A letter-writing campaign at Notre Dame is in order. If Bill Clinton wasn’t invited to be commencement speaker, why on earth has Obama been issued the implicit endorsement of his views — plus a bully pulpit — by the nation’s premiere Catholic university?
— Charlotte Allen is author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. R. R. RENO I can see some good reasons for the University of Notre Dame to invite Barack Obama to give a speech. Free inquiry, open discussion, vigorous debates — that’s what universities do. And Catholic universities do it very well, because unlike most universities, they don’t censure conservatives.
But a commencement address? It’s not an academic event of intellectual exchange and debate. It’s entirely and richly symbolic.
And the symbolism is obvious: A famous Catholic university is putting forward a politician who is closely and unapologetically associated with the most extreme abortion agenda in the modern Western world.
What was the leadership at Notre Dame thinking? In May the university will give Mary Ann Glendon the Laetare Medal, its highest honor. Glendon has heroically devoted a great deal of her life to defending innocent life. And then Barack Obama — a man who has devoted a great deal of his life to representing elite liberal and anti-Catholic moral views about sex, marriage, and reproduction — enjoys the spotlight. It’s an insult to Glendon.
The complacent leaders of Catholic institutions need to wake up. Many of the richest and most powerful people in our country are utterly and aggressively opposed to traditional Catholic moral principles. Notre Dame can’t pretend that the elite’s fondest hope isn’t for the death of the pro-life movement. And Notre Dame also can’t pretend that giving Obama the podium on commencement day doesn’t create the illusion that his abortion policies are somehow okay.
Alumni and donors need to wake up too. By all means write John Jenkins, CSC, the Notre Dame president. But don’t stop there. Some faculty and programs at Notre Dame are deeply committed to the Catholic culture of life. The Center for Ethics and Culture run by David Solomon comes to mind, as does the Maritain Center run by John O’Callaghan. Helping their lights shine more brightly is the best response to the ugly fact of an abortion supporter’s being in the spotlight on commencement day.
— R. R. Reno is features editor of First Things and professor of theology at Creighton University.
COLLEEN CARROLL CAMPBELL
The University of Notre Dame administrators who invited Pres. Barack Obama to deliver this spring’s commencement address surely consider his acceptance a historic coup for their school and yet more proof of Notre Dame’s self-declared role as the place “where the Church does its thinking.” In reality, their decision only cements the school’s reputation as the place where anti-life politicians do their rationalizing.
That reputation first took hold 25 years ago, when former New York governor Mario Cuomo, a Catholic, took the podium at Notre Dame to make the case for Catholic politicians who support legalized — and, in Cuomo’s case, taxpayer-funded — abortion. Cuomo’s speech was riddled with logical fallacies; but for Catholic politicians who wanted to please the powerful pro-abortion lobby without forfeiting the Catholic vote, it was a home run. Cuomo’s abortion alibi soon was parroted by pro-choice politicians across America, its appeal bolstered by the fact that his words bore the apparent imprimatur of the nation’s leading Catholic university.
Now President Obama, struggling with sagging approval ratings and the growing dissatisfaction of Catholic voters who finally have awakened to his deep-seated disregard for unborn human life, needs to butter up his flagging Catholic base. Substantive policy changes are out of the question for such a strident supporter of abortion rights and embryo-destructive research. That leaves only one solution: a visit to that reliable ally of pro-choice Democrats, the University of Notre Dame. There Obama can bask in the reflected glow of Notre Dame’s storied Catholic heritage while continuing to advance policies that contradict the Catholic faith and natural law.
How sad that Notre Dame’s administrators imagine themselves as free-thinkers when they are, in fact, mere political pawns on the wrong side of today’s leading civil-rights struggle. Alumni embarrassed to see their alma mater used in this way should express their outrage in the language that Notre Dame’s image-conscious, endowment-hungry administrators understand: money. By withholding their donations, alumni can send the message that a Catholic school that sells its soul for secular prestige cannot depend on the faithful to foot its bills.
— Colleen Carroll Campbell, an NRO contributor, is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a former speechwriter to Pres. George W. Bush, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. Her television and radio show, Faith & Culture, airs weekly on EWTN, Sirius Satellite Radio, and Relevant Radio.
FR. GEORGE W. RUTLErThis is a highly cynical act, contemptuous of the Church’s prophetic voice in civil society and wagering that there will be no retribution. If a midwestern school seeks attention by granting Mr. Obama an honorary doctorate in law, the next logical step would be to grant Judas Iscariot posthumously an honorary doctorate in business administration.
— Fr. George W. Rutler is a Catholic priest in New York.
