Trinity: the Catholic School Pat McGuire Killed
by Mary Ann Kreitzer
In February, the Washington Post Magazine (WPM) carried a puff piece on Trinity University in Washington, D.C. praising its president, Patricia McGuire, as “The Devoted” with a subheading describing her thus: “She spent her life transforming Trinity. So where does Pat McGuire – and the university she rebuilt – go from here?”1 In general the article described McGuire’s commitment to Trinity and her role in empowering women (pro-abortion feminist women like Trinity graduates Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives; Kathleen Sebelius, former governor of Kansas and currently the Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Maggie Williams, former chief of staff for first lady Hillary Clinton. Trinity has lionized these women as they advanced liberalism and the democrat party.) The author called McGuire “the soul” of Trinity, and he apparently meant it as high praise. But, in fact, McGuire has presided over the demise of a once great Catholic institution that has lost her soul. Trinity once inspired women to be defenders and champions of the Catholic faith. No more.
I know. My mother graduated from Trinity in 1939 with a warrior’s heart. She raised ten children, six of them girls, passing on a strong sense of personal responsibility for practicing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. And her education at Trinity, along with her upbringing, played an important part in developing her moral conscience. She loved the doctrines of the Church that valued life from its first beginnings. She embraced the Church’s exhortation to a life of virtue and resistance to the seven deadly sins that lead one on the path to hell. She had a strong social conscience rooted in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Sadly, the Trinity that fostered that holy devotion to the truth in my mom is long gone and McGuire helped destroy her.