{"id":474,"date":"2009-05-12T08:18:51","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T08:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/obamas-speech-at-notre-dame-a.html"},"modified":"2009-05-12T08:18:51","modified_gmt":"2009-05-12T08:18:51","slug":"obamas-speech-at-notre-dame-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/obamas-speech-at-notre-dame-a.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s speech at Notre Dame: A sneak preview"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\"Obama<\/span>By great good fortune, or the designs of Providence, the text of President Obama’s commencement address this coming Sunday at Notre Dame has fallen into my hands. It is a powerful exposition of Obama’s approach to the most controverted aspect–for some Catholics–of his appearance at Notre Dame and his presidency: namely, abortion. <\/p>\n

Here’s the top:<\/p>\n

\n

“I am grateful to the university for inviting me here today. In a strange way, I am grateful also to those who protest at my coming to Notre Dame because it has made me more conscious of the need to explain the policies of my administration on this deeply sensitive, powerfully emotional issue of abortion.” <\/strong><\/p>\n

“So, dear graduates, permit me to explain, at this university that is the crowning glory of Catholic higher education, what my administration intends to do on this that is of such significance to the Catholic community. For 35 years, Americans have been shouting at each other about Roe v. Wade. Many are shouting still today. We had to pass by their shouts to enter the hall today. How do we find common ground when the issue is so divisive? Is it foolish to even try?”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Okay, so I found the speech in the latest edition of The Tablet of London<\/a>, and it is actually a journalistic exercise by Michael Sean Winters, who “offers a speech for the President to silence his critics.”<\/p>\n

But it is a good read. Obama could do worse, and may. But should he focus so single-mindedly on abortion? And I doubt anything he says will silence his critics. The full text is available only to subscribers, but here is a passage that gives a good sense of the whole, and I think is the strongest and most appealing part:<\/p>\n

\n

“I believe that common-sense proposals to try to reduce the abortion rate are the only available common ground. I believe that if we stop shouting at each other and listen to the women who are actually facing an unplanned pregnancy, we will find plenty of work to do to help them through a difficult chapter in their lives. I believe that if we as a nation and as a culture rally to the support of women facing crisis pregnancies we will both protect women’s constitutional rights and promote what Pope John Paul II called ‘The Gospel of Life’.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I believe that if we seek common ground on this most divisive of issues, it will be easier for us to work together on the other urgent moral tasks facing our nation. We must continue rebuilding our economy so that a day’s work earns a just wage and that the dignity of work becomes the ethical foundation of our economy, not the mere glorification of profiteering which has turned Wall Street into a synonym for greed and worse. We must work together to bring peace to Iraq. We must work together to enact humane immigration reform that honours our nation’s tradition of welcoming immigrants while securing the border from those who wish us ill. We must work together to protect the environment, to show ourselves to be good stewards of God’s creation.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So is such an approach foolish to try? I suspect Obama can never win over his enemies, but I hope he will show greater grace and intelligence than than they, and if he does he will carry the day among the great majority disposed to agree with him. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By great good fortune, or the designs of Providence, the text of President Obama’s commencement address this coming Sunday at Notre Dame has fallen into my hands. It is a powerful exposition of Obama’s approach to the most controverted aspect–for some Catholics–of his appearance at Notre Dame and his presidency: namely, abortion. Here’s the top:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nObama's speech at Notre Dame: A sneak preview - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/obamas-speech-at-notre-dame-a.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Obama's speech at Notre Dame: A sneak preview - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By great good fortune, or the designs of Providence, the text of President Obama’s commencement address this coming Sunday at Notre Dame has fallen into my hands. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}