The
open letter from Professor Mary Ann Glendon to Fr. John
Jenkins declining a Laetare Medal from the University of Notre
Dame almost shimmers with clarity of thought, but some of the
people unimpressed by her principled refusal to serve as a token
for two presidents now accuse Glendon of hypocrisy.
In the letter, Glendon explains why she has a problem with Notre
Dame awarding an honorary degree to President Obama. Although she
highlights President Obama’s sorry record on life issues, Glendon
also makes clear that her chief gripes are with Fr. Jenkins, the
university president whose gamesmanship turned a misconceived
publicity coup into a betrayal of faith and episcopal confidence.
Parts of that indictment could not have been new to Fr. Jenkins,
as Glendon’s daughter
noted afterward, because they are similar to what more than
50
bishops had already said about the incoherence of claiming a
Catholic identity while honoring the most profoundly pro-abortion
president in American history.
Hypocrisy hunters and connoisseurs of irony should find
more of both of those things in President Jenkins and President
Obama than in Professor Glendon, yet some complain about
her instead. After all, they reason, how could a
principled person have worked for George W. Bush?
That really is their argument. They don’t think much of the
former president’s color-blind Cabinet or herculean efforts to
relieve the scourge of AIDS in Africa. To hell with the “Marsh
Arabs,” the belated but sincere attention to terrorism, the
thankless enforcement of United Nations resolutions that other
countries ignored, and the mass graves for which Iraq was
formerly known, they seem to say: George W. Bush was
unscrupulous! He let slip the dogs of war, and huddled with a
vice president who was scary rather than genial. Such critics
still do not understand why Pope Benedict XVI met so
cordially with President Bush.
A comment left at Amy Welborn’s Via Media blog
represents the breed: “To grasp, as Glendon is doing here, for
the moral high ground in opposition to a pro-abortion-rights
president even as she has most recently been the public
representative — to the Vatican, no less! — of an
administration that had, as unapologetic policy, such intrinsic
evils as torture: well, it is more ironic than I could ever have
imagined,”
huffed one reader.
Because the Notre Dame story is packed with theological angles in
addition to its pastoral and political angles, at least one
response to the irony-finder of atrophied imagination quoted
above can be drawn from scripture: Peter the apostle was no
stranger to hypocrisy, either, yet that failing did not
disqualify him from fruitful ministry or powerful Christian
witness.
Some critics ignore the intelligence-gathering policies of the
administration for which Glendon served as an ambassador to
single out capital punishment as a blot on the Bush legacy. They
forget that, per the grand old principle of subsidiarity,
American death penalty cases are usually prosecuted at the state
level rather than the federal level.
While Texas did execute people for capital crimes when George W.
Bush was governor there, the death penalty is not applied at
executive whim, and not properly labeled an “intrinsic evil,”
which also means that it cannot be the moral equivalent of
abortion.
Mindful of the fact that Vatican use of capital punishment
persisted into the 19th century with hangings under Pope
Pius IX, the Catechism of the Catholic Church
describes it as a legitimate but morally hazardous form of
punishment that should only be used in those vanishingly few
cases where non-lethal means cannot protect the public from the
depredations of an aggressive individual. To flout that
restriction is not to invalidate it.
Even if Glendon were guilty of hypocrisy, it is not the
game-ender that some of her critics think it is. Those seeking
unalloyed purity in their messengers might remember that the man
who denied Jesus was afterward told by him to “Feed my sheep.” In
our own time, this is also why I smile at people who wonder
whether willingness to pose in bikinis makes it hard for beauty
pageant contestants to defend traditional marriage or swimsuit
models to speak for the pro-life cause.
Carrie Prejean and Kathy
Ireland seem to be doing just fine.
Alleged complicity in torture is a more serious charge than
support for the death penalty, but whether the American
ambassador to the Holy See would have been briefed on the
particulars of what the Bush administration euphemistically
called “enhanced interrogation techniques” remains an open
question. Torture is evil, as almost everybody admits. Fewer
people remember that the Bush administration took pains to build
anti-terrorist policies on “just war” concepts that theologians
have long regarded as matters of prudential judgment proper to
civil authority.
It is perhaps fair to say that President Bush botched the just
war argument by resorting too frequently to a one-note insistence
on freedom. It may also be fair to speculate that back-benchers
in his administration probably abandoned a few (but not all) just
war principles when they looked harder at legal questions than at
moral ones. Some analysts wrongly attempted to justify cruelty on
utilitarian grounds. Yet thoughtful people who do not condone
waterboarding, for example, can nevertheless
make distinctions between extreme discomfort and permanent
injury. Moreover, George W. Bush had at least one advantage that
Barack Obama does not have: Although he was incapable of
soaring rhetoric, and ridiculed for praising incompetent
subordinates with phrases like “Heckuva job, Brownie,” President
Bush never made the mistake of falling in love with his own
delivery. His gaffes were those of ignorance rather than
intellectual pretension. As a result, he approached ethical
questions with a gravity and humility that the current
administration has yet to match.
The bottom line works to Professor Glendon’s advantage: Serious
arguments for just war and the death penalty have been made,
while the same cannot be said about abortion. In view of all
that, the burden of proof rests not on Professor Glendon, but on
her critics.
The other starring figure in the Notre Dame drama wants to have
it both ways. He and his inner circle hold 100% approval ratings
from the abortion lobby, yet he
promises an “inclusive” and “respectful” commencement address
at a university whose stewards are least nominally opposed to his
most significant policies.
That means that if an oblique reference to abortion or embryonic
stem cell research keeps company with boilerplate phrasing about
hope, change, and dialog, listeners will have to endure the
finest sales pitch for moral equivalence that President Obama and
his speech writers can muster. As Francis Cardinal George
observed after being lied to, “It’s hard to disagree with him
because he’ll always tell you he agrees with you,” yet
disagreement is necessary.
Fortunately, Cardinal George not only challenged President
Obama’s lies (some
of which were
recycled for a press conference last week); he also described
similarities between abortion and slavery, suggesting that if
abortion were viewed through the lens of the Lincoln-Douglas
debates, Catholic bishops would be with Lincoln, and President
Obama would be with Douglas.
As the Learned Hand Professor of Law, with research interests in
bioethics, constitutional law, and human rights, Mary
Ann Glendon could also demolish the talking points to which
President Obama has pledged himself, but an award acceptance
speech is not the proper forum for that.
Far from being hypocritical, Professor Glendon’s service as an
ambassador to the Holy See, her lifetime of pro bono work, and
her refusal to be part of the John Jenkins Circus for Obama
speaks volumes about her understanding of Catholic teaching.
Would that we all had her courage.
