To understand what the controversy surrounding Obama’s invitation is about, it is important to understand what it is not about.
Most important, the issue is not, as some commentators have suggested, whether Notre Dame should welcome, engage, debate and explore a wide range of viewpoints. Of course it should. It was, after all, a central message of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council that “nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo” in Christians’ hearts, and the same can be said for the work of a Catholic university. Such a university has nothing to fear from ”” indeed, it has the best possible reasons to welcome ”” inquiry, investigation, argument and testing. And so, no one could reasonably oppose inviting the president to Notre Dame for discussion and dialogue on immigration, education, health care ”” or even abortion.
The question on the table is not whether Notre Dame should hear from the president but whether Notre Dame should honor the president. A Catholic university can and should engage all comers, but in order to be true to itself ”” to have integrity ”” it should hesitate before honoring those who use their talents or power to bring about grave injustice. The university is, and must remain, a bustling marketplace of ideas; at the same time, it also has a voice of its own. We say a lot about who we are and what we stand for through what we love and what we choose to honor. The controversy at Notre Dame is not about what should be said at Catholic universities, but about what should be said by a Catholic university.
A great piece. I am not myself a member of the church of Rome, nor am I certain I’d agree with her view that aborting a three week embryo is morally equivalent to murdering (say) a three year old child (though I am way closer to the view of Rome than I am of NARAL or NOW).
What I liked about the piece then is not so much its specific content about Roman doctrine or the issue of abortion, but that the paragraphs Kendall quotes could equally apply to all kinds of signal confusions in a typical TEC parish regarding the creeds.
I don’t know how often I hear the same kinds of confusions burble forth from progressive parishioners when they hear someone object, for example, to the parish bookstore featuring books by Borg and Crossan and Spong, or when someone objects to the ideas of these authors emanating from Sunday school teachers or from the pulpit. The same tired arguments are trotted out: you are trying to burn people at the stake, we should welcome people to this parish with different ideas, etc.
And of course, the same response made so patiently in the Notre Dame piece is what is needed. No, we are not on a witch hunt, we are not going to burn anyone at the stake, we absolutely welcome people to come to the parish who may not (yet) believe in the creeds, and absolutely there is a very real place in the parish for these ideas to be discussed (e.g. in an outreach group called, say, Seekers and Skeptics, where people can talk about questions and challenges to Christianity and how the faith responds to these). The issue is NONE of those things, but whether the church is going to have some sort of normative identity.
Jon, would you mind explaining what you find morally inequivalent about intentionally killing a human embryo and intentionally killing a human infant? Your moral distinction escapes me.
Also, a great piece on this by Joseph Bottum posted at the Weekly Standard http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/482btmli.asp
#2… it sounds like you may are thinking that I emphatically reject Rome’s view (that killing a newly fertilized egg is morally equivalent to murdering a newborn baby). If so, you’d be mistaken. Rome certainly might be correct here. All I said was that I wasn’t CERTAIN that Rome’s position was right.
My point was that regardless of what position one takes on that question, the Notre Dame op-ed was not really about that question: but about the right of institutions to have a kind of normative identity, to stand for something and promote that thing, and that when they do that necessarily means NOT promoting its opposite.
“…. make it all the more regrettable…. tragic, really…. that he is so badly misguided on such a fundamental issue of justice”.
Could it simply be that he is evil and that he is not “badly misguided” at all ?