More than 40 years ago the leaders of the major Catholic universities and colleges, notably those at Notre Dame, joined the Land O’Lakes rebellion, proclaiming that teaching and research at Catholic colleges and universities should be independent of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, if they wanted to be “effective” — that is, popular and congenial to the secular powers-that-be.

As Diogenes puts it:

Evidently, the Notre Dame trustees, and the bulk of its faculty wanted the school to be “effective” — that is, well thought of in the editorial pages of the New York Times. They accepted the terms of rebellion. The ties to the Church were kept in name only.

The proclamation cast aside not only Catholic moral teachings, such as on abortion (ground zero of the current fury over Notre Dame’s decision to honor President Obama at its commencement) but also all Catholic doctrine. Catholic teaching and doctrine became “negotiable elements within the ‘academic community itself’”:

The truth that God is “. . . the Father, the Almighty . . .” the entire Nicene Creed . . . the eternal paternity of God the Father . . . [are] simply irrelevant to the intellectual life of the school unless, until, or as long as the academic community itself makes it relevant . . .
the academic community itself contains all teaching authority within the confines of the school. The Pope and the bishop [and, arguably, God] have no teaching authority inside the school except that granted to them by the academic community itself.

Because the Notre Dame administration has never repudiated the Land O’Lakes rebellion, nor requires its theology faculty to submit to the Mandatum set forth in the encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesia (rendering it a shell game), Diogenes rightly concludes that the university fraudulently markets itself as Catholic when it is not in fact Catholic:

Simply because Notre Dame puts the word Catholic in its mission statement, and the local bishop has not gotten around to striking it from the phone listing in the diocesan directory, doesn’t mean it’s Catholic. . . . marketing is not reality, and the sincerity of its students and a handful of its faculty does not make the school’s identity. The identity is in “the academic community itself.”

Outrage over Notre Dame’s scandalous invitation to the president is justified but needs to be understood in the context of, and extended to, the Land O’Lakes agreement — “the law of the land” at the university.