Should Notre Dame Lose “Catholic” Status?

Take the poll in the right side bar at Faultline USA. Five days left on the poll. So far 72% of 100 polled say YES.

Despite the fact that Notre Dame University has a long tradition of extending graduation speaking invitations to sitting American Presidents, this invitation to President Obama is not about Obama, but about Notre Dame. The real issue is about what it means to be a “Catholic” University.

President Obama’s speech Sunday  to the 2009 graduating class of Notre Dame, and his award of an honorary degree, is a slap in the face of Roman Catholicism because of his strong outspoken pro-choice abortion beliefs and his support for federal funding of stem-cell research.

America, You Asked For It!, explains the dilemma this way:

The problem, of course, stems from Notre Dame’s Catholic roots and Obama’s position on the sanctity of human life in its embryonic stage. The Catholic Church “has always condemned abortion as a grave evil” and condemns stem cell research on the basis that “It is immoral to produce human embryos destined to be exploited as disposable ‘biological material.” These views are polar opposites of the President’s positions on abortion and stem cell research.

Moral Outcry explains it this way:

This is a travesty for a Catholic institution to be honoring the man behind some of the most liberal, pro-abortion agendas this nation has ever seen. In the spirit of intellectual openness, the powers-that-be have seen fit to acquiesce to the status quo of the pro-abortion agenda that’s steamrolling through the government right now.

It would appear that money, power, status, and untold legal entanglements would make it very, very difficult for the Catholic Church to punish Notre Dame for this affront to the churches’ basic teachings.

According to LifeSiteNews.com, “Fr. John Jenkins, President of Notre Dame University, sits on the board of directors of Millennium Promise, an organization dedicated to fighting poverty in Africa that promotes contraceptives and abortion, it has been revealed.”

The finding comes as the controversy over President Obama’s award and speech at the University reaches a fever pitch in the last week before the event. As the president of Notre Dame, Fr. Jenkins has received the majority of the heat for the scandal. However, despite the criticism of over 70 U.S. bishops and over 350,000 petitioners, Jenkins has steadfastly continued to defend the university’s honoring of the president. In a letter to graduating students dated this past Monday, Jenkins said that Obama is “a remarkable figure in American history and I look forward to welcoming him to Notre Dame.”

According to UPI, “Bishop John D’Arcy, who oversees the region’s diocese, said he would not attend Sunday’s ceremony.”

President Obama has recently reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred,” D’Arcy said in a statement.

The latest Gallop poll shows that for the first time, more Americans see themselves as pro-life rather than pro-choice. Still I have to wonder what this really means in terms of walking the walk of faith?

Despite the fact that Fox news has been featuring this story for weeks, the actual fact that only hundreds of pro-life activist Catholics from across the country plan to attend a peaceful protest in South Bend, Ind. is a sign that belief in pro-life appears to be more virtual than real.

Pro-Life Action League members also will begin their civil disobedience effort off-campus and then join the Citizens for a Pro-Life Society at the prayer vigil on campus to coincide with the commencement ceremony. Additional arrests are possible, if not expected.

“We’re going have graphic pictures of abortion and what abortion does to babies and we’ll also have signs that will say ‘Obama = Abortion’ and ‘Shame on Notre Dame,’” Gura said.

Citizens for a Pro-Life Society will be carrying signs ranging from the “very graphic to very simple,” Parran told FOXNews.com.

According to ABC News, “Obama won the Catholic vote in last year’s election, 54-45 over Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Twenty-seven percent of voters identified themselves as Catholic, according to national exit polling.”

Note to the Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops: There are some Catholics, however, that understand the actual cost of walking the walk of their faith.

This year, for the first time in more than 100 years, Notre Dame will not present its most prestigious award, the Laetare Medal, because the Catholic scholar who won it, Mary Ann Glendon, turned it down.

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Squandered Opportunities

Listening to the Sean Hannity radio show today, I found it humorous to listen to a caller who said McCain deserved to and should win.  If only Hannity had argued with that statement.  Alas, I guess Hannity is to much of a partisan to see reality.

I really don’t see how anyone can argue that McCain deserved to win.  Aside from the fact that he’s not and never was a conservative, he’s run a dismal campaign!  Until the last week or ten days, he wasn’t even really fighting.  Coming on strong late in the game was simply too little, too late.

The fact is, though, McCain didn’t lose this by himself.  The roots of this loss go back to 1994 and the Republican take over under Newt Gingrich.  In ‘94 the Republicans ran on a very specific platform that was completely grounded in conservatism.  Four decades of Democrat control of Congress had demonstrated the folly of liberal big government.  So too had Ronald Reagan the 80s. To bad those Republicans who swept in to Congress in ‘94 didn’t hold to the conservative principles that got them elected.  Instead, they abandoned conservatism in favor of big government and the nanny state.

Republicans in Congress weren’t alone, however, in squandering power.  The top of the party, none other than the President, really took us down.  Together the President and the Republican controlled Congress lead us to the largest expansion of government since LBJ’s Great Society.  We got the new Medicaid Prescription Drug Benefit and the No Child Left Behind Act, both enormous spending bills that dramatically increased the federal bureaucracy.  We got the Department of Homeland Security, a cabinet level agency that dwarfs its predecessors both in bureaucratic bloat and inefficiency.  We got “compassionate conservatism” which is just a euphemism for Republican liberalism that bears no resemblance to actual conservatism.  From a big government perspective and from a spending perspective, Republicans had become as bad as or perhaps worse than Democrats!  And that cost Republicans control of Congress in 2006.

In the two years since the ‘06 election, not much has changed among Republicans.  With few exceptions, Republican leadership blamed the ‘06 losses on the Iraq war instead of their big government, big spending habits.  While the war didn’t help, it was by no means the primary reason for the overwhelming losses.  Combine that with the fact that the vast majority of Democrat gains in Congress were attained by running candidates who ran as conservatives.

We all know, of course, that those “conservative” Democrats turned out not to be so conservative.  Indeed, with the abysmal single digit approval ratings for the current Congress, it should have been possible for Republicans to retake some of those lost seats.  But alas, hardly a conservative was in sight.  There are notable exceptions to be sure but by and large, the term conservative Republican has become a virtual oxymoron.

So here we are in 2008.  Obama has won the White House and, in spite of their horrible ratings, Democrats have substantially increased their leads in the House and Senate.  Even though they have not achieved their hoped for 60 vote margin in the Senate, the reality is, with RINOs like Snow and Collins they won’t have much trouble stopping any principled conservative filibuster.  Republicans are now basically bystanders with no hope of stopping anything Democrats want to do.

For most Republicans this is a bleak picture indeed but I see a bright silver lining.  I said several months ago that this was the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party.  A McCain win would have set conservatism back a generation both because McCain would do all he could to rid the party of conservatives and because Republicans would get the blame for all the harm McCain would do as President.

As it is the Democrats have taken full responsibility for everything going forward.  If the economy is bad in 2010, it’ll be the Democrats fault.  If we have major foreign policy problems, Democrats get the blame.  Pretty much everything that goes wrong will be their fault.  And who doesn’t believe the Democrats will screw it up?

As well, the complete and utter failure of liberalism in the Republican Party has been fully unmasked.  I’ll be surprised if the Republicans in the House and Senate don’t replace their inept leadership with some real conservatives.  From there it will be possible to rebuild the party from the ground up.  It would then, perhaps, be possible to get some national support for real conservatives as opposed to the tendancy the RNC has had to support moderates (read RINOs).

None of this is a sure thing of course.  Democrats could do a decent job.  Republicans could continue to embrace the strategy that has been such a failure.  Pigs could learn to fly.  Who knows?  One thing that will certainly be required is for grass roots conservatives to become involved and work to make the needed changes.  We need to recruit and field solid conservative candidates for 2010.  We need to put extreme pressure on the Republicans left in Congress to be conservative.  We need to let them know their political futures depend on it.  If we won’t do that we deserve the party we’ve got.