Obama at the Smith Dinner? Yes.


Alfred Emanuel Smith (1873 - 1944) was the 42nd Governor of New York, and in 1928 he became the first Catholic to run for President of the United States. In 1945, one year after Smith's death, Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, inaugurated the Alfred E. Smith Dinner to honor the public service of Smith and Catholics in political life and to raise funds for Catholic Charities. For 67 years, the Smith Dinner has been one of the fixtures of New York's social, political and philanthropic life, and the famed Dinner is an intersection of leading figures in politics, culture, and the Church. Because Smith was the first Catholic to run for President, the dinner has also traditionally included the presidential candidates when it is held in an election year. In 2008, for example, John McCain and Barack Obama (pictured above) were invited by Edward Cardinal Egan, and both accepted. Following this well-established precedent, Timothy Cardinal Dolan has invited Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to attend this year's Smith Dinner, and now Cardinal Dolan is coming under attack from elements of the pro-life movement in the United States because he invited President Obama to the Smith Dinner. I believe that the critics are wrong and should stop their protests of the Cardinal's decision.

 Although we must oppose President Obama's pro-death policies with every fiber of our being, it is nonetheless true that he is one of the two candidates for the presidency, and the Church must have open channels of communication with both major parties and their leaders -- including (perhaps especially) the ones with whom we disagree about fundamental matters of justice.

 Cardinal Dolan did the proper thing by inviting Barack Obama to this October's Smith Dinner, and those in the pro-life movement who are protesting this decision are doing their movement and the Church no favor. Let it be, friends.

Popular posts from this blog

Communion with the Church by Degrees of Fullness

A Lecture Addressed to the  Theological Students' Association  of The Catholic University of America by Father Jay Scott Newman, J.C.L.  Assistant Professor of Canon Law  at The Pontifical College Josephinum 18 April 2001 In his De Praescriptione Haereticorum , Tertullian famously asked with derision, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?", meaning "What has philosophy to do with theology?" I begin with this reminder because, although I am here to address the Theological Students' Association, I am not a theologian; I am a canon lawyer. And some among you may well ask with derision, "What has canon law to do with theology?" It's a fair question, so before I explore the topic at hand today, I need briefly to digress and establish something of a lingua franca for our discussion. Because she is a human society, the Church has had law, and therefore lawyers, since her foundation, but canon law as a distinct science and course ...
Read more

Abortion and the Return of Paganism in Ireland

Image
Irish pagans rejoice in the freedom to kill unborn children. In October 2014 I preached about a decision by the US Supreme Court which was a preview of the Obergefell decision that came in June 2015, and in part this is what I said: "It has been many decades, some would say centuries, since the Gospel of Jesus Christ was the primary engine for the formation of culture in the West, and now we are seeing the rapid abandonment of the Gospel as a source of law in the West. For fifty years and more the trajectory of law and culture in Europe and the United States has been away from the Christian worldview and towards a new paganism, particularly in regard to sex, marriage, reproduction and family life: no fault divorce, birth control, abortion, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, embryonic stem cell manipulation, assisted suicide, multiple remarriages, and now same sex marriage. These changes in law and custom are but a reflection of the post-Christian character of...
Read more

Of Bad Popes and Bad Presidents

Image
For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Bishops of Rome were saintly scholars and heroic pastors who inspired great devotion among Catholics because of their radiant goodness, and for the Church to have the service of such men is a great blessing. But in that blessing lies a danger. When we have so many valiant shepherds on the Chair of St Peter, one after the other, we can forget that many scoundrels and notorious sinners - to say nothing of average men of modest ability - have also served as popes, and that forgetfulness opens us to undue distress when a pope comes who doesn't measure up to his predecessors. Pope Alexander VI - Rodrigo Borgia, pictured above - reminds us that the office of the papacy can certainly survive and in some ways even flourish when occupied by a man who is manifestly unfit to be the Pastor of the Universal Church, and that knowledge should console anyone who is troubled by the character or actions of a man who sits on the Chair of St Peter but...
Read more