Editorial - Op Ed

Wednesday May 6, 2009

Of Interest to ‘Notre Damers’ and others.... UPDATED 5/6/09:

From the Associated Press:

Empathizing with angry Notre Dame alumni, Bishop Thomas Wenski told the Associated Press, “I’m a bishop—I’m not going to tell them to attack Notre Dame with a pitchfork. I’m going to tell them to go pray.”

The Mass last night was not “a tirade against Notre Dame.” Rather, Bishop Wenski said in the AP report, what must be atoned for is “complacency among U.S. Catholics about the legal killing of unborn children, which contributed to the climate that allowed Notre Dame to think it was all right to honor President Obama.” We’re all for prayer, but we’re troubled by the Catholic Church’s increasing insistence that political figures been seen solely through the prism of the abortion issue. As the Rev. Richard McBrien, a Notre Dame theology professor, told NPR recently, rather than saying “all abortions are evil,” a more accurate phrasing of the church’s position is that “all life is sacred.” What’s more, it’s too simplistic to think that abortion is the only issue with which Catholics should be concerned. Unjust wars, capital punishment, torture—all of these violate the sanctity of life. The university has emphasized that President Obama will be honored as an inspiring leader who broke a historic racial barrier—not for his positions on abortion or embryonic stem cell research. Just as George W. Bush was not celebrated when he spoke at the university in 2001 for the record 152 executions carried out while he was governor of Texas but because he was the newly elected president. No university endorses or embraces all of a public figure’s views when it confers an honorary degree. Yet about a quarter of the nation’s 200 bishops have publicly denounced or questioned Notre Dame in recent weeks on the matter of President Obama.

The bishops may want to tread lightly here. Their judgment is not infallible.

And from and editorial in the Jesuit Weekly, AMERICA Magazine:

Sectarian Catholicism
The editors | MAY 11, 2009

The clouds roll with thunder, the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth, and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak—‘We are the only Christians!’” So wrote St. Augustine about the Donatists, a perfectionist North African sect that attempted to keep the church free of contamination by having no truck with Roman officialdom. In the United States today, self-appointed watchdogs of orthodoxy, like Randall Terry and the Cardinal Newman Society, push mightily for a pure church quite unlike the mixed community of saints and sinners—the Catholic Church—that Augustine championed. Like the Circumcellions of old, they thrive on slash-and-burn tactics; and they refuse to allow the church to be contaminated by contact with certain politicians.

For today’s sectarians, it is not adherence to the church’s doctrine on the evil of abortion that counts for orthodoxy, but adherence to a particular political program and fierce opposition to any proposal short of that program. They scorn Augustine’s inclusive, forgiving, big-church Catholics, who will not know which of them belongs to the City of God until God himself separates the tares from the wheat. Their tactics, and their attitudes, threaten the unity of the Catholic Church in the United States, the effectiveness of its mission and the credibility of its pro-life activities.

The sectarians’ targets are frequently Catholic universities and Catholic intellectuals who defend the richer, subtly nuanced, broad-tent Catholic tradition. Their most recent target has been the University of Notre Dame and its president, John Jenkins, C.S.C., who has invited President Barack Obama to offer the commencement address and receive an honorary degree at this year’s graduation. Pope Benedict XVI has modeled a different attitude toward higher education. In 2008, the pope himself was prevented from speaking at Rome’s La Sapienza University by the intense opposition of some doctrinaire scientists. The Vatican later released his speech, in which he argued that “freedom from ecclesiastical and political authorities” is essential to the university’s “special role” in society. He asked, “What does the pope have to do or say to a university?” And he answered, “He certainly should not try to impose in an authoritarian manner his faith on others.”

The divisive effects of the new American sectarians have not escaped the notice of the Vatican. Their highly partisan political edge has become a matter of concern. That they never demonstrate the same high dudgeon at the compromises, unfulfilled promises and policy disagreements with Republican politicians as with Democratic ones is plain for all to see. It is time to call this one-sided denunciation by its proper name: political partisanship.

Pope Benedict XVI has also modeled a different stance toward independent-minded politicians. He has twice reached out to President Obama and offered to build on the common ground of shared values. Even after the partially bungled visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Pope Benedict, Vatican officials worked quickly to repair communication with her. Furthermore, in participating in the international honors accorded New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson in Rome last month for outlawing the death penalty (See Signs of the Times, 5/4), Pope Benedict did not flinch at appearing with a politician who does not agree fully with the church’s policy positions. When challenged about the governor’s imperfect pro-life credentials, Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe responded on point, “We were able to help him understand our position on the death penalty…. One thing at a time.” Finally, last March the pro-choice French president Nicolas Sarkozy was made an honorary canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the pope’s own cathedral.

Four steps are necessary for the U.S. church to escape the strengthening riptide of sectarian conflict and re-establish trust between universities and the hierarchy. First, the bishops’ discipline about speakers and awards at Catholic institutions should be narrowed to exclude from platforms and awards only those Catholics who explicitly oppose formal Catholic teaching. Second, in politics we must reaffirm the distinction between the authoritative teaching of moral principles and legitimate prudential differences in applying principles to public life. Third, all sides should return to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI that in politics there are usually several ways to attain the same goals. Finally, church leaders must promote the primacy of charity among Catholics who advocate different political options. For as the council declared, “The bonds which unite the faithful are mightier than anything which divides them” (“Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” No. 92).

Another view on Obama, Notre Dame
By RICHARD R. GAILLARDETZ

The latest controversy du jour in the American Catholic Church concerns Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Obama to give the May 17 commencement address. As is customary, he will also receive an honorary degree. This has created an uproar among leading voices on the Catholic Right. Randall Terry, recent convert to Catholicism and outspoken anti-abortion advocate, warns that an Obama commencement address would constitute the “cultural rape of true Catholicity.” The Bishop of South Bend, John D’Arcy, has declared that he will not attend the commencement. The current president of the U.S. Bishop’s Conference, Cardinal Archbishop Francis George, has suggested that in inviting President Obama the university seems not to understand what it means to be Catholic.

What is most interesting about this entire affair, however, is the peculiar silence of the Vatican. There is much to learn here. A little over 100 years ago, Pope Leo XIII condemned the evils of “Americanism,” the purportedly heretical American Catholic embrace of, among other things, religious liberty and the legitimate separation of church and state. At that time, leading American bishops sought, to no avail, to convince the Vatican that the American separation of church and state should not be confused with the anti-church version championed during the French Revolution. In the United States, the separation of church and state actually freed the church for a healthy and vigorous cultural engagement.

A half century or so later at the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic church embraced much of what Pope Leo had condemned.

In his recent trip to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI made a point of praising the American separation of church and state as a cultural framework that made possible the flourishing of religion. The Vatican now seems to have embraced the values that some of our current American bishops have forgotten. The Vatican practices a pragmatic realism when it engages public leaders. Our last two popes have met with political leaders from across the ideological spectrum, forthrightly criticizing policies they found problematic while working to find areas of common ground. This pragmatism extends to the practice of offering honorary titles. In 2007, French President Sarkozy, an admittedly lapsed Catholic who has been divorced twice and supports legal abortion was, following a long standing custom, made an honorary canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome.

Pope Benedict is, I suspect, particularly sensitive to the need for prominent universities to encourage engagement with differing viewpoints. In 2008, the Pope was invited to speak at La Sapienza University, a secular Italian university. The event was canceled after faculty and students publicly protested the papal invitation because of the Pope’s purportedly “obscurantist” views on science.
The president of Notre Dame is following the example set by the Vatican. He has made it clear that Notre Dame’s invitation to speak should not be construed as a comprehensive embrace of all of the President’s viewpoints and policy initiatives. The conferral of an honorary degree is a customary gesture of respect for the standing of prominent speakers. Commencement invitations are an opportunity for universities (including Catholic universities) to allow their graduates to engage the ideals and public vision of significant public officials.

Perhaps the bishops who have been so eager to condemn Notre Dame would better spend their dwindling moral capital by following the Vatican’s lead. That would mean encouraging the President to use this invitation to respond to legitimate Catholic policy concerns. President Obama has in the past demonstrated his ability to turn controversy into an opportunity to reframe debate. With proper encouragement, this speech could be Mr. Obama’s newest “Jeremiah Wright” moment.

Richard R. Gaillardetz, PhD, is the Murray/Bacik Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Toledo.

The Tablet
April 11, 2009
Editorial

Questions of principle

As President Barack Obama received the adulation of press and public in London, a very different treatment was being directed at him within the Catholic Church in the United States. He has been invited to America’s senior Catholic university, Notre Dame in Indiana, both to receive an honorary doctorate of law and to give the graduation-day address. The invitation has caused a furore. It has been denounced not only by pro-life campaigning groups but also by leaders of the Catholic Church, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago to the fore, because Mr Obama is pro-choice and has authorised research involving embryonic stem cells. The cardinal, who is president of the US bishops’ conference, said it was too late to withdraw the invitation but it should never have been issued and was an “extreme embarrassment”. He called on Catholics to bombard Notre Dame with complaint! s and to protest at the event itself, which is scheduled for 17 May.

Two questions arise, both of principle. First, is it correct to regard abortion as so crucial an issue to relations between Catholics and a secular government that no other consideration carries any weight? In America that seems to be the view taken, not least by many bishops but also, in even more extreme terms, by Catholic anti-abortion campaigners. It is equivalent to saying that a president, despite representing a social revolution in relations between the races, despite having a political agenda aimed at greater social justice and equality, and despite saying he favours measures designed to cut down the need for abortion, must nevertheless be regarded as tainted by evil and shunned accordingly, because of the issue of abortion. It is not a view that would find much sympathy in most Catholic circles in Europe.

The second question is about how the Church should engage in public controversy. Does it make progress for its ideals and beliefs by symbolic boycotts and gestures of dissent, or does that merely confirm the views of the already convinced while closing the ears of those who are not? Nobody in America seriously doubts the opposition of millions of Catholics to abortion, although they probably also know that those who shout loudest have a hard-line position that is by no means shared unanimously. But if abortion is ever to be restricted by law in America, or indeed any other democratic country, it will come about by means of the democratic process and not just because bishops demand it. That means winning the debate: it means producing better arguments, which in turn means giving due weight to contrary opinions and treating opponents with civility. In a country wh! ere separation of Church and State is almost a religion in itself, anything that looks like an ecclesiastical dictum is counter-productive.

And in this case, a very selective dictum. Nobody has suggested that President Obama should be shunned because he has not promised to end the death penalty, which is also part of Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life; nor that his predecessor should have been shunned because he engaged his country in an unjust war in Iraq, where untold innocent lives were lost. It seriously damages the whole Catholic contribution to democratic politics to treat abortion not only as a black-and-white issue, with no shades of grey, but as the unique black-and-white issue that trumps all others.

And still another from AMERICA Magazine by John Kavanaugh

Outrages

‘We Catholics are in danger of becoming known not by how we love but by how we hate.’

JOHN F. KAVANAUGH | AMERICA Magazine APRIL 13, 2009

Not long after March 20, when the University of Notre Dame announced that President Barack Obama would be the speaker and an honorary degree recipient at its May commencement ceremony, the blogs started bubbling. America’s group blog featured entries by Michael Sean Winters, which received a spray of largely civil but contentious responses. Other sites were not quite so temperate.

The Cardinal Newman Society, a self-appointed watchdog over the orthodoxy of Catholic universities, set up a special site about Notre Dame.

Accompanying a sidebar account of Obama’s dismal “anti-life” record is a call to join over 20,000 signers (gathered in three days) in a protest letter to Notre Dame’s president, John Jenkins, C.S.C. Calling the invitation to Obama “an outrage and a scandal” and a “travesty,” the letter, presuming to know the motives of Father Jenkins, asserts that the university has chosen “prestige over principles, popularity over morality.”

In response to criticism, Father Jenkins affirmed that Notre Dame is honoring a president, not a policy or political party, making it quite clear that it is following the American bishops’ statement Catholics in Political Life by fully disassociating itself with Obama’s stands on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Hoping that this might be a first step to engage the president over policies that, unless changed, would cause a precipitous loss in Catholic support, Jenkins wrote, “You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade.” Other voices, however, seem bent not on challenging Obama but on demonizing him.

On Randall Terry’s Web site www.stopobamanotredame.com, the president is portrayed as a worse murderer than Herod, who apparently slaughtered only 30 little boys: “Obama wants open-ended child killing.” Terry proposes that we “raze [sic] hell” at the university (“our tramp”) if Obama is allowed to speak—the “cultural rape of true Catholicity.”

The indefatigable Amy Welborn raised the issue on her blog “Via Media,” on the Web site www.beliefnet.com. Hers, as always, was a thoughtful question to her readers — wondering whether President Obama should be honored at Notre Dame. But some responses are questionable in the moral quality of their outrage.
On March 22 a writer using the name James pronounced that “Notre Dame is now fully collusional with a vicious form of Satanic evil—and worse, is seeking to entwine students in that evil.” Noting that he has a son at the university whose president has chosen evil over God, he is sure that President Obama is “infected with Satanic evil.”

James is no doubt not alone in his outrage. But we Catholics, we Christians, are in danger of becoming known not by how we love but by how we hate. We will be known as the group that can be outraged only by abortion and stem cell research— not torture, nor the yearly death of 15 million children under 5,nor the reckless launching of wars, nor other deadly sins. We will also present ourselves as oblivious to our fundamental Catholic teachings on the nature of conscience, the judgment of others’ interior lives, and the sin of slander. There is little or nothing of Christ in the rhetoric of hatred. But ample justification is claimed for the ugliest of acts, especially if it is against “Herod” or evil itself. Mostpuzzling in the James comment was its ending: “As Ayn Rand said, ‘When you compromise with evil, evil wins.’”

Ayn Rand. There we have it: Ayn Rand’s ramblings as a proof text. Not Benedict, not John Paul II, not the fathers of the church or the Gospels themselves, but Ayn Rand, anti-theist and pro-abortionist. (In the Objectivist of October 1968 she declared: “An embryo has no rights. Abortion is a moral right.”)

Among her articulated principles are that money is the only scale of success, pride the only virtue and “I” the one word indicating the only God. I would like to ask “James” (as well as a number of conservative commentators who have recently been recommending the writings of Ayn Rand as an antidote to Obama’s view of the world) this question: If Ayn Rand were still alive and invited to give a commencement talk at Notre Dame, would you mount a protest and remove your son from such a Satan’s nest?

John F. Kavanaugh, S.J., is a professor of philosophy at St. Louis University in St. Louis, Mo.
Catholics in Political Life

America | The National Catholic Weekly – Outrages American Magazine

And from:

Catholic News Service
April 3, 2009
The Vatican and Notre Dame

One of the biggest debates among U.S. Catholics at the moment is about Notre Dame University’s invitation to President Barack Obama to give this year’s commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

But so far, the issue has not had the same resonance at the Vatican — at least publicly.

There’s been no Vatican statement, and the Vatican newspaper and Vatican Radio have yet to mention the controversy.
When Catholic News Service requested reaction from Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, head of the Congregation for Catholic Education (which, of course, deals with Catholic universities), we received a polite “no comment.”

Based on conversations with Roman Curia officials, I have no doubt that the Obama‐Notre Dame question is on the minds of U.S. priests and bishops working at the Vatican. With statements pouring in on one side or another back home, how could it be otherwise?

But non‐Americans at the Vatican tend to see the issue in a different light, I think. For one thing, they seem more comfortable with the idea of accommodating dignitaries and civil authorities in a church setting, even when their political positions aren’t in line with the church’s teaching.

I emphasize that these were casual conversations, not a comprehensive survey of opinions. But two episodes in particular have been mentioned to me by Vatican officials over the last week.

One was that French President Nicholas Sarkozy received the title of honorary canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran during his visit to Rome in 2007, a tradition that goes back centuries. Sarkozy, who also met Pope Benedict, supports legal abortion.
The Vatican and the Diocese of Rome seemed to have no problem with honoring the twice‐divorced Sarkozy, who says he is a Catholic. In fact, the Lateran vespers service to bestow the title was “all pomp and circumstance,” as one Vatican official put it.

The second thing mentioned was that when Pope Benedict was invited to give a major talk at the Rome’s Sapienza University in 2008, the criticism and protest by some professors and students who didn’t want to give him a platform caused the pope to cancel the appearance. The episode was viewed at the Vatican as a prime example of intolerance.

Last year, a minor controversy erupted at Rome’s Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, known as the Angelicum, when Cherie Blair was invited to speak on “Women and Human Rights.” Some U.S. and British groups called her “pro‐abortion” and tried to get the invitation rescinded; the university refused to cancel, despite receiving hundreds of complaints. During her talk, Blair said she had difficulties with the church’s teaching on responsible parenthood, but implied that her problems were with church teaching on contraception, not abortion.

_____________

And one more commentary from John Allen and the National Catholic Reporter:

Obama and Notre Dame

By John L Allen Jr
Created Apr 09, 2009

Two great annual festivals of hope, both accompanied by venerable liturgical rites, happen to fall in the same week this year: Opening Day and Easter Sunday. For a Christian and a baseball fan, there’s no better time to be alive.

Emboldened by this air of new possibility, I’d like to float a hope regarding the increasingly acrimonious debate over the University of Notre Dame and its invitation to President Barack Obama to deliver this year’s commencement address. In a nutshell, my hope is that American Catholics will manage their disagreements over the Obama appearance without turning this into yet another nasty front in our version of the culture wars.

For that to happen, two virtues will need to be more in evidence than they have been so far: charity and perspective.

Charity

First, let’s be clear about something: Inviting a pro-choice president of the United States to speak at the country’s premier Catholic university may be highly charged at the level of symbolism and political fallout, but that does not make its advisability a matter of dogma. There’s no heresy implied in either supporting or opposing the move, so Catholics ought to be able to disagree without casting one another as enemies of the faith.

One side believes bringing Obama to Notre Dame will open a conversation, forcing him to confront the church’s teaching on the sanctity of life. The other argues that giving Obama a platform suggests a spirit of “agree to disagree” on critical issues such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research that amounts to compromise with evil. Either side could be wrong, even disastrously so, without thereby committing apostasy.

To date, alas, this has not been the spirit of much conversation.

A poison pen e-mail currently making the rounds, for example, has a picture of a guy behind bars under the fake headline of “Jenkins arrested for impersonating a Catholic.” The reference is to Holy Cross Fr. John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president. In slightly less acerbic form, similar charges have even come from a few bishops. Those comments should probably be chalked up to the intensity people feel about the pro-life cause, rather than a sober evaluation of Notre Dame’s leadership, because otherwise they’re a tremendous injustice both to Jenkins and to the Congregation of the Holy Cross—an order which, in my experience, doesn’t need lessons from anyone on what it means to be both faithfully Catholic and committed to the educational enterprise.

I speak as someone who taught in a Holy Cross high school in Los Angeles (also named Notre Dame), where I saw the legacy of the order’s founder, Blessed Basil Moreau, in action.

In February 2006, I also happened to be at the Lateran University in Rome when Notre Dame awarded an honorary doctorate to Bishop Salvatore Fisichella, then rector of the Lateran. (Fisichella is now president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, where he plays a lead role in making the case for the unborn.) Both Jenkins and Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Ill., a Holy Cross father and a trustee at Notre Dame, delivered perhaps the most impressive treatments of Catholic higher education I’ve ever heard.

“The church always faces crises,” Jenkins said that day. “Our strength is to face them with reason and hope, grounded in the gospel; to take confidence in the truth discovered through reason; to never fear the truth; and to show charity towards all.” For his part, Jenky argued that church-run schools “should never choose between being excellent or being Catholic.” Our Catholic tradition, he said, is “so profound, so wide and so self-confident in its exploration of truth that it can dare to ask questions and promote dialogue.”

One can disagree with particular judgment calls, but let’s not go down the road of questioning the Catholic identity of figures so obviously committed to the intersection of faith and reason.

At the same time, let’s also stipulate that one can be sincerely troubled by the honor Notre Dame appears to be bestowing upon the president without thereby becoming a flack for the Republican Party.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Notre Dame theologian Fr. Richard McBrien asserted that those unhappy with the invitation are “simply Republicans upset that Obama won the election, and they want to pick a fight.” I’m not sure how true that is sociologically—McBrien knows the personalities at Notre Dame better than I do. In principle, however, one does not have to be a disgruntled McCain voter to be alarmed by rolling out the red carpet for a leader whose positions on abortion and embryonic stem cell research are clearly at odds with what the church considers basic principles of justice.

Both Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have defined the defense of human life from conception to natural death as the towering human rights struggle of our time. Someone striving to “think with the church” would obviously have grounds for feeling wary about the Obama invitation that go well beyond lust for political payback.

What makes this such a difficult case, in fact, is precisely that both sides are upholding core Catholic values: the sanctity of life and the imperative of dialogue. Figuring out how to reconcile those values is not easy under the best of circumstances, and hasty certainties don’t help. Neither do unfounded assumptions about the motives of Catholics who reach different conclusions.

Perspective

In a recent essay for National Review Online, noted Catholic author George Weigel asserted that “virtually the entire sentient world” is aware of the melee surrounding Notre Dame and Obama. Unless you define the “sentient world” as the American blogosphere, however, that’s a fairly mammoth over-statement. I just spent two weeks in Cameroon, and I can report that few people there seem worked up over who’s speaking to Irish grads this spring.

This is the chronic Achilles’ heel of American Catholicism: we presume that our issues are the world’s issues, often leaving Catholics elsewhere scratching their heads about what they perceive as our insularity.

To be sure, the debate over the Obama invite is no tempest in a teapot. The question of how to engage public figures who hold pro-choice views without seeming to endorse, or wink at, those views, is critically important. At the same time, however, it’s a big, complicated world, and this is hardly the only matter deserving of American Catholic attention.

Here’s an illustration of the point. As it happens, Notre Dame’s commencement ceremony falls on May 17, just two days after Pope Benedict XVI will wind up his May 8-15 visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories. It’s arguably the pope’s most important foreign voyage to date, with a host of critical issues on the table: the future of Catholic-Muslim and Catholic-Jewish relations, the fate of shrinking Christian minorities in the Arab world, and the church’s role in promoting Middle East peace, to name just three. The United States and the American Catholic community are, or at least ought to be, major players in all those dramas.

It would be tragic if the fracas over Notre Dame were to occlude the high stakes of this trip from American eyes. Keeping the bigger picture in view is not only a matter of justice, but I suspect it would also make the dispute over Obama and Notre Dame seem more manageable. Among other things, it could offer a reminder that what we have in common as Catholics, set against a wider frame of reference, usually looms larger than what divides us.

Thus I dare to hope that, after an Easter lull in hostilities, combatants in the Notre Dame/Obama row can return to a more charitable exchange, with a deeper sense of perspective. A cynic might contend that’s the Catholic equivalent of believing the Royals have a shot at the pennant, but this, after all, is the perennial charm of Opening Day—for a brief moment, anything seems possible.

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And one more from COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE

Obama & Notre Dame
Commonweal
The Editors

“There are some ideas and some causes that a Catholic college campus cannot treat pleasantly,” wrote the outraged editors. “Doesn’t deliberate opposition to Catholic social doctrine come close to being anti-Catholic?”

History can be humbling. The editors eager to censor views they disagreed with were the Jesuits at America. The object of their ire was the outspoken conservative William F. Buckley Jr. The year was 1961, and the dispute erupted over an editorial in Buckley’s magazine, the National Review. Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et magistra, the editorial claimed, “struck many as a venture in triviality.” The National Review editors speculated that the new encyclical would, like Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, “become the source of embarrassed explanations.” Buckley had judged Mater et magistra insufficiently alarmed over the threat of communism, and in turn America’s editors judged Buckley insufficiently docile in his reception of doctrine, and urged that he be banned from speaking at Catholic colleges. The National Review is “a journal which, in our opinion, seriously and consistently undercuts positions which we judge to be central to our faith, the natural law, or the explicit and long established social doctrines of the church,” wrote America’s editors. Thus what might have been an honest and useful dispute over the interpretation and scope of church teaching quickly degenerated into a show trial regarding Buckley’s Catholic loyalties. (See Garry Wills’s Politics and Catholic Freedom.)

It would be helpful for those currently leveling charges of disloyalty at the University of Notre Dame and its president, John Jenkins, CSC, to revisit the Buckley imbroglio. The university’s invitation to President Barack Obama to give this year’s commencement address has ignited a kind of inquisition, which has more than a passing resemblance to what Garry Wills called the “brutal use of doctrinal suspicion” against Buckley.

The Buckley and Obama incidents are not, of course, strictly analogous. Obama is not a Catholic, and his support for legalized abortion is a more serious problem than Buckley’s alleged rejection of papal teaching. But abortion is not only a moral issue; it is also a political problem, and politics requires prudential judgment and compromise, not just prophetic denunciation. Prudential judgment was also needed in assessing Pope John’s encyclical. In both cases, however, the real issue is how the motives of those with whom we disagree about the application of church teaching are put in the dock. In the Buckley case, the papacy’s outraged defenders could imagine only two options: either Buckley accepts the encyclical in its entirety, or he is an apostate. In Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama, the university’s critics see a similar betrayal on the part of the university’s administration. Thus the invitation to Obama has been damned as a symptom of the school’s craven desire for recognition and prestige, its slavish obedience to “elite” liberal opinion, and its perverse determination to betray its Catholic identity. Notre Dame’s critics are loath to credit the institution with any but the basest motives. For them, an invitation to a prochoice president necessarily constitutes a kind of apostasy, and thus becomes a loyalty test for all “faithful” Catholics.

Some of the objections to the invitation have been more reasonable. Some say that a Catholic university might legitimately invite President Obama to give a talk or to engage in a colloquy, but giving him an honorary degree is tantamount to an imprimatur. Yet university officials have made no secret of Notre Dame’s disagreement with the president about abortion and stem-cell research, and certainly the president and the public cannot be in doubt about the church’s opposition to his policies in those areas. Honorary degrees signify an institution’s admiration for the accomplishments of the recipient. They do not signify blanket moral approbation.

The church is not simply the prolife movement, and to the extent that every interaction between the church and our political system is held hostage to the demands of the most confrontational elements of that movement, the church’s social message, including its message about abortion, will be marginalized and ineffectual. The respect and honor owed the office of the president does not depend on any particular president’s merits (as Buckley often reminded his liberal critics). That respect is, among other things, a powerful affirmation of the willingness of Americans to live together peacefully, despite profound disagreement. Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama is perhaps best understood in that light.

And still one more!

Can a culture of life be affirmed by intolerance?

As a Catholic, I have been asking myself this question again recently as a result of the controversy that arose around the invitation Notre Dame University extended to president Barack Obama. In a letter to the president of the university, ten Holy Cross priests have asked to reconsider the invitation. “Failure to do so—they wrote—will damage the integrity of the institution.” The president of the American Bishop Conference, cardinal Francis George, echoed the protest and declared that the invitation to Obama was “an extreme embarrassment” to Catholics. An university alumni wrote:

Notre Dame will never again get another donation dime out of me. They have betrayed what they have stood for all these decades and I no longer recognize them as a school of moral certainty or principle.
The degree of intolerance that many Catholics are demonstrating against Obama is striking. Between 1871 and 1878 Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of the German Empire waged a culture war against the influence of the Catholic Church. Today it is often the other way around, and the Catholic Church, or at least certain radical sectors, appears to be engaged in a fearless fight against modernity.

I wonder if promoting intolerance and shutting the doors of dialogue is an appropriate (and effective) way to affirm a culture of life. Intolerance is violent by definition, especially when professed in the name of values such as life. Love should be synonymous with life and those favoring a culture of life certainly agree with this definition. But intolerance promotes hate, the opposite of love, and thus becomes the expression of a culture of death that promotes the politics of hate. It is exactly this kind of culture that President Obama is trying to reverse both domestically and abroad. This does certainly not mean that the Catholic Church should not express its differences with President Obama. But the way Catholics do so matters, because form is substance.

John R. Quinn, archbishop emeritus of San Francisco, poses Catholics some questions worth considering:

What if the president is forced to back out of his appearance at Notre Dame either because he withdraws or the university withdraws its invitation? If this happens, will that further the pro-life effort in our country? If the president is forced to withdraw, will that increase cooperation between the Catholic Church and the Administration, or will it create mounting tensions and deepening hostility? Will it enhance the mission of the church? Will it be used to link the church with racist and other extremist elements in our country? Will it be used to paint the bishops as supporters of one political part over another?
And archbishop Quinn added: “We must weigh very seriously the consequences if the American bishops are seen as the agents of the public embarrassment of the newly elected president by forcing him to withdraw from an appearance at a distinguished Catholics university.”

The catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that the Church and the state “serve the personal and social vocation of the same human being.” President Barack Obama has made dialogue (including talking to the enemy) and reconciliation the principles of his politics of change. In reaching out to the other and in searching for unity in diversity, the Catholic Church should not lag behind a secular leader. Otherwise, turning into a champion of intolerance, the Church will become the first impediment to the promotion of a culture of life.

Aldo Civico

Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia Univeristy in the City of New York, cited in Huffington Post April 21, 2009

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