Actually, you can’t refer to Notre Dame as one entity with one position, even with regards to the controversial commencement invitation to President Obama and the plan to confer on him the honorary doctorate of laws. Because plenty of people somehow affiliated with the university strongly disagree with it.

As the debate roils on, some commentaries are particularly poignant and clarifying. Like this one out today on First Things. Especially since Francis Beckwith refers to the continuity of the logic, language and morality of civil rights in America.

The University of Notre Dame is a Catholic university, which means that it affirms the truth of Catholic moral theology and all that it entails about liberty, community, and the dignity of the human person. According to Catholic moral theology, a regime whose laws sequester a group of human beings from its protections for reasons that are capricious and gravely immoral is a regime whose laws on this matter are not really laws at all. In fact, we need not even consult a Catholic theologian, philosopher, or legal scholar to receive clarity on this question. We can cite the words of a Baptist minister, who made generous use of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas in what has become one of the most important epistles in American political discourse. On April 16, 1963, in his “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned these words:

I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

I’ve cited that letter and this quote elsewhere in the Forum here, and it remains a pressing question for this administration and its apologists to answer how they can reconcile the truths spoken by the civil rights leader with the anti-life agenda driven by those for whom he paved the way.

And now reconcile this with the Notre Dame decision. Follow the logic…

According to Catholic moral theology, the unborn human being, from the moment of conception, is a full-fledged member of the human community. That means that the unborn’s personhood is not like a matter of taste, preference, or a “deep concern” of “personal belief.” It is a fact that pro-lifers are convinced they know is true, just like such other facts as that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, that it’s wrong to torture children for fun, that Mother Teresa was morally better than Adolf Hitler, and that the Earth is the third planet from the Sun.

But President Obama vigorously opposes this pro-life understanding of human community. For those who may doubt this claim, one need only consult the consistent and unbroken public record the president has established on this matter…Admittedly, Obama is an articulate, winsome, intelligent, and gifted leader. But, whether we like it or not, he has employed those gifts as an apologist for excluding prenatal human beings from the protections of our laws.

Count the ways. Beckwith, in a series of paragraphs, enumerates the policies and proposals Obama is responsible for executing that deny human rights and reverse laws that protected conscience, which is itself a universal human right.

So, this is the man on whom the University of Notre Dame wants to bestow an honorary doctorate of laws? But, as we have clearly seen, Obama, in spite of all his personal talents and accomplishments, explicitly and unapologetically rejects the intrinsic dignity of the human person, the proper subject of the natural and canonical laws on which the university’s jurisprudential patrimony rests. It is a jurisprudential patrimony that the university not only claims to believe, it claims both to believe that it is true and that it knows that it is true.

I have no doubt that Notre Dame would never bestow an honorary doctorate in science to an astronomer who vigorously advances the agenda of geocentricity or a chemist who refuses to teach his students the periodic table, or award an honorary doctorate in divinity to a theologian who is an unrepentant apologist for racial apartheid and white supremacy, regardless of what these three individuals may have accomplished or how well their celebrity may be received by the wider culture and its influential institutions.

Or, as professor Janet Smith said in her letter to Fr. Jenkins (snip from Fr. Jonathan’s blog):

“If someone like George Wallace had been elected president of the United States–no matter how much good he had done–no matter how many causes “near to Notre Dame’s heart” he had elevated, Notre Dame would not have invited him to be the commencement speaker nor given him an honorary degree, for the world would not have believed that Notre Dame remained “firm and unwavering” in its opposition to racism and would not have thought that Notre Dame was hoping to spark a national dialogue on racism. It would have thought Notre Dame had lost its mind and faith.”

And that is something Dr. Martin Luther King worried about, in a larger context, in the Birmingham Jail.

So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth [and twenty-first] century.