LGBTQ Activism at California Catholic High Schools

It’s important for families to understand: the LGBTQ agenda has infiltrated many Catholic high schools.

Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, California, is receiving national press attention this week for replacing gay pride flags in classrooms—which should never have been put up in the first place—with the school’s own LGBTQ-affirming symbol.

Instead of the rainbow flag, the school created a rainbow watercolor “O” symbol to represent “O’Dowd’s commitment” to “LGBTQ+ students, families, faculty, and staff.”

O’Dowd also posted a webpage boasting of the many ways the school promotes an “inclusive” atmosphere that affirms and celebrates teenagers’ LGBTQ identity. Examples include:

• the LGBT-themed Unity Club and Pride Art Club
• Inclusive Family Day to celebrate “LGBTQ+ families”
• “community art workshop to create additional expressions of LGBTQ+ welcome and belonging”
• She Kills Monsters, a play about a teenage girl exploring her “queer” identity, scheduled to be performed this school year

All this is woven through the school’s emphasis on social justice and DEI concerns. O’Dowd’s course catalog includes:

• Identity in Literature: explores race, gender, sexuality, and more from a “rainbow of voices and views.”
• Feminism, Christianity, and Society: explores “the socio-economic influence of Christianity and Judeo-Christian Scripture on gender and other forms of oppression in modern society.”
• Anawim Project: a 60-hour service learning program that “challenges students to connect with people who experience the injustice of marginalization.”
• Solidarity in Action: students “develop and launch social action campaigns of their choosing.”

This story is a reminder of what our Cardinal Newman Society Podcast guest Anthony Scarpo said last year:

“Catholic parents, and all parents, can no longer remain silent.”

Mr. Scarpo was crushed when he discovered his daughters’ Catholic high school in Florida was teaching gender ideology, LGBTQ activism, and divisive lessons that pitted students against each other based on skin tone.

“Your most precious asset in the world, your child, is now at stake,” he told us. “And all that you’ve worked for to elevate and raise your child to a level of greatness, faith, and love of God deep in the Catholic Faith is—depending on where you send your children to school—being undermined daily.”

In California, O’Dowd is not alone in its corruption. The Cardinal Newman Society investigated nearby Catholic high schools and found:

• Carondelet High School lists an LBGTQ+ peer support group for students.
• Cristo Rey De La Salle East Bay High School has an “LGBTQI+ | GSA” (Gay Straight Alliance) club for students.
• Holy Names High School features an image on its Faith & Inclusion page of a “Jesus is my homeboy” t-shirt with a rainbow flag “ALLY” button. The school also has a Gay Straight Alliance club for students.
• Salesian College Preparatory has a “Diversity Club” for students described as “an unconditionally safe space for LGBTQ+ students,” focused on “increasing community visibility and support with discussion, education, events, and advocacy.”
• Saint Mary’s College High School, as part of its “Inclusive Community Initiative,” features discussions on “Growing Up LGBTQ+ in America” focused on “building allyship” to support LGBTQ+ students.

A Catholic high school should help teenagers understand who they are in Jesus Christ. It should teach them the truth about the human person, the meaning of the body, the beauty of chastity, and the call to holiness.

It should never encourage young people to build their identity around sexual desire, gender confusion, or ideologies that contradict the Catholic faith.

The Church teaches that every person is made in the image and likeness of God. Every student has immeasurable dignity. Every young person deserves patience, pastoral care, friendship, and charity.

And dignity and care must be understood in the context of the Church’s teachings on the body, sexuality, marriage, chastity, sin, and salvation.

A Catholic school betrays its mission when it hides or weakens that truth.
It endangers souls when it encourages students to embrace identities and movements rooted in rebellion against God’s design.

This is the danger of LGBTQ ideology in Catholic education.

It takes words Catholics cherish—love, dignity, welcome, belonging—and empties them of Catholic meaning.

Then it uses those words to persuade young people that the Church’s teaching is somehow unloving. That is false!

The truth is not hateful.

The truth is liberating.

And Catholic students deserve to be formed in the truth.