Pro-Choice Rice Headlines Notre Dame Book of Commencement Addresses
By Jon Perr Friday Apr 10, 2009 12:00pm
While the trumped-up imbroglio over President Obama's invitation to deliver the commencement address at Notre Dame continues to simmer, the attitudes and voting behavior of American Catholics belie the manufactured controversy. And as it turns out, a 2003 book of the school's commencement speeches issued by the University of Notre Dame Press shows the political diversity of its past speakers. Among the headliners is 1995 honoree and 1975 South Bend graduate, the pro-choice Condoleezza Rice.
Sadly for the likes of Bush speechwriter turned Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, far from "declaring war on Catholics," Barack Obama enjoys their support. Obama, after all, not only won among Catholic voters by a comfortable 9-point margin, he easily defeated John McCain in St. Joseph County, home to the Indiana university, as well as sweeping an October straw poll among Notre Dame students. And as a recent Gallup survey showed, Catholic attitudes towards abortion, stem cell research, homosexuality, out-of-wedlock parenthood and a host of other social issues differ little from the American electorate that put Barack Obama in the White House.
Of course, political popularity and adherence to ideological litmus tests have not been the deciding factors for the nation's elite Catholic universities in choosing commencement speakers. Despite similar protests, Notre Dame's 1992 graduation ceremonies featured the pro-choice New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And in 1995, the school offered its commencement podium to Notre Dame alumnus and university trustee, Condi Rice.
And to be sure, the "mildly pro-choice" views of Ms. Rice would not be in keeping with the Church's teachings on abortion. As she later told the Washington Times in 2005:
Miss Rice said abortion should be "as rare a circumstance as possible," although without excessive government intervention. "We should not have the federal government in a position where it is forcing its views on one side or the other.
(Apparently, Rice's 1995 speech produced no firestorm akin to that which preceded the Iraq war cheerleader's 2006 commencement appearance and honorary degree at the Jesuit-run Boston College.)
For its part, the leadership at Notre Dame seems to believe that exposing students to the political leadership of their nation, regardless of those leaders' views, fits within the mission of the country's premier Catholic universities. Reflecting that commitment, the University of Notre Dame Press in 2003 published Go Forth and Do Good: Memorable Notre Dame Commencement Addresses by Rev. Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and rector and superior of Moreau Seminary.
With a foreword by Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., who delivered the 1987 commencement, the book includes 24 notable graduation speeches from presidents of both parties as well as a litany of figures who no doubt found themselves on opposite sides of the abortion issue:
Among other featured Commencement speakers are: Joseph Kennedy, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Andrew Young, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Condoleezza Rice, Kofi Annan, and Presidents Eisenhower, Carter and Reagan.
Regarding the invitation to President Obama for its May graduation ceremony, the school's president Reverend John I. Jenkins acknowledged, "Of course, this does not mean we support all of his positions" and called the event "a basis for further positive engagement."
As for Condoleezza Rice, she would doubtless agree. After all, her 1995 speech to Notre Dame graduates was titled, "The Role of the Education Person."
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until their management demonstrates the future viability of their
football program.
Update: I guess I can lay claim to being Number One more recently than the Irish.
..shouldn't she be in jail?
Oh right, Bushie.
Sorry, its just the mood I'm in today.
LOL
LOL
and I have never seen someone wise enough to dispense Condis.
That is why there are too many single parent households.
They should have dispensers in the Ladies' Room too.
don't like his stance on abortion don't invite him to do the commencement address. the right is trying hard to be heard i'm sick of it.
an issue in the Catholic Church until very far right wing members of the clergy, who are tied to certain organizations like Opus Dei, and were pissed off that the government would have the "nerve" to insert it's self into church "problems" like the priest abuse problem, decided this was the way to make the government back off and leave them alone.
This issue has never been about Abortion, but about the Government taking away some funding from Catholic Schools because they didn't adhere to certain policies regarding keeping children safe, and school vouchers.
The Catholic Church in America (meaning a lot of the higher ups) have been protecting bad priests for years, and they still believe that some of the worst offenders were victims, and not victimizers. They refused to police their own, and so had to be policed by the outside world. TSK TSK.
If you want to go back to when all of this calling out of 'pro-Choice" candidates started...that's when it happened. The Church doesn't like having to pay out of it's coffers for any civil legal reason, and so they sicced the Vatican Lawyers on the general public. (Guys like Raymond Burke...if you can find it, look up his record in Michagin and St. Louis.) For all of his "good works" he has been called to the Vatican to sit on the board that decides if churches are acting within Divine Law.
All of this sanctioning against Catholics and none Catholics who hold differing views, is a reaction by a hard core few, to a world that no longer gives their ideology the time of day.
fish on Friday.
I have never been catholic but I used to love Fridays at school because I loved fish. The aroma of the fish cooking would get my mouth watering about mid morning.
we are talking the fried variety here.
I don't know how they cooked those strange little squares of fish meat. It was breaded so they might have baked it. Whatever, to my young taste buds, it was dee-lish!
I rarely eat red meat any more (just a diet thing....want to minimize the fat intake), and I absolutely love fish.
But today, of all days, I just had a full slab of BBQ ribs at Corky's outside of Memphis....mmm, mmm, good!!!!
I guess I'm going to hell.
you can push that Hell thing back a while so you can gobble a couple more ribs and a side order of tater salad while you are killing eternity in Purgatory.
You may go to hell, but you'll have a big greasy smile on your face when you get there, and a full tummy too. :)
You may go to hell, but at least you won't be anemic.
You gotta remember I grew up in the south. If we could catch it, we would fry it. Fried is a food group in the south.
You are showing your age. In my day it was "If we catch em we lynch em." Damn that FDR and his rural electrification.
which the Catholic Church took as a personal affront to their "sovereignty" over their "subjects" anywhere in the world. The RCC never really cared about how many abortions were ever performed, what they really cared about was lip service and hypocrisy in the matter. So my mother's peers in the 1950's could have abortions as long as their doctors called it somehthing else, and the RCC could still maintain the illusion of infallibility. Roe v Wade stuck their nose in it, making it a civil matter and leaving the power of the RCC completely out of it.
This is why the Brazil excommunication scandal happened. The RCC simply couldn't let the mother and the doctors do an abortion so publicly and defiantly.
This is also why you will find RCC funding behind many anti-choice fundamentalist institutions which would otherwise have nothing to do with the RCC. Strange bedfellows over the desire for power over womens' bodies.
The Catholic Church manufactured an issue to stir up the masses? Nay, I say. They would never do such a thing. (end sarcasm)
each and every day they won't.
The media is all a buzz with these sorts of non-news stories. Did the President bow or not? Should Biden speak about Rove when he's asked? Will tea bags be the answer to our financial crisis? Arizona State University decides the president hasn't done enough to earn their honorary degree. Thank goodness there are adults in the white house now that seem very capable of doing their job. Sadly for the media, there is no fun in talking about things like that.
I beg to differ. They are demonstrating their ability to get with the president's program and not offer comments on topics until they know what they are talking about.
Yeah, right! By the time they know what they are talking about it's week old news on the internet.
they can know it that fast. I mean a week goes by pretty quick
for the congenitally slow on the uptake.
Nothing else needs to be said.
May 2001 George Bush spoke at the Notre Dame Commencement. In the five years that he was Governor of Texas, Texas had executed 131 prisoners. The Catholic Church is strongly against capital punishment. If I remember correctly, there was very little protest to W. speaking at Notre Dame.
A more important point; W. was against abortion. Accurate abortion statistics are very hard to get (some groups inflate numbers, some groups depress numbers, and some states don't even report numbers). In the years 2001-2008 it appears that the number of abortions have decreased, but only by less that 10%. This decrease had very little to do with the Bush administration and much more to do with state and local laws. Obama said that although he is pro-choice, he would work to lower abortion numbers. Wouldn't it be ironic if abortion numbers decrease greater under a pro-choice president (Obama) than an anti-abortion president (W.).
They were all found guilty.
And this current opposition to capital punishment is just a passing fad. After all they apologized to Gallileo too. Or was it Copernicus. I forget because my latin has gotten rusty ever since the liberals took over the Vatican and let Kennedy get elected.
I'm a baptized Catholic and have watched the 'too big to fail' church be exposed for the institution of corruption whose Holy Roman Empire is early evidence of the hi-jacking of the name of Jesus for 'crowd control'. Galileo was accused of heresay for suggesting the world wasn't flat!
My God is smarter that the Catholic Church
like copernicus backed the heliocentric view rather than aristotle's geocentric. (earth revolves around sun, not earth being center.) not well rec'd by church.
as they did under Clinton. Abortion numbers started to rise again under Bush due to economic hardships showing up during the Bush regime even before this crisis. Married women were electing not to have more children, younger couples were electing to postpone.
Hopefully "The Role of the Education Person" (educator? student?) is to point out the pervasive hypocrisy of the Catholic church hierarchy
who are the Catholic Clergy gonna sexually abuse then when they grow up to become beautiful young boys?
Eh?
Eh?
I didn't think so...
by Julia Sweeney
Letting Go of God: How many walk the walk and or why?
→ → →[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_FLLzbRVT8 ](5:12)
PS. Wonderful DVD!
Theme Song →[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJKCofjjoJI ](3:57)
Harmony, what a wonderful goal. (♥)
"Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part."
[Charles Rice, Professor of Law, Notre Dame University,
in a pamphlet published by the American Life League]
Amended: "Incest is a voluntary act on the woman's part." Charles Rice, professor of law Notre Dame Univ. http://www.all.org/article.php?id=10065
So horrible, so disgusting, and yet not that surprising.
I wonder if this monster threw incest survivors under the bus when it suited his career (like Freud) or if he's always felt that way.
pregnant rape victims shouldn't punish their rapists by "killing his child."
And now I'm feeling sick again! :(
"I don't think we should punish the criminal [a rapist] by killing his child."
-Dr. John Willke, Past President, National Right to Life Committee.
http://www.sjcdc.org/theocracy.html
and consistent with their outrage at aborting twins (and saving the life) of the very young latin american girl who was impregnated by her stepfather. (rapists are not excommunicated, however; consistent w/ their pedophile protection plan)
Congressman Jack Kimble wrote an open letter to Notre Dame that he posted on his Kimble's Corner blog:
Dear President Father Jenkins,
As a 1985 graduate of Notre Dame, I have many fond memories of my time spent in our lady's hallowed halls. Since graduating I have always remained proud of my alma matter and I have applied the moral training that I received at Notre Dame to my career in public office. As a member of Congress I am often called on to make tough moral decisions and it is my faith and the influence of Notre Dame and Ronald Reagan that allow me to make the tough choices.
It is for this reason I am writing to you to protest in the strongest terms your decision to have President Obama speak at this year's Commencement Ceremony. A graduation speaker must uphold the values of the University he is speaking at and President Obama does not do this.
I remember my own graduation very vividly. When El Salvadoran President Juan Napoleon Duarte spoke to us, we knew that he was approaching us as a fellow Catholic and Notre Dame alumnus and that his faith had carried him through difficult times. When those nuns were murdered in his country by right wing death squads under his leadership he must have felt awful, but like Job in the Bible he persevered to continue fighting against socialism and for Catholic ideals in El Salvador.
My grandfather graduated from Notre Dame in 1942 and while World War II was in everybody's thoughts, it was speaker J. Edgar Hoover who told the graduates about a world where law and order would be strictly enforced. This was another moral man who spoke with the convictions of our beautiful university. What Obama must understand is that the decision of Earl Warren (Commencement Speaker 1957) and his Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade is an anathema to Catholic teaching
Through the years, Notre Dame has had war heroes like William T. Sherman and politicians like President Bush speak at graduations and they have always been men of the highest character. How hypocritical is it of our great university to now ask somebody like Obama, who is quite probably secretly a Muslim, to speak. To go from a great fighter of socialism in Juan Napoleon Duarte to a socialist like Obama in the span of just 25 years is distressing and I fear for the future of Notre Dame. I am suspending my $20 annual contribution until this matter is rectified and a new football coach is hired.
Sincerely,
Representative Jack Kimble (Class of '85)
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
An Open Letter to Congressman Jack Kimble (R-CA) - UPDATED: It's A Parody!
→ → →[ http://www.govtrack.us/congress/replookup.xpd ]
→ → →[ http://broadwaycarl.blogspot.com/2009/04/open... ]
Snip - Not odd that Congressman Kimble would be a conspiracy fearing, Obama socialist name calling, climate crisis denying, creationism supporting hypocrite, but odd that I can find his personal blog, but his name doesn't show up on the House of Representatives government website. You'd think that with an agenda like Kimble's, he'd have his official site up and running instead of calling Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "a mean one and when she stares at you with those cold dead eyes, well you just wilt" in the comments section of his blog like a high school teenage girl talking about her evil chemistry teacher.
Amended: > http://annette-justmylittlepieceoftheworld.bl...
"A" for effort. ;)
Amended: Being deceptive is just part of their "playbook"!
As for Condoleezza Rice, she would doubtless agree. After all, her 1995 speech to Notre Dame graduates was titled, "The Role of the Education Person."
So I take it her diploma was honorary as well?
Bigots???
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