Archbishop Timothy Dolan: "They made a big mistake."

No, he wasn't talking about the Buffalo Bills signing Terrell Owens, or the Yankees signing this or that player (I don't follow baseball, so...):

Archbishop Timothy Dolan appeared on Today's TMJ4's "Sunday Insight" with Charlie Sykes, and was asked if the University of Notre Dame made a mistake by inviting President Barack Obama to speak at the school's graduation ceremony.

Dolan didn't hesistate a bit, responding "They did, and I say that as one who loves and respects Notre Dame.  They made a big mistake."

"There's a lot of things that President Obama does that we can find ourselves allied with and working with him on, and we have profound respect for him and pray with him and for him," Dolan said. "But in an issue that is very close to the heart of Catholic world view, namely, the protection of innocent life in the womb, he has unfortunately taken a position very much at odds with the Church."

A "Catholic world view," you say? Is that something you might expect to be addressed or expressed or otherwise delineated at a Catholic school?

I was talking today to a friend who is currently a student at Notre Dame, and he asked this interesting question: "Why is it that Pope Pius XII is regularly denounced by many cultural and political liberals for allegedly not standing up to Hitler, not doing enough to save Jewish lives, and not speaking out more vehemently in the face of evil, while many of those same people are so offended and aghast that some Catholics are protesting Obama being honored with a law degree at Notre Dame, speaking up about Obama's pro-abortion voting record, and speaking out loudly about how evil abortion really is?"

His point might be readily dismissed or misunderstood. But it shouldn't be, because it was at the service of this basic truth: objective evil is always objectively evil. One doesn't have to engage in over-the-top language and histrionics to simply note that killing people due to their ethnicity and killing people because of their developmental status are both equally wrong in the eyes of the Catholic Church. It's wrong in the eyes of anyone with a decent sense of reality and a bit of moral clarity. The killing of innocents is murder, and the support of such killing, no matter how you spin it, fluff it up, paint it pretty, and dowse it in perfume is wrong.

But let's face it: it's easy to condemn Hitler. Goodness, it's easy for people to condemn Pope Pius XII, and he played a part in saving (at least) close to a million Jewish lives! It's easy to pontificate about evil when it is in the abstract, or when it has been suitably packaged and marked, "Fit for condemnation by influential people and self-appointed cultural elites, as seen on network news."

Perhaps most significantly, it's easy to not recognize or name evil when it is hidden away, hushed up, dampened down, and otherwise stuffed into a tidy, sterile little box called "choice" or "reproductive justice" or "a woman's right to choose." Why did so many ordinary Germans, including some Christians, simply go along for the genocide ride and not protest at what was happening to millions of Jews and Christians? One reason, I'm quite certain, is because what was happening was "out of sight, out of mind." But, hey, that sort of thing would never happen here, to us, would it? Naw. Of course not.

Comments

[Ed Peters]

"I don't follow baseball..."

I don't either. Haven't the 1994 strike. Realized just how boring it was to watch.

[Nancy]

The exact thought (though not so well-articulated) about Pius XII and the current UND controversy crossed my mind as I was doing the laundry.

[Benighted]

>>> Why did so many ordinary Germans, including some Christians, simply go along for the genocide ride and not protest at what was happening to millions of Jews and Christians? One reason, I'm quite certain, is because what was happening was "out of sight, out of mind." <<<

Since pre-WWII Germany was hardly a buddhist or hindu country, your use of the phrase "including some Christians" to qualify the many ordinary Germans who went along seems unwarranted. Christians WERE the "ordinary Germans" at that time.

I imagine that most Christians did not protest what was happening to Jews, Polish Catholics, and others either because they were ignorant of what was really going on -- Operation Tannenberg and places like Chelmno and Buchenwald weren't exactly front page news -- because they did not want to get "disappeared" or shot by the Gestapo, or simply because they thought of themselves as patriots and did not want to hurt the war effort (especially when the unforgiving Soviets were the potential victors). Of course, there were also those who agreed with and participated in the slaughter.

Contrast this with the common American of today. Abortion news is often in Section A, if not on the front page, of the newspaper. No one who can read can plead ignorance. There is no Gestapo on the prowl for traitors, no death camps. We have no war going on against an enemy that would occupy and devastate our country. And yet about a million fellow-citizens (including many fellow-Christians) are murdered every year in the US. And this has been going on for almost 40 years. What a contrast!

My understanding of the Nazi "Rassenhygiene" programme is that the focus was on forced sterilization and euthanization of the "useless eaters" in part because it was thought that the common Germans would NOT accept abortion as a means of eliminating the "unfit." At that time, mass abortion was considered unthinkable. Alas, if only we had more of those tender-hearted Germans living in the US today!