Professor Walter Williams recently observed that today’s academic climate might be described as a mixture of infantilism, kindergarten and totalitarianism.
As a graduate of Notre Dame, I’m sorry to report that the infection has spread even to my alma mater.
Vice President Mike Pence will speak at Notre Dame’s commencement this Sunday, May 21st, but apparently the prospect of his visit makes many students feel “unsafe” – so supporters of “gay rights” and their allies will demonstrate on campus with the blessing of the administration, as America’s stalwart Catholic leaders of the future whine about Pence’s “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, offensive, or ostracizing” past.
I’m not making this up.
The weeks before Pence’s appearance were filled with celebrations of sodomy on campus, culminating with the university bestowing its highest award on the gay pride leader who is also president of the student body.
As our beloved Father Rutler wryly observes, most of these graduating students are older than those kids who stormed the beaches at Normandy, who dared to fly the flimsy fighter planes over Imperial Germany….
Ah, but so what? These poor snowflakes feel “unsafe.” And yet they still insist on referring to themselves as the “Fighting Irish” (which term is trademarked, by the way).
As the late Charles E. Rice, eminent pro-life leader and Professor of Constitutional Law at Notre Dame Law School, wrote in 2009, “What Happened To Notre Dame?”
It is difficult to pinpoint the origins of the decline. Some alumni point in 1967, when Father Ted Hesburgh, C.S.C. proudly led signers of the Land O’Lakes statement to sever Catholic higher education from the authority of the Catholic Church. Others point to outside influences from the 60s – LBJ’s offer of prodigious federal funding in exchange for secularization, or the “Spirit of Vatican II,” or the sexual revolution and the Pill, or radical feminism, or a host of other catalysts of rot.
Whenever Notre Dame’s decline began, it crashed and burned in May 2009, when university President Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., welcomed Barack Obama to the University’s commencement exercises, and conferred upon the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
Reaction to this malignant infection of Our Lady’s university came swiftly. Some 82 American bishops condemned Notre Dame for its blatant violation of the Church’s policy that forbade pro-abortion speakers from appearing in Catholic institutions. Catholics by the hundreds of thousands signed petitions voicing their outrage.
But Father Jenkins doubled down, even helping the Secret Service sneak the presidential limousine onto campus by a back alley so that his honored guest would not be offended by the thousands of pro-life demonstrators that lined all the entrances. When 88 pro-lifers quietly demonstrated on the other end of the campus, an enraged Jenkins had them arrested, while pro-Obama demonstrators were left untouched. The diktat was Orwellian: when a longtime university administrator bravely attended a pro-life vigil, he was fired.
On the Big Day, an exultant Jenkins beamed, brimming with fulsome praise for the ardent supporter of killing babies after they were born. Obama, wearing his now familiar narcissistic smirk, basked in the cheers of the graduates, who shouted down the lone truth-teller (“Abortion is murder!” shouted one honest grad) with “We are ND,” a chant curiously imported from the football stadium.
And then Obama left.
What ensued is a montage of modernism. Later that same year, thirty million taxpayer dollars from Obama’s “stimulus” slush fund arrived, and Notre Dame’s fundraising pros boasted that 2009 was their best year ever. On reflection, the fiasco was the most unique, and most successful, courting of a high-dollar donor in university history, although some critics alluded to the dollar amount as reminiscent of the thirty pieces of silver Judas received for betraying Christ.
Somewhere around 1925, legendary Notre Dame Football Coach Knute Rockne once told my father, a member of ND’s “Athletic Committee,” “You don’t spit on a man’s head if you’re standing on his shoulders”
Father Jenkins is standing on some pretty broad shoulders. Why has he been so flaccid in the face of the attacks on the University’s Catholic character?
Consider: if Obama had appeared at “Nameless U” in 2009, nobody would have noticed that the most radical pro-abortion leader in the world had surfaced once again to strut and preen upon a stage full of fawning sycophants.
But Notre Dame is not nameless; it is named for Our Lady, and Father Jenkins continues to pretend that he is preserving its Catholic character. But even as the Catholic brand loses its luster, the desiccated husk is overflowing with money. A lot of money.
Tuition is rising far beyond the rate of inflation – total costs top $70,000 next fall. Meanwhile, Jenkins has moved the “Crossroads” of the campus from Sacred Heart Basilica, where I was baptized long ago, to the football stadium, which is now receiving an expansion costing four hundred million-dollars (and that’s not a misprint). The project includes luxury skyboxes for plutocrats whose private jets barely fit at the local airport on home game weekends.
While the money might be rolling in, the school’s Catholic Credibility Quotient is bleeding out. And whatever Father Jenkins and Mike Pence might say on graduation day, it’s certain that those demonstrating against Catholic moral teaching on life, marriage, and the family will be celebrated on campus – not arrested like the “Notre Dame 88” who defended that teaching. We should point out that the university, afraid of being sued, bitterly and quietly agreed to drop the trespassing charges months later).
But why is Vice President Pence speaking at Notre Dame at all? Is it because he is the former governor of Indiana? Because he is a former Catholic but now a more committed Christian than many Catholics?
Or because Father Jenkins didn’t want to invite President Trump?
Obama’s appearance was the last of a sitting president. Father Jenkins reacted to the firestorm of opposition then by insisting that the invitation had been extended out of respect for the presidential office, not its occupant. But that sloppy dodge has now been exposed, and at least one group is working to save Notre Dame from itself before it’s too late.
“The Sycamore Trust was established in the summer of 2006 by a group of Notre Dame alumni concerned by the mounting evidence of the weakening of the Catholic identity of the university,” according to its website. Led by the dynamic William Dempsey, Notre Dame alumnus and successful Catholic lawyer, the group constantly seeks the good in Notre Dame, so as to increase it. But sometimes that task takes a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, if one perceives “the good” to mean something beyond money and what my former teacher Ralph McInerny called Notre Dame’s “vulgar lust for prestige.” (See 1 John 2:16).
Unfortunately, goaded by the administration, a great many faculty members do indeed pursue more grants, more invitations to conferences, more notoriety – and they’ll do whatever they need to do to get it.
And if word got out that a future Notre Dame faculty had reversed course, come to its senses, and unanimously voted to give their resounding support to authentic Catholic teaching, they know their dreams of broader renown and career advancement would be over.
While those prideful hopes spring eternal, there are souls at stake right here and now – thousands of souls, of a generation of students who are being groomed for success in their fields. When they get there – complete with high salaries and promotions – will they stand up for the truth when the chips are down, or duck and hope no one notices they’re Catholic?
Or will they even know the faith long enough to tell they are still Catholic?
I’m not sure why, but the university appears to have a “Gender Studies” program. And one Mary Celeste Kearney, its director, recently admitted that the “fundamental principle of gender studies flies in the face of traditional Catholic teaching.”
Yet not only does the university allow such fatuous drivel to be taught in the classroom, they even create an academic department to compound the calamity.
Meanwhile, the university’s associate director of Campus Ministry observes that “the landscape of sexual orientation and of gender identity is changing” and that “the Church must listen to and read the signs of the times … There are many ways to love and to give our selves to one another,” he said. “That we love may be more important than how we love.”
Since 2009, Notre Dame has gone downhill as fast as its tuition has gone up. And Father Jenkins has caught himself in a precarious contradiction that Bill Dempsey puts in perspective:
“All of this is, to adapt a legal metaphor, the fruit of a poisonous tree, the Obama episode and Father Jenkins’s defense that he was simply following Notre Dame’s tradition of inviting elected presidents no matter their hostility to Church teaching. The accounts of the student anti-Pence protests regularly refer to these events as the background for the student petitions that Trump not be invited and the university’s turning to Vice President Pence instead.”
Dempsey then cites liberal journalist and ND alumna Melinda Hennenberger:
“The absolute worst message for college graduates isn’t what they’d hear from Donald Trump or Mike Pence or Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders. The worst message is the one Father Jenkins sent Notre Dame students when he indulged their preference to only hear from those with whom they already agree.”
And Dempsey has the last word: “Grave mistakes that are defended rather than acknowledged are likely to cause continuing damage. Had Father Jenkins confessed error in inviting Obama and scrapped the demonstrably infirm practice of honoring presidents no matter what, Trump’s election would not have cornered him. But he did not, and it did.”
Here’s a snap quiz: Would he have invited a President Hillary?
Let’s not always see the same hands….
This is PRI Review from www.pop.org. We’ll be right back.
Segment two:
When Father Paul Scalia, celebrated the funeral Mass of Judge Robert Bork on December 22, 2012, he made a most interesting comment:
“Bob was a hopeful man,” he said. “Of course, he wasn’t an optimist.”
How many of us today, tempted to feel somewhat less than optimistic, are tempted to throw up our hands and say “it’s hopeless”?
Fortunately, we have one stalwart leader in the Church who, like Father Scalia and Bob Bork, knows the difference between optimism and hope. His name is Gerhard Cardinal Müller, and as Prefect for the Congregation of the Faith, he bears the responsibility of defending the truths of the Magisterium from error. In recent years, of course, that task has become more difficult, and in the Cardinal Müller Report, a marvelous book just published by the Ignatius Press, he tells us why.
First, some background. In 1985, Ignatius published the powerful Ratzinger Report, an extended interview by Vittorio Messori with the then-Cardinal Prefect of the same congregation – often referred to simply as the CDF. The Müller Report follows the same format, as an interview with Father Carlos Granados, Director of the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos (BAC), the highly respected publishing house known the world over for its critical editions of Catholic classics.
This marvelous book is the result of one weekend of conversations, for which Father Granados prepared for weeks. Clearly Cardinal Müller had been preparing for a lifetime. In fact, the German Cardinal knows Spanish so well that the interview was conducted entirely in that language in December 2015, after the Synod on the Family but before the publication of Amoris Laetitia in March of 2016.
While The Ratzinger Report focuses on faith, Cardinal Müller focuses on hope, “which reveals the future,” and stresses the importance of this theological virtue as opposed to its secular version (optimism is “just a guess”).
Cardinal Müller addresses several highly-charged issues, but calmly and soundly. The book’s vital importance lies in its tightly interwoven character that develops unpopular truths with such patient clarity that they are impossible to deny without denying the faith itself.
We can turn briefly to some of those specifics, always mindful that they are developed painstakingly and lucidly as part of a whole. The text is so enjoyable because the cardinal confidently places critical issues of theology within easy reach, without apology or evasion.
Cardinal Müller first presents divorce and remarriage as what he calls a “serious obstacle” which introduces “emotional instability” and practical issues such as children born in the second relationship. In developing the issue further, after a careful examination in the light of Church teaching, however, he is firm: sacramental marriage is indissoluble, period.
With regard to sodomy, he does not flinch. However popular “gender ideology” might be, it represents an “idolatry of the self,” like Adam and Eve deciding what is good and evil. In fact, this “totalitarian pretension” constitutes an attack on the Church and her authority, plain and simple.
But what about “Who am I to judge?” The Cardinal is clear and emphatic: “It is precisely those who before have shown no respect for the doctrine of the Church who now seize on a stray sentence of the Holy Father, taken out of context, to present deviant ideas about sexual morality in the guise of a presumed interpretation of the ‘authentic’ thought in merito of the Pope.” He continues: “The concept of the intrinsic disorder of homosexual acts, because they do not proceed from a genuine emotional and sexual complementarity, stems from holy Scripture.”
But in the cases of “gender” and divorce and remarriage, shouldn’t the Eucharist be available? Not so fat: Cardinal Müller cannot “conclude that anyone can come to receive the Eucharist even though he is not in grace and does not have the required state of mind, just because it is nourishment for the weak.”
But wait, isn’t that “legalistic” Not at all: “Certainly, any proposal to eliminate the law from Christian life or to regard it as an excessive burden would constitute a serious offense to Jews and would be especially an attack on the truth of Christianity.”
And speaking of legal, what about officeholders who celebrate sodomy and abortion? “We pay a high price” for “our refusal to hold politicians to an ethical exercise of power,” he candidly admits.
Without chiding, Cardinal Müller has strong words for current and future priests, who “must take the most meticulous care of our spiritual life: assiduous confession, moments of intimacy with the Lord in silent adoration, praying the breviary for the whole church, and trusting ourselves to the maternal care of Mary, the hard work of spiritual exercises every year, and above all the devout celebration of Christ’s sacrifice and daily Mass. We, too, are enveloped in misery, and therefore we need a firm piety and continual forgiveness of God if we want to renew our Christian life and, specifically, the commitment we undertook one day to serve the church for life, out of love for Christ.”
Yes, he continues, there is a crisis in vocations, but that represents “a crisis of faith, which in turn is a result of a long secularization that has dried up what was once fertile soil and has scorched the earth.”
And what about bishops? They must preach the “full Gospel,” bearing in mind that bishops’ conferences “do not have any more authority than the sum of the authority of all the bishops who belong to them.” Like Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Müller illuminates the problem of bishops hiding behind the cover of the faceless bureaucracy of “the conference” to avoid confronting dissent and outright error with their consecrated authority, however unpopular such truth-telling might be. In fact, one might conclude, if conferences were simply abolished, there would be no loss or dilution of episcopal authority, but it may well sharpened by placing it squarely on the shoulders of individual successors of the apostles.
Specifically, Cardinal Müller does not share the timidity of many American bishops when it comes to defending the moral truths so scathingly attacked by our popular culture. On Humanae Vitae: “the indiscriminate attacks to which it was subject from the outset caused it to be marginalized and forgotten, despite its richness and inventively and prophetically posing the reality of love, of marriage, and the beauty a married life. Today, almost 50 years later, we see much more clearly that Pope Paul VI was right in everything that at the time he had the courage to make clear. Ahead of his time, this humanist pope had the courage to offer this document to the Church and to society, denouncing with an accurate analysis what ended up happening.”
Regarding education, Cardinal Müller points out how the great tyrannies have always attempted to seize control of children from their parents. That temptation is universal: in the 1860s, John Swett, the anti-Catholic superintendent of education in California, insisted that children belong to the state, and not to the parents; hence parents should cede control over education to the superior authority of the state (Swett is honored today as the founder of California’s largest government school union).
And what about the Reformation, so popular in recent days as Luther’s 500th anniversary is celebrated? “The farther away an observer is from Christianity, the fewer differences he can see between the Catholic Church and the other Christian denominations. To an atheist, all religions look the same…. Strictly speaking, we Catholics do not have any reason to celebrate October 31, 1517, the date that is considered to be the beginning of the Reformation that led to the rupture in Western Christianity.”
And religious liberty? It requires that the Church exercise “her complete independence” from the state. In this regard Cardinal Müller does not address problems flowing from government funding of the Church, which reaches into the billions both in his native Germany and the United States.
And mercy?” We have spoken of faith and hope, but mercy introduces the third theological virtue: “Mercy cannot consist in relativizing God’s Commandments, but must, rather, make possible the encounter with God’s love, which renews and changes our life.” Here, and really throughout the interview, Cardinal Müller contrasts the theological virtues with the secular world’s versions. “Supernatural love is the intimate union of God with us: He lives in us, and we are His children,” he insists.
The Ratzinger Report focused on Faith; The Cardinal Müller Report focuses on hope. Given the confusion that abounds among today’s bishops regarding “charity” as government-funded welfare programs, we look forward to a future volume that firmly restores charity – caritas, inseparable from God’s love – to its proper place in the life of the Church.
The particulars noted above are necessarily brief. We emphasize that they emerge from a marvelously coherent and masterful conversation that is indispensable to understanding their place in the teaching of the Church as it confronts the “vulgarity and frivolity” of today’s secular culture. This very readable book deserves to be widely celebrated and appreciated.
Segment Three:
HV WB State Department Announces New Plan to Dramatically Expand Mexico City Policy, Defund Pro-Abortion Organizations
“Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” does exactly what it says…
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of State announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has approved of the new implementing guidelines for the Mexico City Policy recently reinstated by President Trump earlier this year. The State Department has retitled the policy, calling it the “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” policy.
The new implementing guidelines come after President Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum[1] on January 23rd, 2017 reinstating the Mexico City Policy, a U.S. Government policy which prohibits funding for foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning.
The Mexico City Policy cuts the majority of U.S. Government funding for foreign pro-abortion NGOs such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Marie Stopes International (MSI). According to IPPF’s own estimation, the pro-abortion organization is set to lose approximately $100 million in U.S. Government funding due to the Policy.
While previous versions of the Mexico City Policy under the Reagan, Bush (41), Clinton, and Bush (43) Administrations applied only to family planning assistance (formerly referred to as “population assistance”), the new Trump Policy was expanded to include “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies,” to the extent permitted by law.
The Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy will significantly expand upon the versions of the Mexico City Policy implemented under previous administrations. The new Policy will prevent not only the State Department and USAID from funding pro-abortion organizations, as was the case under the Bush (43) Administration, but also various other government departments and agencies involved in furnishing global health assistance including the Department of Defense (DOD), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Peace Corps, according to State Department senior administration officials.
Moreover, the new Policy will not only apply to family planning assistance furnished by these departments but will also include other health initiatives including the the President’s Malaria Initiative, maternal and child health programs, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and other global health assistance disbursed through USAID and other departments. President Bush (43), on the other hand, had explicitly exempted PEPFAR from the Mexico City Policy.
“By cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. funding for foreign pro-abortion organizations, President Trump has proven his commitment to defending the right to life,” says Population Research Institute President Steven Mosher.
“This not only reinstates Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Mexico City Policy, which I supported at the time, but it also dramatically expands upon it. Under the new Policy, U.S. taxpayers will no longer subsidize foreign nongovernmental organizations that perform or promote abortion on demand,” Mosher says.
The scope of the new Policy will increase considerably. According to the State Department, the new Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy will apply to a total of $8.8 billion of global health assistance furnished by various departments and agencies of the U.S. Government. Former versions of the Mexico City Policy only applied to family planning assistance which, since 2012, has stood at approximately $575 million in appropriations annually.
The Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy will have no effect on total U.S. funding for global health programs, according to the State Department. The U.S. Government will continue to fund global health initiatives at the same funding levels approved by Congress this year, including for maternal health and child survival, nutrition and sanitation, family planning and reproductive health, and for combating infectious diseases. Funding that would have been awarded to foreign NGOs that refuse to certify that they do not perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning will simply be reallocated to other NGOs that are able to provide the needed health services and are willing to comply with the policy.
On March 2, 2017, USAID had amended the Standard Provisions for both foreign and domestic NGOs (mandatory references for grants and cooperative agreements awarded to NGOs through the agency) to include interim implementing guidelines for the Mexico City Policy until a more comprehensive policy aligned with President Trump’s January 23rd memorandum could be formulated. The interim guidelines were a near verbatim copy of the implementing guidelines in place under the Bush (43) Administration.
According to the State Department, the current implementing guidelines in USAID’s Standard Provisions will now be used in the new Policy and adapted to expand their applicability to global health assistance across all relevant departments and agencies. The new Policy will be ushered in gradually over the next few months, according to senior officials, as various agencies work to incorporate the necessary provisions into grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements. In six months, the State Department plans to do a review across the various departments and agencies to ensure that the new implementing guidelines are effective and efficient in achieve the goals outlined by the President’s January 23rd memorandum.
Like former versions of the Mexico City Policy, the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy will continue to exempt abortions in cases of rape, incest, and where the life of the mother is at risk.
According to a State Department press release, the new Policy will not apply (at least not in full) to foreign governments that publicly fund abortion procedures. Previous versions of the Mexico City Policy likewise did not prevent foreign governments from receiving family planning assistance, even if they publicly funded abortion procedures. However, the Policy did require such governments to keep U.S. family planning assistance in a separate account.
The new implementing guidelines will also not apply to multilateral organizations as some pro-life advocates had hoped. A previous version of the Mexico City Policy instituted by an act of Congress as part of the annual budget bill during the Clinton administration for the 2000 fiscal year had applied the Policy to foreign multilaterals. Certain multilateral organizations such as the World Health Organization and the African Union receive significant funding from the U.S. Government and strongly promote abortion beyond the cases exempted by the Mexico City Policy.
Like former versions of the Mexico City Policy, the implementing guidelines will also not apply to international migration and refugee assistance funds nor to disaster or humanitarian assistance. However, it was not expected that the new policy would apply to these sources of U.S. foreign assistance.
Perhaps the biggest gap in the the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy, however, is that it still does not apply to domestic NGOs. Like previous versions of the Mexico City Policy, the new Policy continues to permit domestic NGOs that perform or promote abortion in foreign countries to be recipients of U.S. global health assistance.
Yet despite the shortfalls, the new Trump Mexico City Policy is still arguably the strongest version of the Policy yet implemented.
“Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives of unborn babies will be saved from the violence of abortion as a result,” Mosher says.
This is PRI Review from Pop.org. Thanks for listening.
