Father John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame, probably yearns for days past when the only angry messages waiting for him related to rehiring head football coach Charlie Weis for a fifth season after Weis’ dismal 6-6 performance in 2008. Today, Jenkins is being targeted not by bad sports but by conservative Catholics sporting really bad attitudes about Notre Dame’s decision to welcome the president of the United States to campus next month to serve as commencement speaker.
The president recently returned from an extraordinarily successful visit to world capitals in association with the G-20 summit. The massive crowds in cities from London to Prague waiting for hours to catch a glimpse of the 44th president would be baffled by the ND-Obama rancor.
Well-acquainted with abortion politics in America, Notre Dame’s graduating class is less confounded. Indeed, an overwhelming majority are delighted by the opportunity to have their special moment embellished by Barack Obama’s intelligence and eloquence.
Some of the reaction to Obama is still post-election sour grapes. Obama netted 54 percent of the Catholic vote nationwide, including a sizable share in Notre Dame’s home state of Indiana, where he became the first Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 to win the Hoosier State’s electoral votes. Obama’s victory loosened the grip the GOP had on middle-income families, a result of Ronald Reagan’s likable personality and his stance against an abortion rate in excess of 1 million per year.
Obama’s views supporting abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research are pragmatic. Obama knows this is less than the absolute legal prohibition demanded by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in America. Obama successfully found some common ground during the campaign by advocating abortion reduction with enhanced economic and social support, especially for poor, uninsured and often unemployed women. In addition, the president advocates stronger families and teenage responsibility.
Not enough. Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, who met with the president in the Oval Office on St. Paddy’s Day, can be seen on YouTube stirring up letter-writing and e-mail campaigns. The local bishop in Indiana plans to boycott the graduation altogether.
Many Catholics, including this one, find it hard to reconcile this approach with the image of Christ in Matthew’s Gospel never turning away even “sinners and tax collectors,” though no one could blame Obama Cabinet officials for steering clear of tax collectors. Jesus’ method was one of inclusion, teaching with generosity, forgiveness and truth — not snubbing those in high office.
Of course, the truth of unborn life is disputed inside and outside the church. Catholic teaching insists that the personhood of the unborn child is not just a matter of faith but of objective science and the natural moral law available to all. Science does confirm that the first fertilized cell is unique and different from mother and father. But scientists do not claim to establish when legal personhood begins — that, most say, remains a political judgment. For me, it is faith informed by love — but that’s for another column.
Will Obama talk about these differences at ND? He is courageous enough to do so, and he is overdue for a Catholic moment. Unlike his masterful dominance of the rest of the national conversation, Obama has let the right wing frame his post-election ties to the Catholic constituency. For example, when Obama suspended George W. Bush’s hastily drafted eleventh-hour conscience clause regulations, the word went out that this was the end of Catholic hospitals. Not so, but to make the point, the Obama team needed to highlight well-established federal and state laws that already permit medical personnel with moral and religious objection to refrain from abortion practice.
Of equal importance is reminding America of how his administration has already assumed the mantle of Catholicism in winding down the war in Iraq, establishing a greater social safety net for the poor, setting out a bold plan for eliminating nuclear weapons and jump-starting a serious interfaith conversation with Islam, long sought by the Holy Father himself.
At Notre Dame, Obama might remind all of us not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. On May 17, as he stands at the foot of Our Lady’s Golden Dome, it will be 85 years to the day the Notre Dame Irish beat back the lit torches of Ku Klux Klan hatred that had spilled onto the campus. Three-quarters of a century ago, plus 10 years, the “fighting Irish” defeated the ignorance and prejudice of the KKK with their fists.
Today, they and we are blessed to use our minds — if they are open.
Douglas W. Kmiec is the author of “Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama” (Overlook/Penguin, 2008). A former dean of the Catholic University Law School, Kmiec taught at Notre Dame for nearly 20 years before joining the faculty of the Pepperdine University School of Law.
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