The president of Notre Dame, Fr. Jenkins, is receiving an award tonight here in New York—from the American Irish Historical Society dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The society’s reasons for honoring him include things of which the Irish and Catholic—and honor-worthiness—character is not all that apparent. “Father Jenkins has appointed five new deans during his tenure as president,” for instance.
Still, there is this: “Father Jenkins repeatedly has vowed to maintain Notre Dame’s identity as a Catholic university, perhaps most notably at the 2009 commencement ceremony when, in the face of criticism of his invitation to President Barack Obama to receive an honorary degree, he said: ‘Tapping the full potential of human reason to seek God and serve humanity is a central mission of the Catholic Church. The natural place for the Church to pursue this mission is at a Catholic university.’”
Yes, well, he did do that.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…
