I had planned to write about this particular subject tonight but I was distracted by coaching my daughter’s team.  Upon returning home, I received an email from the Volgi pointing to a particularly excellent take down of the instigators of this particular issue.  Let me frame it first and then let it unfold from there:

John Boehner, Speaker of the House, is a practicing Catholic.  He has been invited to speak at the Catholic University of America’s commencement on May 14th.  A group of Catholic academics have authored a letter, essentially in protest of the event but not asking CUA to rescind the offer nor for Speaker Boehner to decline the offer.  They believe that the Speaker’s voting record “is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings.”

My first reaction (after receiving an inquiry from a liberal relative on the subject) was that this just isn’t a big deal.  In my opinion, universities can invite whomever they please to speak and alumni, faculty, students and others can protest (within the limits of the law and common decency) the decision.  The discussion can be slightly different when we speak about our military colleges (federally funded), state institutions (partially state tax funded) and Catholic or other religious universities (usually subsidized by donations by those of particular faiths).

My next reaction was to wonder where these Catholic academics were when Notre Dame invited President Obama to speak at their commencement?  A President whose voting record and public platform included (to some degree) partial birth abortions – an atrocity denounced vehemently by the Catholic Church.  Defenders of Notre Dame’s decision largely said that a University can invite those with differing opinions to speak.  Should we not extend the same for CUA in this case?

Then, I got around to reading the linked post provided by the Volgi.  Wow.  Go read it.  It’s an excellent piece by Father Robert A. Sirico.  Father Sirico makes the point that I in the past have tried to make repeatedly to liberals when presented with this argument:  “They make the unfortunately common error of assuming that concern for the economically weak and marginalized must somehow translate into (yet another) government program.  That assumption is wrong, and flies in the face of another principle of Catholic social teaching — the principle of subsidarity. With good reason, this is something the Catholic Left — or whatever remains of it these days — rarely mentions or grapples with, because they know that it would raise many questions about the prudence of any number of welfare programs they support.”

Amen.  Pax Tecum.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.