When President Obama delivers the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in May, he may face a situation that he has rarely encountered in recent months — many in the audience and outside the hall may have opposed his visit.
The university’s invitation to Mr. Obama to deliver the commencement address on May 17, and receive an honorary doctor of laws degree, has ignited a backlash, both on campus and off, among opponents of abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research; Mr. Obama recently lifted a ban on federal financing for both. And it has revived the long-simmering debate over whether a Catholic university should honor someone who does not ascribe to Catholic teachings; in 2004, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops expressly said that Catholic institutions should not honor those who act “in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.”
Some at the university hope Mr. Obama will use the visit not just to deliver an address but to discuss these issues with students and others.
“At Notre Dame there’s the audacity of hope that the president will make good on his promises to take these issues seriously and dialogue with his critics,” said R. Scott Appleby, a history professor at the university, who supports the invitation. “This visit is one occasion, among others, for Notre Dame and the entire Catholic community to find ways to deepen and extend the dialogue on life issues.”
Still, more than 210,000 people around the country have signed an online petition started by the Cardinal Newman Society, which promotes traditional Catholic teachings, demanding that the invitation be revoked. The petition calls the invitation “an outrage and a scandal” and says that Mr. Obama’s views “directly contradict fundamental Catholic teachings on life and marriage.”
Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of the Phoenix Diocese on Wednesday called the invitation a “public act of disobedience.” Bishop John M. D’Arcy of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, which includes Notre Dame, said he would not attend the graduation ceremony, saying Mr. Obama “has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.”
The Rev. John I. Jenkins, the university’s president, who declined a request for an interview, has said he would not rescind the invitation, but has also said it should not be construed as support for Mr. Obama’s positions.
Opposition to the invitation may be stronger off campus than on, and Dennis Brown, a spokesman for the university, said much of it appeared “very orchestrated,” based on similar e-mails and letters.
In the November presidential election, Mr. Obama won the county in which the university is located, St. Joseph’s, by 17 points over Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee; in 2004, the county voted by two points for President George W. Bush, the Republican, over Senator John Kerry, the Democrat, who is Catholic.
Nationally, Catholic sentiment also favored Mr. Obama in November, when 54 percent of Catholics voted for him, compared with 45 percent for Mr. McCain, according to exit polls. That too was a switch from 2004, when Mr. Bush won Catholic voters, 52 percent to 47 percent.
An editorial Friday in the Notre Dame student newspaper, The Observer, lent some credence to the idea that the opposition was being generated off-campus. Judging by the 612 letters to the editor it had received as of Thursday, the newspaper said 70 percent of alumni opposed the invitation while 97 percent of the senior class supported it. The editorial lamented that the “conversation” about Mr. Obama’s visit had “reduced itself to a circus.”
The White House issued a statement last week saying Mr. Obama welcomed the “spirit of debate and healthy disagreement on important issues.” The statement also said that Mr. Obama “does not govern with the expectation that everyone sees eye to eye with him on every position.” It did not comment on the possibility of some sort of dialogue with students and others during his visit.
Mr. Appleby, the history professor, said the long-range goal of such a discussion with Mr. Obama would be “to change hearts and minds” and move the country “toward a culture of life” that opposes abortion and embryonic stem-cell research and allows medical workers who oppose abortion rights to opt out of participating in certain procedures.
“The question is, how can one who is so good and so insightful and so poised on issues of human dignity and human rights — how can that same person not engage fully and seriously in a debate on unborn life?” Mr. Appleby said.
Some of these same questions arose when John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, campaigned in 1960, and re-emerged perhaps most prominently in 1984 when then-Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, also Catholic, spoke at the South Bend campus. His private view, he said at the time, was that abortion was “sinful.” But as a political figure, he said, he was not obliged to govern according to Catholic dogma.
Mr. Cuomo noted in an interview Friday that Mr. Obama’s situation was different from his, because Mr. Obama is not Catholic. But he said Notre Dame should honor him because he is the president and shares the Catholic mission of wanting to make the world a better place.
Asked whether Mr. Obama should avoid the controversy in his commencement address, Mr. Cuomo said no and suggested he might say something like: “I’m not asking you to agree with me. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to tell you about the values I believe in and to talk about how much common ground we share.”
Mr. Obama will be the sixth sitting president to speak at a Notre Dame commencement and the ninth to be awarded an honorary degree. Even when those presidents have opposed abortion rights, as former President George W. Bush did, Notre Dame students protested — in his case, over his support for the death penalty.
In calling for tolerance of Mr. Obama’s visit, the student newspaper’s editorial noted that the university’s president emeritus, the widely respected Theodore Hesburgh, recently told a group of alumni, parents and friends of Notre Dame: “No speaker who has ever come to Notre Dame has changed the University. We are who we are. But, quite often, the very fact of being here has changed the speaker.”
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