Karen Stohr Responds

For earlier posts, click here, here, and here.

Karen responds:

First, let me suggest that is useful to keep the question of whether a proposed speaker counts as a publicly dissenting Catholic from the question of whether a proposed speaker holds views that the Church considers immoral. As I lack the qualifications to address the first question, I’ll stick with the second. Besides, President Bush and Senator Clinton can hardly be rejected as speakers on the grounds that they are bad Catholics. We also want to remember that the moral status of abortion/ESC research does not immediately transfer to the act of voting to support or uphold legal abortion/ESC research (or voting for people who vote to support or uphold legal abortion/ESC research.)

Let us assume that the proposed controversial speaker would confine her speech to the typical banalities and platitudes of commencement addresses. And let us assume that being asked to deliver a commencement address really is an honor, particularly when accompanied by an honorary degree, as Richard has noted. Richard makes the following remark, with which I agree:

“While the honor doesn't necessarily mean that the school endorses everything the person has ever said or done, the choice to honor someone who disagrees with Church teaching on very important issues has the potential to interfere with the clarity of the message that the school ought to be trying to communicate.”

Of course, “has the potential to interfere with” does not mean “will interfere with”, and in the case of abortion, the Church’s stance is about as clear and unequivocal as it gets. I would not expect much confusion. But I don’t think that confusion is really the issue anyway. I do think it’s about endorsement, and more specifically, whether it is possible to honor someone for her contributions to some aspects of political life while remaining sufficiently distant from the others to avoid cooperation or scandal. And I think that this depends a great deal on the speaker’s actual commitments and the extent to which her achievements and accomplishments are wrapped up with the controversial views. Presumably, a Catholic institution could not bestow an honorary degree on someone like Kate Michelman (who probably wouldn’t accept it) without engaging in formal cooperation, for it is hard to see what else she might be honored for other than her efforts to keep abortion legal.    But not all politicians with pro-choice voting records fall into this category.

The judgment that a speaker’s achievements cannot be separated from her pro-choice voting record on abortion or embryonic stem cell research must be based in the principle that having that voting record is such a grave moral error that it cannot be overlooked or set aside. I know that this seems plausible enough to many people, and yet I would urge caution here. For the judgment to hold, it has to constitute not just moral error, but moral error so culpable as to render the person a morally inappropriate choice for commencement. Pro-choice politicians mostly fall into two camps: (1) those who do not believe that embryos and fetuses have full moral rights, and (2) those who believe it, but who believe it on theological grounds and hence, take themselves to have no arguments against abortion that they can properly bring into space of public reasons. (I will grant that some insincerely claim to be in (2) when they are really in (1), but I will not grant that this is always the case.) Either way, the Catholic remedy should be a thoroughly convincing natural law-based secular argument against abortion and ESC research, but these are not so easy to come by, and anyway, it’s unclear to me that people are appropriately held culpable for unfamiliarity with philosophical arguments.

I’d rather leave the commencement podium fairly (though not completely) wide open on all sides. It just strikes me as, well, more Christian. But on this point, I certainly see how reasonable people might disagree.