Two models of hope | George Neumayr, editor of Catholic World Report | Editorial for the June 2009 issue of CWR
Notre Dame chooses Obama’s over its namesake’s.
Last September, Pope Benedict XVI visited the original Grotto in Lourdes where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette. During his visit, Pope Benedict spoke about the West’s need to recover the Marian model of hope: that salvation comes not through obedience to man’s will but through humble obedience to God’s.
The modern world has largely chosen the man-centered model of hope over Mary’s, and this choice, as the grim and unfolding chapters of recent history illustrate, has delivered not salvation but despair. The ideology that promises man’s perfection through the domination of relativized science, technology, and politics—what one might call the false self-sufficiency of secularism—has led once-Christian countries into dystopias of one kind or another, nations so bereft of real hope that they abort thousands upon thousands of their own children.
On May 17, in a sports arena not far from a replica of that original Grotto in Lourdes, Barack Obama received an honorary degree from Notre Dame—a moment of hollow good cheer in which a university founded in Our Lady’s honor extolled an American president not for habitually hoping in God’s promises but in his own. Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, hailed Obama’s “audacious hope for a brighter tomorrow.”
As the first acts of his administration demonstrate—paying for abortions at home and abroad, rescinding the Bush-era conscience clause for pro-life doctors and nurses, authorizing the over-the-counter sale of abortifacients to teens, placing gay-marriage proponents and aggressive secularists in powerful positions—this “audacious hope” rests not on God’s immutable will but on Obama’s willful rejection of it: that killing unborn children is a “right,” that redesigning marriage and sexuality according to fluctuating human taste and desire is “enlightened,” and that “reason” is not the product of God’s mind but man’s.
Read the entire editorial.
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