Notre Dame Law School professor Charles Rice is still on the case
of America's largest religious university's sell-out. The Obama
commencement speech episode is not over, as Rice explains in an
open letter to the school's president begging him to have the
charges against the "Notre Dame
88" dropped. Rice also delves into the school's still
unaddressed, deeper problems in a comprehensive account in his
new book
What Happened to Notre Dame?
In an effort to undo some of the PR damage wrought by his
invitation to the president to speak at commencement, president
Fr. John Jenkins has announced that he will participate in the 2010
March for life in DC. But as Rice argues in an open letter to
Jenkins, such an action would be tinged with irony in light of
Fr. Jenkins's own indifference to the fate of the Notre Dame 88,
a group of protesters facing jail time for pro-life
demonstration.
The Notre Dame 88 are the people who were arrested during the May
Notre Dame commencement for trespassing. They were all pro-life
protestors, and among them were Norma McCovey, the plaintiff in
Roe v. Wade, and 79-year-old Fr. Norman Weslin, a
veteran soldier and anti-abortion protester. The 88 are scheduled
to face trial for their protests, which the school could easily
prevent by asking the prosecutors to drop charges. But the school
refuses to do so, although the protests were peaceful and took
place across the campus from the commencement activities. In his
letter to Fr. John Jenkins, ND president, Rice explains why
the schools should help these protesters avoid jail and writes
that Fr. Jenkins's refusal to drop the charges against Fr. Weslin
"may be the lowest point in the entire history of
Notre Dame." The entire text of the letter is here; it lays out how unconscionable Fr.
Jenkins's actions are.
In What Happened to Notre Dame, Rice explains the
devolution of Notre Dame from a refuge for Catholics to a
secularized school with some religious trappings with clear logic
and in laborious detail.
The crux of Rice's explanation for Notre Dame's loss of religious
authenticity is that the school's experience conforms to
Neuhaus's Law: wherever orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or
later be proscribed. In this case Notre Dame made Catholic
orthodoxy optional in the 1967 "Land O'Lakes" statement, when
it asserted its academic autonomy from the Church and made
orthodoxy contingent on the faculty's goals. And sure enough,
Rice demonstrates, within decades orthodoxy's proscription was so
advanced that not only did the school's academics often run
out-of-bounds, but even in specifically ecclesiastical matters
the school flouted Church teaching, as most clearly seen in the
university's rogue interpretation of the USCCB's statement on
politics in Church life without reference
to the local bishop.
The historical detail Rice provides for this narrative is
extensive -- the reader will become acquainted with not only the
history of the topic going back to the '50s, but also with all
the players in the recent commencement incident, right down to
students who helped organize the alternative commencement
exercises. But Rice is at his best when illustrating what Notre
Dame has lost in its doomed quest for autonomy.
Rice provides introductions to Church teachings on the topics of
life issues and education, from Ex Corde Ecclesiae,
Humanae Vitae, and Deus Caritas Est through the
most recent encyclical, Caritas in Veritatae. He hints
at the profound insight of these documents, which reflect the
wisdom not only of thinkers like Pope Benedict XVI, one of the
most respected theologians in the world, but also that of
centuries of Christian scholars who wrestled with these problems.
Then Rice contrasts those masterpieces of serious thought, which
even if rejected must be at least addressed, with the rock-bottom
abdication of intellectual responsibility of the current
administration, displayed in Fr. Jenkins's justification for the
showing of the obscene and anti-intellectual Vagina
Monologues in 2006: that they were a "creative
contextualization."
The reader of What Happened to Notre Dame will feel
sorry for Rice, who joined the Notre Dame faculty four decades
ago, for realizing what Notre Dame could be.
