By Steve Jalsevac
May 19, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – There was a deluge of news reports and commentary on President Obama’s Notre Dame commencement speech. LifeSiteNews presents below excerpts from some of the most significant alternative reports to the mainstream and liberal Catholic media’s mindless praise of the president’s address.
Without reading yesterday and today’s LifeSiteNews reports on the event and the items published below, it would admittedly be difficult for many pro-life Americans to avoid being deceived by the ever so slick president and his worshipping non-Catholic Catholic audience. It was indeed a first class and dangerous performance by the president, but the substance, or rather severe lack of substance, of his presentation, calls for skillful examination and explanation to aid those seeking the truth.
The Score — Notre Dame = 0, Team Obama = 2012 by Father Jonathan Morris
While Notre Dame officials argued for months that the decision to invite President Obama to give the 2009 commencement speech and offer him an honorary law degree had nothing to do with his “unacceptable” stance on abortion and the killing of human embryos for research purposes, President Obama shrewdly and shamelessly proved that for him, the occasion had everything to do with these issues.
During much of his 25 minute speech, President Obama lectured Notre Dame about why some of the Church’s fundamental values don’t really matter that much and why graduates should burn these values at his altar of feigned dialogue. And all the while, students and professors cheered. And Fr. Jenkins took bows. And Team Obama scored points, moving quickly toward its goal of winning another electoral victory in 2012.
https://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/05/19/father_jonathan_morris_obama_notre_dame/
Duped at Notre Dame by Paul Kengor
Barack Obama says he wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rare, while doing everything in his power to advance it. For a long time in America, the Religious Left, Catholics and Protestants alike, have been duped, played like fiddles. It happened again at Notre Dame yesterday.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/521dmows.asp
Obama’s Notre Dame Speech Tried to Redefine U.S. Catholicism – George Weigel
George Weigel charged that Obama has inserted himself into intra-Catholic disputes by trying to define who a “real Catholic” is. He warned the president risks assuming the headship of the dissident wing of U.S. Catholicism, pitting Catholic intellectuals and institutions against their bishops.
Weigel, writing in a Monday essay for National Review Online, said it was “surprising” and “disturbing” that President Obama decided to “insert himself” into “the ongoing Catholic debate over the boundaries of Catholic identity and the applicability of settled Catholic convention in the public square.”
Weigel compared the effort to the historical phenomenon of “Gallicanism,” the French bishops’ past efforts to establish a church generally independent of papal authority.
“This is a very serious business, with the president of the United States putting himself in charge of the Gallican wing of the Catholic Church in the United States—the difference being that this new Gallicanism isn’t local bishops vs. Rome but intellectuals and their institutions and magazines vs. local bishops and Rome,” Weigel told CNA.
Weigel said that the “politically savvy” White House and its allies among Catholic progressive intellectuals may have intended to secure Obama’s political advantage among Catholic voters with his appearance at Notre Dame.
The Catholic commentator also argued that the president indirectly presented himself as a more significant authority than the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who had “explicitly and unambiguously” instructed Catholic institutions not to honor pro-abortion rights politicians.
President Obama put forward the late Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as the model for being “congenial and gentle” and for “always trying to bring people together.” Weigel said Cardinal Bernardin’s “seamless garment” approach to public policy ended up helping Catholic politicians and laymen dodge moral objections to their support for a permissive abortion regime. According to Weigel, the U.S. bishops abandoned the “seamless garment” metaphor in 1998 to better emphasize the foundational nature of the life issues. He also suggested that President Obama’s praise for Cardinal Bernardin was an implicit criticism of contemporary bishops who are vocally pro-life, like present Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Francis George.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=16048
Obama Calls for “Conscience Clause” Rights While His Administration Destroys Existing Conscience Clause Rights – Wesley Smith
I was reminded of how adept Obama is in saying one thing while doing just the opposite; such as claiming in his speech to support a conscience clause for health professionals on the issue of abortion. No, Obama—or at least his administration (is there a difference?) plans to revoke the Bush conscience clause, not revise it.
https://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2009/05/obama-calls-for-conscience-clause.html
Notre Dame Becomes a Symbol of Catholic Dissent by Deal W. Hudson
Notre Dame chose to honor President Obama and Fr. Jenkins defended the
choice with arguments that would make a freshman blush. But at the end
the day, the party’s over and Notre Dame will will pay the piper for
many years to come. What’s the price? Notre Dame has become the symbol
of dissent in the Catholic Church (a designation actually deserved by
Boston College). Many bishops will no longer support the institution
and many prospective students and their parents will look elsewhere.
Without those students—and the goodwill of the bishops—ND will
become even more secular than it already is.
https://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Notre-Dame-Becomes-a-Symbol-of-Catholic-Dissent.html&Itemid=127
Pro-Lifers Assess Obama’s Abortion Reduction Plan
Commenting on the White House plan, Heartbeat International’s
president, Peggy Hartshorn, said, “I see this rhetoric about ‘reducing
abortion’ as another ploy to try to convince the American people that
Obama is a ‘moderate’ on abortion. “However, his record indicates
clearly that he is the most pro-abortion president we’ve ever had. He
knows that the policies he’s promoting (birth control, comprehensive
sex education, funding of Planned Parenthood, abortion as part of a
national health-care system, etc.) will only serve to entrench and
expand abortion in America and around the world, and this is really his
goal.”
https://www.ncregister.com/site/article/18199/
Free speech is Dead at Notre Dame
The only individual singled out for arrest FOR TRESPASSING was a woman holding a sign that said, “Shame on Notre Dame!” Those bearing signs of approval were unmolested.
The deputies in this case acted like little brownshirts.
https://www.speroforum.com/a/19337/Free-speech-is-dead-at-Notre-Dame
Small University, Founded on the Catholic Tradition, Unleashes Against ND Critics
Patricia McGuire, President of Trinity University in Washington D.C., accused pro-lifers protesting Obama’s speech at Notre Dame of being “Catholic vigilantes” that are turning back the clock to pre-Vatican II times. “This ugly spectacle – McGuire continued – is an embarrassment to all Catholics. The face that Catholicism shows to our new president should be one marked with the sign of peace, not distorted in the snarl of hatred.” McGuire continued, “The religious vigilantism apparent in the Notre Dame controversy arises from organizations that have no official standing with the church, but who are successful in gaining media coverage as if they were speaking for Catholicism. . . . They have established themselves as uber-guardians of a belief system we can hardly recognize. Theirs is a narrow faith devoted almost exclusively to one issue. They defend the rights of the unborn but have no charity toward the living. They mock social justice as a liberal mythology.”
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=16025
Dr. Obama of Notre Dame: ‘Irreconcilable Views’ call for a New Catholic Action
https://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=33585&wf=rsscol
CNN’s Whitfield on Notre Dame Scandal: Have Catholics ‘Evolved’ on the Moral Issues?
Bullies Raymond Arroyo of the Catholic television network EWTN.
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2009/05/18/cnns-whitfield-notre-dame-scandal-have-catholics-evolved-moral-issues
Networks Lead the Cheer for Obama’s Notre Dame Address
https://newsbusters.org/blogs/colleen-raezler/2009/05/18/networks-lead-cheer-obama-s-notre-dame-address
Archbishop Raymond Burke Interview
When a school uses its Catholic prominence to honor politicians who write and enact pro-abortion laws, what should the Church do? What can the Church do? What it should do is have Notre Dame come clean. Is it Catholic or isn’t it? A Catholic institution, a Catholic university, cannot give honors to someone who is a promoter of things that are opposed to the most fundamental beliefs of Catholics. So that’s what needs to happen.
https://www.ncregister.com/site/article/18206/
Ex Corde Ecclesiae and the Notre Dame Affair By George Neumayr
Notre Dame’s conferral of honors on Barack Obama is merely the latest and most graphic symptom of a larger disease that has coursed through Catholic colleges for decades.
The scandal at Notre Dame originated not in 2009 but in 1967, when its then-president Theodore Hesburgh, along with academics and then-future bishops like Theodore McCarrick (who, decades later as the powerful archbishop of Washington, DC, would hide from his fellow bishops the Vatican’s memo on pro-abortion Catholic politicians), signed a de facto declaration of independence from Catholicism called the “Land O’ Lakes Statement on the Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University.”
That declaration gave birth to the modern American Catholic university, which would henceforth be modern and American but not very Catholic.
Long before honoring Obama, Notre Dame, fostering this academic ethos, had honored the modern liberal ideology he represents by secularizing its curriculum and faculty. It cast aside the magisterium and marginalized the Catholic intellectual tradition as it ceaselessly hired professors who reduced Catholicism to “progressive” politics in the minds of their students.
That a majority of Catholics, many of whom graduated from colleges and universities like Notre Dame, voted for Obama is one of the legacies of the Land O’ Lakes manifesto. And Obama knows it, which is why he leapt at Notre Dame’s honorary degree, seeing in it one more opportunity to cement confusion and spread chaos within the Church.
Nothing if not an adroit politician, Obama pursued this divide-and-conquer strategy from the beginning. He found Catholic academics to serve on his “National Catholic Advisory Committee,” solicited donations from faculty members at Catholic schools (professors at Jesuit Georgetown ranked seventh among all faculties in donations to his campaign, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education), and used the specious defenses of “pro-lifers,” such as former Notre Dame Center on Law and Government director Doug Kmiec, to soften Catholic resistance to his agenda.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=113:ex-corde-ecclesiae-and-the-notre-dame-affair&catid=36:cwr2009&Itemid=53
The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform Let Jill Stanek Ride in 1 of its Truth Trucks to capture the following video. It tracks the impressive 2 mile continuous protest route from I80 to the campus’s main entrance. There was no other route for out-of-towners to take.
https://www.jillstanek.com/archives/2009/05/notre_dame_upda_8.html
Obama at ND: Three lessons
Ten days before the May 17 Notre Dame University commencement at which President Barack Obama was to speak and receive an honorary degree, I told an archbishop who’s a friend that I thought this was a watershed. The third lesson is that the bishops also face a choice. Will they fight to uphold the Catholic identity of Catholic institutions or let them go without protest?
https://www.osvdailytake.com/2009/05/obama-at-nd-three-lessons.html
At the Gates of Notre Dame By Joseph Bottum
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. 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.
What the bishops should do in the short term is not clear. They lack much of a weapon beyond the pinprick of a sharp letter and the atomic explosions of declaring that an institution is no longer Catholic and, I suppose, issuing an interdict that bans the sacraments on campus. The likelihood of that happening to Notre Dame this spring is vanishingly small—but weapons remain valuable only if they get brandished every once in a while.
The day is coming when the bishops may have to do this to a major Catholic university, and it won’t be because they much want to. It will be because the ordinary sense of ordinary Catholics compels them to it.
https://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1434
A House Divided By Ralph McInerny
This division among Catholics has been widening for more than forty years. How did it come about that so many Catholics have such a mushy notion of what it means to be a Catholic? The teaching of the faith since the close of Vatican II in 1965 has been scandalously inadequate. In many cases it has been the deliberate substituting of stones for bread.
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/content/view/1602/2/
True and False Reason: Obama’s Choice
https://community.icontact.com/p/insidethevatican/newsletters/christmas/posts/obama-and-notre-dame
Catholics in Congress: The Ongoing Scandal by Deal W. Hudson
The scandal of President Barack Obama receiving an honorary degree at Notre Dame yesterday pales in comparison with the ongoing scandal of Catholics in Congress. Of the 161 Catholics presently serving, only 26 have 100 percent pro-life voting records, while 28 have a zero percent rating. Sixty-five have less than a 20 percent pro-life rating and 75 have accepted donations from pro-abortion lobbying groups.
https://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6019&Itemid=48