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

[filialucis]

I saw that this morning on, I think, the First Things blog.

Catholic Vertebral Column Status = Win

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Another good article on the matter, linked from Thomas Peter's update: http://www.ncregister.com/daily/glendon_declines_nd_honor/

It could not have been easy for Glendon to decline the Laetare Medal — after all, she is deserving of it, and the people who nominated her for it are now put in an awkward position. Glendon is proud of her Notre Dame connections, including the 1996 honorary degree that she was awarded. No doubt she is proud of her former student Barack Obama for his laudable achievements. No doubt she would have preferred a quieter honor, one which would not have forced her to choose sides. It is to Father Jenkins’s shame that he tried to use Glendon. It is to her great credit that she refused to be used.

In her life of extraordinary accomplishments, the witness given by Glendon by not going to Notre Dame next month is something of a crowning achievement. It matters a great deal that a celebrated laywoman is rejecting this honor. Notre Dame long ago learned how to disregard the advice, admonishment and even the explicit will of the American bishops. For this they paid no apparent price, as there were always those who were willing to take what Notre Dame was offering, including successive presidents of the United States.

Now someone has finally said No. And not just someone, but a woman who has ennobled everything she has lent her name to. It will be noticed on May 17 that someone thought some things more important than Notre Dame’s honors; that someone thought some things more important than basking in the glow of a popular president; that someone thought 25 years of deliberate confusion, evasion, equivocation and deception from Notre Dame on abortion politics was enough.

Glendon will not collect her Laetare Medal. In not doing so, she has proved worthy of the honor; please God, her courageous decision will make Notre Dame more worthy of the honors it seeks to give.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

This may not be very relevant, but this is a beautiful eulogy of Ambassador Glendon written by someone who really knows his way around the English langauge.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Very appropriate icon.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Wow. Very cool.

[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.