When the controversy over President Obama’s visit to Notre Dame began, my initial reaction was to think that pro-lifers’ objections were overstated. Surely, I thought, one speech, even by a sitting president, cannot compromise the Catholic Church’s witness against abortion and related evils. Everyone knows where the Church stands on these matters. Surely there was nothing to be lost from dialogue.

But as the debate unfolded I was quickly reminded how surprisingly little people, both Catholics and non-Catholics, understand about Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life. Many Catholic politicians, such as the sitting vice president and the Speaker of the House, talk as though the Church regards abortion merely as a sin when it also regards it as a grave injustice — which is why it regards the legality of abortion as gravely unjust as well. (It regards the intentional destruction of human embryos, as well as the legality and the public funding of the practice, the same way.) The president of Notre Dame has come close to suggesting that the Church proposes that only Catholics should think this way. Actually, it proposes that the injustice of abortion is a moral truth that all people should recognize.

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Commentators on the dispute have ignorantly brought up Catholic teachings on other matters, especially the death penalty and the Iraq war, to suggest that the objectors are being rank partisans. In truth the Church does not oppose either the war or capital punishment in the same way, and with the same strength, that it opposes abortion. Here is one easy way to mark the distinction. The Church has never said that faithful Catholics should not participate in executions or the war. Participation in abortion is, on the other hand, strictly forbidden.

The Church doesn’t oppose abortion the way it opposes premarital sex, in other words. It would be truer to say that it opposes the abortion license the way it opposes policies of white supremacy. People are free to reject that view or find it unreasonable, although they may find it harder than they think to argue against it. But institutions that hold that view of abortion (whether those institutions are Catholic or not) cannot honor people who disagree without insulting its victims. Similarly institutions committed to racial equality before the law cannot honor people who oppose it — however exemplary those people may be in other respects — without in effect declaring that the harms the victims of racial supremacy suffer are unimportant. For many people this conclusion will be a hard saying. But I do not see how pro-life premises can lead to any other.

Notre Dame is honoring Obama both by giving him an honorary degree in law and by inviting him to deliver a commencement speech. If Obama were merely giving a speech like any other visiting speaker, with a question-and-answer session and perhaps responses, nobody would have had any reasonable ground for complaint. Mario Cuomo’s famous 1984 speech at Notre Dame, attempting to justify a “personally opposed” line on abortion, may have gone seriously awry in its moral reasoning. But the university did no wrong in having Cuomo speak. The present case is different. For one thing, there will be no opportunity for meaningful dialogue.

Once Notre Dame made its initial bad call, different actors had a series of prudential judgments to make. The university had to consider whether to rescind the invitation, Obama whether to accept it, pro-lifers whether and how to protest the invitation, and Mary Ann Glendon whether to participate in the event by giving her own five minutes’ worth of remarks. Different people, each starting from the same pro-life premises, could reach different conclusions in this matter. It would have been defensible for Glendon to speak, for example, even if the better course was to do what she ultimately did. I don’t think Notre Dame could really have rescinded the invitation, and don’t fault Obama for accepting it.

Prudential judgments are not the same thing as political judgments, at least if the latter are narrowly defined. Recall the debate, most intense in 2004, over whether Catholic officeholders who support legal abortion should be able to receive communion. It was sometimes suggested that any effort to deny communion would backfire, leading to more support for the politicians in question and thus setting back the pro-life cause. Polling lent support to this speculation. The right answer to this argument was that this consideration was irrelevant. Even if the bishops knew to a certainty that refusing communion would have exactly these unfortunate political effects, they had a duty to protect the integrity of the Eucharist (as well as a duty to the souls of the officeholders in question).

In the case of Notre Dame, as well, questions about whether pro-lifers are presenting an unattractive face to the world in protesting Obama’s honors, and thus bolstering his political standing, are mostly beside the point. Protesting Catholics (so to speak) should see themselves as striving first and foremost to protect the integrity of their Church. They should of course conduct themselves with unfailing civility, because it is the right thing to do. But to view this weekend’s events through a political lens is to miss their significance altogether.