Posted on 03/23/2009 10:01:53 AM PDT by pissant
A group of Catholic activists (including CWN editor Phil Lawler) has called upon the University of Notre Dame to reconsider an invitation for President Barack Obama to speak at the school's commencement, in light of Obama's aggressive advocacy of abortion. The Cardinal Newman Society reported that by March 23, over 18,000 people had signed a petition opposing the presidential appearance. But David Gibson notes that in a campus poll last year, 53% of Notre Dame students indicated a preference for Obama.
Longtime Notre Dame philosophy professor Ralph McInerny poses a related question. If it is seriously wrong for a Catholic to support abortion, he asks: "Is it any worse to celebrate such a politician as Barack Obama? So where does that put ND President Father Jenkins?" McInerny argues:
By inviting Barack Obama to be the 2009 commencement speaker, Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic university. It invites an official rebuke. May it come.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicculture.org ...
Notre Dame and Georgetown have both become jokes. They are two (of very many) reasons that I have left that faith.
FOCA is a deliberate act to force the Catholic Church to close its hospitals. An all encompassing secular-progressive government cannot impose Nationalized Health Care as long as the Church continues its ministry of caring for the sick. Barack Obama goes not to Notre Dame to praise it, but to close it.
I;m sure that there will be some good earmarks for ND in the next Porkulus pkg. They will be paid in full.
How can you blame people for going where the money is?
CINO=Catholics In Name Only
I have friends who profess to be Catholics and who go to Church religiously (pun intended).
But they are in favor of abortion,etc.
Some people think religion is like being in a line at a buffet.Pick what they like and leave the rest.
The University of Notre Dame has officially and with much self-satisfaction invited President Barack Obama to address its 2009 graduates and to receive an honorary law degree. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a deliberate thumbing of the collective nose at the Roman Catholic Church to which Notre Dame purports to be faithful. Faithful? Tell it to Julian the Apostate.
--snip--
No event was more crucial for Catholic universities than the infamous 1967 Land O’Lakes statement in which the assembled presidents of Catholic institutions declared their freedom from the supposedly baleful influence of Catholic orthodoxy. They would continue to call themselves Catholic, but the definition of the term was constantly under construction. And this by institutions whose task is decidedly not to define what Catholicism is. And now we have come to the point where the University of Notre Dame is publicly excluding itself from allegiance to and acceptance of one of the most fundamental of Christian moral truths, mentioned explicitly in the Didache and again and again over the centuries. Abortion is an essentially evil act, both from the viewpoint of natural morality and from the explicit teaching the Church. There is no way in which an individual, a politician or an institution can finesse that fact.
By inviting Barack Obama as commencement speaker, Notre Dame is telling the nation that the teaching of the Catholic church on this fundamental matter can be ignored. Lip service may be paid to the teaching on abortion, but it is no impediment to upward mobility, to the truly vulgar lust to be welcomed into secular society, whether on the part of individuals or institutions.
Some years ago, Archbishop Michael Miller in his Vatican capacity as overseer of Catholic education, said in an address at Notre Dame that the Holy Father was considering prohibiting the use of “Catholic” by institutions whose behavior contradicts that use. By inviting Barack Obama to be the 2009 commencement speaker, Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic university. It invites an official rebuke. May it come.
Thank You for taking the time to post that.
The faith is still the same, and one can find it on the Rock of Peter in Rome. Just because ND and Georgetown have left the faith, there is no reason why you should.
Why walk from your Faith because of misguided actions of a few weak and misinformed human beings? Only One achieved perfection. Look to Him to find the strength you need to deal with this sort of silliness, and accept His gift of the Eucharist. Don’t allow yourself to be blinded by the actions of these “alleged” Catholics. Father Jenkins has a history of promoting needless controversy on campus. I have no knowledge of how he attained his position there but he seems to have lost the plot somewhere.
Trust in His plan to deal with Father Jenkins and concern yourself with remaining committed to the Faith. We need our feisty Catholics to help us fight just these kinds of battles. This should be one more example of why people who care about the Truth have to stick together.
If BHO does speak, and I have to assume he will, I certainly hope faithful students will be granted amnesty for any protest they may lodge during his commencement address. I would expect my son or daughter to react accordingly during his speech.
Rest assured, that while the administration may have sold out to the Leftist academe' (the President, Fr. Jenkins, earned a degree from Berkeley, after all), there will be a strong protest on campus. The strong and faithful group of Catholic students there will be heard.
And, for all the criticism that the leadership of the University will garner (rightly so), there are few college campuses in this nation upon which 127 masses are offered each weekend.
Ha! This ought to insure that Notre Dame doesn’t make it to the Frozen Four!
Nice to hear and I can understand totally, I agree with very little that 0bama does and he’s my president.
I could never bring myself to say O’Nausea is my president, because he is not.
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