Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins is facing furious backlash after inviting President Barack Obama to give the university’s commencement address next month.
The Cardinal Newman Society, a watchdog group for perceived breaches of orthodoxy on Catholic campuses, calls it an “outrage and a scandal” and has circulated a petition admonishing Notre Dame to “halt this travesty.” Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, warns that the commencement would represent the “cultural rape of true Catholicity.” These stark responses betray a rich Catholic intellectual tradition revered for centuries for promoting the values of civil debate, prudence, and reasoned engagement.
In response, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good has drafted a petition we hope you consider signing here to show your support for Fr. Jenkins and the virtues of civility and engagement.
The Catholic university is not a defensive fortress walled off from diverse ideas that flourish in a pluralistic democracy. As Fr. Jenkins eloquently articulated in his 2006 statement, Academic Freedom and Catholic Character:
We are committed to a wide-open, unconstrained search for truth, and we are convinced that Catholic teaching has nothing to fear from engaging the wider culture … After all, a Catholic university is where the church does its thinking, and that thinking, to be beneficial, must come from an intellectually rigorous engagement with the world.
The Archbishop Emeritus of San Francisco, John Quinn, worries about the precedent set when Catholics are perceived to be hostile to even hearing from a sitting president elected by a majority of citizens (including 54 percent of Catholic voters):
We must weigh very seriously the consequences if the American bishops are seen as agents of the public embarrassing the newly-elected president by forcing him to withdraw from an appearance at a distinguished Catholic university… It is in the interest of both the church and the nation if both work together in civility, honesty, and friendship for the common good where there are grave divisions, as there are on abortion.
Notre Dame has a long tradition of inviting newly-elected presidents from both parties to deliver the commencement. Fr. Jenkins clearly explained that the invitation should not be taken as “condoning or endorsing” President Obama’s “positions on specific issues regarding the protection of human life, including abortion and stem cell research.” Instead, the president will be honored as an “inspiring leader who faces many challenges” and has done so with “intelligence, courage, and honor.” He made particular note of welcoming “our first African-American president, a person who has spoken eloquently and movingly about race in this nation.”
Some critics of Notre Dame have expressed their disagreement in measured tones that foster fruitful debate. Sadly, this controversy has largely been exploited by ideologues and culture warriors more interested in scoring political points than advancing common ground and principled dialogue. What’s at stake in this controversy is more than the essential need to defend the proper role of faith and reason at a Catholic university. It’s also about whether the public face of Catholicism is represented in its fullness. Fr. John Kavanaugh, a Jesuit priest and a professor of philosophy at St. Louis University, is right to ruminate on the question of whether Catholics 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.
While the Catholic Church disagrees with our president on issues of grave importance, President Obama has advanced a range of policies that do align with Catholic social teaching. The president’s commitment to a budget that uplifts the poor, universal health care as a human right, and finding common ground on divisive issues reflects traditional Catholic values in the public square. Catholic Charities USA and other faith-based advocates for the poor have applauded the president’s budget proposal as a fundamental break from policies that favored the privileged few over the common good.
Abortion and stem cell research are matters of profound moral consequence. Yet many urgent moral issues bear on questions of human life and dignity, and these issues interrelate. Economic stress and poverty, for example, increase the abortion rate as the AP recently reported. “We are not a one-issue church,” Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles told Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. in this column. Faithful Citizenship, the U.S. Catholic bishops’ election year political responsibility statement is clear that “direct assaults on innocent human life and dignity, such as genocide, torture, racism, and the targeting of noncombatants in acts of terror or war,” are also actions that “can never be tolerated.”
I’m still waiting to hear from outraged culture warriors when it comes to those moral scandals.
Please consider signing our petition to stand up for Fr. Jenkins and Notre Dame.
John Gehring is a Senior Writer for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.
