Say Anything Blog

In his speech at the university Obama called for “fair minded” debate between the two sides of the abortion issue.  As soon as the speech was over, Notre Dame’s president called the protesters “religious vigilantes.”

Can you feel the hope and change?

Speaking on Trinity’s campus in Northeast Washington, McGuire said that “a half-century of progress for Catholic higher education is at risk of slipping back into those insular, parochial pre-Vatican II days” when academic freedom was not valued within the Catholic Church.

“The real scandal at Notre Dame today is not that the president of the United States is speaking at commencement,” McGuire said. “The real scandal is the misappropriation of sacred teachings for political ends. The real scandal is the spectacle of ostensibly Catholic mobs camping out at Notre Dame for the specific purpose of disrupting the commencement address of the nation’s first African American president. This ugly spectacle is an embarrassment to all Catholics. The face that Catholicism shows to our new president should be one marked with the sign of peace, not distorted in the snarl of hatred.”

McGuire continued, “The religious vigilantism apparent in the Notre Dame controversy arises from organizations that have no official standing with the church, but who are successful in gaining media coverage as if they were speaking for Catholicism. . . . They have established themselves as uber-guardians of a belief system we can hardly recognize. Theirs is a narrow faith devoted almost exclusively to one issue. They defend the rights of the unborn but have no charity toward the living. They mock social justice as a liberal mythology.”

I’m no Catholic, but it’s pretty clear even to me as an outsider that opposition to abortion is a key component of the Catholic faith.  It is a part of their religious doctrine, and expecting that universities that claim to be Catholic actually adhere to and respect Catholic doctrine doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable to me.

Most of the people upset by Obama’s visit to Notre Dame are not vigilantes.  They’re people who feel betrayed by an abandonment of principle.