Do Words Count?

Oswald Sobrino

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The article from an independent newspaper catering to students at Notre Dame University announces the Second Annual “Notre Dame Queer Film Festival.”
It’s not a series about eccentric films. It’s a gay film series bolstered with “two [discussion] panels with acclaimed writers and directors.” Now, since Notre Dame claims to be a first-class academic university, let’s pose some philosophical questions about language — a lot of modern academic philosophy is, after all, focused on language. I am sure Notre Dame’s academic offices have their share of philosophers of language.

So it’s a “gay” film series. No more homosexuals, just “gays.” Of course, the name has an agenda: we are free, happy, and liberated; our detractors are cramped, joyless, and repressed. It’s also called a “queer” film series. Forget about Fred MacMurray as the innocently funny absent-minded professor (1961) or Jerry Lewis as the heterosexual nutty professor (1963), “queer” now becomes a forcibly cozy term for homosexuals in general. Finally, we come to the really serious move in the language game: it’s the Notre Dame Queer Film Festival. It’s not Latin. It’s French for “Our Lady,” the ever-virgin Mother of God, the recognized icon for centuries for purity of mind and body. You don’t have to be Catholic or even Christian to see the deep irony at play here. Even Muslims venerate the Virgin Mary. Everyone remotely familiar with Western culture knows what she represents.

But back to our question: Do names or words mean anything? What we see at the South Bend school is that words mean what a group wants them to mean. George Orwell, the famous British author of the novel 1984, is well-known for vehemently pointing out how those who want to control us manipulate language in outrageous ways. That’s what’s going on in South Bend. In northern Indiana, “Notre Dame” no longer refers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Notre Dame” refers to a university with a famous football team. Period. The university is no longer named for Mary. Mary is named for the famous university. As done with the terms “gay” and “queer,” a new and utterly alien meaning has taken over a familiar term.

There is indeed a totalitarian agenda here. It is the agenda that seeks to erase what Catholicism has always taught as a matter of divine revelation: the marital act is a heterosexual act. It is totalitarian because it lies, just as the rulers in Orwell’s 1984 built their entire society on lies. The great lie is that this South Bend school can define Catholicism. The great truth is that God defines Catholicism. Education is about leading us out of misconceptions and lies into the truth, a truth that we do not invent but rather receive. What is going on in South Bend is miseducation worthy of the propaganda efforts Orwell described in his famous novel. I submit that the South Bend school has become a mirage: it looks like a Catholic educational oasis, when in fact it is a wasteland. But I think many of my readers knew that already.

• Oswald Sobrino’s daily columns can be found at the Catholic Analysis website.
• He is a graduate lay student at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He recently published Unpopular Catholic Truths, a collection of apologetic essays, available on the Internet