One could hardly be faulted for mistaking the University and the Church as age-old antagonists. The two ancient institutions share an inextricable history, a relationship at times both amiable and strained in fair measure. With the Lecture Fund’s invitation of Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, to speak on campus, this enduring tension once again surfaces in plain sight.
The debate over the reciprocal responsibilities and liberties of each establishment is well trodden. Some argue that freedom of expression trumps the University’s particular institutional values, that the University ought to facilitate the unqualified flow of knowledge and discourse. Others argue that the University is logically obliged to divorce itself from Richards’ views (which stand incompatible with the Church’s doctrine on abortion) by virtue of its Catholic identity, a position recently articulated by the Archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Wuerl. Still others go further in asserting that the University is canonically obligated as per Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, to deny statements in contradiction to fundamental Church teachings a pulpit.
Without adopting any of these ideologically grounded positions, this Editorial Board holds on pragmatic grounds that the University is within its rights to distance itself from the perception that it endorses, even tacitly, Richards’ views, while still affording her a public platform for expression. In doing so, Georgetown achieves a reasonable compromise in serving its dual commitments to academic and religious values.
Moreover, this Editorial Board views the manner in which the University reconciles these two mandates in the instance of Cecile Richards as a fair, practical balance. While originally intended to speak in Gaston Hall, the symbolic centerpiece of Georgetown’s identity, Richards has been relocated to Lohrfink Auditorium.
This move bypasses the dissonant image of a speaker—whose message, in part, strikes at the core of the Catholic view of human life—with the backdrop of the shields of the world’s Jesuit universities, the seal of Georgetown University, and the inscription “ad majorem Dei gloriam.” However, the venue of Lohrfink provides Richards with an undeniably prominent platform from which she can speak freely.
Therefore, while the views of this Editorial Board are more in line with those of Richards and Planned Parenthood than those of the Catholic Church, we find that this arrangement affirms both the commitment of the university to dialogue and academic freedom as well as to its Catholic values in the Jesuit tradition.
