Pres. Obama's ND appearance: Links, commentary, analysis

I've been working my way through a stack (well, a cyber stack) of various news pieces, articles, commentaries, and such relating to President Obama's appearance and speech at Notre Dame and am highlighting some (certainly not all) of them here—and not in any particular order:

• Once again, here is a link to the President's speech. If you're looking for the abridged version, Catholic Culture provides a good overview.

• And here is Fr. Jenkins' speech.

• A lot of video footage and material is available on the "Notre Dame Response" site.

• An obvious headline from the Indianapolis Star: "Reactions split over Obama's Notre Dame visit." It is actually a balanced, solid piece of journalism.

• CNN applauded the President's "courageous" decision to attend and give his speech.

• Amy Welborn has written some of the best Catholic commentary I've read so far, including these posts: "Obama at Notre Dame", "Reax", and "But what about the Response?"

• Amy also has a post about the ridiculous comments made by Patricia McGuire, the president of Trinity Washington University. McGuire said:

"The religious vigilantism apparent in the Notre Dame controversy arises from organizations that have no official standing with the church, but who are successful in gaining media coverage as if they were speaking for Catholicism. . . . They have established themselves as uber-guardians of a belief system we can hardly recognize. Theirs is a narrow faith devoted almost exclusively to one issue. They defend the rights of the unborn but have no charity toward the living. They mock social justice as a liberal mythology."

• Bishop Robert W. Finn is interviewed by The Catholic Key about President's speech:

I think the message of the day was this – that the President of Notre Dame said that they had invited the President of the United States and decided to honor him for the sake of dialogue. And then the President got up and said that the differences that we have on abortion – namely the Catholic Church’s staunch opposition to abortion and his staunch support of abortion were “irreconcilable.” And at that moment, it would seem to me that the dialogue came to a screeching halt. Father Jenkins’ expressed desire for dialogue, whether it was well-founded or justified, at that point got thrown back in his face. The President shut the door on dialogue by saying that there was not going to be any change in his position on abortion and he understood that there was not going to be any change in the Church’s position on abortion. To me, that was the lesson of the day. I am glad that Mr. Obama was so clear.

And then, amazingly, everybody gave him a standing ovation. The perception unfortunately was that this was a completely acceptable position of his and, because he is a bright and talented man, this trumps the destructive decisions that he’s making day after day.

• Patrick Deenan of "What I Saw in America" offers some cautiously optimistic observations:

The President's speech - as could be expected - was quite masterful. He is a wordsmith of first order, but more, has a remarkable rhetorical ability to call for forms of higher reconciliation and transcendence of division that has otherwise been fomented by so many other politicians and opinion leaders of our age. While most on the Right either suspect him of bad faith, or impute such bad faith to him for political advantage, I believe he honestly desires to heal some of the worst divisions of the nation. His call yesterday both to include a "conscience clause" to protect professionals who object to the practice of abortion (and gay marriage?), and his call to reduce the number of abortions - including the commendation of adoption as an option - appeared to have been enthusiastically greeted by nearly everyone at the ceremony.

Yet, actions have too rarely accompanied the best words articulated by Obama. The call to "openness" will quickly be seen as an invitation to join him where he stands, not to reach out to others with whom he disagrees, if he does not act firmly and with determination in these areas that could go some distance to narrowing some divides.

• Dr. Paul Kengor's assessment in The Weekly Standard is blunt: "For a long time in America, the Religious Left, Catholics and Protestants alike, have been duped, played like fiddles. It happened again at Notre Dame yesterday."

• Jill Stanek has video footage of the two-mile protest route from I-80 to the main entrance to the Notre Dame campus, as well as photos and coverage of the alternative commencement service held at the Grotto, which included a service led by Fr. Frank Pavone.

• Russell Shaw has a good post, "Obama at ND: Three Lessons," on the OSV blog.

• LifeNews.com highlights the commencement speakers for Catholic schools such as Ave Maria University, Christendom College, University of Dallas, and others.

• The Cardinal Newman Society reports on the commencement address given by Cardinal Arinze at Thomas More College in New Hampshire:

Cardinal Arinze emphasized the mission of Catholic universities to strive to educate students about the relationship “between faith and reason, on specialization and orientation, and on science and ethics.” He noted that the marker of success for Catholic colleges and universities is having “succeeded in forming and turning out model Christians who are good citizens.”

Arinze continued, “If a Catholic College or University adopts this attitude of ‘courageous creativity and rigorous fidelity,’ it will be able to contribute much to promote a healthy synthesis between faith and culture in society.”

“A Catholic college or university educates students to appreciate that moral rules of right and wrong apply also to science, technology, politics, trade and commerce, and indeed to all human endeavors.”

“In the complicated world of today, where all kinds of ideas are struggling for the right of citizenship, a university student needs a clear and viable orientation on the relationship between religion and life. The Catholic College or University is ideally positioned to help him see the light and equip himself for a significant contribution in society.”

• Context is, of course, a very valuable thing, but often ignored. Two pieces—both written before yesterday's events—worth reading for the context they provide are "Notre Dame: Who, what, when, where, why and how", by GetReligion.org's Terry Mattingly, and "At the Gates of Notre Dame", by Joseph Bottum, for First Things.

• John Aloysius Farrell, writing on the U.S. News & World Report blog is looking for less talk, more action from President Obama when it comes to reducing the number of abortions:

President Audacity needs to take the next step now. Words are important. So is the symbolism of a prominent appointment. But, in the end, talk is cheap.     

Since Bill Clinton and Al Gore started talking about making abortion "legal, safe, and rare" back in the 1990s, the Democrats have done everything they can to keep the procedure safe and legal, and not much at all to make it rare.     

With different wording, Obama used the same formula yesterday at Notre Dame. Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean have tried to defuse the abortion issue in recent years, with similar appeals and promises. "Let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions. Let's reduce unintended pregnancies. Let's make adoption more available," Obama said at Notre Dame.

OK, Democrats. We hear you. It is indeed a laudable goal. And now it is time to show us you mean it. Make it happen.   

• Meanwhile, Yael T. Abouhalkah, Editorial Board columnist for Kansas City Star, thinks Obama was the perfect choice (ahem) for the ND commencement address and that he gave the perfect speech:

Mission accomplished on Sunday for President Barack Obama. He addressed the controversy surrounding his commencement address at Notre Dame, making his critics look petty.

In other words, Obama was right on target in delivering an upbeat speech. ...

Notice: A lot of Catholics -- and a lot of students at Notre Dame -- are of the same mindset as Obama. They are pro-choice.

Well, it's hard to argue with that last sentence. The rest is certainly up for debate.

• Fr. Pavone and Fr. Richard McBrien joined Chris Wallace on FOX News yesterday to talk about these various issues. Fr. McBrien, as usual, has no problem holding to contradictory positions, even in the same response:

Well, there's another sentence in that statement of the American bishops that should be quoted, and it said that those individuals should not be given awards, honors or platforms which suggest support for their actions.

And Father Jenkins, our president, has made it very clear that the honorary degree and inviting the president of the United States to address our graduates in no way suggests support for all of his positions, including his position on abortion and on embryonic stem cell research.

However, there are other — there are other positions he has taken, whether it's on immigration or poverty or whatever, which are entirely consistent with Catholic social teaching.

In fact, Mike — I mean, Chris — I'm talking about your dad — in fact, Chris, if we required 100 percent agreement with the Catholic Church's official teaching from everyone who speaks at or gets an honorary degree from a Catholic university, we would then not have any politicians of either party.

Which, of course, misrepresents what the U.S. bishops actually wrote in the 2004 document in question. Fr. Pavone, by the way, blogged about his day on Sunday.

• William McGough, hardly a close pal of pro-life Catholics, is forthright about the problematic stance of some "liberal Catholics" when it comes to abortion:

Getting back to Notre Dame, liberal Catholics who argue that Catholicism  is not a "single issue" faith and that Catholics need to support what the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin (cited by Obama in his speech) called a “consistent ethic of life” comprising opposition to abortion and support for anti-poverty efforts and world peace. But if you really believe, as Catholicism supposedly does, that abortion is the moral equivalent of the Nazis' extermination of the Jews, then a politician who supports legal abortion should be ostracized even if he or she takes the right position on national health insurance or nuclear disarmament. It pains me to say this, but I think at least some  liberal Catholics who wrap themselves in the "seamless garment" of a consistent ethic of life don't believe, deep down, that abortion is the outrage the bishops say it is.

• Holy Cross Father Wilson Miscamble, a history professor at Notre Dame, gave an address at a protest yesterday, stating:

Of late, that rhetoric seems to ring rather hollow. The words have not been matched by deeds. Instead of fostering the moral development of its students Notre Dame’s leaders have planted the damaging seeds of moral confusion.

By honoring President Obama, the Notre Dame Administration has let the students and their parents down. And it has betrayed the loyal and faith-filled alumni who rely on Notre Dame to stand firm on matters of fundamental Catholic teaching – and so to affirm the sanctity of life.

The honor extended to Barack Obama says very loudly that support for practically unlimited access to abortion – and approval for the destruction of embryonic life to harvest stem cells – are not major problems for those charged with leading Notre Dame. They seem easily trumped by other issues, and by the opportunity to welcome the president to our campus. Bishop John D’Arcy, the great bishop of this diocese who so loves Notre Dame, said it well – Notre Dame chose “prestige over truth.” How embarrassing for an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth to settle for temporary attention over eternal honor.

• Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online is frustrated but also hopeful:

The University of Notre Dame used appeals to academic freedom and dialogue to justify a weakening of the school and thereby the Church's public identity. Fr. Jenkins presided over a muddle on Sunday. But there's hope for both Notre Dame and the Catholic Church.

President Obama plugged his book The Audacity of Hope during his commencement address. Let me plug Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict's encyclical on Christian hope. He wrote that "the one who has hope lives differently" — and pointed toward Mary, Mother of God, for whom the University of Notre Dame is named, in a way that could have fit into commencement remarks this weekend:

Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope. Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by — people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her "yes" she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).

Let me also plug Spe Selvi, a wonderful encyclical about the theological virtue of hope—real hope.

• Dr. Bradley Birzer, a Notre Dame graduate who now teaches at Hillsdale College, drove down to ND to attend the outdoor protest mass and rally:

Not only was yesterday’s experience quite different from my earlier ND experiences, but it was also quite different from how the New York Times reported the day. We witnessed no radicals, no arrests, and no graphic pictures of aborted fetuses on our part of the campus. Much to our surprise, a massive screen greeted us, booming professional pro-Catholic commercials, accompanied by a throbbing beat and deep-voiced narrator. Everywhere we saw concerned and respectful families, children, students. We saw many who understand the importance of Notre Dame for the future of American Catholicism, education, and culture.

He has more comments, along with photos, on his personal website.

• The American Papist has a quick post noting that "a Catholic liberal, a feminist liberal, and a Catholic conservative ... all unsatisfied" with Obama's speech. The conservative is Notre Dame legend Ralph McInerny, who writes, in a piece posted today on The Catholic Thing:

This division among Catholics has been widening for more than forty years. How did it come about that so many Catholics have such a mushy notion of what it means to be a Catholic? The teaching of the faith since the close of Vatican II in 1965 has been scandalously inadequate. In many cases it has been the deliberate substituting of stones for bread. It began with waffling on contraception when theologians, real or self-proclaimed, impudently rejected Humanae Vitae, one of the great encyclicals of modern times. The scandal of the encyclical was that it placed Catholics on one side of a line and the zeitgeist on the other. Yet dissent from it was allowed to flourish. Moral theology went into steep decline and the official body of Catholic theologians issued Human Sexual Morality in which doubt was cast on the long tradition of teaching on pre-marital and extra-marital sex, abortion, masturbation, homosexuality, divorce – a systematic dismantling of Catholic moral teaching.

All that is an old and oft-told story, still largely ignored officially. There grew up the notion that dissent from clear Church teaching was okay. With time, the difference between the moral teaching of dissenters and what was dismissively called "official" teaching blurred. Generations have been given a distorted notion of the faith. It is no wonder that Catholic politicians undertook to support policies in flat contradiction to what they purportedly believed privately. And so it was that on Sunday at Notre Dame faithful Catholics were regarded as dissenters. To such disfavor we have come.

If the Obama invitation has stirred such passionately prayerful reaction from an heroic band of students, from alumni and Catholics across the country, and – mirabile dictu – from more than seventy bishops, it may prove to have been providential, an opportunity for Catholics to recognize that their house is indeed divided.

I commented a bit on this division—a huge chasm, really—in my post, "Straw men by the left, straw men from the left", (written at 2:53 a.m. Sunday morning!)

• Speaking of the chasm, Andrew Sullivan titled his post on Obama's speech, "The Audacity of Humility," and remarked, "I found his Notre Dame commencement speech deeply Christian." Aaron Zelinsky of Huffington Post notes that the President's speech was filled with references to passages in the Bible. And to think some people are concerned that Americans are becoming illiterate when it comes to Sacred Scripture! I, for one, was not aware that quoting the Bible automatically makes a speech "Christian", good, or truthful.

• George Weigel, writing about "Obama and the 'Real Catholics'", makes some excellent points about the strategy employed by President Obama at Notre Dame:

What was surprising, and ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about religious freedom in these United States, was the president’s decision to insert himself into the ongoing Catholic debate over the boundaries of Catholic identity and the applicability of settled Catholic conviction in the public square. Obama did this by suggesting, not altogether subtly, who the real Catholics in America are. The real Catholics, you see, are those like the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, who are “congenial and gentle” in persuasion, men and women who are “always trying to bring people together,” Catholics who are “always trying to find the common ground.” The fact that Cardinal Bernardin’s undoubted geniality and gentility in bringing people together to find the common ground invariably ended with a “consensus” that matched the liberal or progressive position of the moment went unremarked — because, for a good postmodern liberal like President Obama, that progressive “consensus” is so self-evidently true that one can afford to be generous in acknowledging that others, less enlightened but arguably sincere, have different views. 

<snip>

Whether or not President Obama knew precisely what he was doing — and I’m inclined to think that this politically savvy White House and its allies among Catholic progressive intellectuals knew exactly what they were doing — is irrelevant. In order to secure the political advantage Obama had gained among Catholic voters last November, the president of the United States decided that he would define what it means to be a real Catholic in 21st-century America — not the bishop of Fort Wayne–South Bend, who in sorrow declined to attend Notre Dame’s commencement; not the 80-some bishops who publicly criticized Notre Dame’s decision to invite the president to receive an honorary degree; not the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which explicitly and unambiguously instructed Catholic institutions not to do what Notre Dame did. He, President Obama, would settle the decades-long intra-Catholic culture war in favor of one faction — the faction that had supported his candidacy and that had spent the first months of his administration defending his policies.

That is, I think, on the target. I'll probably have some similar thoughts later this week.

• The Susan B. Anthony list argues that President Obama's rhetoric does not match reality when it comes to abortion and the "conscience clause."

• Fr. Dwight Longenecker provides some humor. The problem is that it's hard to tell the spoof from reality.

• Finally (for now!), if you are looking for even more commentary and links, check out this post on the Opinonated Catholic blog.

UPDATE: Archbishop Charles Chaput has written a column "on Notre Dame and the issues that remain" (ht: Amy Welborn):

Most graduation speeches are a mix of piety and optimism designed to ease students smoothly into real life.  The best have humor.  Some genuinely inspire.  But only a rare few manage to be pious, optimistic, evasive, sad and damaging all at the same time.  Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame’s president, is a man of substantial intellect and ability.  This makes his introductory comments to President Obama’s Notre Dame commencement speech on May 17 all the more embarrassing.

Read the entire piece.

• Robert Moynihan, editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, has written a lengthy piece about yesterday, focusing on a comparison between President Obama's speech and the recent talk given by Archbishop Raymond Burke at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast:

The crux of the issue, the place where the visions of the two men conflict and cannot be reconciled, is simple to understand. It is the question of human life — the life of the unborn baby — and whether that human life has a claim to be protected by law.

Burke's position is that all human life has a right to be protected.

 

In essence, Burke is a defender of the right of every human being to live, and not be murdered by others for no cause. In this sense, he is "pro-life."

 

For Burke, reason (natural law) teaches that all just human societies should provide a benevolent protection for human life through laws.

 

A society that does not do so, a society which allows a class or group of human beings to be killed without any legal sanction, introduces, in Burke's view, a profound injustice into its legal system, with consequences that ripple out in unpredictable ways, undermining the respect for justice throughout the society.

 

Burke further believes that reason (natural law) teaches that it is the purpose of all law to strive for justice.

 

Thus, reason urges us — reason, not the Christian or any other religious faith — to make laws that protect innocent human life, and repeal laws that sanction injustice.

If we are to be true servants of reason (servants of the Logos at the origin of all things), Burke argues, then we must acknowledge that taking the life of an innocent human being is always and everywhere unjust, that is, evil, and can never be described as just, that is, good.

 

Obama presented a different vision.

Moynihan also remarks on the " rather superficial and unsatisfying report" given by L'Osservatore Romano.

Comments

[Joel]

One thing I haven't been able to find is a transcript of Fr Jenkins' opening remarks. Know where I can find one?

[Carl E. Olson]

Joel: Here you go: http://viewer.zoho.com/docs/tbuawb

[Bryan]

Thanks Carl, for sorting through all of this. It is appreciated.

[Joe]

"He is a wordsmith of first order"

Do we think Obama writes his own speeches? All the "brilliance" is his alone?

And as an aside, what defines someone as a "person of goodwill"? I mean, who is NOT one?

[Kevin]

I'm curious about what Glendon's replacement said. Does anybody have that?

[Dan Deeny]

Mary Ann Glendon was awarded the Bishop D'Arcy Award for Christian witness and service to the Church. This award can become a tradition and custom at Notre Dame, or perhaps, if necessary, at another college. Such an award would honor the Blessed Virgin. Someone who has suffered persecution for his or her faith might be chosen, or perhaps someone who has built schools or hospitals in difficult circumstances. For example, Fr. Elias Chacour or Fr. Edwin Leahy O.S.B.. Or perhaps the founder of Human Life International, Fr. Paul Marx O.S.B..

[g]

Carl, Since you know about stuff like this, can you tell us WHO is writing for L. Romano now?? It seems like its just getting more off the wall esp w/coverage of Obama.