Three Days Until Obama’s Commencement Address at the University of Notre Dame

By Dave Andrusko

“The White House has said Obama will not announce a decision this week [on a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter]. It appears increasingly likely, though, that he will do so before month's end.”
     Associated Press, May 13.

“We have here, however, the granting of an honorary degree of law to someone whose activities, both as president and previously, have been altogether supportive of laws against the dignity of the human person yet to be born. . . .”
     From an April 21 letter sent to the President of the University of Notre Dame by Bishop John D’Arcy, the Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend. Bishop D’Arcy will not be attending the university’s May 17 commencement.

As I write this edition, we are only three days away from pro-abortion President Barack Obama’s appearance on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Obama will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary doctor of laws degree.

But (as I predicted at the time news broke), if anything, the controversy stoked by the decision of the nation’s most recognizably Catholic University to honor the most pro-abortion President in our history has grown even hotter.

Someone asked me if there was anything that Obama might do, in the few days that remain, to make an already contentious situation worse. I responded that he could name his pro-abortion nominee to the Supreme Court this week. But, presumably, not even Obama is that emboldened.

And somehow he will get credit for “graciousness.”

This made me think of all the credit the usual suspects gave Obama when he chose to wait until the day after the annual March for Life to deep-six the pro-life Mexico City policy. Because he did not rub this in our faces, we were told, pro-lifers were supposed to take that a sign of his limitless good faith and fundamental moderation.

This established the basic media template which we will endure for the next four years: be grateful for crumbs.

Back to Notre Dame: From the very first rationalizations offered, it was clear there was never any realistic possibility University President Rev. John Jenkins would withdraw the invitation. We’ve written about it many times in this space, so let’s just say that the justifications he provided at the time and afterward were odd and embarrassingly weak.

But this did not prevent more than a few defenders from flatly stating that opposition to the selection wreaked of “politics” and carried unmistakable racist overtones. Speaking as a non-Catholic, I find this argument by character assassination almost as ugly as the nonsensical charges themselves.

Loads of commentators have cited chapter and verse to illuminate how simplistic and one-dimensional (the children of light versus the children of darkness) much of the coverage of the controversy has been. That was richly on display in a piece that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday and ably critiqued by getreligion.org.

If you are looking for a one-stop overview of all the cross currents at work, you could hardly do better than going to firsthings.com to read “At the Gates of Notre Dame,” by Joseph Bottum. He does a magnificent job of putting the debate in its larger context.

On March 20 it was announced that Obama would be giving commencement addresses at Arizona State University, the University of Notre Dame, and the United States Naval Academy. That same day “Notre Dame announced that it would also be honoring the president with a law degree: the only one of three schools to add an honorary doctorate to the commencement ceremonies,” Bottum writes. You need to know that to understand why the objections run so deep, including from bishops from over 50 of the 195 dioceses.

If you ponder the sequence, it is hard not to draw the conclusion that the President of the University of Notre Dame was figuratively poking his finger in the eye of the Bishops. As Bottum explains the bishops had put an enormous amount of effort into their 2004 document, “Catholics in Political Life.”

It including this: “Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles,” the bishops said. “They should not be given awards, honors, or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” Pretty straightforward.

In his first 100 days+, it is a simple fact (routinely denied, of course) that the Obama Administration has been on a pro-abortion tear. The “penalty”? He is honored by a university that is “firmly identified with Catholicism in the American mind.”

There will be many peaceful protests this weekend at the University of Notre Dame, led by pro-life students on campus. One example, according to Fox News, “The University of Notre Dame is allowing a group of seniors to hold a prayer demonstration on school grounds on Sunday, graduation day -- to protest President Obama's controversial visit, which the students say undermines the school's Catholic identity. ’The university isn't sponsoring it, but we've approved it,’ university spokesman Dennis Brown told FOXNews.com on Tuesday.”

Obama no doubt sees the commencement address and honorary degree as part of his larger campaign to hypnotize pro-lifers in general, Catholic pro-lifers in particular, into believing that he’s not such a bad guy after all. In fact, his mantra is that he is racing to embrace “common ground.” And doesn’t the invitation support that conclusion?

But lest we forget, if not a single bishop had raised his voice in opposition, the laity would still have taken up the cause of defending the cause of life and the integrity of a great university. Bottum explained why brilliantly.

“Still, opposition to abortion is hard and real, the signpost at the intersection of Catholicism and American public life. And those who—by inclination, or politics, or class distinction—fail to grasp this fact will all eventually find themselves in the situation that Fr. Jenkins has now created for himself. Culturally out of touch, they rail that antagonism must derive from politics or the class envy of their lesser-educated social inferiors. But it doesn’t. It derives from the sense of the faithful that abortion is important. It derives from the feeling of Catholics that, however far they themselves may have wandered, the Church ought to stand for something in public life—and that something is opposition to abortion.”

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