Statement of Support for Our LGBTQ Students, Faculty and Staff
Recent events have given us the opportunity to reiterate clearly our commitment as a Jesuit Catholic University to defend the sacred dignity of the most vulnerable members of our community.
For people in the LGBTQ community, visibility can be terrifying. Too often it can mean the real threat of physical and emotional harm; to be exposed is to invite innumerable forms of discrimination. But while visibility for LGBTQ persons is dangerous, invisibility implies another kind of death. Our gay, lesbian, and transgender students are not abstractions. No less than our heterosexual and cisgender students, staff, and faculty, they are people with beautiful names, stories, and journeys of discovery that we are privileged to share, uniquely beloved persons made in the image and likeness of God.
For Regis University, the Jesuit value of cura personalis means a commitment to ensure that every member of our community feels safe and welcome on our campus. No student, faculty, or staff member who, in conscience before God, identifies as lesbian, gay, or transgender, should ever be made to feel unsafe or unwelcome in our company. We aspire to be a community where they find genuine welcome, friendship, and love. As Pope Francis puts it, “In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.”
As a university community, we embrace Pope Francis’s emphasis on open dialogue and prayerful discernment in the Church, trusting in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, even and especially on the most contentious of issues. This means listening without judgment and seeking to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics. It means listening to the voices of medical and psychological professionals and still-emerging scientific understandings of human sexuality, always in dialogue with Catholic teaching on the sacredness of human life and of sexuality. For us, to accompany LGBTQ persons with the love of Christ means allowing them the dignity of telling their stories and naming their experience in terms that ring true for them. Even and especially when those terms elicit confusion or uncertainty in the non-LGBTQ community, the Ignatian presupposition compels us to trust that God is present in the act of listening, of seeking deeper understanding, in the mutuality of love.
We reaffirm our commitment as a Catholic institution to honoring the dignity of every person who crosses our path, seeking to accompany one another with humility and respect in our growth as whole persons. We are a community always in discernment as to how best to embody the justice and mercy of God, in whose image every person is made. Our fidelity is not to ideologies. It is to people and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To borrow the image of Saint Ignatius, we are a pilgrim community, and at once a Jesuit Catholic university, striving to live out the Gospel in a faithful, university way.
For people in the LGBTQ community, visibility can be terrifying. Too often it can mean the real threat of physical and emotional harm; to be exposed is to invite innumerable forms of discrimination. But while visibility for LGBTQ persons is dangerous, invisibility implies another kind of death. Our gay, lesbian, and transgender students are not abstractions. No less than our heterosexual and cisgender students, staff, and faculty, they are people with beautiful names, stories, and journeys of discovery that we are privileged to share, uniquely beloved persons made in the image and likeness of God.
For Regis University, the Jesuit value of cura personalis means a commitment to ensure that every member of our community feels safe and welcome on our campus. No student, faculty, or staff member who, in conscience before God, identifies as lesbian, gay, or transgender, should ever be made to feel unsafe or unwelcome in our company. We aspire to be a community where they find genuine welcome, friendship, and love. As Pope Francis puts it, “In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy.”
As a university community, we embrace Pope Francis’s emphasis on open dialogue and prayerful discernment in the Church, trusting in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, even and especially on the most contentious of issues. This means listening without judgment and seeking to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics. It means listening to the voices of medical and psychological professionals and still-emerging scientific understandings of human sexuality, always in dialogue with Catholic teaching on the sacredness of human life and of sexuality. For us, to accompany LGBTQ persons with the love of Christ means allowing them the dignity of telling their stories and naming their experience in terms that ring true for them. Even and especially when those terms elicit confusion or uncertainty in the non-LGBTQ community, the Ignatian presupposition compels us to trust that God is present in the act of listening, of seeking deeper understanding, in the mutuality of love.
We reaffirm our commitment as a Catholic institution to honoring the dignity of every person who crosses our path, seeking to accompany one another with humility and respect in our growth as whole persons. We are a community always in discernment as to how best to embody the justice and mercy of God, in whose image every person is made. Our fidelity is not to ideologies. It is to people and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. To borrow the image of Saint Ignatius, we are a pilgrim community, and at once a Jesuit Catholic university, striving to live out the Gospel in a faithful, university way.
Join the
QUEER SOLIDARITY MARCH
4 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 15
Meet at the Student Center patio