Tag Archives: Notre Dame

How To Skew News To Fit Your Agenda

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This article is not about the recent Biden scandals, although that is another example of what I am about to illustrate. It is about stating a fact which happens to be true without providing the background information that provides perspective. Last week various media outlets posted articles stating that ‘hundreds of the Notre Dame faculty signed a letter opposing the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.”  Sounds a little fishy when you consider that most reports have said that she was highly regarded by both students and faculty at Notre Dame. Well, there is more to the story.

On Wednesday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the letter.

The article reports:

Eighty-eight faculty members at the University of Notre Dame signed a letter criticizing their “colleague,” Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, though none of these faculty members are from Notre Dame’s Law School.

The letter calls on Barrett to halt her confirmation process until after the election, acknowledging that doing so might ultimately deprive Barrett of the Supreme Court vacancy.

None of the people who signed the letter are from the Law School. That might be the first clue that something is a little off.

The article continues:

Four of those on the list were gender studies professors, five were peace studies professors, nine specialized in English, and seven specialized in Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries.

Leaders at the University of Notre Dame have previously praised Barrett and expressed support for her confirmation.

“She is a person of the utmost integrity who, as a jurist, acts first and foremost in accord with the law,” Notre Dame President John Jenkins said in a statement. “I join her colleagues in the Law School and across the campus in congratulating her on the nomination, and wish her and her family well through what has become, sadly, a personally bruising confirmation process.”

“Judge Amy Coney Barrett is an absolutely brilliant legal scholar and jurist,” Joseph A. Matson Dean of the Law School Marcus Cole said in a statement following Barrett’s nomination. “She is also one of the most popular teachers we have ever had here at Notre Dame Law School. Judge Barrett is incredibly generous with her time and wisdom while mentoring her students.”

The Notre Dame faculty letter came after over 50 law professors sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday praising Barrett’s qualifications as “stellar” and expressing support for her confirmation.

It is a safe guess that those professors opposing the nomination were not registered as Republicans. Although the Supreme Court was intended by our Founding Fathers to be the least political branch of government, recent history shows that is not the case. The questions about healthcare were interesting–Congress is tasked with setting healthcare policy. If they are doing it right, why are they concerned about Judge Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court?

Tearing Down The Foundation

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The most important part of a building is the foundation. If the foundation is sturdy, chances are the building will stand. Our government is built on the concept of Judeo-Christian values. The Constitution states that our rights come from God and that the Constitution is there to insure those rights are protected–the rights do not come from government.

On Friday night, Attorney General William Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame about the attack on those traditional values that form the basis of our society. Yesterday The Observer posted an article about the speech. The Observer is a student-run, daily print & online newspaper serving Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s & Holy Cross.

The article reports:

U.S. Attorney General William Barr spoke at Notre Dame Law School on Friday evening, calling for a defense of Judeo-Christian values and religious freedom in response to growing secularism in America.

The event was reserved for students, faculty and staff of the Notre Dame Law School and de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, both of which hosted the lecture. It took place in the McCartan Courtroom while another room in the law school streamed the speech to another crowd of ticket-holding students and faculty.

Barr began by discussing the new challenges the United States is facing today. It’s a difficulty he said the Founding Fathers foresaw as “the supreme test of a free society.”

“The central question was whether over the long haul, we the people can handle freedom,” Barr said. “The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.”

In the Founders’ view, Barr said, free government was only suitable for people who had the discipline to control themselves according to a transcendent moral order. As John Adams put it, he said, the United States Constitution was made only for “a moral and religious people.” 

“Now, modern secularists dismiss this idea of morality as sort of otherworldly superstition imposed by a killjoy clergy,” Barr said. “But in fact, Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct. They reflect the rules that are best for man not in the by-and-by but in the here-and-now.”

By the same token, he said, violations of these moral laws have “bad, real world consequences” for man and society — such as society is seeing today.

“I think we all recognize that over the past 50 years, religion has been under increasing attack,” Barr said. “On the one hand, we have seen the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square. On the other hand, we see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism.”

With escalating suicide rates, the drug epidemic, hate crimes and more, there is a campaign to “destroy the traditional moral order,” Barr said, and secularists ignore these results and press on with “even greater militancy.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The last part of the article includes the students’ reaction to the speech. Some of that reaction reflects the moral rebellion that has characterized many of our young college students.

CNS News also posted an article about the speech.

CNS News notes:

The secularist government attempts to alleviate bad consequences by advancing abortion, enabling drug use and assuming the roles of parent and spouse, Barr said. And, while promising unlimited freedom, the end result of the secularist religion is one of servitude, he warned:

“So, the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion.

“The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites.

“The solution to the breakdown of the family is for The State to set itself up as an ersatz husband for the single mother and an ersatz father for the children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage.

“And, while we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them.

“We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on whom we depend.”

“Interestingly, this idea of The State as the Alleviator of Bad Consequences has given rise to a new moral system that goes hand-in-hand with the secularization of society. It can be called the System of Macro-Morality. And, in some ways, it is an inversion of Christian morality.

“Christianity teaches a Micro-Morality: we transform the world by focusing on our own personal morality and transformation. The new secular religion teaches Macro-Morality. Once morality is not gauged by their private conduct, but rather their commitment to political causes and collective action to address various social problems.

“This system allows us not to worry so much about the strictures on our own private lives, because we can find salvation on the picket line. We can signal our finely-tuned moral sensibilities by participating in demonstrations on this cause or on that.”

The generation that is fighting to destroy the foundation of America will have to live with the consequences of their actions. They might not like what they have created.

Good News From France

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The Daily Wire reported yesterday that over the weekend, the French Senate approved a bill paving the way forward for restoring Notre Dame cathedral, which nearly burned to the ground back in April in a construction fire. There’s one caveat, however: the cathedral must be returned to its “last known visual state.”

The article reports:

In other words, despite French president Emmanuel Macron’s desire to see parts of the cathedral rebuilt with an eye to more “contemporary architecture,” the French government wants to see Notre Dame returned to its former glory, according to The Local.

“French Senators have stipulated that Notre-Dame cathedral must be restored exactly how it was before the devastating fire that tore through the Paris landmark,” the Parisian news outlet reported Tuesday.

The stipulation came in the form of an addendum to a bill authorizing French authorities to begin work on Notre Dame so that the cathedral is completely rebuilt in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024 — just five years from now. The French Parliament approved the measure earlier this month but did not comment on how the cathedral should look once restoration work was finished.

The bill is controversial already: it’s written so that the French government can bypass the traditional requirements of public and legislative approval before it can shuttle money from national coffers into the project. It’s also tied to what experts consider a “rush job,” allowing only five years for a refurbishment that could — or should — take decades.

The article cites some examples of suggested changes:

Part of the problem, the historians said, was that Macron and others wanted to incorporate contemporary modifications into the cathedral restoration. Proposed ideas included a new glass spire, a glass observation roof, and even a roof addition with a public swimming pool and community garden. Integrating those ideas into a centuries-old monument could prove almost impossible.

Sorry, I just can’t see a public swimming pool in the middle of Notre Dame. Notre Dame was a beautiful cathedral and needs to be restored to its former beauty. If you need a community garden and public swimming pool, please put them elsewhere.

When Technology Is Wonderful

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Yesterday The Daily Caller reported on one of the tools used to fight the recent fire at Notre Dame Cathedral.

The article reports:

The damage to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris could have been a lot worse. If it weren’t for a robot named “Colossus,” firefighters could have lost their lives battling the blaze.

…“The priority we set was to save the two belfries,” he added. “Imagine if the timber of the belfries had been weakened and the bells had collapsed. That was really our fear. In the beginning, it was not impossible to imagine that the cathedral structure could collapse.”

Jean-Claude Gallet, the commander of the Paris Fire Brigade, decided not to risk firefighters’ lives and instead retreat. But there was a backup plan to call in help from a 1,100-pound tank-like robot to help battle the blaze Monday and possibly save any of the Cathedral and relics that might remain.

The robot named “Colossus,” created by Shark Robotics, stands a bit more than 5 ft. tall and about 2.5 feet wide. The tank was able to venture into parts of the cathedral where the temperatures would likely have killed a human.

Gallet told The Times that the robot was able to lower the temperatures in the fire and save lives. Colossus, which is also capable of firing 660 gallons of water-per-minute and controlled via a joystick, took aim at the blaze engulfing the cathedral. It can be operated from as far away as 1,000 feet and the machine is not only waterproof and fireproof but can even withstand thermal radiation, according to the company.

What a fantastic use of modern technology.

What Our Children Are Learning In College

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Anyone who is a parent knows that children learn a whole lot more from what they see than what you tell them.  That continues regardless of how old they are.  Some parents might be upset about the lesson their college-age children recently learned at Notre Dame University.

The Daily Caller reported today that a pro-traditional marriage group that had set up an information table on the Notre Dame campus was shut down by police called by the school.

The article reports:

The cops rushed to the scene after they got the call from school officials at the Roman Catholic school and quickly slapped a “cease and desist” order on the conservative group, Tradition Family Property Student Action (TFP), reports Campus Reform.

TFP Student Action members say they were told by the University of Notre Dame Security Police Department — “fully authorized as a police agency by the State of Indiana” — that there is a distinction between having permission to set up a table and having permission to sit at the table.

Actually sitting at a table seems to require a totally different and higher level of bureaucratic authorization.

If Americans who support the values that have served as the foundation of our country do not stand up for those values and teach those values, those values will disappear. Obviously Notre Dame is not interested in teaching those values.

The article concludes:

TFP Student Action members were handing out a flier entitled “10 Reasons Why Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must Be Opposed.” Ritchie said the response from students and faculty members ranged from respectful to supportive.

Then, a group of leftist students who support gay marriage arrived. They allegedly began ripping up the fliers, shouting a flurry of obscenities and suggesting that the message of religious conservatives does not deserve to be heard.

“It seems like the more you hear about inclusion and diversity in higher education, the less you hear about the truth, the more the truth is shut out of the conversation” Ritchie said.

It seems as if the concept of free speech at Notre Dame only applies to ideas approved by the left end of the political spectrum.

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