Where do we stand after President Obama's Notre Dame speech?
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Where do things stand, two months after the University of Notre Dame defied the bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend and some 80 of his fellow-bishops by awarding an honorary doctorate of laws to the university’s 2009 commencement speaker, the president of the United States?
From the administration’s point of view, President Obama’s Notre Dame speech was an unmitigated success. The president was eloquent, high-minded, and decent-spirited. He also did something no previous president had ever done—he injected himself into the ongoing debate among U.S. Catholics over Catholic identity, by suggesting that the “real” Catholics were those who, like Notre Dame, welcomed him for “dialogue.” This storyline—that the Notre Dame controversy was about openness and dialogue, on the one hand, versus narrow-mindedness and fanaticism, on the other—was successfully sold to the national media by the administration, aided and abetted by the president’s Catholic intellectual acolytes. That, in the process of fostering “dialogue,” the administration was playing wedge politics, dividing a significant number of the Catholic bishops of the United States from their people, went largely unremarked.
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