A slightly quieter incident occurred last September, when some twenty pre-Election Day candidate forums were cancelled on Long Island when the bishop of Rockville Center, New York, James T. McHugh, announced a ban on pro-abortion speakers at “Catholic agencies or organizations, school, or parish groups, even if he/she does not intend to express their pro-abortion views.”
According to Bishop McHugh, the reason for this is that “it would be foolish and counterproductive to provide a platform to those who favor or support a public policy of abortion on demand or of euthanasia or assisted suicide. It would also be extremely misleading to provide such persons a platform to promote their views, even on other issues, lest they claim that the Church somehow implicitly tolerates their rejection of Church teaching on pro-life issues.”
Bishop McHugh's decision comes only months after the bishop of the diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, James C. Timlin, rescinded a Catholic hospital's invitation to vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore to speak about the economy and health care. In June Bishop Timlin said, “the Mercy Hospital has decided not to give Vice President Gore a platform, lest there be any misunderstanding about the hospital's Catholic identity and its commitment to the sanctity of life.”
When I was an undergraduate at The Catholic University of America, naïve teenager that I was, I was shocked to hear the president of the university praise the existence of a gay-rights student group and tell us that he would welcome a pro-abortion group if there was interest. He went on to deride the cardinals who sit on the school's board of trustees, among other transgressions, and was eventually relieved of his duties. Thankfully, the school has a new president now who has taken an oath of loyalty to the magesterium, very unlike his predecessor.
Another Washington, D.C., “Catholic” school, Georgetown University, known in recent years for inviting alumnus Bill Clinton and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt to speak on campus, is currently looking for a new president — a development many see as an opportunity for a much-needed ideological turnaround on that campus, perhaps a chance to restore Georgetown to something of its former prominence as the nation's first Catholic university.
Recent crackdowns and changes in leadership — along with the long-awaited approval by the U.S. Catholic Bishops of guidelines for implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Holy Father’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Higher Education — aside, there is far from a consensus on how to handle pro-abortion speakers at Catholic institutions.
Fresh from a decision, ten years in the making, by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to renew a commitment to that which makes Catholic higher education distinctive, many commencement speakers last spring nevertheless represented opposite commitments, as the Virginia-based Cardinal Newman Society for the Preservation of Catholic Higher Education has chronicled.
St. Mary College in Kansas succumbed to pressure and withdrew its invitation to Kansas City Star columnist Bill Tammeus, who wrote the paper’s infamous editorial on priests and AIDS, an accouterment to a “reporting” series that was subsequently discredited in the mainstream secular press.
No such luck at other Catholic schools. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan gave the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame last spring, despite the fact that under his watch, population-control efforts have dramatically increased, and despite his ongoing refusal to prohibit the use of U.S. funds on abortions worldwide. Sen. Patrick Leahy delivered the address at his alma mater, St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, despite his staunchly pro-choice voting record, which includes opposition to a federal ban on partial-birth abortion. This year’s commencement at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, featured ABC News medical editor Timothy Johnson, who expressed his support for both abortion and physician-assisted suicide. In reporting on the FDA’s quick approval of the first “morning-after kit,” he described the move as a “courageous political action” and dismissed the argument that the pill destroys fertilized eggs as a “red herring.” And then there’s Attorney General Janet Reno — no stranger to controversy on moral issues — who just spoke at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.
This spring I asked Archbishop Giuseppe Pittau, secretary of the Congregation on Catholic Education in the Roman Curia, whether such figures should be granted the opportunity to present their dissenting views on Catholic campuses. “A university certainly has the possibility of offering other people, too, a place for discussion,” he replied. “But if somebody is known clearly for holding opinions that are against what the Church believes, I would not give the opportunity to have somebody speaking about these things — about positions that are not accepted by the Church — without a dialogue, without the possibility of saying what the Church really believes. A university certainly can offer others the possibility to express their opinions, but there should always be somebody who can fairly express in a beautiful, academic way and a persuasive way, the position of the Church, of our faith.”
Catholic organizations today bear little or no resemblance to the brooding monolithic image advanced in the popular media. To the layman on the street, Catholic hospitals and schools are anachronistic throwbacks whose every word, look and deed is controlled by the patriarchal Big Brother Vatican. Those less susceptible to media manipulation, however, well know that the truth is far from that. The Church in America, for better or worse, is given the same freedoms as everyone else in our democratic society to wander paths that could ultimately lead to its own destruction. And so the conversation over how to remain canonically Catholic while exercising those freedoms continues.
