Notre Dame’s formal statement respecting academic freedom and freedom of expression reflects the university’s Catholic character in declaring that the exercise of these rights is to be “consistent with the objectives of the University as a community that… lives in the tradition of Christian belief.” But Father Jenkins’s decision that The Vagina Monologues passes that test shows that this qualification means very little. That is what is to be expected in a school in which Catholic faculty no longer are a determining force.

The Vagina Monologues controversy, thus, was of a genus common to all universities, though of a species unique to those claiming a religious identity. There have been a number of recent studies of the role, actual and ideal, of academic freedom in Christian, often including Catholic, universities, some of which we have collected in our Resources section for those interested in examining the issue in depth. We do not do so here, for we think the issue is simple enough to make elaborate analysis needless. The Vagina Monologues’ unrelenting exaltation of illicit sex is so hostile in its substance to Catholic doctrine and tradition and so scornful in its style of Catholic, indeed of civilized, sensibility that learned discussion and textual dissection seem quite beside the point. What is called to mind, rather, is Mr. Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum respecting the difficulty of defining obscenity. However complex that task, he said, “I know it when I see it.” Jacobelli v. United States, 378 U.S. 184, 197.

These sensible-sounding principles disappeared in their application. Surely the play can’t be thought of a “serious debate” on a “thoughtful position,” to put it conservatively. There is here presented no question of interdicting classroom study of the play, should that for some reason be thought worthwhile, nor of foreclosing a scholarly debate respecting the morality of, say, homosexual intercourse or masturbation (although the promotion of seduction of minors or sadism would seem to raise a question of a different order no matter how imposing the academic credentials of the proponents or the vigor of the opposition). No impediment to academic freedom in any serious sense, that is, is implicated. What is implicated, in striking fashion, is “an overt and insistent” expression of “contempt for the values and sensibilities of the University.” Surely Father Jenkins could not have meant that anything and everything gets a free pass as long as it does not have affixed a prominent and explicit “anti-Catholic” label. And so far as “sensibilities” are concerned, in a discussion with faculty Father Jenkins himself noted that “groups of both women and men feel ‘offended and alienated by the play’” as “an affront to Catholicism.” As well they should. (For this and other interesting interchanges between Father Jenkins and faculty members in which Father Jenkins defended his initial doubts about permitting the play’s performances, see the February 3, 2006 issue of The Observer.)