Excellent review of the speech.
What is the deal with Hespurgh? Obama made him out to be a modern Socrates.
And I would appreciate you taking the time to explain the “seamless garment” liberation theology comment—I’d like to know more.
Thanks.
The seamless garment was Cdl Bernardin’s invention. It basically equated left-wing “social justice” issues (welfare, anti-death penalty, anti-war stuff, etc.) with unchanging Church doctrine on things such as the intrinsic evil of abortion.
It was an attempt to get the Church to back off on abortion. Bernardin, who died before he could be fully outed, was an evil modernist whose great power lay in the fact that he was oily, well-spoken, deceitfully conciliatory, and had an agenda that was totally at odds with Church teaching that he somehow managed to further through the very apparatus of the Church.
In other words, he was very similar to Obama.
“Seamless Garment” was the casuitical moral theory proposed by Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago in the early 1980s to link a host of issues together - death penalty, poverty, social justice, etc. with pro-life. The net result was to downplay the seriousness of abortion. In other words, suggesting Dems were for social justice and morals too.
Hesburgh had doubts about the ban on birth control in the 1960s and apparently linked up with the Rockefeller Foundation, a nestbed of hysterical anti-Catholic Malthusian population control freaks. "Father" Hesburgh presided over Notre Dame's divorce from the Catholic faith and staged a conference on "modernizing" Catholic universities in 1967 at Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin. The result was to secularize Catholic universities and load them up with heretic dissenters and liberal anti-Catholics.
Obama actually mentioned Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, alluding to an earlier meeting there on civil rights. But his speech writer must have known the connection and put that in there as code as well. You just NEVER - never - call Catholics "parochial" in any context. That is a traditional anti-Catholic slur and it was actually quite shocking to hear Obama use that term in his speech. It was an insulting comment and clearly directed at pro-life Catholics. As was Jenkins' and Obama's references to "demonizing" opponents in politics and moral debates. That Jenkins singled out pro-life activists as supposed demonizers was disgusting and a moral distortion.
The other disgusting part was Obama's canard about the boy with diabetes and stem cells. That any Notre Dame student cheered for this line was a damnable indictment of the education going on there. There is NO scientific evidence that embryonic stem cells will EVER cure diabetes. And there are plenty of distinguished medical researchers who will testify to that. That Obama used the ND commencement platform to push for embryonic stem cell research was Satanic and revolting.