Catholic schism

E.J. Dionne writes in today's Post that the Vatican's own newspaper calls for right wing Catholic organizations to just shut up when it comes to Obama's appearance at Notre Dame's commencement ceremonies.

We now know that the reaction of right-wing Catholics to Notre Dame's invitation to President Obama falls into the category of "more Catholic than the pope."

To the dismay of many conservatives, the Vatican's own newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, has offered what one antiabortion Catholic blog called "a surprisingly positive assessment of the new president's approach to life issues" -- so positive, in fact, that a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee was moved to criticize Pope Benedict XVI's daily.

The Vatican newspaper offered its analysis as Catholic liberals and conservatives are battling fiercely over Notre Dame's decision to invite the president as this year's commencement speaker and to grant him an honorary degree. The article will strengthen the liberal claim that the Catholic right's over-the-top response is rooted at least as much in Republican and conservative politics as in concern over the abortion question.

The April 29 essay by Giuseppe Fiorentino, L'Osservatore's frequent foreign affairs contributor, painted Obama as a moderate on many fronts. "Some have accused him of practicing excessive statism," Fiorentino wrote, "if not even of making the country drift toward socialism." But "a calmer analysis," he said, suggests that Obama "has moved with caution." (I rely here on a translation of the article posted yesterday on the Vatican's official Web site.)

On abortion and the other life issues, the article concluded that Obama "does not seem to have established the radical changes that he had aired."

In loosening the rules on federal funding of stem-cell research, the paper noted, Obama did not go as far as many in the antiabortion movement feared he would. "The new guidelines regarding embryonic stem cell research do not in fact follow the [prospective] change of route laid out months ago," Fiorentino wrote. "They do not allow for the creation of new embryos for research or therapy purposes, for cloning or reproductive ends; and federal funds can only be used for experimentation with surplus embryos."

Then came a carefully worded sentence declaring that "these measures do not eliminate the reasons for criticism in the face of unacceptable forms of bioengineering that work against the embryo's human identity, but the new regulations are less permissive than expected."

This restrained view contrasts with charges that Obama is the "most radical pro-abortion president in history," words used earlier this year on the Christian Coalition's Web site. During the campaign, Robert P. George, a Princeton professor who is a leading Catholic conservative intellectual, called Obama "the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of president of the United States."

More importantly, according to Dionne, is that the ferocious attacks on Obama by Catholic conservatives have led more moderate Catholics to raise their voices in support of the president and in opposition to the the fact that conservative Catholics don't seem to hold Republican politicians to the same moral absolutes as they do for Democrats.

Indeed, a Gallup Robinson email I received just a few moments ago has this to say:

Despite the flare-up over the University of Notre Dame's outreach to President Barack Obama, 67% of rank-and-file Catholics approve of Obama's job performance, higher than the 58% found among Protestants. Among religious groups, Muslims and Jews give Obama his highest job scores.