In her latest article in the Daily Beast, Notre Dame professor Candida Moss contends that for centuries the Catholic Church has been canonizing gender-bending saints, and so it should be celebrating Bruce Jenner’s transsexualism as well.
Moss excoriates “religious conservatives” that have issues with Jenner’s transgenderism, asserting that “the trans community has no shortage of religious icons” in the history of Christian martyrs and saints.
The weird thing is, out of the 10,000 or so saints in the Roman Catholic Church, Moss could only dredge up five to help make her case, and (unsurprisingly) none was a transsexual.
In fact, none was anything like Bruce Jenner at all.
Candida R. Moss, Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, University of Notre Dame.
Saint Thecla (of whom there is virtually no historical record) cut her hair short and dressed like a man to avoid getting married, since she wanted to devote herself full time to God. Joan of Arc dressed like a soldier and led the French troops against the English in the 100 Years War. Wow, just like Jenner.
Then there’s Saint Perpetua, who had a dream that “involved becoming a man and fighting an Egyptian in the arena.” Just like Jenner.
Saints Sergius and Bacchus, on the other hand, were military men arrested for being Christians, forced to dress as women in “an effort to humiliate” them. The two men embraced the humiliating ordeal out of love for God, and were subsequently put to death. Obviously, they, too, suffered from gender dysphoria.
And… Moss’s list ends there. Remarkably, she finds it to be sufficient evidence to conclude that ancient Christian authors “saw gender boundaries as porous, and effort was required to avoid crossing them.”
It’s a good thing that Moss went into religious studies rather than law, since her paper-thin “case” would never have made it anywhere near a courtroom.
On the other hand, it is surprising that the parents of University of Notre Dame students, who presumably send their children there at least in part for its Catholic identity, would shell out over $60,000 a year so that their kids can be subjected to the theories of an ideologue like Candida Moss.
The ever-provocative Moss is no stranger to controversy. In fact, she makes her living off it. The British feminist doctor of religious studies has carved out a niche for herself by promoting causes antithetical to the mission of her university and her Church—usually involving gender ideology.
Notre Dame Prof. Moss attacked Pope Francis.
In February, Moss attacked Pope Francis for being anti-woman and made the eyebrow-raising claim that “in the beginning” God made human beings neither male nor female, but “androgynes.”
Moss defended gender theory as having provided much of the intellectual foundations for “LGBTQIA advocacy,” and railed against the Pope for criticizing “an academic perspective that sees gender identities as a spectrum rather than as binaries.”
The benighted Pope still clings to the archaic belief that God creates human beings as “male and female,” rather than an ever-expanding spectrum of contrived pseudo-sexual genders.
Moss found the Pope’s criticism of “ideological colonization” to be particularly appalling, when the pontiff took issue with school funding that would only be given to institutions teaching gender theory.
It’s good to know that when true scholarship fails, there is always tabloid journalism to fall back on—especially if you are willing to sell your soul to the LGBT lobby.
Norte Dame is no longer a Catholic university, and had not been one for quite some time.