I wish there were a sound-bite way of presenting this material, but there isn’t. A large part of the reason that this is the case is that fixed opinions have long since been held and hardened on all sides here — Notre Dame, Bishop D’Arcy, President Obama, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, and their followers and supporters. Yet, these held and hardened moral opinions have never been subject to serious, sincere, and intense public scrutiny and examination within the Churches
in terms of the issue raised here — and the issue raised here is morally primordial for the Christian and for the Churches. Long-held, hardened, taken-for-granted truth, passed on mimetically generation to generation, cannot be easily exposed as untruth, not only because of the heavy personal, emotional, psychological and financial investment a person or institution has made in it, but also because the false premises from which it is derived are usually hidden by a nurtured
sense of cultural normality.
Hopefully the attached will serve as a clarification of Gospel truth through the lens of the Notre Dame-Obama-D’Arcy-Glendon public dispute over the truth content of Catholic and/or Christian morality and its application. Sometimes the best way to expose a universal lie and reveal a universal truth is by examining a specific micro-event. But, unraveling untruth to which people, individually and communally, have emotionally committed themselves takes time. So the question is,
Is this truth worth the time it takes to bring it out of the shadow of the big lie and into the light?
Each of the four reflections is understandable on its own. However, I think the sum of the four parts taken as a unit offers more access to truth than the parts taken individually.
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