When the University of Notre Dame announced that President Barack
Obama would speak at its 2009 Commencement and would receive an
honorary doctor of laws degree, the reaction was more than anyone
expected. Students, faculty, alumni, and friends of Notre Dame
denounced the honoring of Obama, who is the most relentlessly
pro-abortion public official in the world. Beyond abortion, Obama
has taken steps to withdraw from health-care professionals the
right of conscientious objection. Among them are thousands of Notre
Dame alumni who will be forced to choose between continuing their
profession and participating in activities they view as immoral,
including the execution of the unborn. And they will be forced to
that choice by the politician upon whom their alma mater confers
its highest honors. (Mary Ann Glendon, distinguished Harvard law
professor and former ambassador to the Vatican, felt obliged to
turn down the prestigious Laetare Medal because of this.) Notre
Dame's honoring of Obama is not merely a "Catholic" thing. Many
thousands of citizens with no Catholic or Notre Dame connections
have protested it. They see it as a capitulation of faith to
expedience and the pursuit of vain prestige. Obama's record and
stated purposes are hostile to the most basic truths of faith and
the natural law affirmed by the Catholic Church and by many others.
Four decades ago, in 1967, the major "Catholic" universities
declared their "autonomy" from the Catholic Church in the Land
O'Lakes Declaration. The honoring of Obama reflects the replacement
by those universities of the benign authority of the Church with
the politically correct standards of the secular academic
establishment and, especially, of the government. There is a lesson
here for all Americans. Notre Dame fell into relativism and
expediency because it rejected the Church as the authentic
interpreter of the moral law. In this post-Christian era, American
culture is following a similar path by reducing morality to the
unguided consensus of individual choices. If no code of right and
wrong has moral authority - not even the Ten Commandments - then
society is ruled by the conflict of interests, and might makes
right. The jurisprudence of such relativism is legal positivism in
which no law can be criticized as unjust because no one can know
what is "just." What Happened to Notre Dame? by Charles E. Rice,
with an Introduction by Alfred Freddoso - two of Notre Dame's most
distinguished scholars, who together have served the University for
over 70 years - first recounts the details of Notre Dame's honoring
of President Obama. It then examines the succession of fall-back
excuses offered by the Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins,
c.s.c., and University publicists to justify Notre Dame's defiance
of the nation's bishops and of Catholic teaching. But Rice is not
content with mere reportage. What Happened to Notre Dame?diagnoses
the problem's roots by first providing an overview of the Land
O'Lakes Declaration, its inception and its aftermath, including the
ways in which its false autonomy from the Church has led to an
erosion of the Catholic identity of Notre Dame and other Catholic
universities. Then, it offers a cure. Christ, who is God, is the
author of the divine law and the natural law. The book presents
reasons why an acknowledged interpreter of these laws is necessary,
and why that interpreter has to be the Pope exercising the
Magisterium, or teaching authority of the Church. And it shows why
it is so important that we have such a moral interpreter for all
citizens and not just for Catholics. The alternative is what Pope
Benedict XVI calls the "dictatorship of relativism," which the book
analyzes. Even for those who do not share the Catholic faith, our
reason leads us to conclude that the natural law is the only moral
code that makes entire sense and points to the conclusion that the
Vicar of Christ is uniquely suited to give authoritative
interpretation to that law. In the final chapter Rice shows why
great good can come out of Notre Dame's blunder in rendering its
highest honors to such an implacable foe. Notre Dame got itself
into such a mess because it attempted to be Catholic without the
Church and ended up defying the Church and disgracing itself. But
good can result from the lesson here that roll-your-own morality is
no more tenable than roll-your-own Catholicism. * * * * * Rice
shows why what happened to Notre Dame is symptomatic of what's
happening in other Catholic colleges, indeed colleges with
non-Catholic religious affiliations. He shows how the abandonment
of principle at the college level spills over to the general
culture, with devastating effect, as religious standards get pushed
out of the public square. And, finally, he shows why people who
have never seen the Golden Dome, never rooted for the Fighting
Irish, and never graced a Catholic Church, also have a stake in
what happened to Notre Dame.
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