Please take notice: this is what dignity and courage look like

[fpb]

http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/04/flash-mary-ann-glendon-turns-down-notre.html

Comments

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

While I am on the other side of the particular issue (just, and as I think you are aware, with great difficulty). It is impossible not to respect someone willing to give something they would obviously treasure for the sake of her principles.

It does strike me as unconscionable to set her up as some sort of balancing force without seeking her permission.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

More than that - she had been told that she would get the Laetare Medal (which is a very high honour indeed among American Catholics) before anything was announced about President Obama. So it seems clear that she was intended to be trapped into supplying the required balance, and that the whole manoeuvre was intended to placate the increasingly vocal Catholic laity by bringing in together the most outstanding Catholic lay person in America and the President. And I still think that the thing would not have made such a scandal were it not that Fr.Jenkins had seen fit not only to invite the President to deliver a commencement speech, but to award him with an honoris causa degree in civil law. To deliver a commencement speech is an honour indeed, but one that did not commit the University to his policies; with the exception of Bill Clinton, every American President since Eisenhower has given at least one commencement speech at Notre Dame, and nobody imagines that this involved Notre Dame endorsing the policies of Eisenhower or Nixon or Carter or Reagan. What is more, it could be presented as a compliment to his famous rhetorical talent. An honorary degree, on the other hand, means praising the work the man has done in the given field; and before his election to President, the most famous single vote Senator Obama ever cast was againt the Born Alive Infants Act. The degree is certainly what made me hit the roof, and I suspect that it was what drove most of the Catholics who have protested. It was the specific thing mentioned by Fr.Jenkins' own diocesan Bishop, d'Arcy, in the letter that set the ball rolling, in which he announced that he would not attend this year's commencement ceremony. I may say, incidentally, that it is incredible arrogance on the part of a simple priest, however prestigious his post, to treat his Bishop as Jenkins treated d'Arcy; but then, Jenkins also dissed the Pope.