On Pilgrimage

A Letter to L’Osservatore Romano on Obama and Notre Dame

I’ve done it again — here is my latest letter to L’Osservatore Romano. (For anyone else who wants to write, their e-mail address is ornet@ossrom.va).

Dear Signore Fiorentino and editorial staff of L’Osservatore Romano:

I have noted with interest your May 18 news stories about President Obama and the pro-life question in the United Sates. Unfortunately, the whole text of these hasn’t been made available yet on the Vatican web site, so I must go by summaries. But the summarized and quoted text of one of these is once again creating an uproar in the States and causing embarrassment and damage to the pro-life movement.

First I’d like to thank you since it seems in one story you have indeed published the remarks of two leading U.S. bishops, Cardinal Rigali and Archbishop Chaput who are critical of Obama’s embryonic stem-cell research executive order and the resulting guidelines. These would certainly give a clearer picture of the extreme nature of this decision. I am especially glad because I pointed out Cardinal Rigali’s criticism to you in a previous letter. I am very happy to see you taking notice of this.

I am distressed however, that in the other story you put so much weight on President Obama’s remarks at Notre Dame about “seeking common ground,” reducing the need for abortion and helping pregnant women carry their babies to term. These would be laudable goals if the President had any intention of carrying them out. But with politicians it is always best to look at their deeds instead of their frequently empty words. And Obama is a consummate politician. The pro-life movement in the U.S. is not fooled by the President’s words because it knows about his deeds.

In fact that the very time he was speaking at Notre Dame, Obama was giving support in Congress to a bill said to be intended to reduce abortions, but that bill is not the Pregnant Women Support Act, which would give a great deal of government aid to pregnant women, fund crisis pregnancy centers and expand aid for poor mothers of infants and young children. Obama completely failed to give any support to this and similar bills as a senator. Nor is he giving any sign he will support it now.

Instead, he is giving his support to the Prevention First Act, which continues to fight the problem of unplanned pregnancies as Obama and the Democratic party have been doing for years — that is, increasing funds for contraception and sex education according to the model of Planned Parenthood. In fact, a huge amount of the money to be appropriated in this bill would go to Planned Parenthood itself, the great destroyer of the morals of our young, the great provider of artificial contraception, and, of course, the main supplier of abortion in our country. In short, Obama’s speech at Notre Dame was meaningless rhetoric.

Your failure to mention all this, in what looks like unrestricted praise for the President has already led U.S. news commentators, who have always been hostile to the pro-life movement to say that the Vatican is now taking its distance from the supposedly “right-wing’ and “extreme” pro-lifers in the U.S. This, even though it wasn’t the intention of your article, has really hurt pro-lifers and has given our enemies fresh ammunition against us.

But what actually hurts most of all is that your article apparently did not even mention the negative reaction of over 75 U.S. bishops to the University’s disobedience to the orders of the USCCB in inviting Obama. You also brushed aside the actions of the Notre Dame students and faculty to counter their university’s prostituting itself to power, as mere completely predictable “protest.” There was no word about who was protesting.

In fact, several dozen graduating seniors, along with 40-50 Notre Dame professors, including a number of Holy Cross priests, and Bishop D’Arcy, the ordinary of South Bend, the diocese in which Notre Dame is located, all boycotted the commencement, and met in the Grotto of Lourdes on the campus of Notre Dame, along with some 2,000 others, including other students, members of the community and pro-lifers from around the country to pledge their allegiance to the Messiah that Catholics are supposed to worship, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and His blessed Mother, instead of the secular pseudo-Messiah and merchant of death being honored inside with thunderous ovations by a seemingly Catholic university. The protest was followed with great attention by pro-life Catholics around the country, but almost completely ignored by the secular media, who focused only on a few protesters arrested during the previous days.

In ignoring all this, you have missed the real story. Many in the pro-life movement in the U.S. are now looking on this demonstration at Notre Dame as a source of pride and a new beginning for the movement, which is facing a very uncertain future and a very difficult fight under the current administration. They are heartened by the fact that our bishops were so vocal, and that some Notre Dame faculty and students have rejected the secularist model that Notre Dame and other Catholic universities in the U.S. have been adopting (and which our Holy Father Benedict XVI has so deplored) and are calling on them to again assume their true identity as institutions dedicated both to faith and to intellectual honesty and excellence – and also to dialogue where there is actual good will on both sides and not just self-seeking rhetoric.

I’m sorry that your paper doesn’t seem very well informed about what is going on in the Church in the U.S. and that this failure to pay attention to details has inadvertently given support to the enemies of the Church in our country.

Here is some more information about the Notre Dame protest movement. Some is from my web site:

www.pilgrimage.subcreators.com

and some from the Notre Dame Response group itself:

www.ndresponse.com

I hope that L’Osservatore Romano, as the voice of the Church for so many people in the world, will in the future remember to report with an eye on what is happening in the Church in the U.S. instead of being dazzled by the empty words from the White House,

Sincerely yours,

Lori Pieper, SFO
Bronx, New York

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009, by Lori and is filed under "Abortion, Catholic Social Teaching, Life Issues, Pope Benedict XVI ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.