The Handmaid's Tale Has Arrived

To many Americans, the release of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu and the inauguration of President Trump in 2017 perfectly coincided. These Americans, mostly progressive college-educated white women, believed that the plot of the Hulu drama series, based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name, perfectly resembled the potential dangers of a conservative presidency, which could eventually usher in a Protestant theonomy and patriarchal dystopia. 

These fears were exacerbated by Atwood and the series’ cast and producers, including Holy Cross alumna Ann Dowd ‘78, who has argued that the show’s dystopia “is happening” under Trump’s presidency, and that the United States is “a heck of a lot closer” now then when the series began production in 2016 [1]. These nonsensical fears are still parrotted by television hosts like Sunny Hostin who recently said that a hypothetical Trump/Haley ticket would somehow actualize The Handmaid’s Tale, members of Congress, and feminist activists nationwide who larp as handmaids in the quintessential red costume to protest various conservative causes [2].

While the American left is still neurotic over the potential actualization of a fictitious television series that is grounded in a fundamentally heterodox vision of Christian and conservative sexual ethics (there is no orthodox Christian denomination that supports sex slavery, polygamy, or the subjugation of women), there are still some reasons to think that a version of The Handmaid’s Tale has arrived, but not by the people or in the way that you would expect.

The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is contemporaneous with reality. In this fictional world, the United States has been violently overthrown by a fanatical religious sect that rearranges the social order in the newly formed Republic of Gilead. In this newly formed nation, which is mainly concerned with increasing the nation’s birth rate, new hierarchical social classes have been installed. The leaders of the regime are the commanders and their wives, who are mostly infertile women. They exercise dominance over the rest of the social classes, especially the handmaids. These handmaids, fertile women who have deviated from the norms of Gilead, are forcibly required to breed children for commanders and their wives. These children, the offspring of the commander and the handmaid, will never know their true mother, as she will be moved to a new home to be impregnated by another commander. 

The horror of this regime is obvious to every person; however, there is a similarly odious practice happening today in the United States using relatively similar methods– commercial surrogacy. Commercial surrogacy is the process by which a woman gestates and delivers another’s baby for a fee. The surrogate mother is merely a vessel for carrying and delivering the child, and after the birth she has no contact with the child. While there are some large differences between the handmaids and surrogate mothers, they are both viewed by the “true parents” as merely commercial and sexual vessels that are able to give them the greatest pleasure, a child that they mold. 

The surrogate mother, like the handmaid, carries the child in her womb for nine months where the child knows her voice, grows in her body, and is both physically and spiritually connected to her very being. She becomes the child’s mother, and her body and mind naturally operate as if the child is her own.

The legal parents of the child, the only parents that the child of surrogate mothers will ever know, believe that they are somehow the true parents of the child. They believe that this is their child, and that they are owed a child purely because of their desire for one. This is evident in the most important and horrific action in The Handmaid’s Tale: the ceremony, the ritualistic service in which the handmaid is raped. In this ceremony, the handmaid lies between the wives’ legs while the commander rapes her in order for the wife to believe that, in some deeper way, her husband is impregnating her rather than the handmaid surrogate. 

In our own world, the process is much more sanitized, but the result is the same. In one recent example posted on the Instagram page of Men Having Babies, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping gay men through the surrogacy process, a couple from San Diego commented that their new daughter, Donatella, was given that name as she was “given from heaven” to them [3]. However, that objectively is not true. Donatella was not given from heaven, but rather her prenatal development is purely a product of medical intervention. She was created because her legal parents, like the commanders and their wives, believed that they were owed a child through whatever means necessary, including renting a woman’s womb and using her to gestate and deliver a child that she will never know. Donatella is a product of their own means, desire, and will rather than a gift freely given to them from above.

So, the question still remains: why has a sanitized version of The Handmaid’s Tale been pushed onto society by the same people, progressive whites, who have for eight years incessantly moaned about the dangers of a similar regime? The answer, like in The Handmaid’s Tale, is a product of bad theology. 

While the ruling class in Gilead had a fundamentally heterodox vision of Christian morality and law, as they implemented a bizarre quasi-version of the judicial laws of the Mosaic law mixed with bad exegetical interpretations of Genesis, the progressive vision that blesses surrogacy engages in a similar theological undertaking. This theological view places the highest good in the universe not on an infinite and supreme personal God who properly orders every aspect of the universe, but rather it places the highest good on oneself and one’s desires. This hedonistic and egotistical theological view places one’s personal pleasure over the life and well-being of one’s legal children. 

The beneficiaries of surrogacy, those who buy the child, make the moral decision that their desires outweigh the good of the child. The surrogacy process almost immediately rips the child from the only mother that they ever know inflicting a primordial wound that will most likely never heal, commodifies reproduction and human life, and creates a society in which people are viewed as commercial and sexual vessels rather than individuals created for love [4]. The theological worldview that sanctions surrogacy as a positive good for society inherently devalues human life itself. The law, the primary moral teacher for a society, must correct this grave error by outlawing this practice. Ann Dowd ‘78 is right, we are more than “a heck of a lot closer” to The Handmaid’s Tale than ever before. We are currently living in our own hedonistic progressive Gilead, and we, like the handmaids, must make sure that is overthrown.

Endnotes 

[1] John Gage, “‘This is happening’: Producer and actress with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ think show is turning into real life,” Washington Examiner, June 2, 2019, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/1735228/this-is-happening-producer-and-actress-with-the-handmaids-tale-think-the-show-is-turning-into-real-life/.  

[2] Greta Bjornson, “Sunny Hostin Paints A Bleak Picture Of A Donald Trump and Nikki Haley Ticket on ‘The View,’” Decider, January 22, 2024, https://decider.com/2024/01/22/sunny-hostin-bleak-donald-trump-nikki-haley-ticket-the-view-handmaids-tale/.

[3]  Men Having Babies @menhavingbabies, “#throwback to November 2020…,” Instagram photo, December 28, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/C1ZiKnhMRoy/.

[4] Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Gateway Press, 2003.

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.

A Response to "Enough is Enough"

January 3, 2024

To the Editors of the Fenwick Review:

I must respectfully but forcefully express my dissent from Thomas Gangemi’s argument in the October issue of the FR that the U.S. should end its aid to Ukraine “in the name of peace.” Contrary to Mr. Gangemi, the American people have a great stake in preventing Vladimir Putin’s attempted conquest of Ukraine, just as the U.S. and its Western allies had in stopping Adolf Hitler’s militarization of the Rhineland and seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the 1930’s. The immediate result of British appeasement of Hitler’s demands at the 1938 Munich conference, justified by prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous boast that the agreement had brought “peace in our time,” was Hitler’s invasion of Poland, initiating what Chamberlain’s successor Winston Churchill called “the unnecessary war,” World War II, which brought about the deaths of tens of millions in Europe alone, including the Holocaust and the devastation of much of Europe. (Indirectly, it also instigated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, resulting in millions more deaths.)

Contrary to Mr. Gangemi, it makes no difference whether the cruel dictator Putin justifies his aggression by some ideology other than “atheist-communism” (in his case, pure imperialistic nationalism). (Nor have I any notion of what Gangemi means by saying that the U.S. has itself been engaged in such a project itself “for decades.”) Not only the Nazi precedent, but any study of world history, will demonstrate that trying to slake imperialistic aggressors’ appetite for conquest by abject surrender only increases their desire for more. And contrary to Gangemi, not only is Ukraine not a “corrupt country” on a scale in any way comparable to Putin’s Russia, the scare-quotes he uses to refer to Putin’s “unjust” assault – apparently because Ukraine somehow provoked the dictator by seeking membership in NATO, a defensive alliance – are entirely unjustified. Every day Russia continues to launch missile attacks on civilian populations throughout Ukraine, in violation of all the laws of war, the teachings of Christianity and Judaism, and the principles of elementary humanity. 

Also contrary to Mr. Gangemi, nobody justifies American assistance to Ukraine on the ground that “Russia and her people” are “inherently evil.” In fact, Putin’s war is widely unpopular among the Russian people themselves, especially those who have lost family members in the battle to enhance the despot’s quest for glory. The people of Ukraine are fighting simply to preserve their independence and their democracy against subjugation to one of the world’s most brutal tyrannies. To compare Ukraine’s heroic leader Zelensky to Putin on the unsubstantiated ground that “no actor in this affair is completely blameless” violates the most elementary principles of morality and truth – in direct contradiction to the Christian teachings that Gangemi professes to follow. 

Though Thomas Gangemi is an excellent student (as I know from having had the good fortune to teach him last year), he would greatly benefit, as would all of today’s students, from a more thorough, unbiased study of political, diplomatic, and military history. 

Sincerely,

David Lewis Schaefer

Professor Emeritus of Political Science

and Faculty Adviser Emeritus 

to the Fenwick Review

The Review Reviews: Film Review: “The Boys in the Boat” Floats Best on its Historical Cred

Living in Washington State and having once done rowing for a summer, it was practically a mandate that I catch The Boys in the Boat during its time in theaters over winter break. The film, based on a nonfiction book by the same name, tells the story of the University of Washington men’s rowing team that won gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. With sports, an underdog victory against staggering odds, and a rhetorical middle finger to the Nazis right before World War II all in the offering, it’s somewhat surprising this book wasn’t adapted into a big-screen crowd pleaser any sooner.

I’d read the book once before but had forgotten most of the details, and after seeing the film in theaters I was inspired to reread it. Reflecting on the film after the reread was an interesting experience. When comparing a film adaptation with its source material, one typically finds that the film has exaggerated story elements so as to better milk the drama, often to the point of losing realism. A viewer unfamiliar with the story might suspect that The Boys in the Boat has done this. Of course the hero, Joe Rantz, was essentially abandoned by his father and is living in extreme poverty before he’s selected for the men’s rowing team. Of course the team is talented beyond anyone’s predictions, and just in time for an Olympic year, too. Of course one of the rowers falls ill upon his arrival in Berlin and pushes on through the final race anyway. And of course, thanks to unethical behavior by officials, the US rowing team is wrongly given the worst lane in the final race, improperly cued to start rowing, and still manages to win anyway. It seems so contrived that the viewer is inclined to skepticism… but all of these things really happened. In fact, far from exaggerating the truth, the film at times actually downplays what’s described in the book. Though Joe mentions that his father left him to fend for himself, the film does not hint at how extreme his situation really was, foraging in the woods for food at the age of fifteen after his family literally packed their car and drove to another town without him; and his search for a job in the film is tame compared to the exhausting and dangerous work men had to take up to earn a wage during the Great Depression. 

Rereading the book, it’s disappointing that the film didn’t include these elements. They’re an interesting part of the story and they would have added more specificity to what risks being a generic sports film. (As an example, the relationship between Joe and his future wife — in the book, a tender and idiosyncratic relationship between two individuals united by their equally fraught childhoods — is sadly reduced to some stock romantic comedy interactions.) Fortunately, it’s a sports film that knows how to film sports well. All of the race scenes, which are really the movie’s raison d’être anyway, are thrillingly shot, helped by an excellent soundtrack. The director wisely cuts between the rowers and the onlookers/coaches, preventing the scenes from becoming exhausting or confusing while also thematically highlighting the importance of a team’s leadership. Audience members leaving the theater will likely be invigorated, high on adrenaline, and newly appreciative of the joys of physical fitness — provided they’re not busy nitpicking details the film left out.

Is The Boys in the Boat another adaptation that only draws criticism from book purists and is most enjoyable if one forgets the source material, then? No, I can’t say that. True, being familiar with the book will make the film’s omissions more bothersome. However, I think the film would suffer more if one isn’t familiar with the book at all. Those apparently contrived plot elements I described earlier would be positively groan-worthy if one didn’t know that they came from history. A lot of the film’s inspirational value stems from its historicity. Without the record to support it, it would be just another sports movie about people overcoming problems that have been cooked up for the purpose of being taken down. 

Perhaps The Boys in the Boat was simply taking on an impossible task. Even with tight editing, the film needs to be two hours long just to show all of the team’s pivotal races. Including the historical details it omitted would have meant cutting a race or two, and I don’t think that would have necessarily been the right choice. There are some who would argue that the problem lies in the medium, and The Boys in the Boat would have been better as a multi-episode miniseries. With languorously stretched adaptations becoming increasingly common on streaming services, though, and so many theatrical releases pushing well over two hours these days, I have a hard time faulting a film for keeping things short. And after everything, I still like The Boys in the Boat. As I mentioned, I left the theater inspired enough to want to reread the book. Perhaps it would have been nice to see its sights set a little higher, but that’s no mark against what the film does accomplish.

 Ultimately, The Boys in the Boat succeeds in what it sets out to do. It’s a fun, easy sports film with good racing eye-candy, granted some extra gravitas by its origin in reality. Fans of the book may not feel that film captures its source material’s atmosphere and will miss the complexity afforded by a book’s long form. Yet the film we have is inoffensive and could be a good accompaniment to the book if one already knows the story. Perhaps the fact that I find it an imperfect adaptation is only a sign of how good other book-to-film adaptations have been.

Overall grade: B+.

Letter from the Editors Winter '24

Dear Reader, 

Thank you for picking up a copy of the Fenwick Review. Last semester, we were happy to publish our Fall edition and get positive feedback from many of our readers, including those across the political aisle. We were particularly encouraged that one of our senior writers’ articles, “Holy Cross Must Ban Pornography,” proved to be an intersection point for conservatives and liberals. As editors, we want to simultaneously defend our Catholic and conservative viewpoints in The Fenwick Review while still engaging respectfully with those who disagree with us. We are happy to see steps being taken in that direction. We hope all our readers enjoy this edition. 

Reddens laudes Domino, 

Griffin Blood ‘26 & Anna Moran ‘24

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.

Recap of "Is the Catholic University Dead?"

On October 4 at 7 p.m. in Hogan 410, The Society of Saints Peter and Paul hosted Professor James Keating, an associate professor of theology at Providence College, to deliver a talk entitled “Is the Catholic University Dead?” Professor Keating began by answering the question simply: yes. He claimed that the Catholic university no longer fulfills its purpose of infusing the Gospel message into the education it provides, and that this vision of higher education belongs to an irretrievable past. Accepting this disheartening fact, we are left with the question: what do we do now? How are we to find “stirrings of new life among ruins”?

Before discussing plans for the future, Professor Keating performed a post-mortem on the Catholic university. He began by claiming that Catholic leaders did not do what they ought to have done to uphold the tradition of faith-infused education after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Further, in 1967, the “manifesto” on the future of Catholic education named the Land O’Lakes Statement was signed by “more than twenty prominent leaders in American education”. This statement called Catholic schools to embrace the academic standard of secular schools, to reject intellectual imperialism, to learn theology by conversation, to reduce the importance given to philosophy, and to establish “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.” Professor Keating clarified that “autonomy” meant freedom from “the ruling powers of the Catholic Church.” These changes were proposed so that Catholic colleges could match the excellence of secular colleges. However, the implications of the Land O’Lakes statement, coupled with the decreasing numbers within religious orders following Vatican II, resulted in the secularization of Catholic schools. Having started on this path, Catholic education reached a point of no return, leading us to where we are now: a time in which the adjective “Catholic” is difficult to define when it is applied to higher educational institutions. Keating claims that crosses on classroom walls and liturgy offerings do not define a school as Catholic; only offering a “robustly Catholic education” can do that. 

Pope St. John Paul II saw this deterioration and attempted to right the ship with his 1990 Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, meaning “from the heart of the Church.” Professor Keating cited the constitution, recalling that Catholic universities are “called to explore courageously the riches of Revelation and of nature so that the united endeavor of intelligence and faith will enable people to come to the full measure of their humanity, created in the image and likeness of God, renewed even more marvelously, after sin, in Christ, and called to shine forth in the light of the Spirit.” He provided guidance on how to attain this noble goal: offer courses in theology, offer liturgies, and welcome the ongoing involvement of the local Bishop. He also set forth a requirement that all Catholic faculty must be faithful to the Church, and that all non-Catholic faculty must respect Catholic teaching. Further, the non-Catholic faculty could not outnumber the Catholic faculty. Professor Keating emphasized that Pope St. John Paul II defends the right that non-Catholics have to exist in Catholic education: he does not envision an ideologically homogeneous faculty. However, he does say that if we want faith to be central to Catholic education, then the majority of our educators ought to be active members of the faith they are passing on; as the Latin dictum goes: “nemo quod non habet” (no one can give what they do not have). 

This vision has proved unattainable. The majority of faculty at many Catholic universities, including The College of the Holy Cross and Providence College, are non-Catholic. Others may be active Catholics that have not let their faith inform their scholarly work. Professor Keating paused to clarify that these educators do not bear the responsibility for the death of the Catholic university. He paid them due respect: “they have dedicated their lives to educating our students.” The failure of the constitution can be attributed to the irrevocable change caused by the Land O’Lakes statement in 1967: the dynamic was already set by 1990, and there was no going back. The Apostolic Constitution gave false hope, turning hopeful Catholic educators into “fools waiting for Godot.” Professor Keating sadly recalled that many of them “ended their careers in bitterness fighting to keep the dream alive.” 

Having concluded the post-mortem, Professor Keating provided those of us who remain invested in Catholic education with a hopeful plan for the future: Catholic Studies departments. These departments would provide the Catholic education described in Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The first Catholic Studies department was founded in 1993, paving the way for others who will apply Catholic principles to diverse subjects such as art, science, music, etc. Professor Keating also expressed that Catholic Studies’ course offerings need not always speak positively about the Church, though they must never seek to denigrate her, but rather admit that she, and we, operate within a fallen world. 

Professor Keating admitted that some may see this solution as giving up and establishing a “Catholic ghetto” within a secular whole. However, he maintains that these departments are a cause for hope: they are the only way we can follow Ex Corde Ecclesiae. He challenged professors and teachers who want to join this mission to take it upon themselves. Professor Keating himself started a Catholic Studies major and minor at Providence College. If these departments attract enough students, and there is good reason to believe that they will, then there will be more hires and the programs will grow. 

The hopefulness for these departments is born from the fact that many young Catholics are attracted to academic life. Further, Keating pointed out that undergraduates are in crisis and in need of the truth of the Gospel: they are “unsatisfied with the world bequeathed to them by their elders” and acutely aware of the problems within it. They have seen the “hideous reality of the West without Christ.” They see that our secular world looks more like Huxley’s dystopia than “a liberated society, free from guilt and free to reach its potential.” The “easy-going relativism” of the millennials is not as attractive anymore, nor is the dogmatic culture of the coming generation. Keating affirmed that Catholic education is poised to respond to this need for meaning with “the richness of the salvific message of the Gospel.” As a dedicated Catholic educator, Professor Keating said, “We have nothing to give other than Christ Himself.” He concluded by saying that, if Catholic education is to return, “it’ll be His work, not ours.”

Cover image from Guardian H, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fenwick_DSC_1272.jpg, no changes made to image.