DON VINCENZO writes:

Recently, I wrote about the passing of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who presided over the University of Notre Dame for thirty five years (1952-87), and under whose tutelage this once Catholic university morphed into a secular one, although his successors forcefully persist in claiming that nothing has changed, which, given the current state of affairs at the university, assures me that they are in a state of serious denial, which is not a river in Egypt.

The most recent brouhaha involves Prof. Gary Gutting, who holds an endowed Chair in the Department of Philosophy, and whose philosophical perspective indicates how entrenched the forces of modernism are situated at the university. Gutting, who was a product of Fr. Hesburgh’s “outreach” hiring program, came to Notre Dame with a particular interest in “Religious Skepticism,” and, true to form, has lived up to that calling. It appears the Prof. Gutting has a record of stating that the dogmatic principles that have guided the Church for nearly two millennia are anachronisms, and that the moral basis of Church teachings requires a different approach to the times in which we live. In particular, Prof. Gutting takes umbrage at the current effort by San Francisco’s Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone to “promote a Catholic identity” in Catholic schools, (emphasis mine) an effort that seems to have unhinged the professor.

In a op-ed column published in The New York Times (March 12) entitled, “Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex,” Gutting posited:

“The church needs to undertake a thorough rethinking of its teachings on sexual ethics, including premarital sex, masturbation and remarriage after divorce,” he said. “In every case, the old arguments no longer work (if they ever did), and a vast number of Catholics reject the teachings. It’s time for the church to realize that its sexual ethics are philosophically untenable and theologically unnecessary.”

Regarding Archbishop Cordileone’s objectives, Gutting added: “But there is nothing that requires him to vigorously enforce a teaching that is so dubious even in terms of the church’s own view on the two sources of truth,” referring to divine revelation and reason.

Let it not be said that this is Professor Gutting’s first effort of displaying his religious skepticism: in January of last year he used the same venue to urge the pontiff to allow abortion in some cases.

Notre Dame University is not the only, or, for that matter, the worst example of such a decline. William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, and a 1950 graduate of Georgetown University has sued the university’s administration in canonical court to enjoin their use of the word, “Catholic” in both their advertising and on their masthead.  The case has been sent to Rome for adjudication.

Rev. Hesburgh was a major player at the Land-of-Lakes Conference in 1967, where the clerical leadership at U.S. Catholic colleges and universities decided to accept the coin of the realm knowing that in so doing they would have to surrender their identity as Catholic institutions because of the strings attached to federal largesse. As dependence on federal grant and other financial temptations arose, any future hope that these schools would retain their Catholic identity evanesced, and with it the founding principle of Notre Dame du Lac.

Laura Wood writes:

Homosexual fashion designers in Italy are more attuned to natural law and basic social bonds than philosophy professors at Notre Dame.

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