‘The University of Our Lady’

 

Notre Dame is causing a stir again, and its getting very big very fast.

From the time I first heard this on Friday afternoon, reaction to it has virtually exploded.

The White House yesterday announced that President Obama will be the commencement speaker at the University of Notre Dame and, right on cue, a controversy has erupted in Catholic circles over whether it is appropriate for the Catholic university to honor a non-Catholic politician who supports abortion rights.

The university’s announcement made no mention of the abortion issue, but noted that Obama will be “the ninth U.S. president to be awarded an honorary degree by the University and the sixth to be the Commencement speaker.” The university plans to give Obama an honorary doctor of laws degree at the ceremony on May 17.

The question of how Catholic universities should treat politicians who have policy disagreements with the Catholic church has dogged Catholic higher education for years, but has intensified recently with the rise of prominent Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, now including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice-President Joseph Biden.

Here’s a key point:

In 2004, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement on “Catholics in Political Life” that declared, “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

That’s very clear, though the Boston blogger says what’s not clear to him is whether this applies to non-Catholic honorees. Seems to me that “those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” covers anyone who does so.

Of course, the president of the United States raises the stakes considerably — is a Catholic college really supposed to refuse a platform to the elected leader of the nation if he has a disagreement, however serious, with Catholic teachings?

Turn the question around to reflect the reality. Should a Catholic college actually invite and offer a platform to the nation’s leader, given his serious disagreement with Catholic teachings? Because that’s what they did, to be clear.

Longtime Notre Dame professor Dr. Ralph McInerny has endured many conflicts and crises there, and he has seen enough.

For one whose fifty-four year career as a member of the Notre Dame faculty is coming to an end this June, it is a bitter thing to reflect on the 2009 commencement speaker. It is of course convenient to have an excuse to absent oneself from the festivities. Listening to commencement addresses is the penalty that graduates must pay to receive their diplomas. One can count memorable commencement speeches on the cuticle of one finger. They are ceremonial occasions that will be little remembered and less celebrated. One has groaned at previous selections, but the invitation to Barack Obama is far from being 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.

My inbox has been filling with emails on this. Many are notices of organized efforts, like the Cardinal Newman Society, to protest this abandoment of Catholic identity and rejection of the US bishops’ directive from 2004. Some are like this one, from a distressed Notre Dame alum, who says he writes with regret and a broken heart.

Here’s part of his message:

Please highlight the absolute insanity that is going on at Notre Dame, what was once a leading “Catholic” univerisity.  As an alumnus, I am sickened by the invitation to Obama to speak at commencement (and receive an honorary degree!).  I feel like everything I knew has been pulled from under me.  I love(d) Notre Dame, and I always felt that they had the power to stand out and be a truly Catholic University.  I am now realizing my naivety.  How can I promote Notre Dame to my kids (and to anyone else) under these circumstances?

He is a proud father of seven. And he asks others to stand up and make an effort to recall this university to her greatness.

Others are standing up, alright. This is a growing debate. NRO publishes a symposium on it today. George Weigel’s is just the first of many voices there.

Notre Dame’s decision to make President Obama its 2009 commencement speaker is a very bad thing. It’s bad for Notre Dame, bad for Catholic moral witness in America, and bad for the bishops who are trying to mount a defense against the Obama administration’s assault on the conscience rights of Catholic health-care professionals.

The invitation to deliver a commencement address, especially when coupled with the award of an honorary degree, is not a neutral act. It’s an act by which a Catholic institution of higher learning says, “This is a life worth emulating according to our understanding of the true, the good, and the beautiful.” It is frankly beyond my imagining how Notre Dame can say that of a president who has put the United States back into the business of funding abortion abroad; a president who made a mockery of the very idea of moral argument in his speech announcing federal funding for embryo-destructive stem cell research; a president whose administration and its congressional allies are snatching tuition vouchers out of the hands of desperately poor Washington, D.C., children who just as desperately want to attend Catholic schools.

As to Lenin’s question, “What, then, is to be done?,” one does not risk a charge of cynicism by suggesting that the most effective advocates for Notre Dame’s recovering its senses will be alumni and other donors capable of withdrawing or withholding contributions in the range of seven, eight, or nine figures. That is the sad state to which things have descended under the Golden Dome: moral argument seems to be unavailing with the leaders of an institution dedicated to developing the arts of moral reason.

Stay tuned….this engagement is only the start.