Why the Wall of Separation Cracked at Notre Dame

The news media has proclaimed it, and for once they are right: President Obama conquered Notre Dame. At least that part of it that is represented by its "intelligentsia": the president, the faculty, indeed much of the student body.

How strange it is to witness this spectacle: a man who took months to decide where he wanted to attend church services, who has displayed very little regard or knowledge about Christianity, who "sat in the pew" for 20 years listening to a Black Liberationist preacher rant on the evils of white Christian America only to "repudiate" him when campaign necessity required it last year; now act as if he is privy to the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of 2,000 years of Roman Catholicism.

Indeed, he represented himself as "above the fray" of the fierce debate of those who opposed Notre Dame's granting of an honorary law degree to one who has defined his political career by advancing the pro-choice agenda of Planned Parenthood.

He brilliantly cast himself as something of a "secular pope" who would try to bring reconciliation to these warring parties, calculating that he could obscure the fact that he, Barack Obama, was the bone of contention in this debate, not its moderator. Obama believes he has the power to declare that one kind of Catholics -- those who are his true believers -- are the authentic Catholic voice in America.

By his actions, Obama becomes the first president to take an oratorical sledge-hammer to the protective wall of separation as Thomas Jefferson actually described it. Jefferson, in an 1802 letter, reassured the members of the Danbury Baptist Association that the First Amendment of the Constitution erected such a wall to protect religion from the government. (Jefferson's "wall" has been turned upside down by revisionist jurists and modern anti-religionists and now, apparently, a sitting U.S. president.)

How does he get away with this horse manure?

George Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, tries to give us some answers in an article published at National Review. It's a must-read if you are Catholic, and a good backgrounder for those who are not.

Passionate debates over doctrine, identity, and the boundaries of “communion” have been a staple of the American religious landscape for centuries: Trinitarians vs. Unitarians in 19th-century New England; Modernists vs. Fundamentalists in early-20th-century Presbyterianism; Missouri Synod Lutherans vs. Wisconsin Synod Lutherans vs. Other Sorts of Lutherans down to today.

Yet never in our history has a president of the United States, in the exercise of his public office, intervened in such disputes in order to secure a political advantage.

Until yesterday, at the University of Notre Dame.

[SNIP]

What was surprising, and ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about religious freedom in these United States, was the president’s decision to insert himself into the ongoing Catholic debate over the boundaries of Catholic identity and the applicability of settled Catholic conviction in the public square. Obama did this by suggesting, not altogether subtly, who the real Catholics in America are.

Weigel explains how Obama re-inserted the discredited "seamless garment" argument back into Catholic debate by praising the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, it's author. Cardinal Bernardin was a gentle man who sought consensus that, as Weigel explains, invariably ended in compromises that advanced the liberal or progressive positions of the moment, and rarely helped rank-and-file Catholics adhere to bedrock principles.

The "seamless garment" provided cover for cafeteria Catholics, who could be pro-choice on abortion but still claim they were pro-life because they were against the death penalty and/or nuclear war (as if you could find more than a dozen pro-nuke warmongers anywhere except inside North Korea or Iran).

Fortunately the bishops jettisoned the "garment" metaphor in 1998 in favor of a more robust "foundations of the house of freedom" which declared certain fundamental pro-life issues to be of greatest priority.

But the Chicago-based Obama campaign resurrected the "seamless garment" approach last year to wean away socially liberal Catholics to the camp of the new Messiah. Weigel explains:

So the “seamless garment” went underground for a decade, only to be dusted off by Douglas Kmiec and others in the 2008 campaign; there, a variant form of the consistent ethic was used to argue that Barack Obama was the real pro-life candidate on offer. As casuistry, this was risible. But it worked well enough that Catholic Obama-supporters on the Notre Dame board saw their chances and took ’em, arranging for the president to come to Notre Dame to complete the seamless garment’s dust-off and give it a new lease on life by presenting the late Cardinal Bernardin — “a kind and good man . . . a saintly man” — as the very model of a real Catholic in America.

Not the kind of Catholic who would ever criticize Notre Dame for bestowing an honorary doctorate of laws on a man determined to enshrine in law what the Catholic Church regards as a fundamental injustice.

Weigel closes with a warning:

Rather like Napoleon taking the diadem out of the hands of Pope Pius VII and crowning himself emperor, President Obama has, wittingly or not, declared himself the Primate of American Catholicism.

What the bishops of the United States have to say about this usurpation of their authority will be very interesting to see. Whether Obama’s Catholic acolytes will recognize a genuine threat to religious freedom in what they are already celebrating as their Notre Dame victory over the pro-life yahoos and reactionaries will also be instructive.

A president of the United States has no business as a referree, whether it's getting in the middle of a union tiff with an employer, or negotiating a fake bankruptcy between an automaker and its creditors, or telling the nation's largest church who is the more authentic member.

Obama takes the "No Boundaries" T-shirt pledge to heart, and I'm afraid we're in for a rough ride.