Is Notre Dame Still Catholic? |
Hat Tip to regular DaveinLouisiana for the head’s up on Pat Buchanan’s fine article.
~~John Cronin~~
March 31, 2009
By Patrick Buchanan
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day in office, by executive order, he repealed the Bush prohibition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?
