Gonzaga president on board of Arlington nuns’ non-profit

Why the president of a Jesuit university is assisting a controversial Carmel

In the latest development of a story rife with surprises, the president of the Jesuit-run Gonzaga University sits on the board of directors for a recently formed Texas non-profit, which was created to hold property for a controversial convent of Carmelite nuns of Arlington, Texas.

Thayne McCulloh, president of Gonzaga University. Credit: Gonzaga University/YouTube.

Along with his wife Julie, Gonzaga’s President Thayne McCulloh is listed as a board member of the Friends of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Arlington, which in April became the legal title holder for the Carmelite Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity. 

After CBS News published a list of board members Sept. 29, the McCullohs’ membership on the board was confirmed to The Pillar Sept. 30 by a source close to the case, speaking on background.

McCulloh has led the Jesuit-run Gonzaga University, located in Washington state, since 2009. He began working at Gonzaga in 1990, shortly after completing an undergraduate degree there.

The Pillar has confirmed that McCulloh’s sister is Sister Joseph Marie, a member of the Arlington Carmel.

She was in 2021 elected sub-prioress to Mother Teresa Agnes of Jesus Crucified Gerlach, the nun who has claimed authority over the monastery despite a Vatican ruling to the contrary.

Sister Joseph Marie was among the sisters who in May 2023 sought a restraining order to prevent Fort Worth’s Bishop Michael Olson from entering the monastery. In a June 2023 letter to supporters, Sister Joseph Marie compared her community’s struggles to the agonies of Jesus Christ, lamenting that both had faced a “mock trial.”

McCulloh’s wife Julie, who is also listed as a board member of the Friends of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Arlington, is Gonzaga’s vice provost for enrollment management.

The Gonzaga leaders’ involvement in the complicated story of the Arlington, Texas, Carmelites comes to light after CBS News reported Sunday that that the property of the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity had been given to a non-profit foundation made up of the community’s benefactors and supporters — reportedly to prevent Bishop Olson from attempting to seize the monastery’s property for diocesan use.

The property was reportedly transferred in April, in the same month that nuns rejected the Vatican’s designation of a U.S. Carmelite federation to oversee them, amid an ongoing dispute with Bishop Olson.

The nuns’ attorney, Matthew Bobo, has argued for more than a year that Olson’s investigation into the monastery is motivated by a desire to see the diocese seize the nun’s real estate — while the diocese has said consistently it has no designs on the property, calling Bobo’s claims “false and unfounded.”

The move to transfer legal title of the property to a Texas non-profit would seem intended to prevent ecclesiastical authorities from gaining control over the property, if the controversial monastery is ever formally suppressed. The move is likely to raise questions among canon lawyers regarding the validity of the transfer, given that alienation of ecclesiastical property requires Vatican approval. 

Sources close to the case have told The Pillar that Mother Marie of the Incarnation, O.C.D — the monastery’s Vatican-appointed superior — is likely to release a statement addressing that topic sometime this week.

According to CBS News, Friends of the Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Arlington has at least eight board members. Nonprofit records indicate that the board is headed by Bobo, and the nonprofit’s headquarters share a legal address with his law office. 

Controversy between the Diocese of Fort Worth and the Carmelite monastery began in April 2023, when Bishop Olson launched a canonical investigation into the alleged conduct of Mother Teresa Agnes, who had allegedly admitted to violating her vow of chastity with an initially unnamed priest.

Lawyers for the community and for Gerlach, both civil and canonical, have said that her supposed admission of an affair was made following a serious medical procedure, under the influence of painkillers, and when she was in and out of lucidity.

But the issue escalated, coming to involve a million-dollar lawsuit filed by the nuns against Olson, images released by the Fort Worth diocese purporting to show tables inside the monastery strewn with large amounts of drug paraphernalia, and the Vatican’s involvement, supporting Olson and ordering new leadership for the monastery. 

The dispute eventually saw the nuns formally announce an association with the Society of Pius X, a de facto traditionalist association of priests which has been described as having “imperfect communion” with the Apostolic See.

The nuns this month also announced the re-election of their former superior, Mother Teresa Agnes of Jesus Crucified Gerlach, O.C.D, in defiance of the Vatican’s appointment of a nun from another monastery as the Arlington Carmelites’ superior.

The nuns said they elected Gerlach with “supplied jurisdiction” from the SSPX — referencing a claimed argument which has been rejected by the Vatican, that priests of the association have “supplied jurisdiction from the law” for sacramental and pastoral ministry because “personal jurisdiction is unjustly refused to them simply because of their attachment to the Faith and its traditional expression.” 

According to CBS News, board members have expressed support for the nuns’ new association with the Society of St. Pius X.

The Carmelites have garnered the support of the now-excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Vigano, and have had Mass celebrated illicitly by two priests without faculties, both from the Scranton, Pennsylvania diocese, one of whom was was accused of child sexual abuse and in 2012 prohibited from presenting himself as a priest or engaging in priestly ministry in the Fort Worth diocese.

While Olson has in the past suggested that the nuns’ action would be grounds for a latae sententiae excommunication, the bishop has not formally declared such a penalty.

While the nuns’ case has attracted support from Catholics across the United States, the involvement of two Gonzaga University leaders with the traditionalist monastery is likely to take many by surprise — even amid McCulloh’s family connection to the controversial religious community.

In 2013, a group of Gonzaga alumni and supporters formed the 1887 Trust, a nonprofit which said that the university’s Catholic identity was backsliding. 

The group lamented that President McCulloh had invited the Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a proponent of legal protection for abortion, to be its commencement speaker. 

It also noted that Gonzaga had declined to recognize a student chapter of the Knights of Columbus as a university organization, because the fraternal Catholic organization does not admit women. 

More recently, Gonzaga has been criticized for allowing the Queer Student Union to host an annual “Queer Love” drag show on campus. And in 2020, Spokane’s Bishop Thomas Daly said he had “serious concerns” about an LGBT-focused legal clinic launched at Gonzaga’s law school. 

McCulloh also came under fire in late 2018, after Northwest News Network revealed the several Jesuits accused of sexual abusing minors were in residence in a Jesuit home on Gonzaga’s campus, with McCulloh’s knowledge.

The university president said that while he was aware that priests under “supervised ‘safety plans’” were in residence at the university, he did not know the details, and that he had “relied upon the [Jesuit] province to inform us of any Jesuit whose history might pose a threat to our students or campus community.”

McCulloh is set to retire in July 2025.

Gonzaga University has not yet responded to The Pillar’s requests for comment.