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Biden Debases Laetare Medal As Students Bolster Notre Dame’s Catholic Identity

Laetare Medal awardee @JoeBiden's recent trashing of Church teaching on abortion contrasts with @NotreDame Catholic student organizations' support of the University's Catholic character. #GoCatholicND Click To Tweet

Following our last bulletin about an Irish Rover investigative report, we write today principally about Notre Dame’s Catholic student organizations, but the recent feticidal outburst by Notre Dame honoree President Joe Biden claims priority of place.

President Biden, the debasing of the Laetare Medal, and a lucky break for Notre Dame.

Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal is awarded each year to a Catholic who is supposed to have “ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity.”

In 2016, Father John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, unaccountably selected then Vice President Joe Biden as the Laetare Medal honoree notwithstanding his support for abortion and same-sex marriage and the objection of Notre Dame’s bishop, the Most Rev. Kevin C. Rhoades.

Now Biden’s recent blistering assault on Texas’s new anti-abortion law demonstrates anew how undeserving he was of the honor bestowed.

In a press conference and a statement, Biden declared himself “a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade” and disavowed the view that “life begins at the moment of conception.” 

He asserted that the “almost un-American” Texas law “blatantly violates” Roe and “unleashes constitutional chaos.” 

And he assailed the Supreme Court’s permitting the law to go into effect as “an unprecedented assault” on Roe v. Wade that “insults the rule of law.” 

He thereupon announced “a whole-of-government effort” to overturn the Texas law and insure that no targeted unborn child would escape the Texas abortionist’s knife.

So instructed, Attorney General Merrick Garland has filed a lawsuit to put the abortionists back in business.

Joe Biden awarded Notre Dame's Laetare Medal

This pro-abortion eruption by Biden has added an exclamation point to the catalog of actions and statements we have listed in earlier bulletins showing his unsuitability for the Laetare Medal and as a potential Notre Dame commencement speaker.

Luckily, Biden’s rejection of Father Jenkins’s invitation to be commencement speaker has spared Notre Dame the embarrassment Biden’s intensified promotion of abortion would have caused. But this latest episode stands as a silent reproach to those responsible for awarding him the Laetare Medal in the first place.

Biden has once again, this time with striking determination, trashed “the ideals of the Church” celebrated by that award, ideals that are reflected in the teaching that 

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception

and that

The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation. (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2270, 2273)

The Irish Rover

“Upholding the Catholic Character of the University of Notre Dame” 

While university staff encouraged the muting of Notre Dame’s Catholic identity during Welcome Week for freshmen, as the Irish Rover reported in the article republished in our last bulletin, we are pleased to report that there are student voices unembarrassed by the school’s Catholic character. 

The Irish Rover’s is one. With that publication’s consent, we reprint here (with minor elisions) the editor-in-chief’s welcome to freshmen

A Message from the Editor-in-Chief

My dear freshmen, embrace this time, with all its chaos and novelty. College life begins this side of Welcome Weekend, and you have four precious years (which, I might add, slip by all too quickly) to learn and grow. You are faced with daunting questions: Who do I want to be? In what direction am I being called? To what should I devote my time? How on earth does the room numbering system in Debart work?

These are questions worth pondering, both freshman year and every year. Answers come gradually. And, as in the case of the last question, complete certainty is often impossible. Yet, hope finds a path forward through the myriad queries of our college years. The important thing is to ask these questions, to live—if I may—the examined life, intentionally cultivating goodness, truth, and beauty through your years at Notre Dame.

The Irish Rover offers a distinct perspective from which to approach these questions of identity, vocation, and passion. Since 2003, we have worked to promote the Catholic identity of the university, for it is under Our Lady’s mantle that we can most freely and truly pursue the good life. Through coverage of campus news, politics, religion, and culture, the Rover contributes a valuable voice to campus dialogue—a voice shaped by faith, tradition, and a genuine pursuit of truth.

Our mission is simple: to promote the Catholic identity of this university, to articulate conservative principles, and to engage in collegial debate. The Rover seeks to facilitate the desire expressed in the university’s mission statement for “a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity.”

The Rover is always eager for new writers, so please reach out if you are interested in joining our ever-growing team of staff writers. You can email me at mmyler@nd.edu to express interest, or stop by our booth at activities night on Monday, August 30. Additionally, I encourage all readers to stay in the know by following our social media accounts (@IrishRoverND on Twitter and Instagram) and bookmarking our website (https://irishrover.net/).

As we begin this new academic year, I invite you to contemplate anew the questions posed by college life. The Rover offers companionship along the journey to answers, and we begin this year with our gaze firmly fixed on the cross. After all, it is in Christ that we find the answers to the deepest desires of our hearts. It is through a life with Christ that these answers unfurl, beautifully and gradually revealed by grace. What a beautiful adventure!

May your time at Notre Dame be marked by growth, joy, prayer, peace, and an undefeated football season!

Mary Frances Myler
Editor in Chief

Sycamore Trust Note: The Rover is fortunate to have as its faculty advisors a group of Notre Dame’s very best scholars and teachers. All those who love Notre Dame and her Catholic identity should consider subscribing to the Rover — both to support the work of its dedicated staff and to stay informed about matters that relate to their purpose, “Upholding the Catholic Character of the University of Notre Dame”

Other Student Organizations

Happily, the Irish Rover is sided by a number of other vibrant student organizations dedicated to various aspects of Catholic life.

Notre Dame Right to Life, for example, is the University’s largest student club, and its letter of invitation to freshmen describing the wide range of its activities is excellent. It is here.

We will draw attention in later bulletins to other of these organizations, but you can learn more about them now in our bulletin on the most recent Notre Dame Day. The clubs include Children of Mary, Jus Vitae (Law School Right to Life), Knights of Columbus, Militia of the Immaculata, ND Identity Project (Edith Stein Conference), and SCOP (Students for Child-Oriented Society.

The leaders and members of these organizations play a crucial role in sustaining the Catholic character of Notre Dame. We have increasingly come to view supporting them as a very important part of Sycamore Trust’s mission. You can assist them financially by earmarking contributions to the University for the benefit of any of them, and in the case of the Rover, an independent tax-exempt organization, by direct gifts here.

Postscript

A brief comment on the Texas law

The Texas “heart beat” law is an almost total ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. It is plainly unconstitutional under existing Supreme Court decisions. 

The catch is that, because the Texas legislature deliberately took enforcement out of the hands of public officers and placed it with private parties through civil damage actions, and since no one has yet sued for damages, federal courts up to the Supreme Court have turned aside challenges to the law by abortion providers as premature. The new lawsuit by the United States might, or might not, fare better, and state courts might take a different view of the matter. 

In any case, the Texas ruckus is a sideshow to the so-called Dobbs case to be argued in the Supreme Court this fall, as Sycamore Trust vice president Charles A. Donovan, president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, and Notre Dame law school professor O. Carter Snead pointed out in a C-Span Washington Journal appearance and a Washington Post op-ed, respectively. 

Source: C-Span Washington Journal

As both stressed, abortion law will be settled by the Court’s decision in Dobbs, which involves a Mississippi ban on abortion after 15 weeks. The State and scores of amici curiae are urging the Court variously to overrule, or at least sharply limit, Roe v. Wade. 

Notre Dame professors Richard W. Garnett and O. Carter Snead and law school professor emeritus John M. Finnis are co-authors of outstanding amici briefs here and here and here. And Sycamore Trust board member Mary Rice Hasson and Secretary and board member Elizabeth R. Kirk are among the amici curiae scholars on whose behalf yet another brief has been filed. Charlotte Lozier Institute, meanwhile, filed its own brief (here) on the science of fetal development.

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