I’ve now sent five children to Catholic colleges. I’ve seen dozens of American Catholic college campuses rise in my windshield as I traversed the Atlantic seaboard. I sat up in the driver’s seat in awe as the flying buttresses, pointed arches, and limestone gargoyles leered down at my minivan.

I’ve seen countless buildings under construction on Catholic campuses, almost all of them made of stone with turrets, gargoyles, grotesques, spires, pinnacles and finnials. They’re all named something like Aquinas Hall, Saint Joseph’s Science Center, or Marian Commons or whatever nomenclature the development office voted on. I recall watching cranes swinging blocks of massive limestone into place while the alumni magazine ran full-color articles in their alumni magazine with headlines like: “Preserving Our Heritage in Stone.”

And all us parents arrive on orientation weekend in our sensible SUVs, Dad in our polo shirts, Mom clutching the rosary in her purse, and our orientation leader in pajama. But we ignore that because we look up at these massive stone structures with their towers looming above and we breathe easier. this place, we think, is unlike the world. This place understands the importance of continuity, tradition. Here the Faith endures because…look around.

The tuition is astronomical, the endowment balloons, and we keep on giving because the brochures still claim “Jesuit tradition” or “Dominican charism” or plain old “Catholic identity.” The buildings promulgate the same lie: We are the Church Militant, the guardians of two millennia of tradition handed down by Christ himself.

Yet step inside these grand buildings and see the gender-neutral bathrooms. Peek through the windows to see the flyers stuck on the wall for the annual drag show sponsored by the Office of Inclusive Excellence or something even more ridiculous. Wander into the student health center and pick up the Planned Parenthood pamphlets laid out casually on a table.

The teen leading the tour, you remember, the one in pajamas, she’s majoring in “queer theology.” She walks you right past the chapel for fear of offending someone but the pride flags fly from the dorm windows without fear of offense.

The stone facades stand immutable to the elements while the teachings of the Church dissolve like sugar in the rain.

The gargoyles watch on in muted confusion as professors deliver lectures about accepting young men on the field hockey team, guest speakers rant about “reproductive justice” and student clubs demand free condoms. All this while the crucifixes hang overhead.

Everywhere, the architecture screams tradition while the curriculum bows to modernity. The buildings are built to last a thousand years; but the morals survive as long as newspapers in the rain.

It is the most expensive and daring architectural confidence game. You Catholics in the pews. The ones attending Mass every Sunday, the ones still lighting candles for deceased relatives. The ones who pray the rosary. You’re the mark.

You imagine your children and grandchildren kneeling in gothic chapels of stone with the sun slanting in through stained glass. Instead, those children and grandchildren emerge with a degree that certifies them as fluent in the new orthodoxy. Gender is a spectrum. Life only begins when convenience permits. Their “lived experience” outweighs the Church’s patriarchal outdated doctrine.

The stones deceive because they endure and testify to an age which believed the Faith was true. Now the same stones are used to build dormitories and lecture halls where the Faith is deconstructed and discarded in favor of the prevailing culture’s mores.

These massive Gothic constructions merely make it appear that the Church is alive here but they are merely spacious coffins for the true faith. On the majority of Catholic campuses, the body of Catholic higher education lies in state beneath the flying buttresses, looking remarkably lifelike, while inside the vital organs have long since been replaced with the synthetic substitutes of modernity.

And so the cranes keep swinging, the stones are stacked, and parents continue writing checks, reassured by the sight of something ancient and solid in a world gone fluid. The stones themselves are merely the facade which cover the real work of these administrators and professors, which is to “modernize” the malleable souls of our children and grandchildren.