregate with whatever groups of people they should desire, but other students should not be required to subsidize it with their student activity fee. Instead, the student activity fee should be lowered and students should have the opportunity to spend their own money where they wish. Events for MSO and IBO groups already often feature tickets which could instead be sold at a higher price, creating an incentive for these events to be more outwardly welcoming and better attended. The budget should ultimately reflect the student body.

The high budgets of these groups do not reflect poorly on the groups receiving them, as when given the option for more money, it is often smart to accept it, rather it showcases the white savior attitude that this campus and many others across the country clings on to. I have had the pleasure of serving in the SGA senate and have had first-hand experience in the mindset on display. I would like to make it very clear, those in SGA I have interacted with have been very nice and welcoming, and I am sure that they all mean well, nonetheless this attitude of the student body is present in the SGA. A common trope among SGA discussion is to talk about a mythical divide between SGA and the MSOs/IBOs, as if there is some great rift between them. From my experience, the MSOs/IBOs do not care about the SGA and the SGA desperately wants them to care. The guilt that the predominantly white campus and as an extension SGA suffers from is reflected in their willingness to give funds to events that most white students do not feel comfortable attending because they are marketed as students of color or LGBTQ events, even if they are accessible to all.

This attitude is further reflected in the SGA cabinet budget that allocates $24,500 to the Directors of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and a further $2,000 to the Director of Social Justice. The DEI budget is by far the most funded with the next highest being $15,000 for the Director of Community Relations with most of the other Cabinet budgets hovering around $2,000. The discrepancy shows an obsession with DEI initiatives and a need to correct injustice that is just not present on campus.

Other clubs it appears SGA is far stingier with their money. The new Chess Club, a club that was just approved last semester and which every student can feel welcome joining, has been very vocal on their social media that they were given only enough money for two chess sets at the cost of $50. Each club, in order to be recognized, has to present a list of fifteen potential members in order to be eligible for recognition. Two chess sets is only enough for four people and is a capital investment as it can be reused every year, unlike the plethora of events that are scheduled by MSOs and IBOs. Some could contend the dispersal of funds to club chess pointing out that RSOs, according to the SGA Bylaws, are not supposed to receive funding from the reserve board of more than $100 in their first year, yet this rule is rarely followed considering ProspHer, a new MSO dedicated to “Womxn of Color'' received a far greater amount yet was also only approved this last semester.

Fundamentally, the Holy Cross campus, represented through SGA, in an effort to fuel inclusivity to ease the liberal guilt they possess, obsess over the approval of multicultural groups and identity based organizations. The budget is a pure reflection of that, alienating those who are not a part of these groups, and using the student activity to disproportionately fund it. The solution is to not encourage a separation based on identity, fueling the rift with the money of the masses, but rather to bring students together, without the divides of identity. The obsession of identity fuels division.

Multi-Faith "Prayer": Hijacking Faith for Politics

On January 24, 2023, the Chaplain’s Office resumed its annual Multi-Faith Prayer Service to represent the many faith traditions on and around campus.  Many were excited for this tradition to resume, particularly those like me who practice religions different from Holy Cross’s Catholicism.  What many envisioned as an opportunity for people of all faiths to come together in individual and collective prayer unfortunately turned out to be quite different than one would expect of a “prayer service.”  There were some good things about the service, but overall, it hijacked the expectations of students to preach a partisan message and belittled the traditions of many students on campus.  

The most problematic element of this “service” was the fact that very little emphasis was placed on prayer, reflection, or religious unity. It was instead focused on the heated political debate on climate change.  Each speaker, the most extreme of which was Holy Cross President Vincent Rougeau, insinuated that each of their faiths required action by everyone to pursue partisan solutions to climate change without regard to the costs or feasibility of their proposed solutions.  Rather than preaching a uniting message to bind us together as a community, these speakers, especially President Rougeau, decided to present a message that divides Americans along partisan lines and present it as a supposedly unifying message.

The issue of climate change is far from a unifying issue.  The political debates around climate change range from those who literally believe air conditioning should be banned (clearly, they’ve never been to the South) to those who outright deny that climate change happens (which is factually inaccurate).  However, most people fall somewhere in the middle and differ mainly on how to balance short-term necessities like a functioning economy and cheap, reliable energy with long-term goals such as energy diversification and carbon neutrality.  These differences usually fall along partisan lines between Republican and Democrat, distinctions that should be absent from our faith communities.

Despite the divisive nature of the policy debate on climate, President Rougeau decided to equate being a person of faith and joining Eco-Action, an organization that constantly (admittedly not always) pushes a partisan agenda on climate without putting the ‘Democrat’ label on it.  President Rougeau falsely claimed that all major religious organizations prioritize the specific climate policies promoted by the Left, stating that this is an issue that unites us.  While many religions believe that it is man’s responsibility to be good stewards of the earth, that principle does not lead all people of faith to the same climate policy conclusions as President Rougeau and the Democratic Party.  Furthermore, President Rougeau implied that those who do not share his views on climate change policy are selfish and irresponsible. 

Another issue of the service is that it denigrated the Christian faith.  While it represented Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish, and Hindu faiths by inviting faith leaders to read their scripture (and expound on environmental issues from their perspective), there was no such representation of Christians.  While all other faiths read their scripture or equivalent, there was no Christian text read (besides the shared Old Testament text of Christians and Jews).  The only Christian representation was in the form of a song that does not even mention God or Jesus, while Islam’s Allah and Hinduism’s various deities were not only named, but glorified.  Instead, the “Christian” song was dedicated to “Mother Earth,” a deity unknown to Christian doctrines.  The Hindu minister talked about and glorified her goddess, the Muslim minister read from the Quran and glorified Allah, yet Jesus Christ was never even named.  On top of this, the other faiths were represented by ministers of their faiths while Christianity (in which there are several faith traditions) had a college president — not a priest, preacher, or pastor.  

After the service, we enjoyed a very nice meal, to the Chaplain Office’s credit.  During the meal, I spoke to some of my Catholic colleagues on what they felt about the service.  One junior told me that the podium from which the speakers presented their scriptures and messages is only to be used for reading the Bible in their tradition.  She explained that “not even announcements or the priest’s message can be read from that podium.”  The fact that Islamic and Hindu deities were exalted from that same podium (false gods in a Christian context) and that each speaker used it to promote a partisan agenda were extremely offensive to the Catholic students I interviewed.  One sophomore told me that the service was highly unorganized, and students did not even know they had a role in the service until a few minutes before the event began.

Overall, this event was disappointing, as I was hoping to unite with those of different faiths to pray for each other.  Instead, the event seemed like a McFarland Center talk on politics with a creepy bell between each speaker.  As Alexis de Tocqueville advises, clergy should stay out of politics, as once a political movement inevitably fades, so will the religion that bound itself to that political movement.  Faith communities should transcend partisan differences and seek to reach souls, not push a partisan agenda in the name of faith.  Next year, I hope the Multi-Faith Prayer Service stays true to its name and that the Honorable President does not hijack faith for his political agenda.