Joseph Bottum er redaktør av tidsskriftet First Things, og skriver en svært iinteressant (og lang) artikkel om at president Obama skal motta en æresdoktograd i jus fra det kjente katolske universitetet Notre Dame. USA’s president pleier hvert år å besøke og dele ut vitnemål ved tre universiteter – et offentlig, et frittstående og et militærakademi – og i år var det ene universitetet katolsk.
Så langt så alt bra ut, med så valgte Notre Dame å også gi presidenten en æresdoktograd (noe de andre universitetene ikke gjorde), stikk i strid med de katolske biskopenes regler for slike ting. For siden president Obama er (ekstremt) sterkt for fri abort, bryter han så fundamentalt med katolsk lære, at han ikke må settes fram som et eksempel til etterfølgelse på en slik måte. Over 50 av USA’s katolske biskoper har tydelig sagt fra at dette er upassende, men universitetets president har ikke bøyd seg. Slik har denne saken gått fra vondt til stadig mye verre:
We all knew this fight was coming. The Catholic Church and the Catholic colleges have been heading toward a crash since at least 1990, when John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, his apostolic constitution for Catholic institutions of higher education. And now, at last, the battle is public—brought to fever pitch by Notre Dame’s bestowing of an honorary law degree on a prominent supporter of legalized abortion.
As it happens, that supporter of abortion is also the president of the United States, which is unfortunate in a number of ways—beginning with the fact that the office of the president, regardless of who holds it, deserves respect and honor from American citizens of every political persuasion. For that matter, a majority of at least self-described Catholics (54 percent, according to widely reported exit polls) voted for Barack Obama in November, and, as our first black president, he serves a symbolic function in American political life that Catholics should applaud.
But even when we know a fight is coming, we don’t always get to choose the field on which it will be fought. A better place to make all this public might have been the Sacred Heart University dinner at the end of April, which the bishop of Bridgeport, William Lori, refused to attend because it was in honor of the pro-abortion Kerry Kennedy. Or the Xavier University commencement at the beginning of May, which the archbishop of New Orleans, Alfred Hughes, refused to attend because it was in honor of the pro-abortion political strategist Donna Brazile.
Of course, neither Kerry Kennedy nor Donna Brazile are as prominent as Barack Obama, and, in truth, neither Sacred Heart nor Xavier are as firmly identified with Catholicism in the American mind as the University of Notre Dame. And so this is where the long-expected fight at last broke out: in a public controversy over the honoring of the president of the United States with a Catholic law degree.
The story began in December, when the president of Notre Dame, Fr. John I. Jenkins, asked Mary Ann Glendon, the Harvard law professor and former ambassador to the Vatican, to accept this year’s Laetare Medal—the university’s annual honor for service to the Church and society. Then, on March 20, the White House announced that President Obama would be the commencement speaker this spring at Arizona State University, the University of Notre Dame, and the United States Naval Academy: the usual presidential grouping of a state university, an independent college, and a military academy. That same day, however, Notre Dame announced that it would also be honoring the president with a law degree: the only one of three schools to add an honorary doctorate to the commencement ceremonies.