Matthew J. Franck, Radford University

The genesis of MoralAccountability.com, as you can see from our mission statement, lay in the disturbing phenomenon, in the 2008 presidential campaign, of self-proclaimed “pro-life” Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and others declaring their support for the candidacy of Barack Obama.  The signers of that statement set forth as one of our goals the effort “to help ensure that never again will good intentions conspire with shoddy reasoning and wishful thinking to compromise the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our community and to undermine the institution of marriage.”  And so we called on all our fellow citizens of good will, but especially those who proclaim a commitment to the sanctity of life yet who had supported President Obama in the election, “to join us now in repelling the attacks that will be launched against life and marriage by this administration.”

The imperative to continue repelling those attacks falls not just on individual citizens, but also on responsible institutions that can reasonably be expected to “speak” with some moral authority in American public life.  That’s why a word is in order here about the continuing controversy over the coming appearance of President Obama at the University of Notre Dame, to give the commencement address and to receive an honorary degree in May.  For Barack Obama is not just any president.  He is the most fervently pro-abortion president ever to be elected, and his first two months have been marked by an uncompromising zeal to advance, in public policy, an attitude worse than indifferent-rather, positively hostile-to the right to life of the unborn.

The president’s revocation of the Mexico City policy, by which he freed up federal funds to flow to groups that promote abortion overseas; his suspension of a recent Bush administration regulation that would have strengthened the protection of medical professionals who act on what their consciences tell them about the sanctity of life; his executive order on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, which puts the federal government directly in the business, for the first time, of encouraging the destruction of innocent human life, and even opens the door to funding of “clone-and-kill” research practices-all these actions are the most prominent and concrete policy accomplishments of President Obama’s young administration.  Yet the University of Notre Dame, viewed by many Americans as the nation’s flagship Catholic institution of higher education, extends a warm embrace to President Obama to address its graduates and their parents at the spring commencement.

Perhaps the best defense yet of Notre Dame’s invitation to the president has been made by Kenneth L. Woodward, formerly the religion editor of Newsweek, on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.  A graduate of Notre Dame himself, Woodward describes himself as “adamantly pro-life, independent as a voter-and greatly pleased that Obama has agreed to speak at my alma mater.”  Let us take his arguments one by one.

1. The president’s acceptance of Notre Dame’s invitation “is quite a coup for the nation’s most resonantly Catholic university.”  To the contrary, the event itself is quite a coup for President Obama.  True, presidents always have many more such invitations than they can possibly accept.  But as Woodward notes, Obama joins six of the last ten presidents in addressing the Notre Dame community.  Were any of the other four invited-and declined the invitation?  This is unlikely.  For sitting presidents, as for candidates, every event to which they are invited is weighed for its political value.  And an invitation to South Bend is an opportunity to reach out to Catholic voters in a venue too good to pass up.  Barack Obama did well among Catholic voters in 2008; he wants to do at least as well in 2012; his policies on abortion and related matters are resolutely opposed by the shepherds of the faith; therefore a Notre Dame speaking engagement-with the bestowal of an honorary degree, no less-is an event of incalculable value in persuading many Catholic voters that he can’t be all that bad, notwithstanding what a few noisy bishops have to say.

2. Woodward cites the 2004 policy of the bishops stating that “Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles,” and he concedes that President Obama’s recent actions have defied those principles.  But he claims that “the bishops’ policy is directed at dissident Catholic politicians,” and therefore should not be brought to bear against the president, “who is not a Catholic.”  This misreads the bishops’ statement from five years ago.  True, it was developed by the bishops’ conference’s “Task Force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians,” and the statement evinced a special concern for the behavior of Catholic public officials.  But the bishops declared their interest in “more effective dialogue and engagement with all public officials, especially Catholic public officials” (my emphasis), and committed themselves “to maintain[ing] communication with public officials who make decisions every day that touch issues of human life and dignity”-surely including all the non-Catholic public officials who make such decisions as well as the Catholic ones.  For it would be decidedly odd for the bishops to take an interest only in how Catholic politicians make public policy.  When the moral direction of the country lies so much in the power of politicians who are not of the bishops’ flock, that would be the very definition of a parochial concern.  By the same token, the statement’s instruction to “Catholic institutions”-the part about not honoring those who set themselves at odds with “our fundamental moral principles”-is as much about the moral health of those institutions as it is about the moral standing of those whom they choose to honor.  How can it be a matter of utmost moment to the bishops whether a Catholic institution honors a “dissident Catholic politician,” but a matter of indifference to them whether it honors a non-Catholic politician whose views are equally inimical to the Church’s teachings on justice and basic human rights?

3. Citing those past presidents who have spoken at his alma mater, Woodward writes that “I never supposed that by granting them the commencement podium the university was signaling its approval of their policies.”  But surely Woodward knows that Roe v. Wade radically disturbed the ground on which that podium stands.  And surely he knows that the sanctity of life is, as the bishops have put it, “not just one issue among many” but a matter on which prudence itself calls for a stand on uncompromising principle.  Since 1973, when Roe was decided, there has not been one unequivocally pro-abortion president invited to give the Notre Dame commencement address.  Barack Obama would be the first.

4. Noting that Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School will receive the Laetare Medal at the same ceremony at which the president will speak, Woodward declares that hence there will somehow be an “engagement” of a kind that should fulfill any reasonable expectations of Notre Dame as “a university devoted to both faith and reason.”  But this is absurd, for it places the onus on Professor Glendon to speak truth to President Obama’s power-to do Notre Dame’s duty while the university shirks it.  Professor Glendon is, I’m sure, quite capable of a pointed diplomacy on this occasion.  But Woodward wishes to put her in an unfair position.  Surely when President Obama is introduced, nothing but compliments will be said of him-he is the university’s honored guest, after all-and it’s highly improbable that he himself will speak searchingly, or even at all, of the matters in dispute between him and the teachings of the church of which Notre Dame is a part.  Does Woodward think the university has invited Professor Glendon-to honor her, to say nice things of her as well-with some covert expectation that she show up as the skunk at the garden party?  If so, we should think even worse of Notre Dame’s leadership than we have so far.

5. In a telling turn of phrase, Woodward refers to President Obama as “so resolute an opponent of the church’s position on abortion.”  It is not merely the church’s position, of course.  In the church’s own view, opposition to abortion is the dictate of the natural law-a command accessible to the natural reason of all men and women, whether they are of the Catholic faith, another faith, or no faith at all.  The equal rights and dignity that inhere in every human being, from conception to natural death, are a precept of simple justice.  Barack Obama is a former teacher of constitutional law who, it seems, learned too well from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney-the author of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and the Supreme Court’s first Catholic justice-that a whole class of human beings can be treated as having no rights the rest of us are bound to respect.  In 1857 that class was made up of Africans brought in chains to America and their descendants held in the bondage of slavery..  Today it is the unborn.  The “church’s position” is not its alone, but also the position of the nation’s founding principles, which speak of our being “created equal” and “endowed by [our] Creator with unalienable rights,” the first of them being the right to life.  One of the things of which American Catholics can be proudest is that their Church is at the forefront of defending these essential American principles, these human rights that all men and women everywhere are obliged to respect.

6. Woodward says “Obama is not coming to Notre Dame to press a pro-choice agenda but to address issues that affect all American citizens, including Catholics.”  Yes, the president will almost certainly keep silent on the abortion issue.  ”He will receive an honorary degree because it is the custom, not as a blessing on any of his decisions,” Woodward continues.  Leave aside the fact that this is a curious reading of what an “honorary degree” means.  Polite smiles and decorum on the part of hosts and guest alike will not remove from people’s minds the dominant image that the president’s “agenda” is being given a passing grade by a great Catholic university.  Abraham Lincoln famously taught that whatever compromises must be made with slavery in practice, no compromise whatever can be made that undercuts the view that slavery is a grave moral wrong.  Abortion is that kind of issue as well.  To give Barack Obama the platform at Notre Dame’s commencement will undercut, for countless Americans, the leadership of the Catholic church on the gravest moral issue of our time.

Kenneth Woodward’s counsel, apparently, is that both the president and his hosts keep quiet about the most significant matter at issue between them.  This would be the quiet of the quietus, however-a deathly silence under the shadow of death itself.  It is no wonder so many who care about Notre Dame, about the Catholic church-and most importantly, about the inherent dignity and equal rights of all members of the human family-are distressed about what will happen in South Bend this May.

Matthew J. Franck is the Chairman of Political Science at Radford University where he teaches American government, constitutional law, American political thought, and political philosophy. An occasional contributor of articles to National Review Online, Dr. Franck blogs for the “Bench Memos” page and is the author of Against the Imperial Judiciary: The Supreme Court vs. the Sovereignty of the People, published in 1996. A graduate of Virginia Wesleyan College, he received his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University.