We are witnessing one of the most compelling stories of the last 30 years unfold before our eyes. The collapse of the U.S.S.R. was another of those stories. The country that menaced America for over 40 years fell by it’s own weight, with a major assist by President Reagan.
Now we see the courageous Iranian people fighting the forces of totalitarianism in the streets. Young men and women, battling well armed later day Gestapo with chunks of concrete and moral authority.
Take a few minutes to view this riveting YouTube video of what may be a developing Iranian Revolution.
Because of President Obama’s appearance and speech at Notre Dame this Sunday, some seniors will not attend their own graduation ceremony and instead join a University prayer service on the grounds at Notre Dame. No indication yet as to how many seniors will forgo the graduation ceremony.
The student group behind this effort, ND Response, has made this wild hollywood style video showcasing their displeasure with Notre Dame and the President. I must say the production value is extremely high and I feel like I’m watching a trailer for some sort of hollywood blockbuster movie.
Read below as to what will be taking place this Sunday at Notre Dame:
The meditation, which will be led by Rev. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, is part of a two-day rally that has been officially sanctioned by the university.
The evening of May 16, bishop of the Fort Wayne- South Bend diocese, Rev. John D’Arcy, will lead a candlelight prayer vigil for graduating seniors and their families to pray for an end to abortion and embryo research.
On May 17, Commencement Day, in addition to the meditation ceremony, a large rally will be held on the South Quad of the university, the campus’ main quad, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Speakers at the rally will include Elizabeth Naquin Border, Notre Dame graduate and former chairman of the board for the Women’s Care Centers in South Bend; Rev. Joseph Raphael, Notre Dame graduate and principal of St. Augustine’s High School in New Orleans; William Solomon, director of the university’s Center for Ethics and Culture; and Chris Godfrey, a Notre Dame law school graduate and former offensive guard for the Super Bowl XXI champion New York Giants.
You know, the Obama faith team worked really hard during the campaign to court Catholic voters and it paid off because Obama won the Catholic vote. It made a difference in swing states like Pennsylvania and others. All along the Obama team knew they had a challenge on the abortion issue but was able to break through because of how candidate Obama lined up with Catholics on other issues like torture, healthcare, climate change, human rights, etc.
Since becoming President, Mr. Obama has made policy that has left himself open to criticism by pro-life Catholics (conscience clause, mexico city, embryonic stem cell research). When the President faces re-election in 2012, the faith team will have an even tougher challenge because with evidence in hand, pro-life Catholics will now mount a full scale offensive against the President.
Moderate Catholic groups are armed for battle too. Will this be a Catholic armageddon of sorts?
By the way, just because some students at Notre Dame take issue with what will happen Sunday, let me provide a little balance here. 23 student groups support the move by Notre Dame and did you know that the Notre Dame valedictorian is an Obama supporter?
This post is in response to several requests from our regular readers to keep them in the loop regarding upcoming demonstrations on the campus of the University of Notre Dame against the planned appearance of President Obama to deliver the commencement address on May 17.
~~John Cronin~~
[Editor's Note: Signatures on the petition at WWW.NOTREDAMESCANDAL.COM are over 235,000]
Events
Please Note: Events will be added as they are finalized
March 31 - May 17
Nightly Rosary
Please join us at the Grotto every night at 9:30 pm to pray the rosary for the conversion of Barack Obama, greater respect for life, and the Catholic Identity of Our Lady’s university.
5 April
Palm Sunday Prayer Rally
The coalition has announced plans for its first official demonstration, a prayerful rally to be held in front of the University’s Main Building at 2:00 p.m. after the noon Palm Sunday Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on April 5, 2009. We invite all those who share our concerns to support our efforts by joining in this respectful display.
More information
Official Press Release
Ongoing
Red Envelope Day, Notre Dame Edition
We will be delivering red envelopes to Fr. Jenkins, stating:
“Fr. Jenkins, This envelope represents one child who died because of an abortion.
It is empty because the life that was taken is now unable to be a part of our world.
This envelope was going to be sent to President Obama on March 31st. However, as he is scheduled to receive an Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from Notre Dame on May 17th, we ask that you deliver it to him on our behalf at that time.”
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?
Following up on my post, “Blood, Sweat and Tears” by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, here is a short video on a completely different subject, showing Bishop Sheen at his impassioned best.
Ten years ago, when my son Pat was 13 years old, I gave him a copy of the late Bishop Fulton J.Sheen’s ( 1895-1979 ) wonderful book: WAY TOHAPPINESS. About a week ago, Pat did a major cleaning and rearranging of his room as he prepares to enter the spring semester at Webster University. He also is working very hard on his physical fitness regimen so that he will be in top condition when he leaves for USMC OFFICER CANDIDATE SCHOOL in Quantico, Virginia this summer.
Pat gave back to me a couple of books that he has already read and one of them was Bishop Sheen’s book. This is a Cronin tradition, what we call the Cronin Lending Library. We pass good books back and forth between ourselves every few years and it is a great way to revisit books that we haven’t read for years. This is why I now have WAY TO HAPPINESS back on my bookshelves and in a while my sister will probably have it on hers.
As in all great books, although this one was first published in 1953, it is just as fresh as today’s headlines. Like many Catholics, I grew up listening to Bishop Sheen. He was the most popular television personality of his day. Very interestingly, he had an extraordinarily high percentage of Jewish people amongst his television audience.
I remember most of all his vibrant personality. He was a highly educated man and not only that, but he had a gift of insight that allowed him to get to the core of an issue. He once said that he read and studied for 20 hours a week in preparation for his half hour show. Right before he would go on the air live, he would spend time in prayer and meditation, what he called THE HOLY HOUR. During this time of prayer, he would ask the Holy Spirit to guide him in his presentation, to inspire his thoughts and to direct him into those areas that would most benefit his audience.
The excerpt that I am going to use for this article is a chapter that is only four pages long, but that was one of Bishop Sheen’s many gifts. He could pack more real information into four pages than some authors do in a 275 page book.
~~John Cronin~~
By: Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
Way To Happiness
Recently a woman at a forum asked an important politician this question: “Why is it that our political leaders never speak of blood, sweat, tears and sacrifice, but only of how much they will give the farmers and the manufacturers and the labor unions if they are elected?” The politician answering quoted another politician, but it seems as if he missed the deep significance of the woman’s question. Actually, she was a spokesman of a large segment of the American people who know enough about history and psychology to know that no nation, as no individual, ever achieves anything worth while except through sacrifice and self-denial.
Toynbee pointed out that sixteen out of nineteen civilizations which have decayed from the beginning of history to the present, have rotted from within; only three fell to attacks from without. Very often an attack from the outside solidifies a nation and strengthens it’s moral fiber. Lincoln once said he never feared that America would be conquered from without, but that it might fall from within. Lenin once said that America would collapse by spending itself to death, an eventuality that is not too distant with a national debt of a little less than three hundred billion dollars.
Was Walter Whitman speaking of our age as well as his own when he wrote: “Society in these days is cankered, crude, superstitious and rotten….The great cities reek with respectable as well as non-respectable robbery and scoundrels. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelities, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time….It is as if we were somehow endowed with a vast and thoroughly appointed body, but then left with little or no soul.”
Whitman’s worry was in the woman’s mind for she was disturbed about our indifference, tepidity and moral apathy. If there is anything that is becoming clear in our national life, it is that so called progressive education is extremely unprogressive. Juvenal delinquency, crime, racketeering, political scandals—–all these illegitimate children are dropped on the doorstep of an educational theory that denied a distinction between right and wrong and assumed that self-restraint was identical with the destruction of personality. Every instinct and impulse in either a child or an adult, does not, if left to itself, necessarily produce good results. Man has a hunting instinct which is good when directed to deer in season, but bad when directed to the police in season or out of season. The disrespect for authority which is the outgrowth of the stupidity that every individual is his own determinant of right and wrong has now become an epidemic of lawlessness.
Some day our educators will awaken to several basic facts about youth: (1) Youth has an intellect and a will. The intellect is the source of his knowledge; the will, the source of his decisions. If his choices are wrong, the youth will be wrong regardless of how much he knows. (2) Education through the communication of knowledge does not necessarily make a good man; it can conceivably make learned devils instead of stupid devils. (3) Education is successful when it trains the mind to see the right targets, and disciplines the will to choose them rather than the wrong targets.
At present two currents manifest themselves in our American way of life: one is the direction of a great development of moral character both in individuals and in the nation; the other is toward the surrender of morality and responsibility through a socialist state in which there will be no morality but state-morality, no conscience but state-conscience. Of the two the first is by far the stronger, though neither politics nor economics has seen it. Some of our educators are turning away from the spoiled child psychology, in which the child was called progressive if he did whatever he wanted; now the return is toward doing a little bit of thinking and working in order to wrest us out of our juvenile delinquency and moral flabbiness.
Youth particularly is yearning for something hard; it no longer believes it’s teachers who say that good or evil is a point of view and it makes no difference in which you believe. They now want to believe that something is so evil that we ought to fight against it, and something is so good that we ought, if necessary, to steel and discipline ourselves and even die to defend it. This latent power of blood and sweat and tears in our American youth will be captured within the next generation by one of the other forces: either by some political crackpot who will turn that desire for sacrifice into something like Nazism, Fascism or Communism, or by our leaders, political, educational and moral who will first show self-discipline and moral courage in their own lives and thus give an example to others.
The greatest responsibility falls on religious leaders whose message ought to be the message the woman wanted from politicians—–the clarion call to restraint on evil influences and the showing forth of altruism and love of God.
On May 8, 2008, Gov. Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were awarded the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury Medal for “Courage in the Defense of Religious Liberty.” Mr. Romney’s 18-minute acceptance speech, before friends and supporters of the Becket Fund at the Metropolitan Club in New York, focused on the need for religion in a free society.
The Canterbury Medal is awarded annually to the public figure who “resolutely and publicly refused to render unto Caesar that which is God’s.” Past recipients include Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School and current U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See and Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
For previous posts on 2008 Canterbury Medal Dinner, click here.
Watch Part I of Gov. Romney’s acceptance speech here:
