Things have heated up in the past couple of weeks on the Notre Dame campus with regard to the continuing national discussion on abortion and its relation to the upcoming election. This past week a large number of small white wooden crosses arrayed on the south quad to commemorate the victims of abortion were vandalized by persons unknown. The crosses were not simply trampled on randomly, as they have been at past demonstrations, but large numbers of them were intentionally pulled from the ground and broken, the pieces thrown carelessly around the quad. Fellow Ethics and Culture blogger Michael Garvey and I were returning from lunch at the University Club last Thursday when we came upon members of the campus right-to-life group collecting the broken pieces, repairing the crosses and placing them again in their symmetrical rows. There was an air of tranquility among these students going about their restorative business that seemed to me to clash with the horror of what had been done on the quad the previous evening. I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been that white wooden crosses arrayed at the heart of the Notre Dame campus had been treated in such a manner.

The campus newspaper has covered the vandalism and its viewpoint page has given space for a number of students and faculty to express their opinion. A pro-choice faculty member expressed her disapproval of the vandalism while also expressing her disapproval of the university's failure to give proper support to the expression of pro-choice opinion on campus. A student, once a candidate for president of the student body I am told, argued that the vandalism was just an instance of (healthy?) exercise of freedom of speech. What was destroyed he patiently explained were, after all, merely wooden symbols. No one was really hurt. It wasn't like the holocaust or the war in Iraq.

We should be grateful, I think, that these things still matter at Notre Dame. Evidence that what Notre Dame thinks also matters to the larger culture--especially to the Democratic party in an election year--was provided on Monday morning. Our community awoke to find an op-ed column by the dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Mark Roche, prominently displayed at the top of the editorial page of the New York Times arguing that Catholics--even pro-life Catholics as he claims to be--can with a clear conscience vote for John Kerry (a link to Roche's editorial can be found on the October 13 post from Robert George and Gerald Bradley, just below). Our Senior Research Fellow at the Center, Alasdair MacIntyre, had sent an op-ed column to the Times some weeks ago defending the view that Catholics should not vote in this election for either of the candidates for the presidency, but the Times did not bother even to acknowledge receiving his column. I was surprised that such a prominent figure at Notre Dame as Dean Roche should intervene in this contentious campaign with, as it seemed to me, such weak arguments--and on a topic of such moment for those of us persuaded by the Pope John Paul II's moving warnings about a Culture of Death.

Others have responded to Dean Roche, however, (see the George, Bradley response below) and I will refrain from commenting on his particular arguments in this place. The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture does not, of course, endorse candidates for public office. We are neither a Democratic nor Republican ethics center. Indeed, we have been disturbed by the efforts of some prominent Catholic public figures, especially in the past year, to identify too closely the moral and social teachings of the Catholic Church with the political agenda of the Republican Party.

Having said that, however, we do recognize that in virtually every one of the instances in which innocent life is being directly assaulted in contemporary culture, Senator Kerry has stood with the opponents of life. He opposed all attempts to limit partial birth abortion. He has cynically used the stem cell issue in this campaign, exaggerating its medical promise and failing to come to terms with the enormity of the proposals that we should create human lives precisely so we can then destroy them and use their parts to improve our own lives. He vigorously supports the use of federal funds to pay for abortions and he reaffirmed in the third presidential debate that he will appoint no judges to the highest court who are not antecedently and irrevocably committed to upholding the courts ban on democratic voting on the issue of abortion rights.

Although we do not endorse candidates or political parties, we do stand with those students patiently repairing the wooden crosses on the south quad last week. In a culture where we are deprived of the opportunity to vote on the abortion issue, we must seek other ways to witness to our opposition to the continuing slaughter of the innocents. The Right-to-Life students at Notre Dame have found such a way--and their patience in erecting and defending their memorial each year reminds us all vividly of what is at stake in the "abortion debate." The often tendentious and manipulative campaign rhetoric and academic posturing that surrounds talk about the fate of the smallest and most defenseless of our fellow human beings is frequently wearying. The white crosses that are placed each year in such numbers on our campus, however, encourage us all to keep up the battle of ideas as well as the practical fight to make the world safe for unborn children, for the pregnant women who carry them, and for the children they will become if they are allowed to be born.

David Solomon
W.P. and H.B. White Director
Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture