A few weeks ago, I received a letter from the president of the University of Notre Dame, from which I graduated over fifty years ago. I get the impression that the letter had been sent to all contributing alumni. I have always been very proud to be associated with Notre Dame, but this letter really made me stop and re-think. It seems that the Reverend John Jenkins, C.S.C. has decided that the university will participate in a lawsuit against the President of the United States, pursuant to Obama’s ruling on contraception and medical insurance. Obviously, from his letter, Father Jenkins does not feel that the university should be burdened by the same regulations that pertain to, non-Catholic schools that also receive funding from the government. He also, obviously, doesn’t feel that women should have as equal access to health care as men. This is not surprising considering the Church’s male oriented hierarchy and their current attack on nuns.
Why you may ask, was I surprised or taken aback by this letter? After all Notre Dame is one of our foremost Catholic colleges and this lawsuit, fraudulent as it may be, is deemed to be a defense of current Catholic doctrine.
Well, I have always thought of ND as being an intellectually advanced institution, where a free flow of ideas is encouraged, kind of like Georgetown, which has always had the advantage of being run by the Jesuits. Obviously I was wrong, so I decided to investigate, not the lawsuit, which has little chance of victory (I’ll get into that later) but Notre Dame’s reasons for being involved in it, which may not be as clearly motivated as they appear.
I think the first question that has to be asked is why would the university be getting involved in a lawsuit that it has little chance of winning, one in which most of the points have already been adjudicated, and one which the vast majority of Catholics would not support?
Let’s look at the facts, religious freedom aside, because this suit really has nothing to do with religious freedom. In order for the university to win this suit, it will have to convince the court that its refusal to cover contraception, is based on some moral good and not just, that it is against current church rules. This will be hard to do, considering that 98% of Catholic women have used contraception sometime in their lives and most Catholic women don’t think of it as a sin. There is also the problem of what constitutes a sin under Catholic orthodoxy. It’s a problem because the rules are always changing and temporary rules don’t count in court. I remember when it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday. It is a situation that removes gravitas from all the Church’s moral positions, not just conception, which more and more appear arbitrary. This is especially true since recent poles show that 57% of Catholics think that Obama’s compromise on the situation is more than fair. Only 29% sided with the lawsuit’s position. We’re talking Catholics here, not the general population. You want to count the general population, the numbers are off the board.
Then comes the problem that this suit isn’t much different than a number of others that have been tried in various courts around the country. There have been a least four court cases starting with one in Sacramento California in 2004, that come to mind. There may have been others that I am not aware of, but in each of the four cases, suits like the one in question have been thrown out or ruled against.
The big rallying cry in this whole situation has been freedom of religion, but like most political slogans that’s really phony. What we’re dealing with, in this case, is freedom from religion. No one is telling the Catholic Church what they can or can’t do in their churches. But the University of Notre Dame isn’t a church. There are churches on campus but what we are dealing with here is a school, a school, which takes federal funding for many of its programs. As such it falls outside the boundaries of a religion and very much inside the parameters of what it is, a school. If we give that school, even if it is associated with a religion, the perks that we have, as a nation, decided to bestow on religious institutions,
we are cheating every other school in the country, and by doing so, creating a situation, in which those non-Catholic schools must cry out for freedom from religion.
So what this really looked like was a very expensive ploy by certain bishops and certain institutions, among them Notre Dame, to put President Obama in a bad light, just before an election, which he has now won. Why would I think such a thing? Maybe because of another decision by Fr. Jenkins. In this one, alumni were recently pitched that the University was putting its name on credit cards issued by Bank of America. I wrote to Fr. Jenkins asking why he would besmirch the name of Notre Dame, by putting it in the same sentence as a bank that has the most scurrilous reputation of any institution in an already disgraced industry. Bank of America has more indictments and many more convictions for criminal activity than any other bank in the country. Why, I asked Fr. Jenkins would he tie the name of Our Lady’s University to that of a bunch of degenerate crooks?
Of course Bank of America is one of President Obama’s principle opponents in everything he does. I am not saying that the University is cottoning up to BoA for financial reasons but why would it enter into an almost unwinnable lawsuit, spend huge amounts of money that will certainly be, in part, taken away from scholarship programs, if it weren’t for political purposes?
But, of course the suit is for political purposes. The Catholic Church and especially its universities have come to rely on the generosity of their alumni. The biggest donations come from the richest alumni and most of those fall into that famous 1%. What candidate did all but the most moral of the 1% back? Do I have to say it? Of course not, We all know that when the big donors, the ones who give buildings, call the president of a school to ask a favor, it takes a man with a damned strong moral compas to turn them down. Is that what Notre Dame’s involvement in this lawsuit is all about? Only Fr. Jenkins can answer that.
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