From my two cents today:

“Dialogue” has been the apparent cardinal virtue during this Notre Dame affair, as so often is the case when higher education and religion get controversial. True dialogue can be fruitful (Pope Benedict said just this on the South Lawn of the White House, as Fr. Jenkins reminded us Sunday). But it wasn’t there on Sunday at the commencement exercises, and to pretend that it was is a continued outrage.
In that address to Catholic educators last year, Pope Benedict had something to say about “academic freedom”:
I wish to reaffirm the great value of academic freedom. In virtue of this freedom you are called to search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads you. Yet it is also the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s identity and mission; a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus docendi [duty to teach] and not somehow autonomous or independent of it.
Teachers and administrators, whether in universities or schools, have the duty and privilege to ensure that students receive instruction in Catholic doctrine and practice. This requires that public witness to the way of Christ, as found in the Gospel and upheld by the Church’s Magisterium, shapes all aspects of an institution’s life, both inside and outside the classroom. Divergence from this vision weakens Catholic identity and, far from advancing freedom, inevitably leads to confusion, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual.
The University of Notre Dame used appeals to academic freedom and dialogue to justify a weakening of the school and thereby the Church’s public identity. Fr. Jenkins presided over a muddle on Sunday. But there’s hope for both Notre Dame and the Catholic Church.
President Obama plugged his book The Audacity of Hope during his commencement address. Let me plug Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict’s encyclical on Christian hope. He wrote that “the one who has hope lives differently” — and pointed toward Mary, Mother of God, for whom the University of Notre Dame is named, in a way that could have fit into commencement remarks this weekend:
Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope. Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by — people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes” she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14).
On the campus of the University of Notre Dame, there are such lights. There is the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture and the Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life. There are more examples here. If you are a Notre Dame alum or other former donor, you might consider supporting some of those lights of hope. A Catholic university that can touch as many souls as Notre Dame — in the classroom, on the football field, in months of headlines over a commencement speaker — is not one to surrender without a fight.

More here.