A Catholic priest holding a crucifix and a dozen laymen protested a talk by Dylan Mulvaney, one of America’s most controversial transgender celebrities, at St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution, on Monday.

The Catholic university refused to cancel the event, defying Pope Francis’s recent denunciation of gender theory and gender transitioning as “extremely dangerous since it cancels differences in its claim to make everyone equal.” ...

Alexandra Leung, the president of SLU’s chapter of College Republicans, told media the university was not only contradicting Catholic teaching but had rebuffed conservative students who asked permission to host Paula Scanlan, a women’s sports activist, a day after Mulvaney’s talk.

Scanlan, a former University of Pennsylvania swimmer, began campaigning for women’s sports to be protected from infiltration by biological males identifying as women after her school allowed transgender swimmer Lia Thomas to compete on the women’s team and to change in the women’s locker room.