The efforts of Catholic Notre Dame to bring pro-choice President Barack Obama to its campus have generated a tremendous blowback. “This morning the first 300,000 names of individuals who signed the petition at NotreDameScandal.com—opposing the University of Notre Dame’s decision to honor President Barack Obama at this year’s commencement—began to be delivered to Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., the Board of Trustees and the Board of Fellows as they prepare for scheduled meetings on Friday, May 1, at Notre Dame,” the Cardinal Newman Society reported on April 30, 2009. “As of this morning, more than 344,000 people have signed the petition, but because of the overwhelming number of signers The Cardinal Newman Society says it took them more than 24 hours to prepare the data and print more than 64,000 sheets of paper, double-sided, which were then bound in notebooks and rushed to Father Jenkins and individual members of the Notre Dame Board of Trustees and Board of Fellows.”
“Copies of the petitions are also being rushed by The Cardinal Newman Society, which sponsored the petition, to Archbishop Zenon Cardinal Grocholewski, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education; Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Apostolic Nuncio (Vatican ambassador) to the United States; Francis Cardinal George, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB); Bishop John D’Arcy, of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who presides over Notre Dame; and Bishop Robert McManus, Chairman of the USCCB Education Committee.” Full disclosure: One of those petition signatures belongs to your correspondent.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
