Free Republic

Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing Catholic, wants to shatter what she calls the “myth” of martyrdom in the Christian faith. Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion's practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult. The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then...

American Life League 28 October 2010Washington, DC – American Life League president Judie Brown issued the following statement on the news that contributions to the University of Notre Dame fell by over $120 million during the fiscal year in which [Alleged] President Barack Obama, a zealous abortion advocate, delivered a speech and was honored at commencement ceremonies.As one of the first responders to the scandal, American Life League and its supporters insisted that the university had forfeited its right to be called Catholic and thus petitioned for the school’s removal from The Official Catholic Directory.“It is heartening to hear that Notre...

Notre Dame has settled on Brian Kelly as the man who can restore its faded glory, just as he turned Cincinnati into a national title contender. Just 10 days after Charlie Weis was fired, it's up to Kelly to revive the fortunes of a team that just completed the worst decade of football in the history of the storied program with a 70-52 record and three losing seasons. ESPN's Chris Mortensen first reported Kelly would take over in South Bend.

he cases of close to 90 anti-abortion demonstrators arrested on the University of Notre Dame campus will not be headed to trial anytime soon. A judge Thursday granted a defense attorney's motion that a higher court decide if the judge should recuse herself from the cases before they move forward. Defense attorney Thomas Dixon, who represents a large number of the defendants, has repeatedly argued that a new judge should oversee the group of anti-abortion activists who have opted to take their trespassing cases to trial. Dixon believes St. Joseph Superior Judge Jenny Pitts Manier is biased because of her...

South Bend, IN (LifeNews.com) -- On the heels of pro-abortion President Barack Obama speaking at the University of Notre Dame and getting an honorary degree, a noted pro-life advocate will give a speech at its law school. Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo, whose husband subjected her to a painful euthanasia death, will speak.Schindler has been invited to speak today at The University of Notre Dame Law School as part of the Jus Vitae speaker’s series.Jus Vitae is committed to the principle that the right to life is inherent and inalienable in every human being and cannot be abridged...

The controversy over Notre Dame's awarding President Obama an honorary degree raised a fundamental question: What is a Catholic university? Many rich examinations of Catholic mission exist, of course, (from the works of John Cardinal Newman in the last century to Ex Corde Ecclesiae today) but they rarely have any effect on attempts to build Catholic mission. One reason for this may be that these examinations are too rich to serve as guides to definite action. Those in favor of stronger Catholic identity have difficulty maintaining focus on the best among many related concepts. They are left appealing to...

SAN ANTONIO—During their spring Genera Assembly, June 17-19, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops expressed their solidarity fo Bishop John M. D’Arcy of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., in particular for his care and concern for the University of Notre Dame which resides in his diocese The bishops made this show of support during executive session, but released the following statement The bishops of the United States express our appreciation and support for our brother bishop the Most Reverend John D'Arcy. We affirm his pastoral concern for Notre Dame University, his solicitude for its Catholic identity, and...

(CNSNews.com) – The University of Notre Dame  betrayed its Catholic identity by inviting President Barack Obama to give the commencement speech and receive an honorary degree from the school in May, said Archbishop Raymond Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest court at the Vatican.   “We all have witnessed the compromise and, indeed, betrayal of the Catholic identity of Notre Dame University,” said Burke in Rome, during a recent interview with Australian ITV reporter Andrew Rabel. “Thoughtful Catholics cannot help but reflect upon the great danger for a Catholic institution in pursuing a kind of prestige in the secular...

DEARBORN, Michigan, JUNE 2, 2009 (Zenit.org).- A Notre Dame alumni coalition is entering phase two in the program to replace the university's leadership, using their pocketbooks as leverage. David DiFranco, '95 graduate and spokesman of ReplaceJenkins.com, told ZENIT that although the initiative materialized amid the public protest of the school's decision to honor President Barack Obama at the May 17 commencement ceremony, the work is far from being over. The coalition launched the national outreach effort in April appealing to alumni and benefactors to hold back donations until the university's president, Father John Jenkins, is replaced. "Our endeavor is entering...

The protests over the University of Notre Dame’s commencement invitation to President Barack Obama will have an impact beyond the South Bend campus and far longer than graduation season. While the drubbing focused on the nation’s most prestigious Roman Catholic school, the criticism also served as a warning to all Catholic colleges and universities about the potential for opposition to their own policies. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has said that Catholic schools should not give awards or platforms to those who “act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.” “There have occasionally been tensions between an individual bishop...

President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame last Sunday presented a visible and urgent choice for Catholics. There was, to one side, the Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame, who had invited Obama and who quoted the Catholic Church’s pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world to say how much Catholics who hold to their faith must reach out to understand those who disagree with them. Father Jenkins also spoke clearly to say that Notre Dame disagrees with the Obama administration on abortion and stem cell research, even as it welcomed the president’s...

Just listened to Raymond Arroyo's interview with Bishop D'Arcy. One thing I wanted to comment on was that he gave a different perspective on Notre Dame and its Catholic Culture -- maybe softened my views on the subject The one REALLY disappointing point is when Raymond asked the Bishop if he was going to take any action against Fr. Jenkins, he indicated that he was going to push Cardinal George (the USCCB president) to address this subject in June at the next USCCB meeting. (The way i read canon law, and, again I AM NOT A CANONIST SO TAKE ANYTHING...

Obama looking for the common ground Washington, 18. The search for common ground: this seems to be the path chosen by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, to address the sensitive issue of abortion. Setting aside the heated tone of the election campaign, Obama confirmed yesterday confirmed the statement made at the press conference for one hundred days in the White House, when he said that the launch of the new abortion law is not a priority of his Administration. And to reiterate this position, the president has chosen the ceremony for the conferment of honorary degree in...

Via Gateway Pundit, a stemwinder from last night’s Factor that’s most remarkable for her assumption that it was a viable Catholic institution until this past weekend. William McGurn begs to differ: We’ve been here before. In his response to an inquiry from this reporter, Dennis Brown, the university’s spokesman, wisely ignored a question asking whether “ambiguity” would be the word to describe a similar decision in 1984 to give Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York, the Notre Dame platform he so famously used to advance his personally-opposed-but argument. Or the decision a few years later to bestow its highest...

The convergence of several stories I've been reading over the past few days is triggering a reaction in me which I find singularly unpleasant. First, we have Nancy Pelosi - a Catholic - pushing for massive spending on contraception as part of the Democratic stimulus plan.  This morning, Deal wrote about  the 18 Catholic Senators who did not support the restoration of the Mexico City Policy.  Also today, the story emerges that Cardinal Mahony is under investigation for fraud regarding his handling of the sex abuse crisis in his diocese.  (Whatever the outcome of this, one could argue that...

Adolph Hitler had his Vichy French and boot licking quislings throughout Nazi Europe, but he was always wary of and hated Catholics because they refused to knuckle under to his lies. Hitler was right about Catholics. It was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a member of Germany’s Roman Catholic nobility, who led the effort to kill him in July 1944. To counter the Catholic Church Hitler actually created a Nazi Church and many non Catholic Christian Churchmen went along with the sham. Barack Obama is many things but not a fool. He recognizes the real Catholic Church, whose members voted against...

Passionate debates over doctrine, identity, and the boundaries of “communion” have been a staple of the American religious landscape for centuries: Trinitarians vs. Unitarians in 19th-century New England; Modernists vs. Fundamentalists in early-20th-century Presbyterianism; Missouri Synod Lutherans vs. Wisconsin Synod Lutherans vs. Other Sorts of Lutherans down to today. Yet never in our history has a president of the United States, in the exercise of his public office, intervened in such disputes in order to secure a political advantage. Until yesterday, at the University of Notre Dame...

There were two commencement ceremonies at Notre Dame on Sunday. One was the media event in which alleged prestige trumped the truth that you cannot honor a man, president or not, whose policies are unabashedly pro-abortion without honoring abortion.The other took place at the grotto and on the west mall, untelevised, in the shadow of Rockne Memorial, at which the Mass and prayers, principally the rosary, were offered in reparation for the administration’s unconscionable sleeping with the enemy. And speeches were made, most notably by Father Wilson Miscamble, CSC; Professor David Solomon, director of the Center for Ethics and...

Last September, Pope Benedict XVI visited the original Grotto in Lourdes where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette. During his visit, Pope Benedict spoke about the West’s need to recover the Marian model of hope: that salvation comes not through obedience to man’s will but through humble obedience to God’s. The modern world has largely chosen the man-centered model of hope over Mary’s, and this choice, as the grim and unfolding chapters of recent history illustrate, has delivered not salvation but despair. The ideology that promises man’s perfection through the domination of relativized science, technology, and politics—what one might...

We all knew this fight was coming. The Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges have been heading toward a crash since at least 1990, when John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, his apostolic constitution for Catholic institutions of higher education. And now, at last, the battle is public—brought to fever pitch by Notre Dame’s bestowing of an honorary law degree on a prominent supporter of legalized abortion. As it happens, that supporter of abortion is also the president of the United States, which is unfortunate in a number of ways—beginning with the fact that the office of the...