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Speakers analyze Obama's invitation to Notre Dame commencement
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NOTRE DAME, Ind. (CNS) -- Professors from other institutions came to the University of Notre Dame to criticize both the way the university handled its invitation to President Barack Obama as 2009 commencement speaker and Obama's commencement address itself. Speaking at a Nov. 12-14 conference on "The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice and the Common Good" were Francis Beckwith, professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; Gwen Brown, professor of communication at Radford University in Virginia; and Matthew Franck, chairman of the department of political science at Radford. Beckwith was critical of the Obama invitation, but did not suggest that a president who supports keeping abortion legal should be excluded from a Catholic university campus. If Notre Dame "had played its cards right," Beckwith said, the university could have "properly honored" the president and still protected its Catholic identity by inviting him to give the commencement address but without offering an honorary doctorate. If reporters inquired about why Obama did not receive an honorary doctorate, as all previous commencement speakers had, the university would have had an opportunity to explain: "Although we respect and honor President Obama's historic election as well as his accomplishments, we cannot award him an honorary doctorate in laws since he is actively engaged in making sure that a large segment of the human community, the unborn, are permanently sequestered from the protection of the laws," Beckwith said. In the question-and-answer session following the presentations, Beckwith said that it would be far better for Catholic universities to show confidence in their pro-life position by inviting people who support abortion to come to campus to argue what is "true and worthy" in their position.
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