Ralph McInerny: " Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic university"

I've said before that I think The Catholic Thing is one of the best-kept Catholic secrets on the Internet. Today they have published one of their most important pieces to date, an essay by the renowned Ralph McInerny, who has been a member of the Notre Dame faculty for over 50 years.

McInerny pulls absolutely no punches in this essay. In fact, it's one of the best modern examples of disdain being used in an appropriate way I have comes across. McInerny has disdain for the decision-makers at Notre Dame who have forfeited their Catholic identity and mission for secular acceptance:

The University of Notre Dame has officially and with much self-satisfaction invited President Barack Obama to address its 2009 graduates and to receive an honorary law degree. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is a deliberate thumbing of the collective nose at the Roman Catholic Church to which Notre Dame purports to be faithful. Faithful? Tell it to Julian the Apostate.

... the invitation to Barack Obama is far from being the usual effort of the university to get into warm contact with the power figures of the day. It is an unequivocal abandonment of any pretense at being a Catholic university. And it is in sad continuity with decades of waffling that have led with seeming inevitability to it.

... ... now we have come to the point where the University of Notre Dame is publicly excluding itself from allegiance to and acceptance of one of the most fundamental of Christian moral truths, mentioned explicitly in the Didache and again and again over the centuries. Abortion is an essentially evil act, both from the viewpoint of natural morality and from the explicit teaching the Church. There is no way in which an individual, a politician or an institution can finesse that fact.

By inviting Barack Obama as commencement speaker, Notre Dame is telling the nation that the teaching of the Catholic church on this fundamental matter can be ignored. Lip service may be paid to the teaching on abortion, but it is no impediment to upward mobility, to the truly vulgar lust to be welcomed into secular society, whether on the part of individuals or institutions.

By inviting Barack Obama to be the 2009 commencement speaker, Notre Dame has forfeited its right to call itself a Catholic university. It invites an official rebuke. May it come.

I am told we can expect other high-respected past and current members of the Notre Dame faculty to similarly strongly speak-out in the days ahead.