The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts today criticized Anna Maria College —founded by the Sisters of Saint Anne — for its decision to disinvite the Bishop of Worcester, the Most Reverend Robert J. McManus, to the school’s May 19th commencement ceremonies. During a meeting with the bishop on May 3rd, college president Jack Calareso and board of trustees chairwoman Sister Yvette Bellerose asked McManus to withdraw from the graduation exercises, claiming his presence would be “a distraction.” This followed the bishop’s instruction to the college to cancel its award of an honorary degree to Victoria Kennedy, and withdraw its invitation to Kennedy to serve as the principal commencement speaker. Mrs. Kennedy is a supporter of legal abortion and same gender marriage.
The Catholic Action League called the college’s request for the bishop to withdraw “shameful, cowardly and treacherous.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle stated: “For the first time in American history, a Catholic bishop has been disinvited to a Catholic college in his own diocese because he attempted to preserve that institution’s Catholic identity. Apparently, demands of fidelity to Catholic moral teaching are a source of embarrassment to the cultural conformists who govern Anna Maria College. It seems they would prefer an affluent celebrity who repudiates the right to life over an orthodox prelate who defends that right.”
“The bishop has been deemed ‘a distraction’, no doubt from the college’s core values of institutional fundraising and favorable media coverage. The message which the leadership of Anna Maria college is sending, with unmistakable clarity, to its students is that Catholic morality is not merely irrelevant, but unacceptably controversial, and efforts by the Catholic hierarchy to uphold it in Catholic institutions are intrusive, wrongheaded, and inappropriate.”
“Schools like Anna Maria College were founded by and for Catholics, to provide an education infused with the principles of the Catholic religion. Faithful Catholics are being dispossessed of their own institutions by modernist religious orders and secularised administrators and faculty. The time has come for Catholics to recover their own educational institutions. A good place to start would be for the president and the board of trustees of Anna Maria College to resign.”
