NOTRE DAME, Ind. – Last week at Notre Dame, students participated in a “Coming Out Closets” event held annually by campus group PrismND, according to The Observer.  The event reportedly took place on campus “both in front of DeBartolo Hall and on the Fieldhouse Mall.”

The event reportedly consisted of “crowds of students” walking through a mock-doorway covered in rainbow banners to “‘come out of the closet’ as whatever they wished, in an attempt to spread a spirit of acceptance of personal identities across campus.”

Regarding personal identities, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that:

Man and woman have been created, which is to say, willed by God: on the one hand, in perfect equality as human persons; on the other, in their respective beings as man and woman. “Being man” or “being woman” is a reality which is good and willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity which comes to them immediately from God their Creator. Man and woman are both with one and the same dignity “in the image of God”. In their “being-man” and “being-woman”, they reflect the Creator’s wisdom and goodness.

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The Observer article did not mention how Catholic teaching was integrated into the event.

PrismND is Notre Dame’s “first official student organization for LGBTQ students and their allies,” according to the group’s website.

The president and vice-president of the student organization reportedly stated that “LGBTQ identity and its place on Notre Dame’s campus has always been something of a shaky subject.” They also cited “a cultural shift within the last five years [at Notre Dame],” according to The Observer.

“There was silence on campus. Then people started talking about it…and it just needed a push to get that out in the open,” the group’s president reportedly said.

According to the article, PrismND communicates with prospective Notre Dame students who are concerned about “staunch Catholic values.”  The Observer reported:

“There are students who e-mail us before they make a school decision,” Crawford said,referring to LGBTQ-identifying high school students who fear that because Notre Dame is notorious for its staunch Catholic values, it will not be an accepting campus. “We tell them that yes, for a few people here, that stigma is kind of correct and there’s sort of a lack of understanding and an ignorance, but there are people like that at a lot of different places.


Authored by Justin Petrisek
Originally published here by Catholic Education Daily, an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society.

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Published with permission