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Obama at Notre Dame: A conversation begins
May. 27, 2009
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President Barack Obama delivers his address during commencement ceremonies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., Sunday, May 17. (AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Printer-friendly versionSend to friendPDF versionNotre Dame, Ind.
Although Barack Obama was invited to speak at the University of Notre Dame’s commencement because of his historic victory as the first African-American president of the United States, he may be remembered for something even greater: beginning a civil conversation between supporters and opponents of legalized abortion in a speech that earned praise from those on both sides of the issue.
For all the news coverage of finger-wagging bishops, bussed-in protesters and Alan Keyes being dragged off in handcuffs, the bigger story at Notre Dame’s 164th commencement was the respectful tone, not only from the president of the country and the president of the university, but also from the majority of graduates and other Notre Dame students.
In the end, it was pretty much like any other graduation. Black-robed graduates posed with beaming parents for pictures in front of the Touchdown Jesus mosaic before the ceremony. Afterwards they ran up the stairs of the golden-domed Administration Building, smiling for even more pictures at the top. And they cheered their graduation speaker, who just happened to be the president of the United States.
Sure, they had to drive past more than 200 protesters on the way into campus, many of them holding graphic signs of aborted fetuses. And there was the wait to pass through metal detectors before entering the Joyce Center arena. Then a few hecklers tried to disrupt the president’s speech, but they were quickly removed. All in all, the ceremonies went off without much of a hitch. The sun shone, as it’s practically guaranteed to do for Notre Dame graduations. Even parking was easy.
Although 20 or so graduates (of 2,900) chose to boycott the official graduation, and about a dozen wore yellow crosses and baby’s feet on their caps in a sign of protest, the majority of students either supported the university’s decision to invite Obama or decided to attend out of respect for the president of their country. (In an unofficial gauge of sentiment, a Facebook group called “We Will Be Honored to Have President Obama at Notre Dame” has 8,293 members, while the largest anti-Obama group, “Tell Notre Dame to Un-invite President Obama” has only 2,234.) A few graduates wore “Obama: Fine by me” T-shirts under their robes.
“I’m excited to see the president speak,” said Tony Ceravolo, a computer engineering graduate from South Bend, Ind., who was sitting in the sun outside Notre Dame Stadium before the ceremony. “He’s the leader of our nation and the first black president. It’s historic. A lot of us are pro-life, but we also respect the president of the United States.”
Although the controversy around the president speaking was dining hall conversation when it was first announced, students quickly tired of the constant letters to the editor in the student newspaper and what became known as “the abortion plane” -- which pulled a sign with a graphic photo of a 10-week aborted fetus.
“It’s kind of gross,” said Ceravolo. “I wish they wouldn’t have gone to that extreme.”
Andrew Beroli, a political science major from Knoxville, Tenn., originally opposed the Obama invitation, believing that Catholic schools should follow the bishops’ rule against hosting speakers who hold views opposing Catholic moral teaching.
But he chose not to boycott the event. “I hope the respect we have shown as a class will help convince moderates and even some liberals that not all pro-life people are fundamentalist bigots” -- a reference to some of the protesters whom many students considered less than charitable.
At this comparatively conservative university, the protesters may have been preaching to the choir -- or to the media, which descended on the campus as if it were a national championship football game. Some students thought the media coverage portrayed the university in a bad light -- and not for inviting Obama.
“It’s almost a little embarrassing,” said Teresa McGreeney, a junior from Louisville, Ky., and reporter for the campus’s online radio station. “I feel it’s such an honor to have the president come. We should be excited and respectful.”
Like many students, she described herself as more broadly pro-life than just antiabortion. “There are a lot of other life issues that get ignored,” she said. “I think Obama offers a real pro-life perspective. He’s trying to solve the problem, not just attacking abortion.”
President Obama greets graduates following commencement ceremonies at the University of Notre Dame May 17. (CNS/Jason Reed)Though most graduates didn’t let the controversy mar their special day, Jaime Luna of Ventura, Calif., thought the protesters were turning his graduation into a circus. “This is a time for graduates to celebrate,” said the political science major who plans to volunteer with Teach for America. “I don’t think this is the correct venue to protest.”
But his brother-in-law, Alex Luna, who was holding the video camera, added, “It’s unfortunate, but we understand that wherever the president goes, there will be people protesting.”
The activists on the streets outside the university were primarily out-of-towners who arrived on buses chartered by the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League and Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, who together created the Web site NotreDameProtest.com to coordinate their opposition to Obama’s appearance.
“We want about 25 steps between graphic signs,” a yellow-shirted “Staff” instructed those holding placards featuring bloody aborted fetuses -- what the Pro-Life Action League calls its “Face the Truth” tour. Others held preprinted signs saying, “Shame on Notre Dame” or “Obama = Abortion.”
Although he has spent the better part of the past two months begging Notre Dame president Fr. John Jenkins to disinvite Obama, Joseph Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League admitted the whole controversy has been “a blessing in disguise” for the pro-life movement. “It’s brought attention to Obama as an abortion supporter,” said Scheidler, a Notre Dame alum. “It was God writing straight with crooked lines.”
But doctoral graduate Charles Camosy believes the protesters’ lack of charity is an impediment to real movement on the pro-life issue. “While I share their point of view, their methods keep us polarized and prevent us from changing anyone’s minds,” said Camosy, who received his degree in ethics and is teaching at Fordham University in New York. “The truth can’t prevail if no one is listening.”
While several hundred students, parents and other protesters gathered with Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop John M. D’Arcy on the South Quad lawn for an open-air Mass, march and alternative graduation prayer service at the grotto, Obama entered the Joyce Center to whoops and cheers of the more 10,000 graduates, family and guests in the basketball arena.
Both Jenkins and Obama tackled the controversy directly in their remarks to graduates. Jenkins pointed out that most of the focus had been on Notre Dame’s invitation, with little attention paid to Obama’s decision to accept.
“President Obama has come to Notre Dame, though he knows well that we are fully supportive of church teaching on the sanctity of human life,” Jenkins said to applause, “and that we oppose his policies on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Others might have avoided this venue for that reason. But President Obama is not someone who stops talking with those who differ with him. Mr. President: This is a principle we share.”
The class of 2009 showed their support for Jenkins’ decision not to rescind the invitation by voting him as the Senior Class Fellow, an award traditionally given to someone who has had a significant impact on the graduating class.
The sustained cheers, standing ovation and multitude of flashbulbs that greeted the president when he processed in were repeated when Obama received his honorary degree, which specifically cited his “willingness to engage with those who disagree with him and encourage people of faith to bring their beliefs to the public debate.”
A pro-life protester holding a rosary shouts as he is escorted from the Joyce Center during President Obama's commencement address. (CNS/Christopher Smith)A man tried to shout down the president and was escorted from the center, just as the president joked that honorary degrees are “pretty hard to come by. So far I’m only one for two as president” (a reference to Arizona State University’s decision not to give him an honorary degree). He also joked about his willingness to join the team named after him in Notre Dame’s Bookstore Basketball Tournament. “Next year, if you need a six-foot-two-inch forward with a decent jumper, you know where I live.”
When another protester shouted “Abortion is murder,” the crowd booed loudly, then erupted in the cheer, “We are … ND!” Obama responded, “We’re not going to shy away from things that are uncomfortable.”
He didn’t.
Calling for “fair-minded words” and a “presumption of good faith” for those with whom we disagree, Obama received applause for this line: “Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships might be relieved.”
While admitting that “the views of the two camps are irreconcilable,” he called for the kind of common ground that the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago sought. “So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their children to term,” he said.
In a possible policy change, he also promised to “honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause.”
In a slightly less rousing speech, Judge John T. Noonan of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also encouraged debate in the effort to seek the truth about an issue that is both “patently personal and significantly social.”
Conflicting consciences must be respected -- even among friends, he said. “You may suggest what my conscience should say, but you cannot tell me what my conscience must say,” he said to applause.
Noonan said he respected the decision of a friend, Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, who declined the prestigious Laetare Medal rather than share the stage with Obama. Notre Dame decided not to choose another honoree and invited Noonan, who received the medal in 1984, to give the Laetare address.
“But I am here to confirm that all consciences are not the same,” Noonan said, “that we can recognize great goodness in our nation’s president without defending all of his multitudinous decisions, and that we can rejoice on this wholly happy occasion.”
When asked if her happy occasion was marred by all this talk of abortion and politics, Allyson Brantley of Boulder, Colo., said definitely not. “The whole weekend is about how great we are,” said the history major who plans a year of service at a middle school in El Paso, Texas, after graduation. “It was nice to hear about something that reaches beyond us and affects the whole country.”
Heidi Schlumpf teaches communications at Aurora University in the Chicago suburbs.
Online resources
The full text of President Obama's speech is at NCRonlne.org along with reactions to what he said.
Much to do is being made by
Much to do is being made by pro-abortion proponents about how President Obama will champion initiatives to reduce abortions. For example, in this article, Ms. Schlumpf quotes the President saying, “So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies and making adoption more available…”.
Pro-abortionists present a potpourri of arguments to defend abortion as an ethical activity. There are often tangential discussions involving sociological, legal and economic matters. These are distractions and are generally irrelevant to the core issue regarding the status of the unborn child. The more sophisticated pro-abortion defenders will typically admit that the baby is a human being, but lacks the moral standing of a person. In brief, the unborn child has not yet achieved personhood status due to a deficiency of sentience, reasoning capability, self awareness or some other capability. (Note the pseudo-metaphysical nature of this argument.) Sometimes we hear the fetus being referred to as a “clump of cells” which is a simplified version of this train of thought boiled down for popular consumption. Regardless of the sophistication of the defender, the case is made that abortion is the approximate moral equivalent to an organ removal or liposuction since the unborn baby is a material that is not a person, therefore he or she can be removed, destroyed and disposed of via an ethical medical procedure.
So if abortion is nothing more than a medical operation, such as a liposuction, then why should pro-abortionists get excited about efforts to try to reduce the number of abortions? After all, if we are to believe that there is nothing ethically wrong with a medical practice then why should we collectively try to minimize it? For example, one may think that liposuctions may be frivolous, but most will agree that there is nothing morally wrong with this operation; hence large scale initiatives to reduce liposuctions would rightly be perceived as generally nonsensical and certainly not a matter of public policy. Nationwide efforts to reduce a medical practice are typically undertaken if there is something inherently wrong with it; hence, this begs the question: is there something fundamentally unethical about abortion that we should engage in large scale efforts to reduce it?
The pro-abortion argument is ultimately inconsistent and irrational.
Rich Joseph, you say: "The
Rich Joseph, you say: "The pro-abortion argument is ultimately inconsistent and irrational." That is not the same as saying "the pro-choice argument is inconsistent and irrational". Pro-life protagonists would like to identify pro-choice as pro-abortion. This is a calculated fraud and deception.
Life’s continuum is the evolved podium on which pro-life/ pro-choice differences can be reconciled. Earth’s large-scale aborting of life, human and ecological, and the great anxiety over abortion now occurring, is a common and joined reality that demands conscionable consideration. Conscionable choosing demands proportional consideration of human survivability and ecological sustainability.
Love for life energizes every fiber of self-reflective consciousness. Pro-life compulsion finds any assault on life profoundly offensive, but especially, the intentional abortion of human life. The very thought of abortion is radically repulsive; it grates on the grain of right reason and prompts reflexive defense of the unborn. If this is true, how is it that, in this time, intuitional sense fails to prevent abortions, and even allows choices against the better mind of intuition?
The reasons behind this obscenity are complex and globally troubling. The decision to abort is no easy, much less, gratifying choice. But as experience and history testify, choices, good and bad, have good and bad outcomes, and the cumulus of outcomes can become game-changing from a status-quo that will never return.
In our times we are experiencing such a game-change. Human overreach is suffocating Earth’s web-life by polluting air, water and soil, and by species’ extinctions in the artificial and energy-intense hyper culturing of a select few species. Human culture has become a corporate culture of spoliation and death, a prostitutional endeavor beyond justification.
The conundrum of exploiting web-life to extinction impacts more directly on female intuitional sensitivities than on male, for, female intuitional angst over the abortion affects her person more immediately and consequentially; life’s dependence on female nurture persists from conception to death. Trafficking and spoiling of life produce gut-wrenching angst that demands proactive response.
We need to settle our minds about life and reality, that is, to open our minds to the evolved reality of energy/ matter unity and the continuity of life and conscious-ness. To be “pro-life”, one must be “pro-choice”, namely, practiced in habits of choosing the conscionable option and avoiding the unconscionable. Sometimes choice isn’t between good and evil, but between the lesser of evils. That is the conundrum we face today.
There are those who rail against personal/ social decadence, and for good reasons, but who do so from misguided and unproductive presumptions. The misinformation driving cultures through millennia has contributed largely to the cumulus of outcomes conflicting conscience; more of the same, of ideological righteousness and judgmentalism, does nothing to mitigate the bad situation or reverse the bad outcomes of misguided culture.
The worldview presumptions of ancient cultures persist in world religious traditions and continue to drive people in self-destructive directions. At the heart of cultural confusion and fixation is the theological understanding that God individually creates the individual soul of every person; therefore, man or woman cannot gainsay the personal action and intention of God in creating new life. Human consciousness has yet to discern how God uses the medium of nature to create body and soul together, and the moral implications that compel humankind with respect to other-life abortion.
So, the question is, “how does God create the individual human soul?” Does God create soul independently from nature’s energy/ matter evolution? If it is believed that soul is an extra-world creation, above and apart from material evolution (creation), what is the “supernatural”, then, tolerance of fetal abortion is a direct affront against the will of God.
If, on the other hand, nature is the medium of the divine act of creating a human soul, then the wellbeing of nature has a priority value of equivalent merit in divine intentions, and human action that aborts other natural life (in a way that aborts also human life) is a direct offense against the will of God. In the light of this truth, evolution takes on a wholly new dimension of moral importance; which is to say: death to the amniotic graces of nature is also an abortion that denies natural soul. Where is the moral proportionality in weighing natural/ human abortions? This buried moral sensitivity is an underlying angst that weighs on the intuitional soul of woman more heavily than on man.
Dominion theology divides the realms of the spiritual and the material in distinct and separate categories; this error of insight belies the truth of nature, namely, the unity and continuity of energy/ matter co-evolution. In pitting spirituality against materiality, the theology of dominion culture drives people into schizophrenic thinking and acting that accumulate destructive and terminal outcomes for nature and humankind. Corporate institutions are blind to the cultural abortions of their choosing, including churches fixated in fideism.
People at the “religious right” are uncompromisingly intolerant of the thought that pro-life is also pro-choice; for them pro-choice is pro-abortion, and in this presumption they are wrong. Too often, life’s circumstances in the face of (an unintended) pregnancy seem so soul-wrenching that there is no good choice that is both pro-nature and pro-life, so a pro-life decision pits the life of the unborn child against the sustainability of nature.
The waste of nature is an overwhelming abortion that weighs heavily on intuitional conscience. The economic price for wasting nature will not be escaped, as is presently being experienced by global humankind — which focuses the public mind on population reductions and stopping unconscionable waste and excess consumption. Disregard, disrespect and disdain for nature, as practiced by public institutions are unconscionable. The examination of conscience must begin with churches, which are and represent to be the guardians of cultural conscience.
The callous idolatry of male super-arrogation and patriarchal dominion is an anxiety of soul that dominates all aspects of male/ female relationships. Persistent insult results in enduring trauma, both psychological and physical; instituted male dominion frustrates female sensitivity every step of the way in religious, political and corporate decisions. The persisting phenomenon of the “culture of death” is mortally telling on all life, and except for the healing virtue of femininity, humankind will not be rescued from its self-induced blindness. As Walter Brueggemann says:
“Adam, that is, mankind, has a partner and mate, adamah, land. Humankind and land are thus linked in a covenantal relationship, analogous to the covenantal relationship between man and woman …unfortunately, in our society we have terribly distorted relationships between man and woman, between adam and adamah, distortions that combine promiscuity and domination.… Likely, we shall not correct one of these deadly distortions unless we correct them both”.
(Quoted by Monica Steffen, “Ethical Land Use”, Quantum Religion, pg 212ff) http://www.authorhouse.com:80/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=16722
In the divine order, God entrusts “choice” in the matter of new life to women; men need to have the same pro-choice confidence in women that God has. Humankind needs to learn not to obstruct divine order, rather, facilitate women in their ordained roles. Divine revelation in creation is gradual and evolving, aided or obstructed by human behavior/ misbehavior. God self-reveals from generation to generation, if only human insight is open to divine/ natural symbiotic purposes.
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