The Ongoing Identity Crisis on Campus
As grotesque as it may sound, political correctness continues to get in the way of the Catholic faith on some Catholic campuses in America. That faith took a thumb in the eye at two major institutions in 2009, with some strange “games” being played at both Georgetown and Notre Dame.
The latter school’s invitation to President Obama to address its graduation class last spring sparked a major public clash in values. Months after the eruption died down, the controversy resurfaced. It stems from the arrest of no fewer than 88 people, many of them Catholics themselves, for peaceably demonstrating on a purportedly Catholic campus on behalf of their Church’s unwavering support for the sanctity of life.
All were charged with trespassing. As a misdemeanour crime, that meant that they faced up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine if convicted. The arrestees’ cases have now spilled over into 2010. Behind all this lurked Notre Dame’s mystifying urge to honour an American president who had developed an addiction to “abortion rights” long before he was ever invited to the school’s 2009 commencement.
“We were told to be prepared to get arrested for trespassing, and taken to jail, if we didn’t end what we were doing,” recalls Penny Cyr, one of the arrestees. “I couldn’t believe it. We were walking together and praying for a change of heart by the administration at the time.” Ms. Cyr, a South Bend pro-lifer, said she knew of at least two people who accepted an offer to settle their charges by paying court costs, doing community service, and agreeing to stay away from the campus. One of them was a student due back in school. The other was an older person with a heart problem. “But why should anyone be expected to plead guilty to praying the rosary on a Catholic campus?” she asked.
Among the demonstrators were two Colorado women, Jane Brennan and Laura Rohling, both of whom had had a change of heart about the abortions they had undergone during the 1970s. They hoped to dissuade Notre Dame students from falling into the same trap. Their biggest “sin” seemed to be the placards they carried, which read, “I regret my abortion.” But administrators at both Notre Dame and Georgetown apparently had become so intoxicated by the lure of a presidential visit to their schools this year that both were willing to play by secular-culture rules, at the expense of their schools’ Catholic identity. Couldn’t those administrators decide whose “team” they were playing for?
Take a look at what happened at Georgetown. . . People who came to Gaston Hall on April 14 to hear President Barack Obama deliver a speech on economics noticed something missing onstage. Behind the spot where the president spoke, a black cloth hung from a wooden archway above the dais. It covered an ancient Greek monogram containing the letters IHS — a symbol of the holy name, Jesus. The school later confirmed that the symbol had been covered temporarily at the request of the White House, to clear the stage for the audience to focus on the president as he talked, with only a row of American flags in view to flank him.
Why, to ask the obvious question, was Georgetown willing to comply with such an odd request? The administration of the Jesuit college could have gracefully declined to accede to the request, on the ground that the “IHS” was a key symbol of campus identity. Its presence in no way would dishonour the man invited to speak there. Georgetown could have diplomatically assured the White House that Mr. Obama was more than welcome to address the audience, with the symbol remaining visible. The White House was hardly in a position to demand what it asked for. The speaking venue, after all, was not under government control, was it?
Yet the Georgetown administration decided to honour the White House request. Some members of the audience may have scratched their heads and wondered who ruled the roost on campus—Jesus Christ or Barack Obama? To phrase the situation in another way: why cover up the school’s symbol of its real Messiah for the sake of a White House occupant whose image is that of an imitation messiah, created by admiring media?
The Notre Dame situation proved far more volatile. President Obama was not only invited to be the commencement speaker on May 17, but the decision was made to award him an honorary doctor of laws degree. That decision added fuel to the fire, and the Rev. John Jenkins, the university president, found himself on the hot seat for weeks.
The invitation to the major event of the school’s calendar year spoke volumes about Notre Dame’s willingness to distance itself from the right-to-life issue. The administration wanted to avoid focusing attention on President Obama’s disdain for the unborn child’s right to live. He was clearly the most radical abortion supporter to occupy the White House since Roe vs. Wade. His stance put him in open conflict, not only with Catholic teaching, but with the natural law as well. The Cardinal Newman Society branded the invitation “an outrage and a scandal.”
The invitation touched off quite a response: Bishop John D’Arcy, head of the South Bend diocese, where Notre Dame is, decided to boycott the graduation because the invitation to Obama clashed head-on with a directive from the U.S. bishops against honouring prominent public figures who openly defy Catholic principles. A large number of bishops spoke out, one after another, against Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama to address a captive audience. If any doubts lingered about the size of the controversy, they vanished by the end of April. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, turned down Notre Dame's offer to honour her on graduation day with the school’s highest award, the Laetare Medal. She made it clear in a letter to Father Jenkins that, as a strong pro-lifer herself, she wanted no part of becoming a public relations ploy to gloss over the school’s controversial invitation to Obama. Father Jenkins decided to leave the Laetare award vacant, but continued to defend Obama’s appearance under the guise of “academic freedom”. By commencement day, more than 350,000 people across the country had signed a Newman Society petition opposing the invitation—and yet it was not withdrawn.
For comparison’s sake, one may consider Brandeis University, which declined to invite a former U.N. secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim, to speak on campus in the 1980s. Waldheim was still president of Austria at the time. But his ties to the Nazis as a German intelligence officer in the Balkans in World War II were shrouded in mystery. Rather than invite him to speak on campus, Brandeis decided that the integrity of its Jewish identity was too valuable to risk. But no potential critics had reason to question the school’s commitment to academic freedom.
Father Jenkins offered a glowing introduction to the president on graduation day. Among other things, he lauded Obama’s apparent commitment to education reform “for those who most need it”, in a way clearly designed to appeal to his audience. But the very intensity of Jenkins’s praise for the visiting team’s cleanup hitter risked alienating some of his school’s own Catholic “fans”. Was Notre Dame willing to subordinate the Church’s magisterial teaching on the sanctity to life to the interests of a government leader who turned his back on this most fundamental of all human rights?
President Obama’s flowing rhetoric elicited warm outbursts of applause from his young audience, as he tried to project the image of a bridge-builder who is above partisan politics. Many media analysts saw his Notre Dame presentation as an unqualified success. But what’s missing in that appraisal? In their eagerness to get on the presidential bandwagon, why did Notre Dame’s administrators and the president’s young audience let their glowing personal perceptions of Obama overshadow the reality of what he represented from a truly Catholic perspective?
A few weeks earlier, Obama had contradicted his own promise of education reform by sitting by quietly when Congress ended a successful five-year-old tuition voucher plan that had allowed a host of poor black and Hispanic students from Washington’s public schools to attend Catholic and private schools chosen by their families. Only a mass protest by more than 2,000 parents and students outside the D.C. mayor’s office later prodded Obama to ask Congress to extend the programme—but only for students already in it. Other low-income families eyeing the D.C. voucher plan were left to their own devices.
Father Jenkins made no reference to any of that in his introduction of the president. As for the abortion struggle, the flash-point for the campus furor, Obama addressed the issue at some length in his speech. Yet his vague promise to seek “common ground” with his pro-life critics did nothing to close the gap between them. Instead of any direct promise to help cut the abortion rate in our country, Obama added only a vague presidential pledge “... to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies”. His phraseology was significant.
The artful dodger from the White House offered a great show of respect for his critics’ “consciences”; yet nowhere did his talk reflect any recognition that an unborn child’s right to life is a fundamental principle that belongs at the heart of this public debate. Instead, Obama stressed the equality of women at one point; in the context, he was clearly endorsing their presumptive “abortion right”. His speech, in fact, included a series of euphemisms carefully designed to keep abortion’s harsh impact on the woman as well as the child out of any public discussion of “equality”. We can call it “ObamaSpeak”.
At one point in his perceptive study, “Render unto Caesar”, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput offered America a piece of savvy advice: when politics enters a discussion, “. . . it becomes important for citizens . . . to examine the language of public discourse for what the words really mean.” The Notre Dame graduation dramatized how easily the truth can get distorted in today’s academic environment.
Our new president worked relentlessly in his early weeks in office to advance by executive order the abortionist agenda and to fund embryonic stem cell research, and he stacked his administration from top to bottom with ardent defenders of abortion. Any nod toward bipartisanship was an illusion. And a predominantly “pro-choice” Washington press corps let him get away with it with minimal questioning. At least two nationally significant media voices refused, however, to treat this graduation either as an unmitigated triumph for President Obama or as a mere exercise in academic freedom by Notre Dame.
Executive editor Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard saw Obama’s promise, at Notre Dame, to seek common ground with his pro-life critics as outright hypocrisy—barring a miraculous change of heart, Obama simply didn’t fit the description of a bridge-builder on this subject.
Nor was Mr. Barnes alone in seeing hypocrisy at work. The National Catholic Register laid responsibility for the scandal squarely on the back of Notre Dame, and the headline of its editorial analysis of the situation just before commencement day labelled the school’s handling of the entire event “institutional hypocrisy”.
Nevertheless, an enormously inspiring series of prayer rallies also took place on graduation weekend. This prayerful protest was a moment created, not by the faculty or administration, but by Notre Dame students. The pro-life student group behind it set up its own web site to outline campus plans for graduation weekend. It ended up drawing several thousand supporters from states all across the country, and packed an Alumni Hall chapel for an overnight Eucharistic prayer vigil, and two gatherings to pray the rosary at Our Lady of Lourdes, the campus grotto created in honour of the school’s namesake.
Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, was present to lead the rosary at one of the two “vigils for life” at the grotto. About 40 graduates boycotted their own commencement exercises, and came to pray the rosary instead. They were accompanied by Bishop D’Arcy and at least two dozen dissident Notre Dame faculty members.
John Ryan, who was among a group of about 100 St. Louis-area people at the rally, returned home with high praise for the student pro-lifers’ efforts. In his mind, they had reignited a spark of hope for rejuvenating their school’s badly compromised public image.
One of these days, errant Catholic college administrators should take another look—coupled with an honest moment of self-examination—at the infamous “Land O’ Lakes document”, drawn up by a handful of Catholic campus leaders at a Wisconsin retreat in the late 1960s. The two key leaders behind that event were the presidents of Notre Dame and Georgetown. Whether or not these organizers started out with the good intention of boosting the excellence of Catholic higher education is beside the point. They ended up doing something very different.
A great many campus leaders welcomed the Land O’ Lakes document as cover for an unofficial declaration of independence from Rome. Their decision to emulate Ivy League schools on their own campuses would give them the flimsy excuse they needed two decades later to ignore John Paul II’s call in Ex Corde Ecclesiae to revive authentic church teaching on Catholic campuses. The American media élite’s growing support for “abortion rights” had opened the door for many of those same campus leaders to pay only lip service to the sanctity-of-life issue and downplay its importance as much as possible.
But Catholic campus administrators who held their act together heard a refreshingly different message in recent years coming from John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Both popes have shown why the papacy is anything but an enemy of excellence for Catholic higher education. They also made it clear why jurisdictional autonomy, necessary as it may be in other ways, should not become a devious excuse to distance a nominally Catholic campus from the influence of the papal Magisterium. The church, in fact, is the shining light most needed for a truly Catholic campus to guide its students through the spiritual and intellectual wilderness of our time.
By late September, the Notre Dame arrests had reignited the campus controversy. The Thomas More Society in Chicago, which was drawn into the defence of those arrested, has asked Notre Dame’s administration to request the prosecutor in South Bend to dismiss all the trespassing charges as not worth pursuing. But nothing has happened since Father Jenkins told Thomas More president Tom Brechja that the cases were “out of their hands” because the charges were filed by public officials.
Monica Miller, another arrestee, thinks the school was caught on a hot seat, trying to save face by ducking responsibility for the arrests. “Father Jenkins probably thinks any intervention on his part would be viewed as a slight to President Obama,” she said. Ms. Miller, a longtime pro-lifer who now teaches theology at Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan, helped to arrange for four busloads of demonstrators from southern Michigan to come to the campus for the mid-May rally and protest.
But the boldest voice in this debate has been that of Dr. Charles Rice, an eminent Notre Dame law professor. On Sept. 17, he issued an “open letter” to Father Jenkins that caught the attention of various web sites. He started off with a note of praise for a mid-September announcement by Father Jenkins that he was setting up a new Task Force on Supporting the Choice for Life on campus. But Dr. Rice also shared the scepticism expressed by William Dempsey, a 1952 Notre Dame grad, about the Jenkins initiative. Mr. Dempsey criticized the exclusion he saw in the Task Force membership of those associated with two existing campus pro-life groups—the Centre for Ethics & Culture and the Notre Dame Fund for the Protection of Human Life.
“It is hard to resist the inference,” Dr. Rice’s letter said, in support of William Dempsey’s remarks, “that this is a move toward marginalizing the Centre and the Fund, neither of which receives any University support the way it is.”
Dr. Rice also echoed a concern voiced by Professor Fred Freddoso, who had urged the administration in an e-mail to request dismissal of all charges against those arrested at graduation time. Dr. Frances Shavers, Notre Dame’s chief of staff, in defending the university’s action, told Professor Freddoso that the protesters were arrested “for trespassing and not for expressing their pro-life position”. Dr. Rice called it “disingenuous . . . to pretend that this is merely a routine trespass case. Clearly, Notre Dame should do all it can to obtain the dismissal of those criminal charges.” Near the end of his message, he added this barbed assessment of Notre Dame’s latest quandary: “As long as you pursue the criminalization of those pro-life witnesses, your newest pro-life statements will be regarded reasonably as cosmetic covering of the institutional anatomy in the wake of the continuing backlash arising from your conferral of Notre Dame’s highest honour on the most relentlessly pro-abortion public official in the world.”
Weigh it all up: Dr. Rice is not only a professor emeritus and a famous member of the Notre Dame Law School faculty; he is also an honourable scholar who insists on defending his Catholic integrity amid cultural confusion. Thus, his criticism of the college’s handling of the Obama Affair carries a special sting. If there was a message sent by those pro-life students and faculty members at campus rallies, it is this: their biggest hope is that campus administrators will stop brushing their Catholic faith out of sight for flimsy reasons, before they risk another controversy rivalling that of 2009. To the rally participants, the commencement fiasco was a disingenuous way for Notre Dame to enhance its public image (among the wrong people). In their view, President Obama’s persistent defence of abortion “rights” had turned the most basic principle of human rights upside down. And so, therefore, Catholic identity still counts—for something far more distinctive than some campus leaders in today’s America seem to think it does. Notre Dame’s most faithful Catholic supporters on campus clearly think it’s time for a change in attitude by the university administration.
