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The University of Notre Dame has announced that Pres. Barack Obama will be the principal speaker and will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree at the university’s commencement on Sunday, May 17. The invitation comes after the president has taken several official actions that directly oppose the Catholic Church’s most sacred teachings. National Review Online asked some of our experts on education and Catholicism for their comments.
At the link, an important discussion on what it can mean for Notre Dame to have invited President Obama to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address, to students who will have been taught (we hope) that abortion is deeply immoral, and who will witness the honoring of a president who supports it.
What, exactly, would a president have to do to be found ineligible for such an honor by a putatively Christian institution? Apparently, supporting abortion in the most radical way possible is not enough.
Perhaps if he actually ate the babies after the abortions? An interesting question: is cannibalism a greater sin than aiding, abetting and encouraging unjust killing in the first place? I think not. After all, they’re already dead, right? It’s a shame to waste them. (And besides, for the pro-abortion crowd, they never did have human rights anyway, did they? I mean, being just lumps of tissue and everything. How immoral can it be to eat something that has no civil rights, anyway? Isn’t that the same as cattle ranching, or hunting and eating what you kill?)
So, I think we have conclusively demonstrated that even if Obama ate aborted babies, he would still get an honorary degree from Notre Dame, a Christian university, since abortion is a greater sin than cannibalism (if someone else did the killing), and promoting abortion did not disqualify him.
Ah, but if Obama was well known as an industrial polluter, shooter of wolves from helicopters, corporate raider/downsizer, Pentecostal snake handler, and believer in young-Earth Creationism, and had still managed to get elected, would Notre Dame have invited him to receive an honorary degree and address impressionable undergraduates ?
Probably not. Some sins really do matter.
The next post in this series is here.
