Catholic World News News Feature
Roundup: Reactions to Obama at Notre Dame May 18, 2009
President Obama's appearance at the Notre Dame commencement exercises produced an enormous outpouring of journalistic coverage.
Prior to the event, the atmosphere was so feverish that when Duncan Maxell Anderson concocted a story based on the idea that Obama had donated his speaking fee to defray lost alumni contributions, many readers failed to recognize that it was a satire.
On the GetReligion site, Terry Mattingly continued to insist that reporters should get their facts straight. That was, alas, a losing battle.
USA Today provided live blogging on the event, with a panel of experts (including Joseph Lawler, son of CWN editor Phil Lawler) offering their perspectives.
When he addressed the commencement audience, Father John Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame, was in effect making his own observations on the controversy. Father Jenkins let his enthusiasm for President Obama show through clearly; it cannot be a coincidence that he used the word "hope" five times in his first five opening paragraphs.
Father Jenkins clearly implied, in his plea for civil dialogue, that opponents of the President's speech were guilty of intolerance, while "President Obama is not someone who stops taking to those who differ with him." The Jenkins speech did not impress Ralph McInerny, longtime Notre Dame philosophy professor, who commented for The Catholic Thing. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that McInerny was impressed--negatively:
The fallacious defenses on the part of a once stellar philosopher, Father John Jenkins, continued in his introduction of the president, exhibit how corruptive of clear thinking holding high office can be. Not since the local lands were wrested from the Indians has a white father spoken with such forked tongue.
Another Notre Dame faculty member, law professor Gerald Bradley, asked a rhetorical question in his analysis for National Review: "Prestige or Truth?" Bradley's answer to that question can be summed up in one sentence: "Notre Dame chose prestige."
Not everyone saw things that way. Predictably enough, some of the President's political allies felt that his appearance had been a coup. E. J. Dionne, writing for the New Republic, put the emphasis on Obama's willingness to confront criticism:
By facing their arguments head-on and by demonstrating his attentiveness to Catholic concerns, Obama strengthened moderate and liberal forces inside the church itself. He also struck a forceful blow against those who would keep the nation mired in culture-war politics without end.
Father Tom Reese, SJ, gave a Washington Post audience an even rosier view of the occasion, suggesting that Obama's message to the Notre Dame audience-- the same message that he has trumpeted for months-- was a brilliant new strategy that all pro-lifers should adopt. In fact, while others including Father Jenkins said that pro-life activists were wrong to "demonize" the President, Father Reese took the first step to demonize the pro-lifers. First he announced that "pro-life people should join with Obama in doing everything possible to reduce the number of abortions." (Implicit there is the assumption that in fact Obama is doing everything possible.) Then Reese added: "Not to do so is to put politics above the life of the unborn." So there you have it: anyone who fails to support the President is showing contempt for unborn human life: a neat reversal of the reality most people perceive here.
If Father Reese has become a cheerleader for the Obama administration, he is merely continuing down the path that he has followed throughout his journalistic career. But it is truly sad to see Douglas Kmiec, once a thoughtful pro-life analyst, acting the same way. Kmiec told his new friends at the National Catholic Reporter that both presidents, Obama and Jenkins "were there in splendid form" at the Notre Dame commencement, but the bad guys in the drama were the American bishops who questioned the wisdom of honoring an advocate of unrestricted abortion.
Not every liberal voice joined the chorus of praise for President Obama. Michael Sean Winters of America gave the President a grade of C-minus for his effort, saying that his speech "did not help his cause."
These analysts, however, were concentrating on the influence that Obama's speech would have on the political world. In a perceptive National Review critique, George Weigel looked at the event from the opposite perspective, and noticed the influence that the President was having on the internal affairs of the Catholic Church.
Debates are not uncommon within religious groups, Weigel observed. "Yet never in our history has a president of the United States, in the exercise of his public office, intervened in such disputes in order to secure a political advantage.?? Until yesterday, at the University of Notre Dame."
The key point of the presidential address, Weigel argued, is that he--Obama--was setting himself up as judge, to pronounce on which side of the intramural Catholic debate was correct:
Rather like Napoleon taking the diadem out of the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowning himself emperor, President Obama has, wittingly or not, declared himself the Primate of American Catholicism.
