While too many other Catholic colleges are preparing to celebrate LGBT “Pride” events at their schools, Franciscan University of Steubenville is taking the narrow road and hosting a symposium designed to counter the confusing and false narrative about human sexuality that is being perpetuated by the culture.

The Cardinal Newman Society is reporting on the event, entitled the Gift of Human Sexuality Symposium, which will promote a proper moral and spiritual understanding of human sexuality. Designed to be a basic introduction to Theology of the Body, the talks are designed to lend students a deeper awareness of masculinity and femininity as understood through complimentarity of the sexes in light of God's plan for man and woman.

“This [Gift of Human Sexuality Symposium] will help our students understand and integrate their sexuality into who they are amidst a culture that celebrates disordered sexual desires and acts,” Robert Siemens, the university’s director of pastoral care and evangelization said in an email announcing the symposium.

“The culture says, ‘Hey, everybody is doing it — looking at porn, masturbating, hooking up, changing their gender.’ This symposium will counter that and say, ‘This is who you really are in Christ and here is how to rightly order your sexual desires in the context of Catholic teachings and Christian moral principles,’” Siemens added.

The Symposium will run from September 12-30 and include a variety of presentations from guest speakers, such as: “The Gift of Human Sexuality,” “Male and Female He Created Them: Complementarity as Mission,” “Living the Truth in Love – Approaches to Same-Sex Attraction,” “The Challenges of Friendship Today,” “Your Brain on Porn/How Porn Kills Love,” “Authentic vs. Counterfeit Love in Dating Relationships,” and “Technology and the Gift of our Sexuality.”

Scholars at Franciscan believe that the “lack of understanding of human sexuality as a gift from God has become a major crisis of the 21stcentury.”

Adam Cassandra, writing for the Cardinal Newman Society, believes other Catholic colleges across the country are actively contributing to this crisis.

“With ‘National Coming Out Day’ — a day to announce to the world one’s same-sex attraction — falling in October, many Catholic colleges have turned the event into weeks or even a whole month of LGBT celebrations, dubbed ‘OUTober’,” he writes.

The events and activities hosted by these schools are largely geared towards leading students to embrace and accept “disordered sexual desires and acts.”

For example, Georgetown University has sponsored OUTober events on campus for more than a decade with last year’s celebrations offering no discussions on chastity or Church teaching on human sexuality.

Other Catholic colleges, such as the University of Dayton, Saint Mary’s College in California, Marquette University and others have also held “Coming Out Day” or LGBT pride events in the last year.

Cassandra cites the words of Father Philip Bochanski, associate director of Courage International, the Church’s ministry to same-sex attracted individuals, who warned that these events run the risk of equating a person’s identity with his or her sexual attraction.

“Promoting events that reduce a person’s identity to his or her sexual attractions betrays our Catholic faith in the dignity of the human person, and does a disservice to those it claims to defend.”

Instead, Catholic colleges have a responsibility to reject acceptance of the LGBT lifestyle even while combatting all forms of discrimination against the same-sex attracted, he said.

“Catholic institutions of all sorts ought to be the first to identify and repudiate unjust discrimination, and Catholic colleges and universities are right to welcome all students, including those experiencing same-sex attractions, and to accompany them along the way of holiness,” he said. But, “It is not charitable or loving to withhold or obscure the truths of faith, even when this is done in an effort to be compassionate or welcoming.”

As Cassandra rightly concludes, “Franciscan’s effort to confront issues of human sexuality on campus in a Christ-centered manner, focused on Church teaching, is a welcome one that should be the norm at Catholic colleges.”

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