Notre Dame To Have Barack Obama As Commencement Speaker: Only The Latest In A Long Line Of Scandals

When Fr. John I. Jenkins was elected President of the University of Notre Dame on April 30, 2004, it was hoped that he would take decisive action against dissident factions within the university, something his two predecessors were unwilling to do. Several friends of mine were among those who expressed great optimism over the new administration; and indeed, Fr. Jenkins' inaugural address in 2005 served only to fuel that optimism. The leadership page of Notre Dame's website includes the following quote from that inaugural address:

"If we are clear in our purpose, we will excel in our ideals. This will be my priority and my passion as President of Notre Dame."

It took all of one scandal to call Fr. Jenkins' priorities and passions into question.

For years, the university had been allowing an annual production of the vulgar play "The Vagina Monologues" to be held on campus. I'll let you find out about this play on your own, if you dare: there are standards for what I will and will not say on this blog. A growing faction of students were expressing outrage that such a play would be allowed in a Catholic setting, and they appealed to Fr. Jenkins to put and end to this atrocity. On the other side, Fr. Jenkins was under increasing pressure from a number of dissident factions to leave things as they were. This included a large number of faculty members who allegedly threatened to resign if Fr. Jenkins banned the play from campus. I know many good and decent Catholic administrators who would have welcomed such a golden opportunity to rid themselves of so many negative influences in one fell swoop. Instead, Fr. Jenkins betrayed the students who had placed their trust in him to restore the Catholic identity of the university with a "compromise": the sponsoring department would decide for itself whether or not to hold the event on campus, but would be required to have a "dialogue" afterwards in which all sides were presented. Conveniently, Fr. Jenkins left it to the department to decide how best to represent each point of view.

In making this decision, Fr. Jenkins effectively invited all dissidents to run roughshod over him for the remainder of his term as President.

What faith remained in Fr. Jenkins' commitment to restore the Catholic identity of Notre Dame university after that debacle has all but evaporated after he allowed the most anti-Catholic President in U.S. history to be invited as the 2009 commencement speaker. The scandal this propagates goes well beyond giving a forum to a moral degenerate like Barack Obama. Obama will, without a doubt, use this opportunity to show his "great support" for the Catholic Church, and in so doing will deceive many poorly informed Catholics into thinking that he supports their Catholic beliefs.

Notre Dame has long been regarded as the "flagship" Catholic university in the United States. Many poorly catechized and poorly informed Catholics still regard the actions and statements of this university as being representative of Catholic higher education and Catholic belief and practice. It simply does not occur to them that a university with a Catholic charter does not in fact teach authentic Catholicism in the classroom or promote authentic Catholic ideals in the public square. Notre Dame has long had elements within its faculty that have been promoting a suspect theology; this is a problem that goes back at least to the 1950s, if not earlier. It was then-President Fr. Theodore Hesburgh who, in 1967, spearheaded the efforts of 26 Catholic university Presidents to draft and sign the infamous Land 'O Lakes Statement, which purported to be a statement on the need for academic freedom in the Catholic university (which the Church has never opposed, provided that a clear distinction is made between what is and is not in keeping with Catholic belief and practice), but is in fact a declaration of independence from any accountability to the Magisterium for what is taught in the classroom. Dissidents have long embraced this statement as an excuse to promote outright heresy in the classroom in the name of "academic freedom," and often use it as a staging point to criticize the late Pope John Paul II's wonderful 1990 Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae (which, among other things, reiterated the need for Catholic university theology professors to comply with Canon 812 of the 1983 revision to the Code of Canon Law: namely, that all such professors are to have a mandate, or mandatum, from their local bishop by which they agree not to misrepresent Catholic belief and practice in the classroom). It is also in the name of "academic freedom" that Fr. Jenkins has allowed both "The Vagina Monologues" and Barack Obama to bring their views to campus under the guise of authentic Catholicism.

Those who speak loudest about "academic freedom" - such as Fr. Richard McBrien, a notoriously dissident professor at Notre Dame and a blight on Catholic theology - are usually the ones most intent on undermining it, as they speak only of freedom for themselves to teach and promote what they please, without thought of the academic freedom to which the student is entitled: namely, the right to know what is and is not authentic Catholic belief and practice and the right to not be subjected to deception or be taught errors by those who are tasked with educating them. But then, dissidents never concern themselves with what is in the best interests of anybody besides themselves.

If you would like to find out more about this brewing scandal, and would like to join in a petition to stop Barack Obama from being the commencement speaker at Notre Dame, please click here. I pray this post finds each of you well. God bless!


In Jesus and Mary,
Gerald