William Peter Blatty is the author of the deeply thoughtful
novel The Exorcist. (The movie tried, but didn’t quite,
capture the depth of theology in the novel; the movie is now
remembered mostly as a rather graphic horror flick, but it really
was far better than that.) Now Blatty has taken up a
massive cudgel against his (and my) alma mater,
Georgetown University, for its repeated affronts to people of
Christian and particularly Catholic faith which — after including
the draping of the Jesuit cross in order for President Obama to
speak on campus — has culminated in yesterday’s featured
speaking role for HHS Secretary and religious-freedom assault queen
Kathleen Sebelius. As Jenna Johnson reported in the Washington
Post, “An invitation to be seated on the commencement stage is
one of the highest honors a university can bestow. Especially
coveted is the opportunity to address the graduating class.” Yet
Georgetown’s increasingly radical President Jack DeGioia, in direct
defiance of the
Archdiocese of Washington, has defended the
Sebelius invitation and basically thumbed his nose at every
Catholic bishop in the country and at all the faithful
following.
Blatty is justifiably incensed. He offers a petition drive against
Georgetown, asks those who ordinarily donate to the school to
withhold contributions for at least a year, and promises a canon
lawsuit against the university. Among the potential outcomes from
the lawsuit would be “relief that may include a declaration by the
appropriate ecclesiastical authority that Georgetown University is
no longer entitled to call itself a Catholic or Jesuit university.”
This would be big stuff. Frankly, my understanding is that it is
within the Pope’s authority to order the Jesuits out of Georgetown
entirely.
In addition to these potential actions, I would suggest
consideration — not a conclusion yet, but definite consideration
– of another one: Fire Jack DeGioia.
I write this with heavy heart. Jack and I have always been
friendly, ever since my first day on campus as a resident of the
building he then served as Resident Director. In many ways he has
served Georgetown well in various capacities for something like 35
years. But he has gone well beyond the pale. His defiance is
outrageous.
Despite an
absurd editorial by the increasingly
anti-Catholic-leaningWashington Post, the Sebelius
speech has nothing to do with “the free exchange of ideas.” It is
patent dishonesty to somehow suggest that a speech at a diploma
ceremony does not carry with it a rather explicit honorific. This
is not an in-semester speech sponsored by the College
Democrats or by an on-campus debating society. This is a university
sponsored and sanctioned event — as Johnson wrote, “one of the
highest honors a university can bestow.” DeGioia knows this. The Post knows this. To suggest otherwise is errant nonsense,
so much a prevarication as to be beneath contempt.
As the Archdiocese noted, DeGioia is being deliberately and
flagrantly misdirectional by making the excuse that the invitation
to Sebelius went out before the January announcement of the final
decision on abortifacient mandate. The fact is, as the statement
indicates, that ”the mandate was published last August” as a
near-final draft rule for public comment. In fact, it was
way back in September that the bishops objected and called
it “an unprecedented threat to individual and
institutional religious freedom.” That was long before the
invitation from Georgetown was issued. DeGioia knows this.
It is not just the defense of the invitation by DeGioia that
raises the issue of his fitness to continue as president; it is the
intellectuall dishonesty represented by the above-described
evasions of the truth.
Again, this isn’t just some debate about contraception or even
about abortifacients. This mandate is a direct frontal assault on
religious liberty — and not just that of Catholics, but of every
faith and denomination in the country. It is the very essence of
tyranny to force somebody to financially support that which his
faith teaches is among the gravest of all sins.
When I was at Georgetown and writing 200 articles for the
Georgetown HOYA newspaper, the single biggest feature I did was on
the role of the Jesuits at Georgetown. I was/am a Catholic-leaning
Anglican, but I was fascinated by the additional moral seriousness
at GU that seemed to stem from its Catholic identity. I wish I had
the story in front of me, but one of the interviews I did has stuck
with me until this day. The legendary Fr. Joseph Durkin, S.J.,
founder of the school’s American Studies program, author of a
multi-volume history of the university, and beloved, active member
of the campus community until his death two weeks after his 100th
birthday, told me in words that I can repeat almost verbatim from
memory even a quarter-century later:
“We are a Catholic and Jesuit University. Because we are a
university, we welcome and encourage freedom of thought and of
speech. Because we are Catholic and Jesuit, we take specific
positions on certain issues. You have every right to speak up
against those positions of ours, openly and without fear of
repercussion. But we reserve the right to explain to you why
you are wrong, and to insist that while you are perfectly free
to keep being wrong, we will continue to say publicly why we are
right. An example of this is the Communist philosophy, which
teaches atheism. It is wrong, and we will say so.”
Jack DeGioia not only is failing to step up and say that
Kathleen Sebelius is wrong, but is going in the other direction by
providing her a speaking slot that carries with it a widely
understood honor (even if not officially an honorary degree).
DeGioia thus has moved nearly 180 degrees away from Father Durkin’s
wisdom. Shame on him. And shame on the university’s board if it
lets him get away with it.
Washington (CNN) – In an anticipated and controversial address Friday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius delivered a speech that blended inspirational messages to graduates with a discussion of public policy’s tough decisions, including health care and honoring religious freedom.
Her speech at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute awards ceremony had been considered controversial by conservative Catholic organizations that saw her appearance as the university validating her positions on abortion and contraception.
The speech did not mention the controversy directly, but Sebelius did address faith in public life in a section of the speech devoted to John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States.
“Kennedy was elected president on November 8, 1960,” she said. “And more than 50 years later, that conversation, about the intersection of our nation’s long tradition of religious freedom with policy decisions in the public square, continues.”
Sebelius continued: “Contributing to these debates will require more than just the quantitative skills you have learned at Georgetown. It will also require the ethical skills you have honed – the ability to weight different views, see issues from other points of view and, in the end, remain true to your own moral compass.”
A few minutes into the speech, a protester sitting with families in the crowd stood up and shouted at Sebelius, getting the crowd’s attention. “Georgetown should be ashamed,” he yelled, drawing boos from the crowd.
Though the protester continued, the crowd largely drowned out his statements. Police escorted him out, but his chants could be heard inside the room as he left.
Sebelius remained composed throughout, and when the speech continued, she received a round of applause.
Student reaction to the protester was largely evidenced by their reaction to his shouting.
“The students here are very committed to public service …” said Taiyang Gul, 24, who came to Georgetown from China. “Obviously, this is not the forum for expressing opinions. People can express their views in some other occasions.”
Gul said in the end, this day was for the students, to mark their success and wish them well.
Ranjini Danaraj, a 31-year-old master’s in policy management graduate, dismissed the protester, calling the response to him appropriate, and said she thought Sebelius did a great job.
“I thought [the speech] was great,” she said. “She did a good job of relating events from her life that were relevant to us. I thought she had a lot of life lessons to pass along.”
The secretary’s statements on understanding different points of view largely echoed Georgetown President John J. DeGioia, who defended her invitation by saying Georgetown is “a university, committed to the free exchange of ideas.”
DeGioia’s defense, however, was not enough for the groups and some faculty who protested Sebelius’ speech.
Just outside the Georgetown walls, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property held banners, flags and signs that protested the speech. About 15 protesters counted the rosary and said the Hail Mary prayer as people in graduation gowns walked past.
“There are certain lines that we can’t cross,” said Michael Drake, a volunteer for the organization. “She [Sebelius] has a pro-abortion record from her time in Kansas. … We are very scandalized that Georgetown would even invite her.”
There were also vocal groups of protesters before the speech. Leading the charge was the conservative Cardinal Newman Society, a group that has regularly blogged about speakers at Catholic universities who go against Catholic teachings.
Patrick Reilly, the group’s president, labeled Georgetown as “anti-Catholic.”
“It is recognized by the bishops as Catholic, so it is Catholic,” Reilly said about the university. “Does it do a good job at upholding its Catholic identity? No, it is one of the worst at doing so.”
At the heart of his and other protest groups’ disagreement is that Catholic bishops, in 2004, released a document that outlined how a Catholic university should invite speakers to campus. In it, the bishops said Catholic universities should not bestow honors upon speakers whose views differ with those of the Catholic Church.
Reilly’s take: “I would say that a commencement address falls into the category of an honor.”
Protest was not limited to solely independent Catholic organizations, however. The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., also chimed in on the speech.
“Given the dramatic impact this (contraception) mandate will have on Georgetown and all Catholic institutions, it is understandable that Catholics across the country would find shocking the choice of Secretary Sebelius, the architect of the mandate, to receive such special recognition at a Catholic university,” the Washington Archdiocese’s statement said.
The archdiocese was referring to a Health and Human Services mandate that religious employers offer health insurance coverage that includes access to contraceptives and birth control services.
Georgetown is the oldest Catholic university in the United States. It was founded by the country’s first Catholic bishop, John Carroll, and describes itself as a “global research university deeply rooted in the Catholic faith.”
Catholic faith, as directed by the church’s hierarchy, is adamantly against abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage. As a Catholic university, Georgetown adheres to those positions – no condoms are passed out on campus, for example – but this has caused friction with the student body.
In her remarks, Sebelius addressed the path she took to become leader of the Department of Health and Human Services. She also talked about her role in implementing President Barack Obama’s hallmark health care legislation.
“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 care,” she said.
Sebelius was one of a handful of graduation speakers at Georgetown this weekend. Many of the university’s individual schools have both a commencement and an awards ceremony. Sebelius was speaking at the awards ceremony – called a tropaia, after the Greek word for “trophy” – for Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute.
Baltimore, Md., May 16, 2012 / 01:20 pm (CNA/EWTN News).-
At his May 16 installation in the “Premier See” of the U.S. Church, new Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori urged believers to proclaim their faith to the nation while standing up for the Church’s freedom.
“Let us not shrink from entering the public square to proclaim the person of Christ, to teach the values that flow from reason and faith, to uphold our right to go about our daily work in accord with our teachings and values,” he told the 2,000-strong congregation at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen.
“By its nature, the profession of faith is a public matter,” said the archbishop, who also leads the U.S. bishops’ religious freedom committee.
He indicated that the Catholic faith cannot be confined solely to privately-held beliefs and acts of worship, since it is “meant to be spread far and wide and acted upon, in and through Church institutions and in the witness of individual believers.”
“Let us never imagine that the faith we profess with such personal conviction is merely a private matter,” he said to the congregation.
Instead, he told them, “we must be loyal Americans by being bold and courageous Catholics.”
Known for his religious freedom advocacy during his past appointment as the Bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., Archbishop Lori was installed amid ongoing controversy over the federal government’s contraception mandate and other moves seen as hostile to religion by Catholics and other believers.
Over 300 priests and bishops, joined by representatives of 150 parishes and 70 Catholic schools, heard Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano proclaim the decree establishing the new archbishop, a 61-year-old Kentucky native, as the leader of the archdiocese’s 500,000 Catholics.
Archbishop Lori’s installation homily drew inspiration from the public witness of Saint Paul, as well as the missionary journeys of Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. He recalled Bl. John Paul II’s own words, delivered at Baltimore’s cathedral during a 1995 visit to the city.
In words delivered on that occasion, and quoted by Archbishop Lori, the late Pope spoke of America’s “precious legacy of religious freedom,” telling Catholics “to defend that freedom against those who would take religion out of the public domain and establish secularism as America’s official faith.”
The archbishop also paid tribute to those who led the nation’s first Catholic diocese before him – including Archbishop John Carroll, the United States’ first Catholic bishop; and Cardinal James Gibbons, who led the Church in Baltimore during a period of anti-Catholic suspicion.
Archbishop Carroll, he said, led a “generation of believers and patriots,” whose legacy “has enabled the Church to worship in freedom, to bear witness to Christ publicly, and to do massive and amazing works of pastoral love, education, and charity in ways that are true to the faith that inspired them.”
Archbishop Lori also recalled how Cardinal Gibbons, Baltimore’s archbishop from 1877 to 1921, opposed “those who said it wasn’t possible to be a practicing Catholic and a loyal American.”
He recalled Cardinal Gibbons’ description of the U.S. as a country “where the civil government holds over us the aegis of its protection, without interfering with us in the legitimate exercise of our sublime mission as ministers of the Gospel of Christ.”
As he reaffirmed the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on the human right to religious liberty, Archbishop Lori made it clear that the U.S. bishops “do not seek to defend religious liberty for partisan or political purposes, as some have suggested.”
Rather, the religious freedom committee chairman said, “we do this because we are lovers of a human dignity that was fashioned and imparted not by the government but by the Creator.”
“We defend religious liberty because we are lovers of every human person, seeing in the face of every man and woman also the face of Christ,” he explained. “We uphold religious liberty because we seek to continue serving those in need while contributing to the common good.”
As he reflected on a variety of public and internal challenges, Archbishop Lori urged the faithful to pray for his leadership and the good of the Church.
He asked the congregation to pray “that, as the Year of Faith announced by Pope Benedict XVI, unfolds, I shall not only teach the faith but bear witness to it in a manner that helps to heal the breach between faith and culture.”
“Pray that, in God’s grace, I might foster that unity of faith which makes the Gospel credible,” he urged, “ so that together, we may always warmly invite those who have left the Church … and together may we continue to invite and welcome those sincerely searching for the truth.”
BALTIMORE,MD (Catholic Online) - We have followed the courageous leadership of Bishop William Lori for years. He is a faithful and inspiring shepherd of the Catholic Church. He is also a heroic defender of religious freedom, marriage and the dignity of every human life during an historic time in the United States of America. Finally, he is an answer to much prayer.
We must face the facts, the first freedom, religious freedom, is under a ferocious assault in the United States of America – and the Catholic Church is increasingly threatened – at the very heart of her mission. I was among the many who expressed my deepest gratitude to the Lord when the Bishops of the United States selected Bishop Lori to Chair their Committee for Religious Liberty.
Bishop William Lori is a highly regarded theologian and teacher of the faith. He is known to be a man of deep prayer and personal warmth – which endears him to the faithful under his pastoral care. The people of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the greater Washington D.C. area have been blesses with an outstanding Shepherd of the Church.
The Nation which we love has now been given one more courageous Catholic Bishop in a position of significant leadership at this critical time in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. Archbishop Elect Lori is being installed as the 15th successor of John Carroll, to preside as Archbishop of Baltimore at a pivotal time in the history of the American experiment.
We present the homily given by the Archbishop Elect at Vespers on Tuesday evening in the Basilica of the Assumption. It shows not only the depth of his gifts but the historic significance of this pregant moment in the history of the Catholic Church in America.
The homily was provided by the great Rocco Palmo on Whispers in the Loggia. We ask our readers around the globe to pray for the Archbishop as he assumes this office of such significance. We ask you to pray for the Catholic Church in America. may God Bless America.
***** Homily of Bishop William Lori
Together with Cardinal O’Brien, moments ago, I stood in reverence before the tombs of the Archbishops of Baltimore, beginning with Archbishop John Carroll, our nation’s first bishop. With architect Benjamin Latrobe, he envisioned this, the nation’s first cathedral, as a place of great beauty that would embody the Catholic Tradition while reflecting the distinctiveness of the American experiment of limited government, designed to recognize and protect religious freedom.
We paused before the resting place of Francis Patrick Kenrick, a man of great scholarship and refinement, remembered for translating the Bible into English and for launching the first of three Plenary Councils of Baltimore.
With Cardinal O’Brien, I stood before the tomb of Martin John Spalding, who belonged to a family with deep Maryland roots but who, like myself, came from Louisville to Baltimore.
We stood also in the shadow of the great James Cardinal Gibbons, arguably the most influential Catholic leader in the United States for forty years and one of the great architects in the ongoing project of true faithful citizenship. There also, we looked upon the tomb of Archbishop Michael Curley,both the tenth Archbishop of Baltimore and First Archbishop of Washington.
In my day, it was said that Archbishop Curley was not enamored of the federal city and even less enamored of the proposal to separate Washington from Baltimore. Be that as it may, what we should remember about Archbishop Curley is that he loved the poor, African Americans, immigrants, and the elderly – at his death in 1947 he was penniless.
In this very place the contours of the church in the United States began to take shape: the parish system, Catholic schools, the Baltimore Catechism, the founding of The Catholic University of America, laws of fast and abstinence, a spirited defense of the Church against the anti-Catholic bigotry of the day, and more.
It is a rich legacy, stretching from 1634 to the present, which author Thomas W. Spalding captured with three words: The Premier See. It is a legacy of which we are proud but also a legacy which can weigh heavily upon us. I can well imagine myself some sleepless night tiptoeing by the imposing portraits of my predecessors on my way to the kitchen to get a glass of warm milk!
But how should we think about this legacy? Is it like a grand castle in the English country-side which the landed gentry can no longer afford to maintain? Is it a mere distraction amid the very real problems and challenges which the Church of Baltimore is facing as we look to the future?
Or is it a living legacy, more than a collection of historical facts, which continues to provide us with fresh strength and hope in our …
WASHINGTON (CNS) — New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan praised the class of 2012 at The Catholic University of America, saying in his May 12 commencement address that the 1,500 students receiving degrees that day had all majored in “the Law of the Gift” — learning to pattern their lives after the self-giving love of Jesus.
Cardinal Dolan noted how Blessed John Paul II described the “Law of the Gift” this way: “For we are at our best, we are most fully alive and human, when we give away freely and sacrificially our very selves in love for another.”
The cardinal noted how Jesus spoke about the “Law of the Gift” when the Lord said, “Greater love than this no one has, than to give one’s life for one’s friends.”
New York’s archbishop, who also is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, encouraged the graduates to draw on their faith to help in the effort to stand up for religious freedom in the United States and to oppose efforts to redefine marriage.
“Religion, faith, the church promote a culture built on the ‘Law of the Gift,’” the cardinal said. “Thus, wise people from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Courtney Murray … have observed that an essential ingredient in American wisdom and the genius of the American republic is the freedom it allows for religion to flourish.”
He predicted that a challenge the class of 2012 “will inevitably face is the defense of religious freedom as part of both our American and creedal legacy.”
Cardinal Dolan has played a leading role in the U.S. bishops’ defense of religious freedom in the face of recent threats, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate that would force Catholic institutions including hospitals, universities and social service agencies to provide health insurance coverage to employees for procedures the Catholic Church opposes, including abortion-inducing drugs, artificial contraceptives and sterilizations.
Cardinal Dolan said the “Law of the Gift” also provides special insights into the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage.
The law “is most poetically exemplified in the lifelong, life-giving, faithful, intimate union of a man and woman in marriage, which then leads to the procreation of new life in babies, so that husband and wife, now father and mother, spend their lives sacrificially loving and giving to those children,” the cardinal said.
“That union — that sacred rhythm of man/woman/husband/wife/baby/mother/father — is so essential to the order of the common good that its very definition is ingrained into our interior dictionary, that its protection and flourishing is the aim of enlightened culture.”
The cardinal said the Catholic University graduates had first learned those lessons from “the most significant of all professors, your mom and dad,” at home, and he led the graduates in applauding their parents.
“The ‘Law of the Gift’ is part of the DNA of any Catholic school, this sterling one included,” he said.
“That we are at our best when we give ourselves away in love to another — the ‘Law of the Gift,’” Cardinal Dolan continued, “is, I’m afraid, ‘countercultural’ today, in an era that prefers getting to giving, and entitlement to responsibility; in a society that considers every drive, desire or urge as a right, and where convenience and privacy can trump even the right to life itself; and in a mindset where freedom is reduced to the liberty to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever, however, with whomever we want, rather than the duty to do what we ought. … Well, the ‘Law of the Gift’ can be as ignored as a yellow traffic light in New York City.”
New York’s cardinal also noted how Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized the importance of Catholic universities being faithful to their Catholic identity as they carry out the church’s mission in service to the Gospel. He noted that each classroom at The Catholic University of America features the most effective audiovisual aid of them all — the crucifix.
A big part of the joy at that morning’s graduation, the cardinal said, was rooted in gratitude of the university’s solidarity and communion with the church’s pastoral leadership, knowing “that this university is both Catholic and American, flowing from the most noble ideals of truth and respect for human dignity that are at the heart of our church and our country.”
Earlier, Cardinal Dolan received Catholic University’s President’s Medal, the school’s highest honor. Cardinal Dolan has a doctorate in American church history from Catholic University.
Washington Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, chancellor, offered the invocation at Catholic University’s 123rd annual commencement, asking God to bless the university’s work, and he prayed that at the university, the light of Catholic faith would continue to shine so that those seeking truth will come to know God, who is truth.
Addressing the graduates, John Garvey, president of Catholic University, noted that many commencement speakers encourage graduates “to follow your dreams and wear sunscreen.”
He urged them instead to draw upon the virtue of patience. “Patience is the disposition to await God’s grace. … Get up every morning with the disposition to await God’s grace,” he said.
- – -
Zimmermann is editor of the Catholic Standard in Washington.
END
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This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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Defending Religious Freedom in Full: A Generation’s Challenge
“[A] special word of thanks, today, to the parents of today’s graduates — and the grandparents, and the other family members — who have helped bring you, the Class of 2012, to this pivotal moment in your lives.
Today is, by its nature — and I think at Benedictine College we can still speak of the “nature” of things! — a day of celebration, a day of remembrance, and a day of thanksgiving.
We share, today, a unique and critical moment in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics accounted for less than one per cent of the population of the thirteen colonies — a tiny population clustered primarily in my native Maryland and a few Pennsylvania counties. Yet within a few decades of the Founding, the great tides of European immigration that began to wash onto the shores of the new nation – those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as they are memorialized on the Statue of Liberty — brought millions of Catholics to the New World: at first, Irish and Germans; later, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and the many others who wove their lives, their traditions, and their aspirations into the rich tapestry of American democracy. Those 19th century immigrants felt the sting of anti-Catholic prejudice, even anti-Catholic violence. But notwithstanding that bigotry, Catholics have, I believe, almost always felt at home in these United States.
We have felt at home because we have thrived here; with the exception of immigrant Jews, no religious group has prospered more in America than the Catholic community. Yet Catholic “at-homeness” in the United States has had a deeper philosophical and moral texture. One of the great Catholic students of American democracy, Father John Courtney Murray, described that side of the Catholic experience of America in these terms, in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, a book published fifty-two years ago:
In this second decade of the third millennium, there are many grave questions be debated in America: the question of the legal protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death; the question of long-term strategy and morally worthy tactics in the war against Islamist jihadism; the question of how we attend to the sick and how we manage immigration; the question of fitting public policy ends to fiscal means; the question of building an appropriate regulatory structure around the biotech revolution so that the new genetic knowledge leads to genuine human flourishing rather than to a stunted and manufactured humanity; the question of the health of American civil society and of the American national character; the list goes on and on. The very question of what should be on “the public policy agenda,” and what ought to be left to the private and independent sectors, is being as vigorously contested in our country today as at any time since the Great Depression and the New Deal. Yet amidst all this churning, the gravest question for our public culture is whether what Father Murray called the “American consensus” — that ensemble of “ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law” — still holds.
There are reasons to be concerned.
In October 2009, the nation’s political newspaper of record, the Washington Post, ran an editorial condemning what it termed the “extremist views” of a candidate for attorney general of Virginia who had suggested that the natural moral law was still a useful guide to public policy. The Post, determined to nail down the claim that homosexual orientation is the equivalent of race for purposes of U.S. civil rights law, deplored this as “a retrofit [of] the old language of racism, bias, and intolerance in a new context.” Yet the Post’s own claim was, to adopt its language, “extremist.” For it suggested that the label “bigot” ought to be applied to notable historical personalities who had appealed to the natural moral law in causes the Post would presumably regard as admirable: figures such as Thomas Jefferson, staking America’s claim to independent nationhood on “self-evident” moral truths derived from “the laws of nature”; or Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing in his Letter from Birmingham Jail that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law”; or Pope John Paul II, who, at the United Nations in 1995, suggested that the truths of the natural moral law — “the moral logic which is built into human life,” as he put it — could serve as a universal “grammar” enabling cross-cultural dialogue.
Appeals to the natural moral law we can know by reason underwrote the American civil rights revolution. Appeals to that same natural moral law underwrite the pro-life movement, the successor to the civil rights movement. And appeals to the natural moral law have underwritten U.S. international human rights policy for the past thirty years. Until, that is, December 2009, when the Secretary of State of the United States, in a speech at Georgetown University, emptied the concept of religious freedom of everything save the “freedom to worship” while asserting, in a catalogue of what she claimed were fundamental international human rights, that people “must be free…to love in the way they choose” — which “choice” must, presumably, be protected by international human rights covenants and national and local civil rights laws.
This speech, as things turned out, was one harbinger of an assault on religious freedom that continues to this day — an assault that imagines “religious freedom” to be a kind of “privacy right” to certain leisure-time activities, but nothing more than that. This dramatic misconception of religious freedom was evident in the present administration’s attempt to re-write federal employment law by dissolving the “ministerial exemption” that had long protected the integrity of religious institutions. It was evident in the administration’s refusal to continue funding the U.S. bishops’ efforts to help women who had been victims of sex-trafficking (because the Church refused to provide abortion as part of that work). And it has been most dramatically evident in the January HHS mandate that requires all employers (including religious institutions with moral objections and private-sector employers with religiously-informed moral objections) to facilitate the provision of contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs like Plan B and Ella to their employees.
All of this suggests that one of the great challenges of your generation, my fellow-members of the Class of 2012 of Benedictine College, will be to rise to the defense of religious freedom in full. And, indeed, what could be a more apt challenge for the graduates of a college named in honor of the saint whose inspired vision and evangelical vision saved the civilization of the classical world when it was in danger of being lost? What better challenge for the graduates of Benedictine College, named for one of the patrons of Europe, whose life-work saved the West as a civilizational enterprise built from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome?
For the defense of religious freedom in full which you must mount must be both cultural — in the sense of arguments winsomely and persuasively made — and political, in that you must drive the sharp edge of truth into the sometimes hard soil of public policy.
What is this “religious freedom in full” that you must defend and advance?
It surely includes freedom of worship, but it must include more than that; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is content with freedom of worship, so long as the Christian worship in question takes place behind closed doors in the American embassy compound in Riyadh. Religious conviction is community-forming, and communities formed by religious conviction must be free, as communities and not simply as individuals, to make arguments and bring influence to bear in public life. If religiously informed moral argument is banned from the American public square, then the public square has become, not only naked, but undemocratic and intolerant. If, on the other hand, religiously informed moral argument is welcome in public life, then we have the possibility of rebuilding, not a sacred public square (a goal the Catholic Church rejected at the Second Vatican Council), but a civil public square, in which tolerance is rightly understood as differences engaged within a bond of civility formed by a mutual commitment to reason.
It is a matter of both political common sense and democratic etiquette that Catholics in public life should make our arguments in ways that our fellow-citizens, who may not share our theological premises, can engage and understand — which is to say, in our particular case, that Catholics should bring to bear in public life the moral truths we hold through arguments framed by the grammar and vocabulary of the natural moral law. That is what John Paul II did at the United Nations in 1979 and 1995. That is what Benedict XVI did at the in 2008 and in the German Bundestag in 2011. That is what the bishops of the United States, and lay Catholics in their millions, have done over the past four decades in defense of life. And if there are some who consider such appeals to the natural moral law a form of tarted-up bigotry, well, we shall simply have to inform them, politely but firmly, that they are mistaken, and then demonstrate why.
Religious freedom in full also means that communities of religious conviction and conscience must be free to conduct the works of charity in ways that reflect their conscientious convictions. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the problems that have been posed by tying so much of Catholic social service work and Catholic health care to government funding — save, perhaps, to note that these problems did not exist before the Supreme Court erected a spurious “right to abortion” as the right-that-trumps-all-other-rights, and before courts and legislatures decided that it was within the state’s competence to redefine marriage and to compel others to accept that redefinition through the use of coercive state power. What can be said in this context, and what must be said, is that the rights of Catholic physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals are not second-class rights that can be trumped by other rights-claims; and any state that fails to acknowledge those rights of conscience has done grave damage to religious freedom rightly understood. The same can and must be said about any state that drives the Catholic Church out of certain forms of social service because the Church refuses to concede that the state has the competence to declare as “marriage” relationships that are manifestly not marriages.
My fellow-graduates, your defense of religious freedom is going to require the skills of reasoning and argument that you acquired here at Benedictine College. It is going to require that some of you accept the risk and challenge of public service in elective office. And it going to require all of you to support those who take, as their vocation, the defense and promotion of religious freedom in full.
This will be the work of a lifetime. But it must begin sooner rather than later, for the threats to religious freedom among us are great, and many of them are deeply embedded in postmodern American culture. This work will not be without cost. Some of you may suffer various forms of martyrdom in taking up this cause: the martyrdom of ridicule, of being labeled “intolerant” and “bigoted”; the martyrdom of career paths blocked and promotions denied because of your adherence to the moral truth of things; the martyrdom of political defeat, or a judicial case well-argued but lost. Fidelity to the truth can have its costs. Yet as Blessed John Paul II taught young people all over the world, those costs are worth paying because the truth sets us free in the deepest sense of human liberation. Thomas More, patron saint of Catholics in public life, was never more a free man than when he bent his neck to the executioner’s axe in free adherence to the truth.
Let us pray that it does not come to that for any of you, or indeed for any of us. But let us also be clear on the stakes for which your generation is playing, which are nothing less than the long-term integrity of American democracy. So: be the culture-forming heirs of St. Benedict that your education here has prepared you to be. Be the champions of religious freedom in full. In doing that, you will give America a new birth of freedom — freedom tethered to truth and ordered to goodness, freedom that sets us free in the noblest sense of human liberation.
Godspeed on your journey.
Delivered May 12, 2012 at Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas.
Delivered today at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas:
Defending Religious Freedom in Full: A Generation’s Challenge
Your Excellency, Archbishop Joseph Naumann; members of the Board of Trustees; President Minnis and members of the faculty and staff; Benedictine fathers and sisters; parents, grandparents, and family members of the graduates — and especially mothers of the graduates, who celebrate a double-header today; and my fellow-classmates of the Class of 2012 of Benedictine College:
Thank you for inviting me to join you on this great day. Thank you for honoring my work with the gift of a degree. It has been one of the great graces of my professional life to have been given the opportunity to work regularly with young men and women of intelligence, wit, and character — after their parents had done the heavy lifting! So a special word of thanks, today, to the parents of today’s graduates — and the grandparents, and the other family members — who have helped bring you, the Class of 2012, to this pivotal moment in your lives.
Today is, by its nature — and I think at Benedictine College we can still speak of the “nature” of things! — a day of celebration, a day of remembrance, and a day of thanksgiving. Permit me to take a few minutes to suggest that you consider it a day of challenge as well: a challenge that might lead to a certain kind of vocational commitment.
We share, today, a unique and critical moment in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. At the time of the American Revolution, Catholics accounted for less than one per cent of the population of the thirteen colonies — a tiny population clustered primarily in my native Maryland and a few Pennsylvania counties. Yet within a few decades of the Founding, the great tides of European immigration that began to wash onto the shores of the new nation – those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as they are memorialized on the Statue of Liberty — brought millions of Catholics to the New World: at first, Irish and Germans; later, Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and the many others who wove their lives, their traditions, and their aspirations into the rich tapestry of American democracy. Those 19th century immigrants felt the sting of anti-Catholic prejudice, even anti-Catholic violence. But notwithstanding that bigotry, Catholics have, I believe, almost always felt at home in these United States.
We have felt at home because we have thrived here; with the exception of immigrant Jews, no religious group has prospered more in America than the Catholic community. Yet Catholic “at-homeness” in the United States has had a deeper philosophical and moral texture. One of the great Catholic students of American democracy, Father John Courtney Murray, described that side of the Catholic experience of America in these terms, in We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, a book published fifty-two years ago:
“Catholic participation in the American consensus has been full and free, unreserved and unembarrassed, because the contents of this consensus — the ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law — approve themselves to the Catholic intelligence and conscience. Where this kind of language is talked, the Catholic joins the conversation with complete ease. It is his language. The ideas expressed are native to his universe of discourse. Even the accent, being American, suits his tongue.”
In this second decade of the third millennium, there are many grave questions be debated in America: the question of the legal protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death; the question of long-term strategy and morally worthy tactics in the war against Islamist jihadism; the question of how we attend to the sick and how we manage immigration; the question of fitting public policy ends to fiscal means; the question of building an appropriate regulatory structure around the biotech revolution so that the new genetic knowledge leads to genuine human flourishing rather than to a stunted and manufactured humanity; the question of the health of American civil society and of the American national character; the list goes on and on. The very question of what should be on “the public policy agenda,” and what ought to be left to the private and independent sectors, is being as vigorously contested in our country today as at any time since the Great Depression and the New Deal. Yet amidst all this churning, the gravest question for our public culture is whether what Father Murray called the “American consensus” — that ensemble of “ethical and political principles drawn from the tradition of natural law” — still holds.
There are reasons to be concerned.
In October 2009, the nation’s political newspaper of record, the Washington Post, ran an editorial condemning what it termed the “extremist views” of a candidate for attorney general of Virginia who had suggested that the natural moral law was still a useful guide to public policy. The Post, determined to nail down the claim that homosexual orientation is the equivalent of race for purposes of U.S. civil rights law, deplored this as “a retrofit [of] the old language of racism, bias, and intolerance in a new context.” Yet the Post’s own claim was, to adopt its language, “extremist.” For it suggested that the label “bigot” ought to be applied to notable historical personalities who had appealed to the natural moral law in causes the Post would presumably regard as admirable: figures such as Thomas Jefferson, staking America’s claim to independent nationhood on “self-evident” moral truths derived from “the laws of nature”; or Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing in his Letter from Birmingham Jail that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law”; or Pope John Paul II, who, at the United Nations in 1995, suggested that the truths of the natural moral law — “the moral logic which is built into human life,” as he put it — could serve as a universal “grammar” enabling cross-cultural dialogue.
Appeals to the natural moral law we can know by reason underwrote the American civil rights revolution. Appeals to that same natural moral law underwrite the pro-life movement, the successor to the civil rights movement. And appeals to the natural moral law have underwritten U.S. international human rights policy for the past thirty years. Until, that is, December 2009, when the Secretary of State of the United States, in a speech at Georgetown University, emptied the concept of religious freedom of everything save the “freedom to worship” while asserting, in a catalogue of what she claimed were fundamental international human rights, that people “must be free…to love in the way they choose” — which “choice” must, presumably, be protected by international human rights covenants and national and local civil rights laws.
This speech, as things turned out, was one harbinger of an assault on religious freedom that continues to this day — an assault that imagines “religious freedom” to be a kind of “privacy right” to certain leisure-time activities, but nothing more than that. This dramatic misconception of religious freedom was evident in the present administration’s attempt to re-write federal employment law by dissolving the “ministerial exemption” that had long protected the integrity of religious institutions. It was evident in the administration’s refusal to continue funding the U.S. bishops’ efforts to help women who had been victims of sex-trafficking (because the Church refused to provide abortion as part of that work). And it has been most dramatically evident in the January HHS mandate that requires all employers (including religious institutions with moral objections and private-sector employers with religiously-informed moral objections) to facilitate the provision of contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs like Plan B and Ella to their employees.
All of this suggests that one of the great challenges of your generation, my fellow-members of the Class of 2012 of Benedictine College, will be to rise to the defense of religious freedom in full. And, indeed, what could be a more apt challenge for the graduates of a college named in honor of the saint whose inspired vision and evangelical vision saved the civilization of the classical world when it was in danger of being lost? What better challenge for the graduates of Benedictine College, named for one of the patrons of Europe, whose life-work saved the West as a civilizational enterprise built from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome?
For the defense of religious freedom in full which you must mount must be both cultural — in the sense of arguments winsomely and persuasively made — and political, in that you must drive the sharp edge of truth into the sometimes hard soil of public policy.
What is this “religious freedom in full” that you must defend and advance?
It surely includes freedom of worship, but it must include more than that; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is content with freedom of worship, so long as the Christian worship in question takes place behind closed doors in the American embassy compound in Riyadh. Religious conviction is community-forming, and communities formed by religious conviction must be free, as communities and not simply as individuals, to make arguments and bring influence to bear in public life. If religiously informed moral argument is banned from the American public square, then the public square has become, not only naked, but undemocratic and intolerant. If, on the other hand, religiously informed moral argument is welcome in public life, then we have the possibility of rebuilding, not a sacred public square (a goal the Catholic Church rejected at the Second Vatican Council), but a civil public square, in which tolerance is rightly understood as differences engaged within a bond of civility formed by a mutual commitment to reason.
It is a matter of both political common sense and democratic etiquette that Catholics in public life should make our arguments in ways that our fellow-citizens, who may not share our theological premises, can engage and understand — which is to say, in our particular case, that Catholics should bring to bear in public life the moral truths we hold through arguments framed by the grammar and vocabulary of the natural moral law. That is what John Paul II did at the United Nations in 1979 and 1995. That is what Benedict XVI did at the in 2008 and in the German Bundestag in 2011. That is what the bishops of the United States, and lay Catholics in their millions, have done over the past four decades in defense of life. And if there are some who consider such appeals to the natural moral law a form of tarted-up bigotry, well, we shall simply have to inform them, politely but firmly, that they are mistaken, and then demonstrate why.
Religious freedom in full also means that communities of religious conviction and conscience must be free to conduct the works of charity in ways that reflect their conscientious convictions. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss the problems that have been posed by tying so much of Catholic social service work and Catholic health care to government funding — save, perhaps, to note that these problems did not exist before the Supreme Court erected a spurious “right to abortion” as the right-that-trumps-all-other-rights, and before courts and legislatures decided that it was within the state’s competence to redefine marriage and to compel others to accept that redefinition through the use of coercive state power. What can be said in this context, and what must be said, is that the rights of Catholic physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals are not second-class rights that can be trumped by other rights-claims; and any state that fails to acknowledge those rights of conscience has done grave damage to religious freedom rightly understood. The same can and must be said about any state that drives the Catholic Church out of certain forms of social service because the Church refuses to concede that the state has the competence to declare as “marriage” relationships that are manifestly not marriages.
My fellow-graduates, your defense of religious freedom is going to require the skills of reasoning and argument that you acquired here at Benedictine College. It is going to require that some of you accept the risk and challenge of public service in elective office. And it going to require all of you to support those who take, as their vocation, the defense and promotion of religious freedom in full.
This will be the work of a lifetime. But it must begin sooner rather than later, for the threats to religious freedom among us are great, and many of them are deeply embedded in postmodern American culture. This work will not be without cost. Some of you may suffer various forms of martyrdom in taking up this cause: the martyrdom of ridicule, of being labeled “intolerant” and “bigoted”; the martyrdom of career paths blocked and promotions denied because of your adherence to the moral truth of things; the martyrdom of political defeat, or a judicial case well-argued but lost. Fidelity to the truth can have its costs. Yet as Blessed John Paul II taught young people all over the world, those costs are worth paying because the truth sets us free in the deepest sense of human liberation. Thomas More, patron saint of Catholics in public life, was never more a free man than when he bent his neck to the executioner’s axe in free adherence to the truth.
Let us pray that it does not come to that for any of you, or indeed for any of us. But let us also be clear on the stakes for which your generation is playing, which are nothing less than the long-term integrity of American democracy. So: be the culture-forming heirs of St. Benedict that your education here has prepared you to be. Be the champions of religious freedom in full. In doing that, you will give America a new birth of freedom — freedom tethered to truth and ordered to goodness, freedom that sets us free in the noblest sense of human liberation.
ROME, May 11, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Against a backdrop of institutionalized opposition to Catholic teaching in much of American Catholic academia, Pope Benedict XVI has told visiting U.S. bishops that Catholic colleges need to return to being a bastion of orthodoxy against an increasingly hostile and aggressive secular world.
While improvements have been made, Pope Benedict said, “much remains to be done,” particularly in “such basic areas” as compliance with Canon 812 of the Code of Canon Law. That section mandates that theology professors at Catholic universities be faithful to the teaching of the Church.
Canon 218 says, “Those who are engaged in the sacred disciplines enjoy a lawful freedom of inquiry and of prudently expressing their opinions on matters in which they have expertise, while observing due respect for the magisterium of the Church.”
This lack of progress, the pope said, has created confusion by “instances of apparent dissidence” between academics and the bishops. “Such discord harms the Church’s witness and, as experience has shown, can easily be exploited to compromise her authority and her freedom.”
The issue of religious freedom is at the top of the American bishops’ agenda at the moment, in the midst of their fight against the Obama administration’s attempt to mandate coverage of artificial birth control by Catholic institutions. Even as the U.S. bishops have fought the Obama mandate, prominent Catholic organizations have expressed their support, undercutting the efforts of the bishops. Most recently Georgetown University, a Catholic Jesuit university, invited Kathleen Sebelius, who as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was the architect of the birth control mandate, as a commencement speaker.
The pope called the need to reform Catholic academia the “most urgent internal challenge facing the Catholic community” in the U.S.
“Catholic identity, not least at the university level, entails much more than the teaching of religion or the mere presence of a chaplaincy on campus.
“All too often, it seems, Catholic schools and colleges have failed to challenge students to reappropriate their faith,” Benedict continued.
In the decades since the 1960s, most Catholic universities and colleges in the U.S., and around the world, have shifted their focus from being bastions of Catholic orthodoxy against the outside world’s secularism, to playing along with the zeitgeist, especially in areas of sexual morality. Most critics agree that this shift in Catholic academia was the source and engine of the more general shift in the same direction throughout the Church’s institutions and among the laity.
In recent years, this shift toward a secularist orientation has shown itself prominently in Catholic academia’s quiet, or even open support first for contraception use, then legal abortion, homosexual behaviour and most recently euthanasia.
The scramble of American Catholic academia away from Church teaching on sexual matters began to be seen in public in 1967 when Fr. Charles Curran, a former theological advisor or “peritus” at the Second Vatican Council, was re-instated at his tenured professorship at Catholic University of America (CUA) after having been sacked for opposing Catholic teaching on artificial contraception.
Curran, who was barred by the Vatican from teaching Catholic theology and now teaches at a Methodist university, became a herald of the new, updated and heavily secularized version of Catholicism when in 1968, he, together with 600 other theologians, authored an open letter formally dissenting from Pope Paul VI’s encyclical on contraception, Humanae Vitae.
This new, and increasingly popular version of Catholicism became highly fashionable, first at CUA, the American Catholic Church’s flagship educational institution, then throughout most of the Church’s most prominent colleges, seminaries and convents. From there, the idea of the “loyal dissenter” in the Catholic intellectual establishment spread out into the political world, leading finally to the advent of the “pro-choice” Catholic politicians who now represent the majority of Catholics in public life.
In the current, highly politicized climate since the reaction of the U.S. bishops against the Obama administration’s contraception mandate, some Catholic colleges are starting to pull back from full support for the secularist agenda.
In an address to Catholic academic loyalists at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Cardinal Newman Society (CNS) President Patrick J. Reilly said that a return to Catholic orthodoxy, far from being a retreat to the “Catholic ghetto,” would create a strong line of defense for religious liberty in the U.S.
“There is little question that the apparent hypocrisy of some Catholic colleges, charities, schools and other entities—which may dissent from church teachings, or may have watered down their religious identity in search of state and federal funds—reduces public sympathy for groups whose rights are threatened,” Reilly said.
“There is no question that the threats to Catholics’ religious liberty are wrong. But it is the failure of the Church to respond adequately to dissent, to clearly distinguish Catholic from secular identity, that endangers even the most faithful Catholic apostolates by feeding suspicion in a culture already suspicious of the Church,” he continued.
Reilly’s remarks are in line with Pope Benedict’s previous messages to visiting American bishops this year. Speaking to the bishops of Baltimore and Washington in January, the pope said, “The legitimate separation of Church and State cannot be taken to mean that the Church must be silent on certain issues, nor that the State may choose not to engage, or be engaged by, the voices of committed believers in determining the values which will shape the future of the nation.”
He noted that the founding American political “consensus” of political, social and religious liberty, “has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents” that are “directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition” and “increasingly hostile to Christianity as such”.
“The left-liberals who run the show at Georgetown have found a way to signal to the world that the nation’s oldest Catholic, and most famous Jesuit, university stands with the Obama administration in its war … against the Catholic bishops and others who oppose the HHS mandate as a violation of religious freedom and the rights of conscience,” fumed Robert P. George, a legal scholar at Princeton University and a conservative Catholic with close ties to Republican causes.
The conservative Cardinal Newman Society, which monitors Catholic schools for any actions it deems a danger to the faith, called the Sebelius invitation “scandalous and outrageous.” It set up a website and petition to push Georgetown President John DeGioia to rescind the invitation.
“Georgetown insults all Americans by this honor,” wrote the society’s president, Patrick J. Reilly. “The selection is especially insulting to faithful Catholics and their bishops, who are engaged in the fight for religious liberty and against abortion.” Other conservative Catholics have echoed Reilly and George on online outrage.
A reversal seems unlikely, however.
In announcing the invitation, a Georgetown press release praised Sebelius for leading efforts “to improve America’s health and enhance the delivery of human services to some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations, including young children, those with disabilities and the elderly.” It also hailed her work in implementing President Obama’s health care reform law — which the bishops and conservatives strongly oppose — for helping “34 million uninsured Americans get health coverage.”
Moreover, Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl has generally declined to pick a public fight on these issues. In fact, a spokesperson for Wuerl, who is in Rome for meetings with Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican officials, told Catholic News Service he had no comment on the Sebelius invitation.
On Saturday (May 5), a day after the Sebelius announcement, Pope Benedict XVI told a group of American bishops visiting Rome that bishops and universities have to get on the same page when it comes to affirming orthodoxy and avoiding “confusion created by instances of apparent dissidence between some representatives of Catholic institutions and the church’s pastoral leadership.”
The most vivid example of such “dissidence” was the controversy over University of Notre Dame’s 2009 invitation to Obama to give its commencement address and receive an honorary degree. Most bishops objected because Obama supports abortion rights, but the university did not back down.
Sebelius will not be speaking at the main university commencement and will not receive an honorary degree, which was a point of contention for protesters in the Notre Dame case.
Copyright: For copyright information, please check with the distributor of this item, Universal Uclick.
“The left-liberals who run the show at Georgetown have found a way to signal to the world that the nation’s oldest Catholic, and most famous Jesuit, university stands with the Obama administration in its war … against the Catholic bishops and others who oppose the HHS mandate as a violation of religious freedom and the rights of conscience,” fumed Robert P. George, a legal scholar at Princeton University and a conservative Catholic with close ties to Republican causes.
The conservative Cardinal Newman Society, which monitors Catholic schools for any actions it deems a danger to the faith, called the Sebelius invitation “scandalous and outrageous.” It set up a website and petition to push Georgetown President John DeGioia to rescind the invitation.
“Georgetown insults all Americans by this honor,” wrote the society’s president, Patrick J. Reilly. “The selection is especially insulting to faithful Catholics and their bishops, who are engaged in the fight for religious liberty and against abortion.” Other conservative Catholics have echoed Reilly and George on online outrage.
A reversal seems unlikely, however.
In announcing the invitation, a Georgetown press release praised Sebelius for leading efforts “to improve America’s health and enhance the delivery of human services to some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations, including young children, those with disabilities and the elderly.” It also hailed her work in implementing President Obama’s health care reform law — which the bishops and conservatives strongly oppose — for helping “34 million uninsured Americans get health coverage.”
Moreover, Washington’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl has generally declined to pick a public fight on these issues. In fact, a spokesperson for Wuerl, who is in Rome for meetings with Pope Benedict XVI and Vatican officials, told Catholic News Service he had no comment on the Sebelius invitation.
On Saturday (May 5), a day after the Sebelius announcement, Pope Benedict XVI told a group of American bishops visiting Rome that bishops and universities have to get on the same page when it comes to affirming orthodoxy and avoiding “confusion created by instances of apparent dissidence between some representatives of Catholic institutions and the church’s pastoral leadership.”
The most vivid example of such “dissidence” was the controversy over University of Notre Dame’s 2009 invitation to Obama to give its commencement address and receive an honorary degree. Most bishops objected because Obama supports abortion rights, but the university did not back down.
Sebelius will not be speaking at the main university commencement and will not receive an honorary degree, which was a point of contention for protesters in the Notre Dame case.
Copyright: For copyright information, please check with the distributor of this item, Universal Uclick.
Today is, by its nature — and I think at Benedictine College we can still speak of the “nature” of things! — a day of celebration, a day of remembrance, and a day of thanksgiving.