Notre Dame: Obama’s controversial invitation

last updated 8 January 2015

Catholic bishops have a “sticky issue on their plates,” said Kenneth L. Woodward in The Washington Post. President Obama has agreed to give the May commencement address at Notre Dame, the nation’s “most resonantly Catholic university.” Yet in his first months in office, Obama has lifted restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research and for abortions overseas, both of which violate “fundamental Catholic principles.” Now the Internet is “smoking with protests,” and some Notre Dame alumni are up in arms. I’m an alumnus myself and “adamantly pro-life,” but I’m glad Obama will join the six other presidents, including George W. Bush, who have addressed the university. Having previously pledged to work with Obama for “social and economic justice,” do the bishops now find the current president “morally unfit” even to speak?

They should, said George Wiegel in the Chicago Tribune. Notre Dame made an “egregious error” by inviting Obama, who is not only scheduled to speak but to receive an honorary doctorate of laws degree. In other words, this relentlessly pro-choice president will receive a “high honor” from the nation’s supposedly pre-eminent Catholic university. The result is “moral incoherence,” said William McGurn in The Wall Street Journal. Giving Obama a platform at a Catholic university “demoralizes those who support the cause of life while removing fears of even the slightest social sanction for those who do not.” When is the church going to stand up to politicians like Obama, who “defend the snuffing out of tens of millions of innocent human lives as the exercise of a fundamental right”?

Oh, buck up, said Douglas W. Kmiec in the Chicago Tribune. The church is “properly uncompromising” about the sanctity of life. But “politics is the art of compromise,” and Obama shares Catholic values on social justice. He has already extended health insurance to millions of children, and he’s working to improve the lot of the poor and working people. Try telling that to the Cardinal Newman Society, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. That’s the hard-line conservative group spearheading the protests. The National Catholic Reporter accused the Newman Society of trying to turn Catholic universities into “madrasas” of theological orthodoxy and Republican partisanship. Meanwhile, three out of four students who have written to Notre Dame’s campus newspaper support Obama’s visit. It seems right-to-life leaders will “have to look elsewhere—and to another generation—for their single-issue voters.”