AMERICA:Obama's pro-choice stance means not everyone will welcome him at the Catholic Irish-American university, writes Denis Staunton
WHEN BARACK Obama next month delivers his first commencement address as president, it won’t be to the graduating class at any of the three universities he attended or to a historically black college but at Notre Dame, home of the “Fighting Irish” and one of the leading Catholic educational institutions in the United States.
The president’s choice looks like a generous tribute to the remote university at South Bend in northeastern Indiana but it has provoked noisy protests from students and alumni because of Obama’s support for abortion rights.
More than 260,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the university to revoke the invitation and anti-abortion activists are planning protest rallies in advance of the May 17th ceremony. Almost 30 bishops, including Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, have condemned Notre Dame’s decision to host the president and the local bishop says he will boycott the event.
Cardinal George has described the invitation as an “extreme embarrassment” to Catholics and Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford, Illinois, suggested that Notre Dame should change its name to the “Northwestern Indiana Humanist University”.
Only a few hundred of the university’s 8,000 undergraduates have joined Notre Dame Response, the conservative student group leading the protests on campus. The controversy has, however, excited many anti-abortion campaigners outside, including Randall Terry, founder of the radical group Operation Rescue. Terry, who once sent a dead foetus to Bill Clinton, has moved his family to South Bend and is planning a series of actions between now and the graduation ceremony. “There’s a whole plethora of things, some of which I’m not at liberty to discuss yet,” he told Notre Dame student newspaper The Observer. “We will make this a circus.”
Notre Dame president the Rev John Jenkins insists that the university’s decision to invite Obama to speak doesn’t imply support for the president’s views on all issues. In a 2004 document called Catholics in Public Life, US bishops said that Catholic institutions “should not honour those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” or give them “awards, honours or platforms which would suggest support for their actions”.
Jenkins says the 2004 document’s title implies that it only applies to Catholic public figures, adding that the invitation was issued in the spirit of providing a basis for dialogue. “In every statement I have made about the invitation of President Obama and in every statement I will make, I express our disagreement with him on issues surrounding the protection of life, such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research,” he said.
Jenkins has upset conservatives at Notre Dame before, notably by negotiating compromises to allow The Vagina Monologues be performed on campus and to lift a ban on Notre Dame’s gay film festival.
The priest appears to be closer to his flock than the protesting bishops, with letters to the student newspaper overwhelmingly in favour of allowing Obama to speak. A number of students and alumni have pointed out that conservatives on campus raised no objection when George Bush delivered the commencement address, despite his record of presiding over 152 executions as governor of Texas and the Catholic Church’s opposition to the death penalty.
“The death penalty is an even more egregious affront to life since it is the government taking an active role in snuffing out life. . . . How this can be overlooked while abortion becomes the premier pro-life issue is politics, at best,” Ellen Burns, a third-year law student, wrote to The Observer.
American Catholics knew about Obama’s views on abortion before last November’s election but they supported him by a margin of 54 per cent to 45 per cent. In 2004, Bush won the Catholic vote by five points.
Sixty-three per cent of US Catholics believe that embryonic stem cell research is morally acceptable, despite their bishops’ characterisation of it as the destruction of human life. Catholics are no less likely than others to find abortion morally acceptable, according to a Gallup survey last week, which also found that 54 per cent of Catholics think homosexual relations acceptable, compared to 45 per cent of others.
“It is possible that Catholics who themselves do not adhere to Catholic Church positions on moral issues could still object to Obama’s being honoured by Notre Dame,” Gallup said. “And Catholic leaders’ objections to the Obama situation could themselves be at least partly a reflection of the leaders’ awareness of and concern over the fact that in today’s contemporary American culture, there is little differentiation between Catholics and non-Catholics in terms of adherence to conservative Catholic Church positions.”