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Wokeness’and ‘pseudo-religions’: Catholic colleges look for ways to challenge growing cancel culture
BY TERRY O'NEILL

https://bccatholic.ca/news/catholic-van/wokeness-and-pseudo-religions-catholic-colleges-look-for-ways-to-challenge-growing-cancel-culture

In his annual “state of the world” address to the Vatican diplomatic corps last month, Pope Francis expressed his deep concern over a phenomenon that he believes poses an escalating threat: “cancel culture,” the increasingly prevalent practice of silencing individuals, institutions, and even, in the Pope’s estimation, entire cultures that are deemed to hold incorrect or inconvenient views or values.

In expressing this concern, Pope Francis has given new voice to the growing number of Catholic clerics and academics who fear that cancel culture’s relativistic and amoral philosophical underpinnings are the antithesis of Catholic teaching.

They further contend that Catholic schools and universities are a key battleground in which the war against cancel culture must be fought and won if Christianity is to thrive. At its most fundamental level, it’s a battle over what is true in the world. And, as such, it’s a struggle to which leaders at Catholic colleges in the Vancouver area—Catholic Pacific College in Langley, and Corpus Christi-Mark’s College in Vancouver—say they are deeply committed.

The term “cancel culture” has come into common usage over the past few years and is widely understood to mean the increasingly successful attempt to censor views—and to shame and shun those who utter them—that do not conform to the “politically correct” tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its closely associated cultural manifestation, “woke-ism.”

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez recently said, “Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic.” (CNS photo/Bob Roller

An integral part of the agenda is “diversity, equity, and inclusion” mandates that critics say end up discriminating against members of groups that have not been identified as oppressed or under-represented.

Canadian academic and author Jordan Peterson wrote in a National Post column last month that these mandates comprise an “appalling ideology,” and constituted the primary reason why he had resigned as a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. As well, Frances Widdowson was fired from her job as a Mount Royal University (Calgary) political-science professor late last year after being a persistent critic of equity mandates and of the contention that Canada’s former treatment of its aboriginal residents represented an attempted cultural genocide.

Writing last month for the National Review, Canadian columnist Mark Milke observed, “Widdowson and Peterson are only the most high-profile academic casualties of the woke mania in Canada. It is unlikely that they will be the last.”

The interconnected phenomena have sparked widespread debate in the secular world for at least the last several years, but their adverse impact on Christianity and Catholicism has now come into sharper focus with the statements by Pope Francis.

Pope Francis has, in several past addresses, used the term “ideological colonization” to describe the Western world’s trampling of Indigenous cultures and institutions. He referred to that phenomenon again in his January address to diplomats representing 183 countries, but also widened his critique to include cancel culture.

Pope Francis warned that political, legal, and cultural “agendas are increasingly dictated by a mindset that rejects the natural foundations of humanity and the cultural roots that constitute the identity of many peoples.”

“As I have stated on other occasions,” he said, “I consider this a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the ‘cancel culture’ invading many circles and public institutions.”

The Pontiff continued, “Under the guise of defending diversity, it ends up canceling all sense of identity, with the risk of silencing positions that defend a respectful and balanced understanding of various sensibilities.

“A kind of dangerous ‘one-track thinking’[…] is taking shape, one constrained to deny history or, worse yet, to rewrite it in terms of present-day categories, whereas any historical situation must be interpreted in the light of a hermeneutics of that particular time, not that of today.”

Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, who is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, used more direct language in November when he said that secular movements promoting social justice and “wokeness” are “pseudo-religions” that should be understood as “replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.”

As reported in America Magazine, Archbishop Gomez made the comments in a videotaped address to the 23rd Catholic and Public Life Congress, held Nov. 12-14 in Madrid. “With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” he said.

He continued, “Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness.

“They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities—the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background or our position in society.”

Archbishop Gomez linked these movements to liberation theology; he added that “they seem to be coming from the same Marxist cultural vision. Also these movements resemble some of the heresies that we find in church history. These new movements have lost the truth about the human person” because they deny God. No matter how well-intentioned they are, they cannot promote authentic human flourishing.”

Archbishop Gomez’s speech can also be seen as a critique of CRT, which has been defined as an intellectual movement and framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is a socially constructed category that leads to oppression of minorities. Some of CRT’s more common manifestations are hiring quotas for visible minority (rather than employment policies based on qualifications) and justice-system “reforms” that lessen penalties for members of races or ethnic groups that are “over-represented” among those charged or convicted of crimes.

CRT and “wokeness” are intrinsically anti-Christian, says a representative of the Virginia-based Cardinal Newman Society, whose mission is to promote and defend faithful Catholic education.

“First, critical race theory has a very narrow focus,” Dr. Denise Donohue, Vice-President for Educator Resources, said in answer to questions from The B.C. Catholic. “It premises everything on race and addresses the question of who benefits and who doesn’t.

“But the first principle of Catholic social teaching is the dignity of all people. It is race-neutral. It teaches that all people have a common origin and a common destiny, that we are all children of God, made in his image and likeness.

“We all have individual dignity; we can’t ‘cancel’ anyone. Critical race theory opposes a person’s dignity by imputing unconscious bias within them which negates their individual freedom of choice – that which actually makes them an image of God. And that’s another difference. Critical race theory is atheistic and leaves no room for a Creator/creature relationship. There is no transcendence or reliance upon anything higher than man himself.”

She added that, while both CRT and Catholic social teaching focus on the poor and marginalized, their means of eliminating economic and societal disparities clearly differ. Last summer, the Cardinal Newman Society published a fact sheet, drawing on Donohue’s research, outlining 10 ways in which Catholic education and CTT are “simply incompatible.” (See below.)

Donohue’s colleague, Dr. Dan Guernsey, said it is important that Catholic educational institutions mount a challenge to this anti-Catholic worldview. “Catholic universities should respond to every event, opportunity, and challenge in light of their mission,” said Guernsey, who is the society’s Education Policy Editor and Senior Fellow.

“Vatican II affirms that a central mission of Catholic universities is to offer ‘a public, enduring, and pervasive influence of the Christian mind in the furtherance of culture,’” he said in emailed answers to B.C. Catholic questions. “Insofar as woke-ism and critical race theory are currently powerful cultural forces, Catholics should examine them in an academic context.

“Insofar as central elements of their underlying philosophies run counter to the Christian mind (influences of Marxism, materialism, relativism, etc.), these elements must be called out and examined against an authentic Christian anthropology and a comprehensive Catholic worldview. Catholic universities should not use their institutional reputation and resources to further a mindset antithetical to Christianity.”

This would be in keeping with St. Pope John Paul II’s 1990 “Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities,” in which he declared, “It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic university to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth.”

St. Pope John Paul II continued, “The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterest service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished.”

Andrew Kaethler, Academic Dean and Assistant Professor of Theology at Catholic Pacific College in Langley, said in an interview that one important way he carries out this important responsibility is to introduce his students “to a tradition in which there is a recognition that there is a good, there is a truth, that there is truth to reality, that we can encounter it, and that the logos (universal divine reason) that undergirds all reality—that of our own individual logos and everyone’s—interconnects with The Logos, and therefore see reality for what it is.”

Kaethler said that does not mean that he wants the college’s graduates to go out into the world “wagging their fingers, and saying, ‘wrong, wrong, wrong.’” There is a time and place for naysaying, he said.

“But our students are better off if they are equipped to respond by offering a counter story, the story of the true, the good, and the beautiful—that is, Gospel.”

On the specific issue of CRT, “We want to teach our students to relate to the truths that are within critical race theory—the desire to combat racism and to have empathy with those who are struggling—but then to provide a far more beautiful response than CRT, a response that, unlike CRT, does not perpetuate the problem that it seeks to overcome,” he said.

On the interconnected issues of cancel culture, Kaethler said Christian teaching is clear. “As Joseph Ratzinger [Pope Emeritus Benedict VXI] beautifully sets out, to be the elect means that we have been called to lay our lives down for the sake of the world,” he said. “Part and parcel of this is forgiveness, something that does not exist within cancel culture.

“There’s no room for forgiveness in this perspective because it overlooks persons. Here one does not live for the other, and the human person is lost in group think. This is terrifying.”

The newly-appointed President and Principal of Corpus Christi-St. Mark’s, Dr. Gerry Turcotte, agreed that the pursuit of truth is central to a Catholic college’s mission. Turcotte, who will replace retiring Dr. Michael W. Higgins in August, said in an interview that, “the cause of truth is one that allows and encourages, specifically in Catholic universities, the asking of questions about all the most difficult issues.”

However, this does not mean dissenting or differing voices should not be heard. “We need to create a space of dialogue, where we can meet and encounter truth,” Turcotte explains. “It’s arguably the hardest thing to do. And I think it was always the mission of Catholic universities to pursue this.

“This was why the Catholic Church created the very first universities in the first place, to create a space where difficult questions could be asked, and it’s always going to be uncomfortable, because of the wide range of issues, and it’s something that you have to negotiate in the university system.”

Turcotte, who is currently President and Vice-Chancellor of St. Mary’s University in Calgary, said he will devote himself to continuing the Corpus Christi-St. Mark’s tradition of “creating these amazing individuals” who are going “out into the community to make a difference.

“I think that’s the antidote to the negativity and to guilt and to all other issues we may be struggling with. It’s creating people who have good strong values and who want to make a difference and to do the right thing in our community, even when that’s a difficult thing to do.”

Turcotte said that he personally is dedicated to improving the community and to social justice. “And I believe strongly that Catholic education can heal a lot of the wounds that our planet is experiencing right now,” he said. “And I will come in with energy, and I will come in with an open heart, and I will try to assist in every way I can to make the mission of the colleges a success. And through that success, and through those actions, to really celebrate the dynamism and the beauty of the Catholic faith.”

As Catholic colleges in B.C. look to grapple with these fundamental issues, retired St. Thomas Aquinas Regional Secondary teacher Peter Nation is working to educate parishioners, parents, and other interested people about the dangers of the woke worldview.

Nation, who is the founder of Catholic Voices Canada, said in an interview that he believes the intent of woke ideology and cancel culture “is to bring down the Judeo-Christian tradition, including specifically the family and the moral law, and so it is a threat to Western civilization as a whole.”

He also believes that woke philosophy has infiltrated deeply into all schools and that students, even those in elementary schools, have been thoroughly indoctrinated. For example, Nation said he heard from one Grade 4 teacher who was explaining how adjectives must agree with nouns in French. Her students were outraged when she used the word “white.”

As an antidote, Catholic Voices launched its “Awake from Woke” education series last April. The virtual sessions show that woke ideology is based on beliefs and assumptions that are the antithesis of the Catholic faith. Catholic Voices has held 14 such sessions so far. One scheduled for February will instruct participants on how to engage in conversations about woke ideology.

“Adults themselves need to be educated before our young people can stand against cancel culture,” he said. “One problem has been that woke ideology has been camouflaged by terminology like ‘diversity, inclusivity, and equity,’ and ‘social justice,’ which sound like they are secular initiatives that could be aligned with Catholic social teaching. They are not.”

Nation said the struggle to counter woke-ism is not an easy one, especially given the inroads the philosophy has made. But he said success may be found through a commitment to the “unity of family and friends,” through devoted “prayer warriors,” by “taking back institutions through friendships,” and through the “Awake from Woke support network” of parents and students.
10 ways Catholic education is incompatible with Critical Race Theory

The following are 10 ways Catholic education and critical race theory are incompatible, summarized from the Cardinal Newman Society’s Principles of Catholic Identity, Catholic Curriculum Standards, and “Background on Critical Race Theory and Critical Theory for Catholic Educators” by the society’s Dr. Denise Donohue.

1) Catholic education teaches from the truths of our faith and Christian anthropology. But critical race theory is a political, divisive ideology that is antithetical to the Catholic worldview.

2) Catholic education teaches the dignity of all people, made in the image and likeness of God. But critical race theory has its origins in critical theory, a Marxist-inspired movement that views all things through the lens of power and divides society into oppressors and the oppressed. Critical race theory marks this division according to racial lines.

3) Charity and community are central to the mission of Catholic education. But critical race theory promotes division and forces people into competing racial groups.

4) Catholic education conforms consciences to Christ and his Church. But critical race theory imputes unconscious bias upon persons and deems racism a permanent condition.

5) Catholic education teaches that sin is an individual fault that can have devastating social impact. But critical race theory imputes guilt for “social sins” committed in the past.

6) Catholic education teaches the unity of faith and reason and helps students know and live the truth. But critical race theory is skeptical of objective truth and rejects the Western intellectual tradition. It places individual experience and cultural constructivism over reason.

7) Catholic education recognizes individual autonomy and cultivates students’ capacity for reason, without regard to skin color. But critical race theory assumes that race defines how one thinks and looks at the world.

8) Catholic education observes human accomplishments and failings according to a Catholic worldview, by which racism is one element of a fallen and redeemed nature. But critical race theory demands that history be taught through the lens of race, power, and privilege.

9) Catholic education favours literature that promotes understanding of the human condition across time and culture. But critical race theory demands that classic texts be set aside for contemporary literature that is narrowly focused on race and social deconstruction.

10) Catholic education respects the natural and religious rights of parents to direct the formation of their children in collaboration with the school. But critical race theory manipulates education to form children according to its narrow ideology and to reshape culture.

‘Woke’ social justice is not Catholic social justice: Bishop Barron

One of North America’s most popular Catholic apologists says Catholics committed to social justice for the poor and disenfranchised should be aware of the dangerous, anti-Catholic underpinning of the “woke” social-justice movement currently holding sway over Western culture.

Bishop Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said in an April 2021 interview with Pablo Kay, Editor-in-Chief of Angelus News, that advocates of “woke” ideology have made no secret of the philosophical underpinnings of their perspective. “They do indeed find inspiration in [Communist Karl] Marx, [German philosopher Friedrich] Nietzsche, [French philosopher Jean-Paul] Sartre, [Algerian-French philosopher Jacques] Derrida, and [French historian and philosopher Michel] Foucault, among others,” he said. 

Bishop Barron said “woke” social-justice advocates derive several principles from these thinkers. “First, they advocate a deeply antagonistic social theory, whereby the world is divided sharply into the two classes of oppressors and oppressed,” he said. “Second, they relativize moral value and see classical morality as an attempt by the ruling class to maintain itself in power.”

His third observation was that social justice warriors focus more on racial and ethnic categories than individual characteristics, which leads them to endorse the idea of collective guilt while supporting “a sort of reverse discrimination to address the injustices of the past.”

“Fourth, they tend to demonize the market economy and the institutions of democracy as part of a superstructure defending the privileged,” Bishop Barron explained. “Fifth, they push toward equity of outcome throughout the society, rather than equality of opportunity.” And finally, “wokeism” employs divisive strategies of accusation that are contrary to the Gospel demand to love our enemies.”

Bishop Barron concluded: “Suffice it to say that Catholic social teaching stands athwart all of this. It wants social justice, of course, but not on ‘woke’ terms. Its heroes are not Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, but rather Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Jesus the Lord, Ambrose, Aquinas, and Teresa of Calcutta.”


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