Elite Catholic girls’ school in gender identity uproar now accused of promoting Islam
AN elite Catholic girls’ school engulfed by a gender fluidity uproar has been plunged into greater turmoil with revelations parents accused the college of promoting Islam to its students.
NSW
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AN elite Catholic girls’ school engulfed by a gender fluidity uproar has been plunged into greater turmoil with revelations parents accused the college of promoting Islam to its students.
The head religion teacher at Santa Sabina College was targeted by complaints from families over her “obsession with Islam” years before the gender identity row currently threatening the career of principal Maree Herrett.
Religious co-ordinator Helen Smith was promoted by Dr Herrett to Head of Mission and Identity last year despite the complaints, but later left the Strathfield college, where students’ parents pay up to $22,850 a year in tuition fees.
Ms Smith was previously head of religious education at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill, before forming a relationship with a younger priest, Andrew Nee, who became her husband. It is understood their departures from Joeys were “managed by the leadership” of the school.
Several ex-students and parents say they complained to Dr Herrett, who is now battling a parent-led campaign to oust her as principal, about the Islamic teachings in Ms Smith’s religion classes from 2015.
“She was obsessed with Islam,” one ex-student said. “She was a religion co-ordinator at a Catholic school but promoted Islam (and) gay-marriage.”
Parents demanded Dr Herrett’s resignation and threatened to pull as many as 200 girls out of the school after she linked the concept of gender fluidity with introduction of pants and shorts into the school uniform.
Parents also complained that two “gender fluid books” in the junior school library were sent home with a five-year-old student — Heather Has Two Mummies and Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress.
After the complaints the school library removed the books from the shelf for “review”.
It is understood the college board is supporting Dr Herrett but school records show at least 150 teaching and administration staff have left Santa Sabina in the five years since she became principal, including deputy heads Ed Codsi and Carmelina Eussen and six executives.
The Telegraph has learned that an “overwhelming” response has been received to join focus groups on the crisis organised by an outside public relations company, Australian Public Affairs contracted by the college board.
Ms Smith told The Daily Telegraph she did not wish to comment publicly on the complaints.
But one ex-student said: “We were taught that we had the same God as the Islamic God, that Christians are the ones persecuting Muslims, that Jesus ‘was a refugee’ and thus we should have free and open borders to accept all refugees, and that Islam was peace and essentially, truth.
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“Ms Smith would get guest speakers from the Islamic community to speak about how they found the truth, healing and peace through Islam.
“During class lessons we were encouraged by Ms Smith to go online on a Facebook page called ‘Muslims against ISIS’ and defend Muslims who were ‘victims of Islamophobia’.”
The ex-student said some girls “left Santa Sabina hating the Catholic Church and loving Islam”.
Another ex-student said Ms Smith “told us that it’s our Islamophobia, hatred and racism that is contributing to the radicalisation of Muslims who join ISIS”.
”She told us that the [Catholic] Church has a lot to answer for and that Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan were also Catholic.”
Another ex-student said: “In class, we were always taught that Islam was peace, that Muslims were persecuted, victimised in society, and that anyone who opposed or thought that particular Quranic phrases were violent was intolerant and Islamophobic.”
Parents and ex-students also complained that Ms Smith made students watch YouTube videos on Christian extremism in the US, and videos likening the treatment of Muslims and gay people in Western society to that of victims of the Jewish Holocaust.
Students say Smith would begin religion classes with an Islamic call to prayer and end with a photograph of herself standing with two burqa-clad women in Bradford, UK, while on a Churchill Fellowship to “investigate the use of education as a means of addressing cultural misunderstandings of Islam in Australian society”.
Santa Sabina last year hosted an Iftar dinner to mark the end of Ramadan and invited students from the predominantly Muslim Punchbowl Boys High.