The campaign to stop Obama speaking at Notre Dame commencement is gathering pace. Tonight over 45,000 people have signed the petition asking ND to disinvite this most pro abortion President from speaking and receiving an honorary degree.
We invite you to sign the petition here. I would also ask you, if you are a blogger, to link to this site and encourage your readers to sign. At this site you will also be given email and postal addresses for your involvement.
If you are a non-Catholic reading this blog, network this through to our separated brothers and sisters who share with us the horror at the crime of abortion in our land. Please ask them to sign the petition and voice their own views.
If I were not a Catholic Christian I would get involved and write to Fr Jenkins thus: “Dear Fr Jenkins, I am not a Catholic, but I respect and agree with the Catholic Church’s courageous stance against the crime of abortion. I am surprised and disappointed that the premier Catholic college in America should honor the most pro abortion politician ever elected to high office by inviting him to be your commencement speaker and to receive an honorary doctorate. Sir, stand up for your own church and its teachings before it is too late!”
I don’t know. I think this president has done more to stop unjust war and poverty than the anti-abortion president did. The lives of adults do in fact figure into the equation of whether or not someone is a moral or immoral person. If Obama is tragically wrong about when life begins, he is still radically and thankfully right about many other issues.I simply don’t see Obama as some tried and convicted baby-killer. I think that within the reference frame of his erroneus conviction (that life begins at birth) the man has done more to protect life as he recognizes it than his anti-abortion predecessor. As much as you profess to realize Bush was no good catholic, you still seem awfully slow to condemn the unjust war as more than ‘my personal opinion’ and probably would not toss and turn at night over Bush speaking at ND.
So much Kool-Aid, so little time, Marcus.Look up the word ‘Radical-ly’ and you’ll see a picture of Mr. Obama. What exactly is it he has done to ‘protect life’? What does Obama have to do with a former president? Put down that cup lest you be lost forever.
Marcus,Please note: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” Pope Benedict XVI when Cardinal Ratzinger).Relativism is “Different opinions, no one authority, and as many ‘truths’ as there are people or societies or cultures advancing different ways of doing things,” says Simon Blackburn, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University.It is easy, he says, “to give relativism a slogan: Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” And when that is applied to ethics, then goodness, virtue and duty also lie in the eye of the beholder. BBC News – April 20, 2005.What another president did or didn’t do has nothing to do with Obama’s radical pro abortion policies and views. Science has repeatedly and unequivocally stated that life begins at conception; Obama has horrifically ignored this simple fact of science and since Jan 20th has been mandating abortion as lawful policy. He is in error and needs our prayers, for nothing else is as important as how a government treats its unborn, (need one bring up socialist governments of the 20th century?). Just as Obama is wrong, it’s wrong for any Catholic college to show Obama support for just this reason. You cannot justify (or relativize) these policies in any manner. As my archbishop recently noted, no Catholic should be complacent when it comes to the right to life for the unborn. No Catholic, nor Christian.
Marcus, stop justifying your support for Obama by comparing him to Bush. This simply does not wash. A Catholic does not make moral judgements by comparing one person’s choice in one issue to another person’s choice in another issue. This is how Middle School children make moral choices. “It’s true I cheated on a test, but I wasn’t as bad as Suzy who lied three times!” Come now, you’re smarter than that aren’t you?The other intellectual trap you continue to fall into is comparing abortion to the unjust war. This is also an intellectual fallacy used to justify abortion. Two wrongs do not make a right.Let us by all means find the good things that Obama has done. Feel free to specify them here if you wish. I will applaud them.But do not use the good a man does to whitewash his evil. The same arguments you use could be used to support Hitler. He did good. He meant well. He didn’t seem as bad at the time as the corrupt and spineless regime that went before him…
Oh Marcus–do you really think that? How has he saved us from unjust war? If anything, he’s taking a couple of small unjust wars, abandoning the Iraqi people just when they’re getting on their feet, and rolled everything up into one enormous unjust war in Afghanistan! Everyone talks about the good he’s supposedly doing by pulling troops out of Iraq where we’re just keeping the peace, but the fact that he’s doubling, if not tripling, the efforts in Afghanistan is continually being swept under the rug. At least the soldiers and terrorists have a choice of where to be and what to do. Babies in the womb are sitting ducks without voices.
Perhaps Diocletian or Caligula would better suit Ye, Marcus. You claim that Obama has done “so much” to stop an unjust war and poverty.Whah?What, exactly, has this man done, save for pivot his head from one addictive telepromter to another? I had no idea that the war was finished and all of our troops are now safely home! I had no idea that the trillions spent by Obama’s debt-doomed Marxist pork-plan have already ended poverty.Certainly, Marcus-A, the commencement at Notre Dame ought to be bypassed and Obama should be assumed (in glory) to Heaven forthwith.[Amazing: even this man’s ardent admirers have no idea that he’s accomplished absolutely nothing save for cobbling together a couple of vague biographies and karaoke-ing his way into the White House on the wings of the nation’s off-the-rack ‘American Idol’ morality and warped sense of taste. As a Catholic who does not always entirely agree with ecclesiastical minutae but who assents to all ordinary magisterial teaching, I am disgusted that Notre Dame University has extended this honor–this endorsement–to Obama. Where are our bishops? Where?]
Fr.,I’m linking to it and copying your “Letter from a Protestant” on my blog. I hope you don’t mind. If you do, I hope you’ll forgive me.
This situation is a natural consequence of our culture’s impact on the Church (the flip opposite of what should be!) and reminds me of the thinking in days when abortion was first legalized nearly 40 yrs. ago: “If it’s legal then it must be OK.” (yes, I was in grad school at the time). Even Catholics expressed those sentiments. And the Bishops had no response…Since my son-in-law is a N.D. graduate and VERY proud of his school, I’ve been approaching this topic as unemotionally as I can. I was pretty incensed about Fr. Jenkins allowing “The Vagina Monologues” in 2006; what a horrendous insult to Our Lady! And I must admit that I would hate to see our family college fund $$ for grandchildren go to this institution, which I am sure their Dad will push (thankfully that is years in the future). I did sign the petition knowing that it will have no impact on Fr. Jenkins’ thinking/plans. And the Bishops have had no response…
My thoughts:It is fine and good for people to write letters and sign petitions. I did it myself. But what really needs to happen is that Fr. Jenkins’ Catholic superiors have to take action. Without decisive and unequivocal discipline for all in the hierarchy, these kinds of misjudgments by individual priests (or bishops) will continue to proliferate. By the same token, bishops must be willing to take a firm stand with regard to anyone, including prominent politicians, and insist that they be refused communion if they support abortion in any way. A church that has a “top down” power structure has to make shepherds and teachers and leaders of those with courage and the ability and will to do the right thing.Also, please don’t use Hitler in your arguments about an American president who has been in office but two months. It’s a not so subtle attempt to equate the two, and that, certainly at this juncture, is arguably offensive and unnecessary. Surely, you can make cogent arguments without resorting to that. I don’t excuse Obama’s stance on abortion one whit, and I’m doing what I can to try to change it. But, I think just as we should not “use the good a man does to whitewash his evil,” we should also remember that no man is defined only by part of himself. All of us will be judged on our entire lives and being, on whether we have loved, on whether we have treated our neighbor as ourselves, on whether we have remembered the orphan and the widow. Etc. We should rightly turn away from sin, but we are not to judge our fellow men as though we knew their souls, their minds, and their hearts. We don’t. Only God knows the sum of all parts. We can deal with people’s acts, accepting or rejecting them as necessary, but that is all.
If you feel scandalized by fellow-Catholics, consider the following.In his book, “Spirit of Catholicism”, Karl Adam writes: “So it may happen, and it must happen, that pastor and flock, bishop, priest, and layman are not always worthy mediators and recipients of God’s grace, and that the infinitely holy is sometimes warped and distorted in passing through them. Wherever you have men, you are bound to have a restricted outlook and narrowness of judgment. For talent is rare, and genius comes only when God calls it. Eminent popes, bishops of great spiritual force, theologians of genius, priests of extraordinary graces and devout layfolk: these must be, not the rule, but the exception. God raises them up only at special times, when He needs them for His Church. We may and should pray for them, but we cannot reckon on their coming. And so as a rule it is the ordinary and average man who bears God’s truth and grace through the world. The Church has from God the guarantee that she will not fall into error regarding faith or morals; but she has no guarantee whatever that every act and decision of ecclesiastical authority will be excellent and perfect. Mediocrity and even defects are possible. “The weak and the little hath God chosen that He may confound the strong.” It is true that the power of divine truth and grace is manifested all the more gloriously because of this weakness. But reflective Catholics must feel and be pained by the conflict which arises out of the contrast between the sublimity, depth and power of divine revelation and the weakness of the human, too- human factor. The same phenomenon is repeated in the history of the Church throughout the centuries which so tragically moulded the relation of our Lord to His disciples. They were unable in their small mirrors to receive all the rays of light which went forth from His divine Person and to transmute them without loss into living forces.” “Still more palpable and painful does the conflict between the power of God and the weakness of man become when the in-streaming life of grace and truth is checked by human passions, by sin and vice, when Christ as He is realized in human history is dragged through the dust of the street, through the commonplace and the trivial, and over masses of rubbish. That is the deepest tragedy, the very tragedy of the Divine, when It is dispensed by unworthy hands and received by unworthy lips. An immoral laity, bad priests, bishops and popes—these are the saddest wounds of the Body of the mystical Christ. This is what grieves the earnest Catholic and inspires his sorrowful lamentation, when he sees these wounds and is unable to help.”
Bishop D’Arcy finally responds:March 24, 2009″On Friday, March 21, Father John Jenkins, CSC, phoned to inform me that President Obama had accepted his invitation to speak to the graduating class at Notre Dame and receive an honorary degree. We spoke shortly before the announcement was made public at the White House press briefing. It was the first time that I had been informed that Notre Dame had issued this invitation.President Obama has recently reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred. While claiming to separate politics from science, he has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.This will be the 25th Notre Dame graduation during my time as bishop. After much prayer, I have decided not to attend the graduation. I wish no disrespect to our president, I pray for him and wish him well. I have always revered the Office of the Presidency. But a bishop must teach the Catholic faith “in season and out of season,” and he teaches not only by his words — but by his actions.My decision is not an attack on anyone, but is in defense of the truth about human life. “
“I think that within the reference frame of his erroneous conviction (that life begins at birth) the man has done more to protect life as he recognizes it than his anti-abortion predecessor.”The conspiracy of relativism on display.
Not all relativism is inherently evil. The jews think it is evil to forgoe circumcision. Hopefully the israelis will respect christian morality within its frame of reference and will avoid murdering us in Palestine for not agreeing with them.There is a certain time and place to respect another person, of another faith, for being true to their principles and for being just and faithful to their belief system.Question: Would you be angry with ND should they choose to honor the Dalai Lama? Surely he disagrees with some catholic doctrine. Yet we respect him for what he is.I think the sort of slipshod, nihilistic relativism is very different from respecting another individual who lives in another, concrete belief system from ones own.That doesn’t mean I don’t think we should protest FOCA and pray for Obama. I just sent off a bunch of anti-FOCA cards to the powers that be. But I am fairly certain that we should respect others who hold firm to another set of values within which there is a great deal of good.And Marcus Aurelius, by the way, said the same thing. Others have their belief systems, as we have our own. Why be angry with a bird for being a bird? It is what it is. Being angry with a bird for flitting about from moment to moment pretending at being a Rhino or a cow is another sort of relativism altogether.Ian:I do not see Afghanistan/Pakistan as an unjust war. We were actually attacked from their soil and people there are promising to attack us again. That meets the requirements for just war.I do take your point, however, that Obama’s promise of accomplishment is often conflated with the reality.
I don’t think anyone is particularly interested in a dissection of relativism. Rather, we just want to see an end to the “Well Bush did this” every time Obama’s atrocities are called out. (And they say conservatives live in the past). Oh yeah, I’m not convinced that Obama won’t get us in an unjust military dust up in some place favored by progressives.
Amazing to see how easy it is to be blinded. This time by ambition it would seem.
With all due respect to Bishop D’Arcy and to his rightful duty to consider many factors when responding to this N.D. invitation, I think he is acting more like a layperson than a bishop. He is doing what any private person can do: not attend. But as a bishop, he has other, more powerful options. I hope that he will consider and employ those as well.