Earlier posts today in the preceding page:
- New statistics about the US Church
- Worldwide ban for Brisbane's rebel priest
- L'Osservatore Romano 'steps back', sort of, on Barack Obama
The following two editorials have to do with the Church in the United States, specifically, with the widespread failure of many Catholic institutions of learning to abide by the Magisterium, best exemplified, of course, by the now notorious 'Notre Shame' [one could also say 'Notre Sham'] affair.
Two models of hope:
Notre Dame chooses Obama’s
over its namesake’s
Editorial
By George Neumayr
June 2009 issue
Last September, Pope Benedict XVI visited the original Grotto in Lourdes where Our Lady appeared to St. Bernadette. During his visit, Pope Benedict spoke about the West’s need to recover the Marian model of hope: that salvation comes not through obedience to man’s will but through humble obedience to God’s.
The modern world has largely chosen the man-centered model of hope over Mary’s, and this choice, as the grim and unfolding chapters of recent history illustrate, has delivered not salvation but despair.
The ideology that promises man’s perfection through the domination of relativized science, technology, and politics — what one might call the false self-sufficiency of secularism — has led once-Christian countries into dystopias of one kind or another, nations so bereft of real hope that they abort thousands upon thousands of their own children.
On May 17, in a sports arena not far from a replica of that original Grotto in Lourdes, Barack Obama received an honorary degree from Notre Dame — a moment of hollow good cheer in which a university founded in Our Lady’s honor extolled an American president not for habitually hoping in God’s promises but in his own. Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, hailed Obama’s “audacious hope for a brighter tomorrow.”
As the first acts of his administration demonstrate — paying for abortions at home and abroad, rescinding the Bush-era conscience clause for pro-life doctors and nurses, authorizing the over-the-counter sale of abortifacients to teens, placing gay-marriage proponents and aggressive secularists in powerful positions —
this “audacious hope” rests not on God’s immutable will but on Obama’s willful rejection of it: that killing unborn children is a “right,” that redesigning marriage and sexuality according to fluctuating human taste and desire is “enlightened,” and that “reason” is not the product of God’s mind but man’s.
Behind all the buzzwords and honeyed phrases in Obama’s speech to Notre Dame’s graduates lay an essentially man-centered, not Marian, model of hope. His advice to them contained
an insidiously deceptive bow to religion even as he advanced unproven secularist claims that render God irrelevant to public life:
Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. Stand as a lighthouse. But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that his wisdom is greater than our own.
This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness, and service that moves hearts and minds.
This is a jumble of half-truths and lies.
First of all, it is not beyond our capacity to know the intentions of God; he has written them on our hearts and promulgated them through our minds.
- It is certain, not doubtful, that killing unborn children and the elderly is unjust.
- It is certain, not doubtful, that man is made for heterosexuality, not homosexuality.
- It is certain, not doubtful, that God exists and man owes him piety.
What is doubtful, indeed destructive, is Obama’s glib notion that a civilized democracy is attainable without these truths.
Notice that
Obama’s straw-man secularism defines all of faith, including its preambles, as willfulness while cordoning off his own willful rejections of reality from rational scrutiny.
To what universal truth, for example, does he appeal when describing abortion and same-sex civil unions as “rights”? There isn’t one; his claim springs from his own denial of the self-evident realities that make any moral reasoning possible.
And herein lies the fatal sectarianism, or to use his phrase, the “parochial principles” of secularism in this time and place.
A country that gives Obama’s skepticism and relativism a privileged and honored place in public life while treating the existence of God and the natural moral law as mere “opinions” and uncertainties has stripped away the grounds for hope.
And it is only the reconciliation of reason and revelation, which was once the mission of Notre Dame, that can restore them.
Man, as a dependent creature who comes from God and culminates in him, cannot save himself from death nor his society from disintegration.
By honoring Obama’s “audacious hope,” Notre Dame has put its faith in princes and forgotten the model of hope that its namesake preeminently embodies.
Mr. Neumayr had an equally cogent editorial on the Notre Dame affairs in the May issue of CWR, i.e., before the speech, which focuses Notre Dame's explicit defiance of the Magisterium - specifically, John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, in its misguided decision to give Obama an honorary degree.
Ex Corde Ecclesiae
and the Notre Dame affair
Editorial
By George Neumayr
June 2009 issue
May 2009 issue
Will Notre Dame’s decision to honor the most pro-abortion American president ever occasion a serious and widespread implementation of
Ex Corde Ecclesiae? If not, the outrage over it is idle.
Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on Catholic universities and colleges has gathered dust since its 1990 release. These schools, with exceptions here and there, remain either indifferent or hostile to it.
Notre Dame’s conferral of honors on Barack Obama is merely the latest and most graphic symptom of a larger disease that has coursed through Catholic colleges for decades.
What’s needed now is not more feckless and stalling discussions about “Catholic identity” but unapologetic and comprehensive episcopal application of Ex Corde.
Notre Dame’s decision to honor Barack Obama was not surprising but utterly predictable. Where a college’s faculty, student body, and curriculum are, there its heart will be also.
The scandal at Notre Dame originated not in 2009 but in 1967, when its then-president Theodore Hesburgh, along with academics and then-future bishops like Theodore McCarrick (who, decades later as the powerful archbishop of Washington, DC, would hide from his fellow bishops the Vatican’s memo on pro-abortion Catholic politicians), signed a de facto declaration of independence from Catholicism called the “Land O’ Lakes Statement on the Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University.”
That declaration gave birth to the modern American Catholic university, which would henceforth be modern and American but not very Catholic.
“The Catholic University today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word,” it stated in part. “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.”
Long before honoring Obama, Notre Dame, fostering this academic ethos, had honored the modern liberal ideology he represents by secularizing its curriculum and faculty. It cast aside the magisterium and marginalized the Catholic intellectual tradition as it ceaselessly hired professors who reduced Catholicism to “progressive” politics in the minds of their students.
That a majority of Catholics, many of whom graduated from colleges and universities like Notre Dame, voted for Obama is one of the legacies of the Land O’ Lakes manifesto.
And Obama knows it, which is why he leapt at Notre Dame’s honorary degree, seeing in it one more opportunity to cement confusion and spread chaos within the Church.
Nothing if not an adroit politician, Obama pursued this divide-and-conquer strategy from the beginning. He found Catholic academics to serve on his “National Catholic Advisory Committee,” solicited donations from faculty members at Catholic schools (professors at Jesuit Georgetown ranked seventh among all faculties in donations to his campaign, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education), and used the specious defenses of “pro-lifers,” such as former Notre Dame Center on Law and Government director Doug Kmiec, to soften Catholic resistance to his agenda.
“A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard, “but
a revolutionary age that is at the same time reflective and passionless leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.”
Obama is that cool revolutionary. He won’t even bother to topple the Church in America; he will leave it standing and co-opt it from within.
Whenever possible, it appears, he will enlist nominal Catholics for the work of neutralizing the Church’s influence in public life. He has already found a Catholic Health and Human Services secretary in Kathleen Sebelius to hasten the transformation of Catholic hospitals into secularist ones, a Catholic vice president in Joe Biden to lock anti-Catholic morality into place through the executive branch, and a Catholic Speaker of the House in Nancy Pelosi to seal the moral revolution in the legislature, all the while receiving honors from the Catholic bishops’ most prominent university and hosannas from Catholic academics.
This unfolding and grotesque farce defies even the satirical imagination of an Evelyn Waugh. And come May 17 a new scene in it will emerge: a staged, PR-necessitated “dialogue” between Obama and Notre Dame, as if the two don’t already basically agree, as if the middle distance (supposing that Notre Dame and Obama even wanted to get there) between grave error and orthodoxy isn’t still error.
Father John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, scrambling for cover in the wake of the controversy, spun the honorary degree as a chance for “positive engagement.” But the only positive engagement that could come from it is the engagement of bishops at long last with Catholic higher education.
Will they let this charade continue? Or will they finally enforce
Ex Corde, not just at Notre Dame but at all Catholic colleges? Divided against themselves they cannot stand.
Unfortunately, I have yet to read what the US Conference of Catholic Bishops plans to do about enforcing Ex Corde Ecclesiae - teh USCCB not having done anything since Pope Benedict XVI's address to the rectors and officials of American Catholic universities in Washington on April 17, 2008.
And I don't read about any serious action to exclude Notre Dame from the official directory of Catholic schools in the United States, which is the very least one might expect as an aftermath to the Obama dog-and-pony show.
For the full English text of Ex Corde Ecclesiae:
www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/06/2009 19:07]