Abortion, Notre Dame, and Obama

last updated 8 January 2015

Some people think they're "more Catholic than the pope," said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. Conservatives are lobbying to rescind an invitation to President Obama to speak during commencement next month at Notre Dame, the nation's best-known Catholic university. They reason that Obama's views on abortion are incompatible with those of the church—but Pope Benedict XVI has been cordial to Obama, so why can't they?

Because Catholics believe abortion is the premeditated killing of an unborn child, said Patrick Buchanan in RealClearPolitics, and Obama is the most pro-abortion president this country has ever had. Notre Dame's job isn't to "join the secularists in their endless scavenger hunt" for truth—it's to "teach eternal truths about God and Man," including the sanctity of every human life.

"Catholicism is not a sect that shuns the world as evil," said Kenneth L. Woodward in The Washington Post. American bishops have a policy forbidding Catholic institutions from honoring anyone who acts contrary to Catholic moral principles, but that's aimed at "dissident Catholic politicians such as Sen. Ted Kennedy." Obama's visit would be "quite a coup for the nation's most resonantly Catholic university."