Notre Dame's Kabuki Dance with Obama and the Culture of Death

Notre Dame’s Kabuki Dance with Obama and the Culture of Death:
The Keynesian Kenyan from Kansas Meets the Kantians

Notre Dame’s Kabuki dance with Obama and the culture of death moves into full swing this weekend. Everyone should watch the steps of this tango very carefully as the Keynesian Kenyan from Kansas boogies down with the Kantians for some Transcendental Twister on the South Bend campus. Although some students and professors will boycott the commencement lovefest and attend a prayer vigil at the Lourdes Grotto on campus instead, the damage to Notre Dame will still be done and observers of Catholic higher education will be debating this bizarre event for some time to come.

Among the howling absurdities of this latest episode were talking points presented to board members to give the best spin on the decision to honor Obama at commencement. In a stroke of sophistry and hair splitting which must have come from theological training at Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch Seminary, Fr. Jenkins announced that the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ ban on honoring pro-abortion politicians at Catholic universities did not apply to Obama because, get this, Obama is not a Catholic. This casuistry, we were assured, was certified by modernist canon lawyers consulted by Notre Dame. Keeping a straight face while delivering this whopper must have taken some ascetic discipline. And it seems likely Fr. Jenkins must have had practice since it is a safe guess this seminary training involved extra helpings of Rudy Bultmann, Hans Küng, Enneagrams, Kumbaya folk guitars, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull theology.

While it is clear that Obama’s orientation is far removed from the Catholic faith and traditional Christian moral standards, Jenkins’ enthusiastic and groupie-like attraction to Obama raises deeper questions about what is really going on and who exactly is in charge of running Notre Dame. They need to be pursued and answered so that Catholic standards can be restored and honored as soon as possible.

At the center of this is the elephant in the room, the liberal modernist mentality which came out of Vatican II and the 1967 conference on Catholic universities held in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, which set the course for modernizing and secularizing Catholic colleges and universities. It will be a good time to reflect on this liberal agenda and the damage it has done to Catholic education. Contrary to the utopian romanticism of the 1960s and 1970s which Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh and Georgetown’s Timothy Healy imbibed with wild abandon, the Land O’Lakes agenda for Catholic universities has been a disaster. This Obama episode is just the latest in a much wider freakshow afflicting the modernist priesthood. The infiltration of Catholic institutions and even the priesthood by anti-Catholics and morally-challenged malcontents has created an environment hostile to the Catholic faith and normal Catholic values. It is a situation that no Catholic should be forced to tolerate. A Catholic institution bending over to Moloch and Mammon. And for what? The vanity of liberal prestige and secular status. It should not end here. There needs to be a rigorous investigation of those directing anti-Catholic trends at Catholic universities.

The anti-Catholic liberalism which has possessed administrative leaders at Notre Dame was predicted. Some professors at Notre Dame and elsewhere may remember the 1965-66 Symposium in America magazine debating the future of Catholic philosophy in the Catholic university. In his 1965 book on the same topic, Professor Ralph McInerny warned that the inrush of faculty with a non-Catholic orientation would pose dangers to Catholic institutions.

For more on the anti-Catholic agenda at Catholic universities, you can read Professor Carroll Quigley’s 1967 article ( "Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide?" ) which discussed a similar loss of Christian foundations at Georgetown: “But, instead of being Catholic, or even Jesuit, Georgetown has rudely turned its back on its one chance of making any contribution to American education and has instead almost totally destroyed its opportunity for becoming an excellent Catholic university and a good American university, in its frantic drive to become a fifth-rate Harvard.” Notre Dame has followed down a similar path in a demented and trendy quest for this Golden Calf.

[Middle English simonie, from Old French, from Late Latin simōnia, after Simon Magus, a sorcerer who tried to buy spiritual powers from the Apostle Peter (Acts 8:9-24).] si'mo·nist n.

The transfer of the property and assets from a religious order of the Catholic Church to a secular corporation controlled by non-Catholics and heretics is contrary to canon law. The alienation of church property at places like Georgetown, Notre Dame, and elsewhere was and is a violation of canon law. ALL of the property should be returned to lawful Catholic authorities and ALL of the anti-Catholics, non-Catholics, and heretics should be fired and removed from the premises. That is what should happen.

BRAVO!!!!

And the "Priests" that had any hand in inviting 0bama, and things like the filthy, pornographic, pedophilic "Vagina Monologues" should be EXCOMMUNICATED and DEFROCKED!

Let them work for their friends on the Left.

Oh, but the Left has no use for useful idiots once they've outlived their usefulness.

Jenkins' litany of praises to Obama was loaded up with modernism and code.
This was the Berkeley and Jonathan Livingston Seagull version
of Gaudium et Spes as mediated through Erich Fromm and Stuart Smalley.
The "those who think or act differently" has a special meaning here.

It was almost like a parody of modernism.

Thanks.

Did you catch Obama invoking the Laurel and Hardy of this Kabuki dance, Bernardin and Hesburgh, as his patron saints of relativism?

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