You still don't get it. Jenkins has no wish to make Miscamble's life difficult. They are on the same side. They are friends and allies. Miscamble thinks Jenkins made an unwise, imprudent decision. He hopes Jenkins will change his mind.
I didn't say Notre Dame was a Thomas Aquinas College. You write as if there are only two categories. I was distinguishing four, so that you could be properly incensed at the ones who are beyond the pale and properly supportive of the forces within the ones in the middle who are trying to turn them around. Notre Dame is in the middle. It cannot ever be a Thomas Aquinas College. The pedagogy and mission of the two are very different. But Notre Dame could become a good Catholic college again. I'm not holding my breath, indeed, I don't hold out a lot of hope. But I do have some hope. Jenkins is on our side but he made a very bad decision. He is in a damned if I do, damned if I don't situation. If he moves too far too fast and the majority of the faculty who are not Catholic or are CINOs simply revolt, he would be forced out as president--faculty can do that (witness Harvard) and then he does the cause of restoring Catholicism at Notre Dame no good. But Miscamble thinks that he could have decided the VM matter in the opposite manner and not have risked losing all credibility even with the anti-Catholic/CINO/non-Catholic elements at Notre Dame.
It's a dispute over strategy in a huge chess game that, if not played properly, will end in a disaster for the goal you and I share--a Catholic revitalization. I think Miscamble is right in his strategy on this point and Jenkins wrong but I don't conclude that Jenkins is a tool of the Devil and will have to make Miscamble's life difficult. When you write that sort thing you show no understanding whatsoever of the battle that has been joined for decades now and of the risks and opportunities available to our side.
If you were writing tongue-in-cheek you should have said so. My generalizations were reasonable because you did not indicate that you did not mean what you wrote. I can't see your wink over cyberspace. Surely you know that it is your obligation, Sir, to indicate sarcasm when you mean sarcasm, hyperbole when you intend hyperbole. You indicated nothing of the sort.
Now was your "make his life difficult" in your reply to me also hyperbole? If you didn't mean it, why did you write it? If you meant it (and the context implies you did, which is why you have to indicate you did not if you did not) then it betrays continued failure to understand who Miscamble is, who Jenkins is, where the fault lines are.
And you don't have to be a ND insider to know that. Miscamble's letter was utterly clear. He addressed Jenkins as an ally, named other allies, and appealed to Jenkins as his friend and ally to change is mind. That's what I mean by your misreading of a text--Miscamble's own letter makes your interpretation impossible--unless, of course, you mean the opposite of what you write.
But if you mean the opposite of what you write, then write that as well. Until you do, you deserve to be taken at your word.
Dear Dionysiusdecordealcis,
"But Notre Dame could become a good Catholic college again. I'm not holding my breath, indeed, I don't hold out a lot of hope."
I'm a little more hopeful than you, maybe. I have a friend who is a philosophy professor at a Catholic school, and he seems to be in the know about what's up at Notre Dame. His view is that the less-than-orthodox are in the generation that is passing away, while the those for whom orthodoxy is the touchstone are all the younger folks. He says the same phenomenon is at work where he teaches (although he says that where he teaches, the theology department is still mostly vipers).
sitetest
No, I think I get it. What you still don't seem to get is that I was responding to your post primarily as one might intend to respond to an unwarranted personal attack. Everyone knows that there are gradations of deviancy from orthodoxy in Catholic colleges. Are you now implying that I lead so sheltered a life as to not know this? I don't have time to humor you on fine distinctions in issues that don't pertain to my original post, yet you insist on bringing up. Accordingly, the either/or type of contrast with TAC should have sufficed to show that ND isn't near the top of the heap, and that was sufficient for me in response to your charge that I am a mere "uninformed traditionalist."
But I'm not keenly absorbed with making such fine distinctions. Notre Dame has made its way in the world letting-on that it is a fine "Catholic" institution. This is false advertizing. The Catholic applicants and their parents have every right to suppose that it *is* entirely orthodox when shelling-out their hard earned $100,000+ for the tuition bill over the four years they'll attend there. That ND may not be as bad as some other Catholic colleges is besides the point. From the standpoint of parents getting what they think they're paying for, students learning the Faith more fully as a bulwark for the likelihood of their salvation, and society as it profits from Catholic morality and philosophy making its way into the world from Catholic schools, nuancing levels of infidelity makes little sense. Either a college purporting to be Catholic is, in fact, Catholic, or it isn't. If it isn't, decades after the wheels started coming off the rails, then who is ultimately at fault but the school itself.
Fr. Jenkins *might* mean well overall. But his actions here are limp-wristed in the extreme. If he feels compelled to mollify the student body and faculty with the cave-in he made to the VM, it bellows the supposition that the entire campus is so "un-Catholic" that it is beyond hope. Were it otherwise, he could have stood his ground with relative impunity. The students and faculty not only would have supported such a decision, they probably wouldn't have put him in this position to begin with, as they would see that the VM has no business being shown on a Catholic campus. What is being taught (or, perhaps that should be *not* taught) at Notre Dame that such a palpably hedonistic worldview needs to be appeased by Fr. Jenkins? His appeal to the concept that the show can at least teach the young women to respect their bodies is most touching, and most instructive for us out here. Yes, even for us uninformed traditionalists!
Fr. Jenkins may not discipline Fr. Miscamble or make his life difficult. Or maybe he will. I don't know and neither do you. I'm sure Fr. Miscamble is angling for a change of mind and nothing more. But, if no change is forthcoming, do you suppose that Fr. Miscamble may soldier-on in his crusade for integrity? Given his sincerity of tone and earnestness of purpose, it's a fair assumption he will. At what point does Fr. Jenkins do "something" to put a stop to it? Tenure means nothing. A persons life can be made miserable enough that he will eventually leave any tenured position just to have some peace. From the position of someone like a Fr. Jenkins in such a scenario, that's just as good as a firing.
The long-suffering Catholics of America have coddled these types long enough. The spiritual, societal and financial (for the parents paying tuition bills) stakes are too high to fool around any longer. If Notre Dame cannot or will not get back on the rails quasi-immediately, it has no reason to exist as a Catholic institution. Have *all* of the professors in the relevant departments taken the oath of fidelity yet? I dare say not. Then Catholics need to call ND to task for this publicly. They have no excuses, they're years behind schedule. And we're tired of footing the bill for promises not kept and services not delivered. Fr. Jenkins needs to understand that, for he has more to fear from disaffected alumni and parents of potential students than he ever will from the likes of a few dozen harpies from the women's studies department, their hangers-on, and their facilitators.