Mary Rice Hasson named visiting fellow for Franciscan University’s Veritas Center

CNA Staff, Mar 12, 2024 / 14:15 pm

Franciscan University of Steubenville has announced that Catholic writer and speaker Mary Rice Hasson will be a visiting fellow for the school’s Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life. 

Hasson, a graduate of Notre Dame Law School, has been a three-time keynote speaker for the Vatican at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She has also testified on parents’ rights and transgender issues before the U.S. Senate. She currently serves as the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. 

The Veritas Center’s mission is “to bring faithful Catholic scholarly reflection to bear on the most pressing ethical questions in contemporary culture — questions of marriage and sexuality, war and peace, life and death, as well as economic and social justice,” the school’s March 5 press release read.

“We are happy to have Mary Hasson join us as our Visiting Veritas Fellow,” said Anne Hendershott, sociology professor at Franciscan University and director of the Veritas Center, in a statement. 

“Our students really enjoyed meeting her and hearing her presentation on the challenges families face from the transgender movement when she participated in our Transgender Moment Conference a few years ago,” Hendershott said of Hasson. 

“She truly is a leading Catholic voice on the ways in which our Church needs to help families and individuals respond to this issue.”

Hasson said that she is “look[ing] forward with great enthusiasm to working with the center’s scholars in the year ahead.”

“It’s a wonderful opportunity not only to engage with faithful, intellectually curious students but also to contribute to the center’s serious exploration — in light of faith and the natural law — of compelling cultural issues,” she said.

“It’s no secret that our culture has lost sight of what it means to be a human person, to be a man or a woman. The consequences are immense,” Hasson said. “How should Catholics respond, politically and spiritually? These are the conversations the Veritas Center seeks to engage.”

Hasson co-founded and directs the Person and Identity Project, an organization that offers resources to help parents, churches, and teachers navigate gender ideology issues. She also heads the Catholic Women’s Forum, an international network of Catholic women.

She has co-authored several books on education and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the National Catholic Register, National Review, and First Things.

“Mary is a profoundly gifted leader and a truly visionary thinker — as well as a wife and a mother of seven beautiful children,” said Deborah Savage, a professor of theology at Franciscan who worked with Hasson as a member of the Catholic Women’s Forum. 

“She has established an international network of faithful professional women — many of them established experts in their own disciplines — who are all engaged at various levels in the battle to recover a culture of life,” she noted. 

“It is wonderful that Mary will join us as a fellow at the Veritas Center as Franciscan University seeks to realize its mission to rebuild the Church — something that cannot be accomplished without the moral authority of women,” Savage said.