Cool reception for dissenting Catholics at US universities

AMERICA LETTER:There were objections to speakers at 12 Catholic universities because of their support for abortion or gay rights

CARDINAL DONALD Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, and the 28,230 conservative Catholics who had by yesterday signed the Cardinal Newman Society’s self-described “Georgetown Scandal Petition”, failed to stop Kathleen Sebelius delivering a speech about “the value of public service” and “commitment to work for the common good” at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.

Sebelius, née Gilligan, is an Irish-American Catholic who was denied Communion during her two terms as governor of Kansas because she supported the right to abortion.

Last February she infuriated the church hierarchy by announcing that the Affordable Care Act would require religiously affiliated universities to include contraception in healthcare insurance.

Sebelius’s speech yesterday contained only two allusions to the war she sparked within the American Catholic Church.

“I have the extraordinary opportunity to help implement legislation that is finally, after seven decades of failed debate, ensuring that all Americans have access to affordable health coverage,” she said.

Sebelius quoted John F Kennedy’s reassurance to Protestant leaders seven weeks before his election.

Kennedy said he believed in an America “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials – and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against us all.”

Established in 1789, Georgetown is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the US.

Cardinal Wuerl called the invitation an “unfortunate decision” and said Sebelius’s actions in office constituted “the most direct challenge to religious liberty in recent history”.

Catholics across the country “would find it [the invitation] shocking” and “would view this as a challenge to the bishops”.

In its petition to Georgetown’s president John DeGioia, the Cardinal Newman Society called it “scandalous and outrageous” that the university “elected to provide this prestigious platform to a publicly ‘pro-choice’ Catholic who is most responsible for the Obama administration’s effort to restrict . . . the right to free exercise of religion”.

US bishops issued guidelines to Catholic institutions in 2004 saying they “should not honour those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles”.

The Cardinal Newman Society this spring objected to commencement speakers at 12 Catholic universities because of their support for abortion or gay rights. That is down from 24 in 2006, because some colleges now ask the society to vet speakers before inviting them.

Three years ago, the Conference of Catholic Bishops tried to stop Notre Dame University awarding an honorary degree to President Barack Obama.

This spring, Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester, Massachusetts, persuaded Anna Maria College to withdraw its invitation to Vicki Kennedy, widow of Senator Ted Kennedy, because of her support for abortion.

“By objecting to my appearance at Anna Maria College, he [Bishop McManus] has made a judgment about my worthiness as a Catholic,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This is a sad day for me and an even sadder one for the church I love.”

EJ Dionne, a professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, called Sebelius’s speech yesterday “a victory for freedom of speech on Catholic campuses”.

Dionne, who is also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a former Vatican correspondent and now a columnist for the Washington Post, says relations between liberal and conservative Catholics have reached historic lows.

Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, Illinois, went so far as to compare the Obama administration to Hitler’s and Stalin’s in a homily last month.

Catholics were united in their initial opposition to the directive on contraception, Dionne says, but when Obama decided that insurance companies would be required to provide free contraception coverage to all clients, with zero involvement by church institutions, liberal Catholics accepted the compromise.

The bishops framed the contraception issue as a question of religious liberty and rejected the compromise, then attacked the Obama administration on same-sex marriage.

A recent Vatican statement condemning the US Leadership Conference of Women Religious for statements that “disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops” particularly shocked liberal Catholics. The nuns had dared to support healthcare reform in 2010.

Dionne sees the Catholic right’s campaign to silence dissent as a breach in “the great intellectual tradition” of the Catholic Church.

“The bishops are mounting a campaign for religious liberty; it’s certainly a mistake to say ‘certain people are barred from our campuses’.”

Dionne received more than 2,000 responses to “I’m not quitting”, a column he published this week in response to a full- page advertisement by a secular group urging Catholics to jump ship. “Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church,” he wrote, “but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.”

By Dionne’s estimate, some 40 per cent of US bishops are now staunch conservatives.