"The university is clearly taking sides and has no business doing this in one of the most important elections in the country," said Bob Destro, a professor and former acting dean at the law school.
Other prominent people have been barred from formal addresses on the campus because their views differed from Catholic teaching, Mr. Destro and others noted.
"The race is one of the most hotly contested and important in the country … and the votes of the Catholic community are likely to provide the margin of victory," Mr. Destro said yesterday in a letter to Father O’Connell.
"Casey should not be given a free pass to speak at a Catholic institution, given his public opposition to the church’s teachings on some critical life issues and on ‘homosexual marriage,’" said Joseph Cella, president of Fidelis, a Catholic activist group.
The Cardinal Newman Society issued its own protest, saying that by "choosing a Catholic dissenter and active U.S. candidate for a prestigious lecture on public morality, the Catholic University of America law school is compromising its academic purpose, Catholic mission and political neutrality."
Mr. Santorum, a Republican, is a pro-life Catholic who opposes same-sex "marriage." He has steadily narrowed the gap with his challenger and now trails Mr. Casey by 4 percentage points in the latest John Zogby poll.
Through an aide, Father O’Connell declined to say whether he thought the invitation to Mr. Casey would be read by many Catholic voters in Pennsylvania as a signal that the hierarchy of one of the nation’s top-rated Catholic universities was embracing Mr. Casey’s candidacy.
Speaking of talks at Catholic universities…I understand that Archbishop J. Michael Miller, the Secretary for the Congregation for Catholic Education, gave a talk at Boston College on "The Holy See and Catholic Higher Education in the United States" on Monday night. Has anyone seen a report of this talk? Was anyone there? Let me know…thanks!
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