[BRIGADE] PJB: Is Notre Dame Still Catholic?
Published: Tue, 03/31/09
By Patrick J. Buchanan
March 31, 2009
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third day in office, by executive order, he repealed the Bush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?
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SOURCE:
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-is-notre-dame-still-catholic-1485