Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Joseph Bottum on Obama and Notre Dame:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_03-2009_05_09.shtml#1241896233
[1]Says it is an issue of Catholic culture, more than Catholic
politics. An interesting thesis and one that seems intuitively correct
to me:
You could cut the irony with a knife: It's only demonizing when
conservatives do it. Still Fr. Himes joins Douglas Kmiec, and
America, and Commonweal, and the administration of Notre Dame, and
most of the newspaper columnists who've weighed in on the
controversy, and a surprising number of conservatives. They all
look at the Notre Dame protests and think it must be about
politics. Bad politics or good politics, take your pick. But
politics all the way down.
As it happens, they're wrong. Politics has very little to do with
the mess. This isn't a fight about who won the last presidential
election and how he's going to deal with abortion. It's a fight
about culture--the culture of American Catholicism, and how Notre
Dame, still living in a 1970s Catholic world, has suddenly awakened
to find itself out of date.
The role of culture is what Fr. Jenkins at Notre Dame and many
other presidents of Catholic colleges don't quite get, and their
lack of culture is what makes them sometimes seem so
un-Catholic--though the charge befuddles them whenever it is made.
As perhaps it ought. They know very well that they are Catholics:
They go to Mass, and they pray, and their faith is real, and their
theology is sophisticated, and what right has a bunch of other
Catholics to run around accusing them of failing to be Catholic?
But, in fact, they live in a different world from most American
Catholics. Opposition to abortion doesn't stand at the center of
Catholic theology. It doesn't even stand at the center of Catholic
faith. It does stand, however, at the center of Catholic culture in
this country. Opposition to abortion is the signpost at the
intersection of Catholicism and American public life. And those
who--by inclination or politics--fail to grasp this fact will all
eventually find themselves in the situation that Fr. Jenkins has
now created for himself. Culturally out of touch, they rail that
the antagonism must derive from politics. But it doesn't. It
derives from the sense of the faithful that abortion is important.
It derives from the feeling of many ordinary Catholics that the
Church ought to stand for something in public life--and that
something is opposition to abortion.
***
Still, in a peculiar way, Himes is right that "some people have
simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue." It is a
horrifying fact, in many ways, that Roe v. Wade has done more to
provide Catholic identity than any other event of the last 50
years. Still, for American Catholics, the Church is a refuge and
bulwark against an ambient culture that erodes morality and
undermines families. Catholic culture is their counterculture,
their means of upholding the dignity of the human person and the
integrity of family--and, in that context, the centrality of
abortion for American Catholic culture seems much less arbitrary
than it first appeared.
This is what the leaders of Notre Dame need to grasp.
By the way, he isn't too impressed with you guys (remember--I'm just
the messenger):
Even some conservatives, Obama's natural opponents, took the
school's side and denounced Mary Ann Glendon for refusing this
year's Laetare Medal, Notre Dame's annual honor for service to the
Church and society. A Harvard law professor, author of the widely
cited Rights Talk, and the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican,
Glendon is well known for her basic niceness and her well-mannered
willingness to join attempts at coalition building between left and
right.
Her decision was no personal caprice. Back in 2004, the American
bishops reached a compromise between their own left and right
contingents and issued a carefully worded document called
"Catholics in Political Life." "Catholic institutions should not
honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral
principles," the bishops agreed [emphasis in the original]. "[Such
people] should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would
suggest support for their actions." In part, this explains why, at
the present moment, not a single American bishop is supporting
Notre Dame in its clash with the bishop of South Bend, John
D'Arcy--and bishops from 68 of the 195 American dioceses have
publicly chastised the school. What was the point of all that
careful work by the bishops if Catholic institutions are simply
going to ignore it?
Anyway, Glendon had first accepted the invitation to receive the
medal back in December. In March came the announcement of Obama's
honorary degree, and then the school's lashing out at critics, and
then the leaking of Notre Dame's official talking points, which
instructed the university's spokesmen to reply to complaints:
"President Obama won't be doing all the talking. Mary Ann Glendon,
the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, will be speaking as the
recipient of the Laetare Medal." Glendon decided she didn't much
like being a makeweight, so she wrote on April 27 to decline the
medal, saying that Notre Dame's refusal even to speak with its
local bishop threatened a "ripple effect" that could lead "other
Catholic schools . . . to disregard the bishops' guidelines." The
university's president, Fr. John Jenkins, had ratcheted the
situation up, and up, and up, until even the gracious Mary Ann
Glendon was forced to choose between the bishops and Notre Dame.
What made them imagine she could possibly choose Notre Dame?
That wasn't how some saw it, of course. The comments about Glendon
left, for example, on the libertarian law professors' blog The
Volokh Conspiracy are well worth reading: a hilariously incoherent
recital of a hundred years' worth of anti-Catholic tropes--mashed
together with the thin-skinned reaction of Obama's supporters to
any criticism of their leader and spiced with a conservative
complaint that Glendon is childishly picking up her ball and going
home, retreating into irrelevance instead of fighting the good
fight.
On the other hand, [2]polls indicate that the majority of Catholics
support the Obama invitation:
A survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
from April 23 to 27 found that half of Catholics aware of the
speech thought it was right to invite Mr. Obama; 28% said it was
wrong; and 22% had no opinion. In the November election, 54% of
Catholics voted for Mr. Obama.
Prof. Campbell said 85% of the students he has polled supported Mr.
Obama's visit. Among graduating seniors who do not support the
visit, many will protest by wearing an image of a golden cross
between two baby feet on top of their mortarboards.
An interesting--and as you surely can infer from these
snippets--provocative article.
References
1.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/482btmli.asp?pg=1
2. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124182829629302479.html
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