President Barack Obama will be the principal speaker and the recipient of an honorary doctor of laws degree at the University of Notre Dame’s commencement May 17.
Longtime Notre Dame philosophy professor Ralph McInerny called it "a deliberate thumbing of the collective nose at the Roman Catholic Church to which Notre Dame purports to be faithful."
"The invitation to Barack Obama … is an unequivocal abandonment of any pretense at being a Catholic university," McInerny wrote in a column today. "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."
Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org, said the university should rescind the invitation.
“For a prominent Catholic institution to give President Obama the benefit of their platform is shocking and disappointing,” he told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
"There’s a clear contradiction between his policies and that which a Catholic institution is presumably bound to promote.”
Obama would be the ninth U.S. president to be awarded an honorary degree by Notre Dame and the sixth to speak at its commencement ceremonies. The president also is scheduled to give commencement addresses at Arizona State University and the Naval Academy.
