By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
The Cardinal Newman Society continues to provide important information about what is taking place at Catholic colleges these days. The organization’s April 22 press release provided a troubling list of this year’s commencement speakers and honorees at eight Catholic colleges. It should be kept in mind that in 2004 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a document, Catholics in Political Life, requiring Catholic institutions to withhold honors and platforms for opponents of Catholic teaching. The eight colleges listed by the Newman Society are not doing that. Let’s go through the list:
The College of Our Lady of the Elms (Elms College) in Chicopee, Mass., will host Cong. John Lewis of Georgia, who has “earned 100 percent ratings with the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) Pro-Choice America in 2013 and 2014. Lewis voted against banning partial-birth abortions, barring minors from crossing state lines to procure abortions, and requiring minors to involve responsible adults before having an abortion.”
Hilbert College in Hamburg, N.Y., “will award an honorary doctorate of humane letters and host Lieutenant Governor of the state of New York and former Congresswoman Kathy Hochul as commencement speaker.” Hochul has publicly declared her support for abortion and has gained the full endorsement of NARAL Pro-Choice New York.
Loyola University New Orleans will honor former National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who has “publicly advocated for same-sex marriage and given thousands of dollars to the cause,” and made “a $1 million gift to support the LGBTQ Resource Center at Georgetown University, which has been a significant challenge to the university’s Catholic identity.”
Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. “will award an honorary doctor of laws degree and host former Sen. George Mitchell as commencement speaker on May 17, despite his legacy of pro-abortion support. Mitchell is infamously remembered as a sponsor of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would have made abortion protection mandatory in state and federal laws.”
St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia “will host Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter as the undergraduate commencement speaker. Nutter officiated a ceremony granting marriage rights at Philadelphia City Hall to a same-sex couple — Israeli diplomat Elad Strohmayer and his partner.” In 2011, “Nutter launched a campaign to provide free condoms to youth in Philadelphia. In May 2013, Nutter touted the fact that Philadelphia offers ‘safe’ abortion services in the wake of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell.”
St. Mary’s College of California will feature Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show Hardball. More than once Matthews has “publicly stated his support of abortion and his opposition to the Church’s teaching of life beginning at conception.” Matthews once said about the Church’s stance on marriage, “If you’re really anti-gay, you become a Catholic now.”
St. Peter’s University in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., “has selected Cornell Brooks, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to serve as the commencement speaker this year.” The NAACP advocates for same-sex marriage, a position Brooks has indicated that he would defend.
Xavier University of Louisiana will honor Mary Landrieu and Eric Holder “as commencement speakers, as well as award them with honorary degrees.” Landrieu “is endorsed by EMILY’s List and earned a 100 percent NARAL rating in 2013 and a 90 percent rating in 2014 (for missing a vote). Holder has consistently defended the Obama administration’s controversial HHS mandate, which forces mandatory insurance coverage of contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients, regardless of conscientious or religious objection.”
It is hard to defend these choices, even if one takes the position that institutions of higher learning have a responsibility to provide their students with an exposure to a wide variety of points of view. There is a difference between being chosen as a commencement speaker and an invitation to be a guest lecturer at a university symposium on a topical issue.
An offer to be a commencement speaker is an honor; that is why it is often accompanied by an honorary degree. In contrast, an invitation to speak at a symposium, or even to teach a course on a particular topic, implies no necessary honor; the purpose is to provide the student body with access to a point of view they might not get elsewhere.
I can remember a Jesuit professor of mine at Fordham in the early 1960s who liked to demonstrate his commitment to a free exchange of ideas by telling his classes that he would have no objection to the then widely discussed atheist intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre being given a contract to teach a course on Marxism and atheistic existentialism at the Jesuit university.
I saw nothing wrong with the idea at the time, and feel pretty much the same way now. What better way to find out how atheists and Marxists think than hearing it from one of them, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. I realized at the time that some of my classmates might be won over by listening to Sartre or someone with the same views.
But I was confident that most of us would evaluate what we heard from Sartre with a critical eye, weighing it along with what we heard from our other professors, who often were Thomists and champions of the thought of Edmund Burke and St. Augustine. I can remember saying to myself that my classmates who might have been won over to Sartre’s thinking were already leaning that way.
But a commencement speaker and an individual being given an honorary degree is in a separate category. I repeat: The university is honoring these individuals. The president of the university usually introduces them to the assembled graduates and their families with high praise for their life’s work and accomplishments.
When those accomplishments include a long record of activism in causes inimical to what the Church teaches, the message is clear: What the Church teaches is — officially, in the eyes of the university — just another opinion in the marketplace of ideas, something that can be rejected by men and women of intelligence and high principle. That is not a message a Catholic college or university should be promoting.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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