Is Notre Dame Still Catholic?
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By inviting Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary degree at Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins has polarized the Catholic community nationwide — and raised a question. What does it mean to be a Catholic university in post-Christian America?
Are there truths about faith and morality that are closed to debate at Notre Dame? Or is Notre Dame like London’s Hyde Park, where all ideas and all advocates get a hearing?
To Catholics, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, a premeditated breach of God’s Commandment “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” The case is closed for all time. Any who participate in an abortion are excommunicated. Catholic politicians from Nancy Pelosi to Joe Biden who support a “woman’s right to choose” have been denounced from pulpits and denied Communion.
Obama, however, is the most pro-abortion president ever. On his third day in office, by executive order, he repealed the Bush prohibition against using tax dollars to fund agencies abroad that perform abortions.
He supports partial-birth abortion, where a baby’s soft skull is sliced open with scissors in the birth canal and its brains sucked out to ease its passage, a procedure Sen. Pat Moynihan said “comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary.”
In the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill to save the lives of infant survivors of abortion. He voted to allow doctors and nurses to let these tiny babies die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.
Barack is committed to signing the Freedom of Choice Act, which would repeal every federal and state restriction on abortion. He has smoothed the path for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Notre Dame, a university that teaches that all innocent human life is sacred, will thus honor a leader determined to ensure that a woman’s right to destroy her unborn child in the womb remains unrestricted.
There is thus a direct clash between what Notre Dame professes to stand for and what Notre Dame is doing.
Says Ralph McInerny, a philosophy professor since 1955: “By inviting Barack Obama to be the 2009 commencement speaker, Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic University. … (T)his is a deliberate thumbing of the collective nose at the Roman Catholic Church to which Notre Dame purports to be faithful.
“Faithful? Tell it to Julian the Apostate.”
McInerny calls Father Jenkins’ invitation to Obama worse than the “usual effort of the university to get into warm contact with the power figures of the day.
It is an unequivocal abandonment of any pretense at being a Catholic university.”
An honorary degree, writes Catholic author George Weigel, is a statement that here is a man we should admire and emulate. But how can a Catholic university say that about a man who means to appoint Supreme Court justices who will keep constitutional and legal the systematic slaughter of the unborn that has taken 50 million lives in 35 years?
Can Father Jenkins not see the contradiction here that renders Notre Dame a morally incoherent institution?
Diocesan Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend has told Father Jenkins he will not be attending commencement because of Obama’s support of embryonic stem cell research.
Said the bishop, “While claiming to separate policies from science, (Obama) has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.”
Pope Benedict has yet to be heard from. But on his visit to the United States, he declared that any appeal to academic freedom “to justify positions that contradict the faith and teaching of the church would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission.”
Does not honoring the most visible pro-abortion advocate in America “betray the identity and mission” of Notre Dame?
Father Jenkins says the invitation “should not be taken as condoning or endorsing his positions on specific issues regarding the protection of human life.”
But what Notre Dame is saying with this invitation is that Obama’s 100 percent support for policies and programs that bring death to more than a million unborn children every year is no disqualification to being honored by a university dedicated to Our Lady who carried to term the Son of God.
Chris Carrington, a political science major, regards the opposition to Obama’s appearance as un-Catholic: “To not allow someone here because of their beliefs would seem a little hypocritical and contradictory to what the mission of the university and church should be.”
The obtuse Carrington has stumbled on the relevant question: Is Notre Dame still a repository, teacher and exemplar of eternal truths about God and Man, right and wrong, whose mission is to convey and defend those truths in a hostile world?
Or has Notre Dame joined the secularists in their endless scavenger hunt to seek and find truth in the marketplace of ideas?
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Filed under: Culture
If peanut Jimmy Carter can go to Brandeis ( an ostensibly Jewish university ) why can’t Obama go to Notre Dame. ( an ostensibly Catholic university ) But they still definitely have the best fight song
Pat
You say “The obtuse Carrington has stumbled on the relevant question: Is Notre Dame still a repository, teacher and exemplar of eternal truths about God and Man, right and wrong, whose mission is to convey and defend those truths in a hostile world?”
Is it? Have you analyzed everything Notre Dame has done in that past to figure out your septillion dollar question?
Here is a simple example: This is the university who awarded an honorary degree to Ms Rice of all the people!!!! I leave it to your warped up intellect to figure out what are the “Catholic” values she personally and the administration she was part of, stood for. Were you outraged at that time, pouting like a child like you are now?
Yet another instance that confirms, despite all your intellect, your comfort zone is always the place where you perform the duties of a typical GOP shrill. It is pathetic and sad.
To paraphrase Abbie Hoffman’s takedown of some 1960’s Indian fakir; Notre Dame truly is a Catholic University, but it’s just the kind of University that Catholicism deserves.
Since abortion became a national issue after Roe v. Wade, national-level Catholic politicians in the Democratic party (which is their ancestral home) have either been on the wrong side of it or so tepid in their opposition to it that they had might as well favor it.
If RK doesn’t know the difference between shill and shrill, he has no business mentioning “intellect”
I’m Catholic, my family has been Catholic since at least 400 AD I would guess (being Italian and all) – and no one I know really gives a rat’s ass about abortion as a policy issue. It’s a private shame that you shouldn’t discuss in public, and making opposition to abortion the center of Church life or a litmus test is ridiculous, absolute folly. Nothing has done more to undermine the community of the Church over the last 30 years than the “pro-life” movement. It’s funny, on many issues I consider Vatican II a disaster, but it seems to me the centrality of the abortion debate to many Catholics is really more Vatican II heresy, just under the guise of “conservatism.”
Pat, you need a fact check on that partial-birth position. President Obama does not support partial-birth abortion. He required that a ban on partial-birth abortion include protection for women’s health be included, but does support a ban on the procedure.
The President only mentioned FOCA once in 2 years on the campaign, but frequently spoke of his committment to finding common ground on reducing the number of abortions in the country. Just because he doesn’t want to criminalize women and doctors does not mean he is “pro-abortion.” He is even bringing culture warrior radicals who use your same talking points around a table with women’s rights groups to chart out constitutional common ground solutions. If the Republicans who have been in power for the majority of the time since 1980 haven’t made any progress on reducing abortions and President Obama puts us on the path to reduce abortion, then who is really “pro-abortion?”
He is not the most “pro-abortion President ever.” That is offensive grandstanding. Having worked in 2 Administrations and running for the position numerous times yourself, I would think you would have a bit more respect.
Many a conservative American Catholic and Christian who would not obtain one themself and who would go to lengths to discourage their kin on spiritual grounds to avoid same procedure, would, out of ethnopolitical concerns, not be enthused about overturning Roe vs. Wade currently.
If abortion is what Christians say it is, then there is no question of whether or not it should be illegal. It’s interesting to see how shocking some of the recent comments favoring an intermediate approach would look when applied to other gross moral evils:
“Rape is a personal, private, choice. It should be worked out between the two parties. Bringing the government into it really won’t do any good. Are we really ready to send young men and women to jail for sex?”
“As a Christian, slavery isn’t something that I would choose to engage in, but we ought to be governed by pragmatism on this issue. Freed slaves living among us would cause problems, and the issue would have horrible political repercussions. God calls us to be wise, and it’s wisest to do nothing, at least until the political climate changes.”
Pat,
First, wasn’t it the opinion of the St Thomas Aquinas about the fetus that the human soul enters it after 3 months of pregnancy? If so, why the opposition of the church to the abortion even in the first 3 months? Do the priests of today know more or are more pious than the teacher of the church?
Second, would have you made the same vigorous objection if, say, president Bush had been invited and honored? Sure, he was anti abortion, but he was ok with killing hundreds of thousands of innocents at the whim of the Israel lobby and neocons. Sometimes impartiality is a virtue, you know!
John,
St Aquinas based his *opinion* on the very limited science of the time. His flawed understanding of human biology led him to judge early abortions as less evil than late-term abortions — but still gravely evil. St Aquinas was not a pope, and thus never taught infallibly on this or any other issue.
Here in the 21st century we know that the fetus is alive, human, distinct from the mother (though still dependent on her), and a complete organism (rather than part of a larger organism, as an arm or liver would be). This is basic biology, and would never be debated for the fetuses of non-human species.
Still, science can’t tell us if the fetus has a soul (if souls even exist), or is a Person (whatever that is), or is deserving of legal protection against attempts by its mother to kill it.
Notre Dame hasn’t been Catholic in decades. Its former president, Father Hesburgh, conspired with the Kennedys and the Rockefeller foundation to promote contraception and even to get Pope Paul VI to endorse that abomination. They failed with the Pope but succeeded in the larger objective of promoting the anti-life mentality and practices throughout the US and the world. Meanwhile Notre Dame has played host to every anti-Catholic movement and individual it can find. It has been anti-life longer than Obama has.
One might better ask, is the President still American? The US is an institution that in theory supports equal rights for women, and severe punishment for child molestation. It would seem to me that it diminishes the moral authority of the country to have its President associated with an institution that is affiliated with Catholicism. Or perhaps it’s just a speech, and more high-horsiness is a silly game best left to the immature?
Or perhaps Obama wishes to acknowledge the fact that but for the Church, Universities as we know them, would not exist.
Note the vicious cycle: Faithful/rigorist Catholics stop supporting a Catholic school because of its dubious actions.
This makes the school more dependent on lax Catholics and non-Catholics’ support.
This makes the school perform more dubious actions, which then prompt more Catholics to stop supporting it.
Anybody wishing to steal another Catholic university from the faithful who built it would simply have to instigate one or two large scandals to begin the negative feedback loop.
Granting its existence, how could this cycle be reversed? Among pro-life Catholics, “decline and fall” is the preferred narrative rather than “recovery after collapse.”
I’m surprised that noone else has noticed the irony of the posting above (by JPG) that mentions favorably both biological science and papal infallibility. Given the church’s shifting historical ideas about evolution, the two would seem to be quite obviously at odds.
And this hints at the crux of this as I see it: yes Notre Dame is a serious university and yes it’s Catholic. But if it’s to take seriously its mission as a serious university, it can’t take its institutional cues about ideas, speakers, and even honorary degrees from the Catholic hierarchy. If it did it would become something more like Oral Roberts or somesuch–which would never invite a political figure who didn’t tow its institutional party line and which is not a serious university. So, yes Catholic and, yes, hetrodox, as any serious research institution must be.
“I’m surprised that noone else has noticed the irony of the posting above (by JPG) that mentions favorably both biological science and papal infallibility. Given the church’s shifting historical ideas about evolution, the two would seem to be quite obviously at odds.”
Inform yourself better about the nuances of Catholic theology and papal infallibility, and you’ll realize the irony is not so great as you think.
In matters of ethics and public policy the church has a right to insist that institutions operating in its name uphold its ideals. Inviting a politician like Obama has nothing to do with free enquiry. it has everything to do with public policy that the Church and many other Christians find immoral.
Speaking of ironies, some commenters here fault the Church with failing to in effect defer to Obama as a secular leader. Yet how many of you also fault Pius XII specifically for participating in diplomatic relations with that other secular leader, Adolph Hitler? It seems the Church can’t win with some people.
Kevin, if faithful Catholics keep supporting (financially, I assume you mean) a nominally Catholic school despite its dubious actions, those actions will continue to get worse. Eventually you’re hardly better off than if you were sending your money to Planned Parenthood.
The solution is for the relevant bishop to revoke the Catholic identity of a school that persists in non-Catholic behavior.
http://nathancontramundi.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/obama-at-nd/
Additionally, Mr Carrington is a bit obtuse, to say the least, and probably one of the last people, right up there with Chris Hitchens, whom I’d consult about what is Catholic and what is anti-Catholic.
I guess it is not ok for Obama to speak at Notre Dame, but I’ll bet this twit has no problem taking money from the NRA, which has helped kill how many children by being on the wrong end of a gun.
Or I’ll bet he was pro George Bush, who had no problem killing americans in an un-necessary war for profit.
OR Dick Cheney, who while being vice president of the united states, still was a prower broker at Halliburton, which has killed soldiers by their republican ways of building showers, which has electrocuted over a hundred soldiers with shoddy workmanship.
I’ll bet he also pro war, and gives money to Pat Robertson, who went on one of the God Channels and put a bounty on Hugo Chevez’s head, and was OK with that as well.
Talk about the poster children of the two faced people….
Note to John: OK, so if he is not the most “pro-abortion” president ever…..then who the heck was???? One of them has to be. This ought to be good to see how you worm out of this one. Pope John XXIII once said “I believe that when I stand before God, God will simply ask me, ‘How did you use the gift of life I gave you?’ ” I am ready to answer…..are you?