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office, by executive order, he repealed the Bush prohibition against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?
The church's teachings on this have been consistant. They are a private institution, funded in part, directly from Rome, and should defer to the beliefs set forth by the church.
It would be inappropriate for them to invite a serial killer to speak. Obama, by his stance on abortion is no better. Yes, I said that and meant it. Innocent life is stopped- killed- murdered when an abortion is performed.