Earlier this morning, legendary Washington television sports anchor, George Michael (Mr. "Go For It!"), died at the age of 70 after a two year battle with leukemia. 
Here is an outstanding book review by Kenneth Whitehead featured in the November "Catalyst" newsletter from Catholic League on the downfall of the University of Notre Dame. The book is titled, "What Happened to Notre Dame" and is authored by Charles Rice. The book can be ordered online at http://www.staugustine.net/ or at your favorite online bookseller. Although the Obama incident in May 2009 set off a national outcry against the once-devout institution, its origins of secularism date back much further...Many people were shocked when the University of Notre Dame, long thought to be America’s premier Catholic university, in May, 2009, invited President Barack Obama to be its commencement speaker and to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. It was not the first time that Notre Dame had hosted a U.S. president, but since President Obama had come into office with such a pronounced and unapologetical pro-abortion stance—verified within the first few days of his administration when he quickly removed by executive order those obstacles to untrammeled abortion put in place by previous administrations—it was hard to understand how a Catholic university could single him out for special honors.
In 2004, in fact, the Catholic bishops of the United States had issued a statement on “Catholics in Political Life,” in which, among other things, the bishops had declared that:
The Catholic Community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors, or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.
Notre Dame’s honoring of President Obama was thus a direct contravention of the position that the Catholic bishops had expressly established on the question of honoring pro-abortion politicians. The bishop of the diocese in which Notre Dame is located, the Most Reverend John M. D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, pointedly declined to attend the university’s commencement and declared that Notre Dame had chosen “prestige over truth.”
In the controversy that blew up and lasted for several weeks after the announcement of Notre Dame’s invitation to the pro-abortion president, more than 80 American Catholic bishops publicly spoke out against it. This was an unprecedented public reaction by bishops, but then the university’s action was an unusually defiant and even crude and insulting rejection of the bishops’ responsibility to lay out and make clear what the proper reaction of Catholic institutions ought to be on one of the principal moral issues of the day. Equally unprecedented were the more than 350,000 signatures of Catholics who signed a petition protesting the university’s action and asking Notre Dame’s president, the Reverend John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., to rescind the invitation.
Thus, many Catholics were scandalized and, indeed, shocked that a Catholic university would turn out to have so little regard or respect for Catholic teaching on the very grave issue of legalized abortion in America—against which the Church’s opposition has been made so unmistakably clear in the numerous statements issued over many years by the bishops and the popes. Abortion is not just another neutral or indifferent or optional matter in the Catholic view.
According to Charles E. Rice, emeritus professor at the Notre Dame law school and the author of this new book which, ably and concisely, tells what did happen to Notre Dame, Catholics are right to be dismayed and scandalized by the university’s action. However, according to him, they should not have been shocked by it, or perhaps even surprised. For according to him, what happened to and at Notre Dame went back a very long time. He shows that Notre Dame “made a wrong turn four decades ago,” and has been acting on wrong principles—antithetical to authentic Catholic faith—ever since. Notre Dame, according to him, has not been a Catholic university in the true sense for quite a long time.
Professor Rice traces the university’s wrong turn back to something called the “Land O’Lakes Statement,” a manifesto issued by a group of Catholic academics and college presidents meeting in Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin, back in 1967. This Statement was subscribed to (if not largely inspired by) the very well-known president of Notre Dame in those days, the Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. According to the Land O’Lakes Statement:
The Catholic university today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively, the Catholic university must have a true autonomy in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth, and indeed of survival, for Catholic universities, as for all universities.
In practice, this claim to “autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind,” amounted to a declaration of independence by the university from the authority of the Church. The Church was no longer seen as necessarily defining what was authentically “Catholic” and what was not. In no way did Notre Dame and the other Catholic colleges and universities that subscribed to the Land O’Lakes Statement cease to be subject to the rules and laws of the state, or of accrediting, licensing or of funding agencies and the like. It was just the Church’s rules that were effectively set aside. The Land O’Lakes Statement was very instrumental in the secularization of many Catholic institutions, beginning in the 1960s.
It was primarily to counter this pernicious secularization of Catholic higher education that prompted Pope John Paul II to issue his apostolic constitution on universities Ex Corde Ecclesiae (“From the Heart of the Church”) in 1990. Subsequently, the U.S. bishops issued their own “Application” of Ex Corde Ecclesiae for this country in order to try to modify or even reverse the secularization of so many Catholic colleges. However, the fact that Notre Dame nevertheless felt justified in honoring President Obama in defiance of the bishops’ policy indicated that the bishops still have a long way to go to restore the integrity of Catholic higher education.
In this book, author Charles E. Rice accurately and effectively chronicles some of the deleterious effects of this straying off the right path of authentic Catholicism on the part of Notre Dame (and many other Catholic institutions!). By declaring the teaching authority of the Church to be “external” to the university, as the Land O’Lakes Statement did, these institutions, in effect, set themselves up as competing moral authorities to the Church. Henceforth, the university would decide what was right and wrong according to its own criteria, regardless of the Church’s teaching.
Professor Rice discusses a number of cases where Notre Dame went off the moral tracks long before the Obama invitation. As early as the 1960s, for example, the university was holding conferences with such organizations as Planned Parenthood and the Population Council to examine whether there might not be an alternative “Catholic” position on birth control different from the traditional teaching which Pope Paul VI reaffirmed in 1968.
Later, in 1984, Notre Dame famously provided the platform for New York Governor Mario Cuomo to inform the world that Catholic politicians could be “personally opposed” to abortion while enabling and promoting it through the public offices held by them.
Then there was the inexplicable refusal of Notre Dame president Father John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., to come out against campus performances of the obscene play “The Vagina Monologues.” Professor Rice records a statement of Father Jenkins that no anti-Semitic play or speech would ever be permitted at Notre Dame since it would be “opposed to the values of a Catholic university.” Yet over a number of years Father Jenkins could never bring himself to affirm that this wretched play crudely exploiting women and depicting, yes, actual violence against them was even more opposed to those “values.”
The arguments of Father Jenkins aiming to justify the Obama invitation are no more convincing than his arguments justifying the performance of this obscene play on campus. They are embarrassing, in fact. One can only wonder how the trustees of Notre Dame could countenance such leadership as that of Father Jenkins. Professor Rice recounts the whole sad tale of the commencement fiasco in several brief but hard-hitting chapters. It is all here, not only the serial missteps of the university administration, but the admirable, dignified, and prayerful counter-steps, mostly led and inspired by students. The book thus fulfills the promise of its title in answering the question, in adequate and carefully documented detail, of what happened to and at Notre Dame.
In addition, the book contains a very informative Introduction by long-time Notre Dame Professor Alfred J. Freddoso throwing further light on the whole affair. It also reprints the inspiring talk to the Notre Dame Response Rally by Father Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C.—showing, thankfully, that not all of the Holy Cross fathers on the campus are of the caliber of Father Jenkins!
Although Professor Charles E. Rice thus provides as lucid and cogent account of the whole Notre Dame/Obama affair as could be expected—and abundantly shows what happens when the Church’s teaching authority gets laid aside!—it still remains something of a mystery how America’s one-time premier Catholic university came to such a sorry pass. One tantalizing clue, however, perhaps lies in the reported statement of former ND president Father Theodore Hesburgh that before a university can be “Catholic,” it must first be a “university” as understood by the secular “modern world.” This was to get it exactly backwards: a university must first be in conformity with the Catholic Church as “the teacher of truth” (Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae, 14) before it can be a true Catholic university.
Kenneth D. Whitehead’s latest book is "Mass Misunderstandings: The Mixed Legacy of the Vatican II Liturgical Reforms" (St. Augustine’s Press, 2009). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Catholic League.
Copyright © 1997-2009 by Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
The Reagan Conservatives.us Blog is proud to endorse political newcomer Will Nance in the December 1 Republican primary for Virginia's 37th Senate District. The primary and special election are the result of the election of Ken Cuccinelli as Virginia's Attorney General on Nov. 3. The primary will take on December 1 from 6 p.m. - 10 p.m. at Centreville High School.
Edwin Meese III, the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation as well as the United States Attorney General between 1985 and 1988 released the following statement today on the proposed trials of terrorists in New York City, including confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.CBO today said a modified Senate Finance Committee healthcare overhaul bill would cost $829 billion over 10 years, a modest increase over the original $774 billion price tag, and will decrease the deficit by $81 billion. Changes to the measure appear not have altered coverage, keeping the number of Americans who will have insurance as a result of the proposal at 94 percent.
This piece appeared in "National Review" recently and was written by Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl. This is the best summary of why the stimulus failed. It is long, but well worth the read...
Why the Stimulus Failed
Fiscal policy cannot exnihilate new demand
Conservatives have correctly declared President Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus” a flop. In a January report, White House economists predicted the bill would create (not merely save) 3.3 million jobs. Since then, 2.8 million jobs have been lost, pushing unemployment toward 10 percent.
Yet few have explained correctly why the stimulus failed. By blaming the slow pace of stimulus spending (even though it’s ahead of schedule), many conservatives have accepted the premise that government spending stimulates the economy. Their thinking implies that we should have spent much more by now.
History proves otherwise. In 1939, after a doubling of federal spending failed to relieve the Great Depression, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau said that “we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . and an enormous debt to boot!”
This repeated failure has nothing to do with the pace or type of spending. Rather, the problem is found in the oft-repeated Keynesian myth that deficit spending “injects new dollars into the economy,” thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. According to this theory, government spending adds money to the economy, taxes remove money, and the budget deficit represents net new dollars injected. Therefore, it scarcely matters how the dollars are spent. John Maynard Keynes famously asserted that a government program paying people to dig and then refill ditches would provide new income for those workers to spend and circulate through the economy, creating even more jobs and income. Today, lawmakers cling to estimates by Mark Zandi of Economy.com that on average, $1 in new deficit spending expands the economy by roughly $1.50.
If that were true, the record $1.6 trillion in deficit spending over the past fiscal year would have already overheated the economy. Yet despite this spending, which is equal to fully 9 percent of GDP, the economy is expected to shrink by at least 3 percent this fiscal year. If the spending constitutes an injection of “new money” into the economy, we may conclude that, without it, the economy would contract 12 percent — hardly a plausible claim.
If $1.6 trillion in deficit spending failed to slow the economy’s slide, there’s no reason to believe that adding $185 billion — the 2009 portion of the stimulus bill — will suddenly do the trick. But if budget deficits of nearly $2 trillion are insufficient stimulus, how much would be enough? $3 trillion? $4 trillion?
This is no longer a theoretical exercise. The idea that increased deficit spending can cure recessions has been tested, and it has failed. If growing the economy were as simple as expanding government spending and deficits, then
The simple reason government spending fails to end recessions is that Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress “injects” into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new income, and therefore no new demand, is created. They are merely redistributed from one group of people to another. Congress cannot create new purchasing power out of thin air.
This is intuitively clear in the case of funding new spending with new taxes. Yet funding new spending with new borrowing is also pure redistribution, since the investors who lend
Even during recessions — when total production falls, leaving people with less income to spend — Congress cannot create new demand and income. Any government spending that increases production at factories and puts unemployed individuals to work will be financed by removing funds (and thus idling resources) elsewhere in the economy. This is true whether the unemployment rate is 5 percent or 50 percent.
For example, many lawmakers claim that every $1 billion in highway stimulus will create 47,576 new construction jobs. But Congress must first borrow that $1 billion out of the private economy, which will then lose a roughly equivalent number of jobs. As transportation-policy expert Ronald Utt has explained, “the only way that $1 billion of new highway spending can create 47,576 new jobs is if the $1 billion appears out of nowhere as if it were manna from heaven.” Removing water from one end of a swimming pool and dumping it in the other end will not raise the overall water level. Similarly, moving dollars from one part of the economy to the other will not expand the economy. Not even in the short run.
Consider a simpler example. Under normal circumstances, a family might put its $1,000 savings in a certificate of deposit at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $1,000 to the local hardware store. This would have the effect of recycling that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that, induced by an offer of higher interest rates, the family instead buys a $1,000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill.
The mistaken view of fiscal stimulus persists because we can easily see the people put to work with government funds. We don’t see the jobs that would have been created elsewhere in the economy with those same dollars had they not been lent to
In his 1848 essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” French economist Frédéric Bastiat termed this the “broken window” fallacy, in reference to a local myth that breaking windows would stimulate the economy by creating window-repair jobs. Today, the broken-window fallacy explains why thousands of new stimulus jobs are not improving the total employment picture.
Keynesian economists counter that redistribution can increase demand if the money is transferred from savers to spenders. Yet this “idle savings” theory assumes that savings fall out of the economy, which clearly is not the case. Nearly all individuals and businesses invest their savings or put it in banks (which in turn invest it or lend it out) — so the money is still being spent somewhere in the economy. Even in this recession, with tightened lending standards, banks are performing their traditional role of intermediating between those who have savings and those who need to borrow. They are not building extensive basement vaults to hoard cash.
Since the financial system transfers savings into investment spending, the only savings that drop out of the economy are those dollars literally hoarded in mattresses and safes — and there is no evidence that this is occurring en masse. And even if individuals, businesses, and banks did distrust the financial system enough to hoard their dollars, why would they suddenly lend them to the government to finance a stimulus bill?
Once the idle-savings theory collapses, so does all the intellectual support for government spending as stimulus. If there are no idle savings to acquire, then the government is merely borrowing purchasing power from one part of the economy and moving it into another part of the economy.
Even foreign borrowing is no free lunch. Before
I’ve purposely ignored the Federal Reserve, which actually can inject cash into the economy, but not in a way that constitutes stimulus. Congress can deficit-spend; Treasury can finance the deficit spending by issuing bonds; and the Federal Reserve can buy those bonds by printing money. Any economic boost is then due to the Federal Reserve’s actions, not the deficit spending — and of course the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates, slowing the economy again, to bring the resulting inflation under control.
If government spending doesn’t cause economic growth, what does? Growth happens when more goods and services are produced, and the only true source of this is an expanding labor force combined with high productivity. High productivity in turn requires educated and motivated workers, advanced technology, adequate infrastructure, physical capital such as factories and tools, and the rule of law.
Government spending could boost long-run productivity through investments in education and infrastructure — but only if politicians could target those investments better than the private sector would. And it turns out that politicians cannot outsmart the marketplace. Mountains of academic studies show that government spending generally reduces long-term productivity.
Furthermore, most government programs that could increase productivity don’t work fast enough to counteract a recession. Education spending cannot raise productivity until its student beneficiaries graduate and enter the work force. It can take more than a decade to build new highways and bridges.
The only policy proven to increase productivity in the short term is to lower tax rates and reduce regulation. Businesses can grow only through consistent investment and an expanding, skilled workforce. Cutting marginal tax rates promotes these conditions, by creating incentives to work, save, and invest.
It’s happened before. In 1981, President Reagan inherited an economy stagnating under the weight of 70 percent marginal income-tax rates. Under Reagan, the top rate fell to 28 percent, and the subsequent surge in investment and labor supply created the strongest 25-year economic boom in American history.
Such tax-rate reductions are superior to tax rebates designed to “put money in people’s pockets.” Rebates — like government spending — simply redistribute existing dollars. They don’t increase productivity because they don’t change incentives: No one has to work, save, or invest more to get a tax rebate. The 2001 and 2008 rebates failed because Congress borrowed money from investors and foreigners and redistributed it to families. Not surprisingly, any new personal-consumption spending was matched by corresponding declines in investment spending and net exports, and the economy remained stagnant.
If conservatives wish to provide economic leadership, they must get this argument right. The stimulus is not failing because it is too small or because too much of it is being saved. It’s failing because Congress can only redistribute existing demand, not create new demand. This recession will eventually end. The more serious, long-term danger is that President Obama’s Europeanization of the economy will bring the same slow growth, stagnant wages, job losses, high taxes, and lack of competitiveness that have plagued Western Europe, leaving the United States at an ever-growing disadvantage with Asian countries not so afflicted.
Mr. Riedl is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
I was not able to personally attend, but I am watching the event on C-SPAN with my three oldest daughters (12, 9, 7) who are very engaged and interested. From "American Thinkers" Geoffrey P. Hunt....
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson.
In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to
George Bush Jr didn't fail so much as he was perceived to have been too much of a patrician while being uncomfortable with his more conservative allies. Yet George Bush Sr is still perceived as a man of uncommon decency, loyal to the enduring American character of rugged self-determination, free markets, and generosity. George W will eventually be treated more kindly by historians as one whose potential was squashed by his own compromise of conservative principles, in some ways repeating the mistakes of his father, while ignoring many lessons in executive leadership he should have learned at
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.
Posts
