Since its founding in 1842, the University of Notre Dame has been a beacon of light in a sometimes dark and confused world. Our Lady’s University has been looked to for inspiration, guidance, and truth – not only by faithful Catholics, but by countless people of good will all around the globe.
For the past six weeks, that beacon has been flickering, in danger of being extinguished from within, because of a devastating error in judgment by two lay members of the university’s administration who announced the appointment of a radically pro-abortion faculty member to become director of a prestigious campus institute, effective July 1st.
Happily, the university has now announced that the appointment will not move forward.
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The backlash against this tragically misguided appointment of Professor Susan Ostermann has been overwhelming – from pro-life students, faculty members, alumni, parents, and Catholic clergymen.
Unlike past Notre Dame scandals involving honors bestowed on pro-abortion politicians, the current scandal would not have been a temporary, one-day disgrace. It would have embedded Prof. Ostermann as head of the prestigious Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, a senior administrative position for an avowed advocate for positions which are antithetical to Catholic values and the mission of Our Lady’s University. The appointee has not simply espoused pro-abortion positions – Prof. Ostermann has aggressively, publicly, repeatedly promoted them and attacked pro-life values and those who hold them.
This appointment, if it had been allowed to take effect, would have been seen as Notre Dame’s placing a higher priority on currying favor with the secular culture than on fidelity to the University’s Catholic mission, character, and values. It would have been viewed as a betrayal of the university’s Patroness.
There was a somewhat analogous situation involving the abortion issue at a Catholic university some years ago. Father Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., was President of Gonzaga University, a Jesuit school in Spokane, Washington in April of 2000 when, unbeknownst to him, a Planned Parenthood official was invited to give a speech on campus.
When he learned of it, Father Spitzer canceled the event. In an interview afterwards, excerpted below, he explained his decision:
“Religious identity and academic freedom must be brought into balance and complementarity in order to have a Catholic university…. all universities must decide whether they are going to act on principle or not…. In academic settings, academic freedom frequently is thought to have absolute sway. However, you cannot act according to principle if you give academic freedom absolute sway. If that happens, anything is tolerable. If we make toleration an absolute principle, we can’t act from other moral principles. No university committed to the welfare of culture and society can live under that unwitting assumption….
“[T]here are two logics involved. One logic will always try to legitimize an absolute interpretation of toleration. The other kind of logic espouses a principle of non-toleration when certain objective criteria such as the destruction of whole populations of vulnerable, innocent human beings are present…. We hire faculty and staff, and we show them our mission statement, which indicates these institutional commitments to the Catholic and Jesuit character of Gonzaga. It should, therefore, come as no surprise to anyone that these are the commitments under and through which we exist….”
Perhaps it was thoughts similar to these that Notre Dame President, Father Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., a humble and holy priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, took into consideration when deciding how to deal with the misguided actions of two subordinate administrators who had caused this tragic scandal to land on his desk.
As Pope Leo recently told us, using the words of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, “the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion.” He added, in his own words, that “no policy can genuinely serve the people if it denies the unborn the gift of life…”
One of the titles by which the Mother of Jesus is known is Our Lady of Sorrows, because of the Seven Sorrows that she suffered. If this tragic scandal had been allowed to stand, it would have added an Eighth.
