Yesterday at First Things, William Dempsey laid out a case for the decline of the nation’s preeminent Catholic university: Notre Dame. Dempsey is an alumnus of the university and chairman of Sycamore Trust, a group of Notre Dame alumni dedicated to preserving the university’s Catholic identity and furthering its Catholic mission.
In recent years, Dempsey notes, that goal has seemed like a hopeless cause. As a recent graduate, I know firsthand how discouraging the university’s latest moves have been to those who want their alma mater to retain some semblance of a Catholic identity, and to current students who work to make that possible.
That much is apparent to an outside observer, too, as there was national outrage in 2009 when Notre Dame invited President Obama to give the commencement address. Notre Dame has a history of inviting the sitting president to speak at the first graduation after the election, but it wasn’t the speech that people objected to; it was the honorary degree that the university conferred upon Obama.
To many, this move was a shocking betrayal of Catholic identity, most notably because of Obama’s radical pro-abortion stance, which at that point was evident primarily from his time as an Illinois state senator. In the state senate, Obama fought stridently against the Illinois version of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA), which guaranteed medical care to babies surviving attempted abortions.
Not a single U.S. senator voted against the near-identical federal version of this bill; not even NARAL opposed it. And yet Obama, honored by “Catholic” Notre Dame, opposed it. One can see why Notre Dame alumni and supporters of the university might be a bit upset.
And then this May, my graduation year, university president Fr. John Jenkins, CSC, decided to take things a step further. Despite explicit instructions from the local bishop not to do so, he honored vice president Joe Biden and former speaker of the House John Boehner with the Laetare Medal, an the oldest and most prestigious award given to American Catholics for their outstanding service to the Church and to society.
According to Notre Dame, Joe Biden — a politician famous for his “personal” opposition to abortion but his nearly limitless support for the “right” to an abortion, a man who earlier this week “married” two men in his home — is an outstanding servant of the Catholic Church.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I chose not to attend my graduation ceremony because of this move. And, despite sending a letter with over 300 student signatures to Fr. Jenkins and the Board of Trustees, my fellow signatories and I were twice denied a meeting to discuss our concerns. So much for the dialogue modern universities supposedly foster.
What does all of this mean? It means, I think, that Notre Dame has come dangerously close to the point of no return, and it must work quickly if it is going to turn back. As Dempsey notes, this tension between Notre Dame as a Catholic university and as an elite research university has existed for decades, going back to the 1967 Land O’Lakes statement, composed by representatives of 26 leading Catholic universities, which stated:
To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.
Notre Dame’s administration seems to think it can have the best of both worlds: the money, acclaim, and prestige of benchmarking itself against Ivy League schools and the honor and distinction of being the leading American Catholic university. This is inherently impossible. The irreconcilable clash between modern culture and Catholic values makes it so; that much is evident from the way Catholic politicians such as Joe Biden and Tim Kaine must subordinate their faith to their politics in order to get ahead.
For Notre Dame, it will be no different. There is an explicit choice to be made between these two models of school, and the university must choose soon if it wants to retain its claim to Catholicity. Otherwise, its increasingly un-Catholic actions will make the choice for them, and any hope of being a truly Catholic university will be gone.