Culture
Whose Social Justice?
State of the Union: A recent legal battle over student journalism at the University of Notre Dame showcases the corrosive effect of political ideology on faith.
After reporting on a professor’s offer to provide abortion access, student journalists at a Catholic university found themselves being sued for defamation. Despite the troubling nature of the allegation, one good of living in a post-Dobbs world is that being called out for promoting abortion is now received as a defamatory claim rather than a compliment.
Last Wednesday, the Irish Rover, an independent Catholic student newspaper at the University of Notre Dame, filed an anti-SLAPP motion in response to the defamation lawsuit against the publication from university professor Tamara Kay.
In a complaint filed in St. Joseph County, Indiana, Kay’s attorney said two Rover articles from October and March are “defamatory per se and establish a willful intent to portray Dr. Kay in a negative and disparaging manner consistent with a motive of bad faith and a reckless disregard for truth and falsity.”
According to the anti-SLAPP motion provided to The American Conservative, the Rover’s legal representation at The Bopp Law Firm maintain that “the Irish Rover’s statements did not contain defamatory imputation, as they reported on Dr. Kay’s own scholarship and advocacy, and on her statements regarding academic freedom and encouragement to students to advocate for their own sincerely held beliefs.”
Rover editor W. Joseph DeReuil, told The American Conservative that “because Kay’s claims are baseless, we wish to put this behind us as quickly as possible so that we can reorient our focus upon promoting the Catholic identity of Notre Dame…. I know that everything we published is true and written in good faith, so I firmly believe that the lawsuit can only be decided in favor of the Irish Rover.”
Indeed, the publication has built its mission around “preserving the Catholic identity of Notre Dame,” with DeReuil referring The American Conservative to an op-ed where the editors expressed their “hopes to continue discussions that secular culture considers closed.” They added, “We write to defend those teachings of the Church that are hard to accept, those that are more readily ignored.”
I grew up in South Bend and was there long enough to witness Notre Dame’s continued transformation from a quaint Catholic school run by the Congregation of Holy Cross to an institution increasingly preoccupied with prestige, climbing the college rankings on U.S. News & World Report and engaging in extravagant building projects like the $400 million football stadium expansion.
To explain the mission drift, many, such as previous Rover editor and TAC contributor Mary Frances Myler, point to the mid-century Land O’ Lakes gathering that redefined academic freedom at Catholic universities and “traded submission to the Vatican for submission to secular academic standards.”
Yet, whatever the cause of the decline, most distressing about the recent events at Our Lady’s campus is the fact that Kay herself is Catholic. At a gathering of college Democrats in March, she said that her “Catholicism is about social justice, liberation theology, and the Farm Workers’ Movement,” causing her after the Dobbs decision to “feel compelled—from a deep, deep, faith-based place—to speak up.” While commitment to social justice undoubtedly has deep Catholic roots—the very term originated from 19th century Jesuit Luigi Taparelli—Kay’s position could be more accurately described as the misappropriation of faith by political ideology.
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Buried on campus in the crypt of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the prolific writer and famous convert Orestes Brownson foresaw a similar pattern among his 19th-century countrymen, writing that his fellow Catholics, “fired by political ambition, and engrossed in political affairs,” had come to embrace the ideology of political liberalism in “ignorance of its real anticatholic character, supposing they might adopt it and act on it, without injury to the church.”
The corrosive effect political ideology has had on faith in this country cannot be overstated, but even in his day Brownson saw a cause for hope in people like those at the Irish Rover:
But there is a large class of Catholic young men, graduates from our colleges, whose minds are fresh and malleable, whose hearts are open and ingenuous, who love truth and justice, and who take a deep interest in the future of their country. We write for them to warn them against the dangers which threaten us, and against which there were none to warn us when we were young like them.
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