Gee, are Notre Dame, BYU, Howard and Yeshiva in the NCAA semifinals in some sport? No. They have something else in common.
How would you react to these headlines:
-- “Yeshiva University to Honor Holocaust-Denier”;
--“BYU to Honor Jerry Brown -- California Attorney General Refused to Defend Proposition 8”; or
-- “Howard University to Honor David Duke”?
You would never see these headlines. It would be unthinkable that Yeshiva, a Jewish university, BYU, a Mormon (LDS) university, and Howard, a historically black university, would honor – not simply invite to speak – any person, of any rank, who is hostile to their mission, to their identity, to their soul, to what they stand for. It simply would not matter if the Holocaust denier, or Jerry Brown, or white supremacist David Duke had done many wonderful things.
But you saw the headlines on March 23 that Notre Dame, a Catholic university, would honor President Obama at commencement on May 17. In his opening days in office, President Obama has agreed to fund destructive embryonic stem cell research, to fund abortions and abortion lobbying throughout the world, and to limit conscientious objections by healthcare professionals. Given his campaign promises, these acts were expected. Given his campaign promises, there will be more to come. He is the most anti-life American president to date. And, unlike legislators, as an executive, the Chief Executive, he is in a position to do a lot of damage.
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--from a coalition of Notre Dame students: www.NDResponse.com;
--from over 30 Catholic bishops; http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/04/round-up-bishops-who-have-responded-to.html#links;
--from 10 priests of the same religious Order as Father Jenkins; Notre Dame Observer, April 8;
--from alumni/ae who belong to Project Sycamore, a group seeking to enhance Notre Dame’s Catholic identity; http://projectsycamore.com;
--from alumni/ae who have organized to withhold donations; http://replacejenkins.com;
--from alumni/ae like Joseph Scheidler, executive director of Pro-Life Action League who has three times taken his pro-life cause to the U.S. Supreme Court;
--from the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, a national association of 600 priests and deacons; www.lifesitenews.com;
--and from more to come.
Anyone in the business world knows the concept of “the brand.” A brand – like Amazon, Kodak, Coca Cola, Honda, Starbucks, Motorola, Apple – is a mark of excellence. Another example is Polaroid. It was auctioned in bankruptcy court a few days ago for $88 million solely on the strength of its brand.http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090417/bs_afp/usphotographyconsumerelectronicscompanypolaroid_20090417181853.
If you work for a company that competes with one of these, you know how difficult it is to gain acceptance by the public. If you work for one of these companies, you never, never, never take your brand’s excellence for granted. You nurture it from top, bottom, left and right. You do nothing to detract from the brand.
By honoring President Obama, Father John Jenkins - president of Notre Dame - has not protected Notre Dame’s brand as a Catholic university. Father Jenkins did not come from the business world. He was trained in philosophy and theology. Okay, so let us use two biblical concepts he should readily understand.
One is the vineyard. In this biblical imagery, the nation of Israel is the vineyard. God cares for the vineyard. He weeds it and prunes it and waters it. It is His love and delight.
But, pertinent to our issue, is that Israel sins against God. God’s response is, as Isaiah declared, “What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; I will break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down: and I will lay it waste; it shall not be pruned nor hoed; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.” (Isaiah 5:4-6)
In Matthew chapter 21 (and Mark 12 and Luke 20), Jesus takes this image and relates a parable about a vineyard to which the lord of the vineyard sent his son and the tenants killed him. The lord came and killed the tenants and rented the vineyard out to others.
The second biblical image is also from the Hebrew prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea. Here is just one verse: “How is the faithful city become a harlot! she that was full of justice! righteousness lodged in her, but now murderers.” (Isaiah 1:21)
The lesson for Father Jenkins is plain. By honoring President Obama, he has failed to nurture the vineyard. He has prostituted himself and the University he professes to love. These are harsh words, but what will Father Jenkins say to Notre Dame graduates who practice medicine when the President gives them (and other pro-life) doctors the choice (a word the President likes) to stop practicing medicine or to start practicing anti-life medicine? What will Father Jenkins say when Catholic (and other pro-life) hospitals decide to close or transfer ownership rather than become anti-life?
What will Father Jenkins say to Catholics (and other pro-life people), including members of his own religious Order, who will die rather than accept medical treatment derived through unethical human experimentation (destructive embryonic stem cell research)? (When the catchword in 1988 was “fetal tissue transplantation,” New York’s Cardinal O’Connor said that his father would die before accepting any of its benefits.)
Understand (a word the President uses to begin sentences) that there are Catholics who would rather die than participate in abortions and there are other Catholics (Pelosi, Biden, Kennedy, Kerry, and on and on) who would hold the surgical tools or morning-after pill. Both cannot be Catholic. Simply put, real Catholics do not kill their young – and do not legalize the killing of their young. It is abhorrent.
Hundreds, thousands, of our fathers and mothers in the Christian Faith died rather than offer sacrifice to the gods. What’s more, Christianity ended human sacrifice to the gods, demonstrated most clearly in the days after the 16th century apparition by Mary, the mother of Jesus, near Mexico City, for which she is venerated under the name “Our Lady of Guadalupe.” (Recently, Secretary Clinton notably asked, “Who painted this [image on Juan Diego’s tilga in the Basilica in Mexico City]?”) And we don’t kill people – at any age or in any condition – so we may live a longer life.
For the young and frail, abortion and euthanasia is a life-and-death issue. And for we who try to protect them, it may become a life-and-death issue. I am reminded of a line from “Gone With the Wind” where a man tells a young lady, “This is war, not a garden party.” In his presidential ivory tower, Father Jenkins looks down on this war like it is a garden party, like the ladies who came in their buggies out of Washington, D.C., to watch, and picnic during, the First Battle of Bull Run. But it is a war and we now know which side of this war Father Jenkins is on. The by-laws of the University require the president to be a priest of the Holy Cross Order (C.S.C.), but they do not specifically require him to be pro-life.
Father Jenkins’ invitation to President Obama is remarkable in another way. There have been two persons associated with Notre Dame who have written at length about the demise of religiously affiliated universities: Rev. James T. Burtchaell in Dying of the Light (1998) and George M. Marsden in The Soul of the American University (1994). While the business world pays attention to “lessons learned,” Father Jenkins and other University personnel have ignored these two books.
For example, on April 16, 2008, after a long process, but issued one day before Pope Benedict’s address on April 17 at the Catholic University of America to presidents of Catholic universities (an event Father Jenkins attended), the University Faculty Senate issued a “Faculty Response to University Initiative on Hiring Faculty.” It resolved “The University should not compromise its academic aspirations in its efforts to maintain its Catholic identity" and no numerical goal in hiring Catholic faculty should be permitted. http://facultysenate.nd.edu/documents/final_reports.shtml
The faculty is willing to “compromise aspirations” (affirmative action) in order to achieve gender, racial, and ethnic diversity, but not Catholic identity, among the faculty.
I praise my non-Catholic professors, among them, Stanley Hauerwas and the late Gerhart Niemeyer, but in recent years, departments have hired faculty hostile to Catholicism.
Let me ask you: Would Yeshiva, BYU and Howard hire faculty hostile to their mission? Do you think Hofstra would allow the Jewish members of its faculty to dwindle to zero, BYU allow its Mormon (LDS) faculty to dwindle to zero, Howard its African-American faculty to dwindle to zero? Do these academics at Notre Dame not know they teach at a Catholic institution? Do they not accept its mission? Do they not know the practical requirements of ensuring that the mission is accomplished?
The Bible is full of blessings and corollary curses. You may recall the biblical verse Eric Liddell carried as he ran in the 1924 Olympics, as depicted in the film “Chariots of Fire”: “He who honors Me, I will honor.” (1 Sam. 2:30). Father Jenkins needs to heed the corollary: He who does not honor Me, I will not honor.
James M. Thunder is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a former general counsel of Americans United for Life.
(Ed. note: This current version corrects an earlier iteration that included an inadvertent error.)
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