…The Archdiocese of Baltimore did not answer questions posed for this piece, so I contacted Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane, Washington, the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Catholic Education and a former long-time educator and high school administrator. I asked Bishop Daly to address the permissive gender-inclusion policy at primary schools in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the acceptance of gender-confused athletic competitors, and to speak on the growing number of American Catholic schools caught within the lengthening shadows of reengineered anthropology.

Bishop Daly stated:

“The Catholic school’s mission is suffering terribly because we are playing make-believe with students’ biological sexes.

“I’ve found myself thinking more and more about Truth. Is there Truth in that [Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland] policy? No. We are created man and woman in the image and likeness of God—the notion that we assign it to us is a falsehood. This notion has ripped us apart in our culture, and especially hit hard [are] our young people. When we in the Church deny the youth a clear understanding of our Christian anthropology, we have deeply harmed them. And it is something we will answer for from God.

“When Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me,’ it was a beautiful gesture of love, care, and the importance of our young ones. Christ asked us to care for the orphan. In modern society, the new orphan is the impressionable young person who is confused by what some in the Church have allowed him to believe. When the child is allowed to be confused under church auspices, the harm done is unspeakable….”

Bishop Daly said the foundational issue plaguing Catholic schools is the lack of strong Catholic leadership. In refusing to place the full teachings of the Catholic Church first, he said, certain bishops have capitulated and adjusted old Catholic norms in exchange for state money. The aftermath is often reflected by a change of verbiage in school handbooks.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore has received millions of dollars from the state of Maryland in the form of BOOST scholarships. In some of the archdioceses’ own school handbooks is a state-mandated “Non-Discrimination policy” that asserts participating “nonpublic schools” seeking state funds cannot discriminate against “sexual orientation or gender identity….”

The above comes from a Sept. 12 article in Crisis magazine by Kevin Wells, author of Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz and The Priests We Need to Save the Church.