REVIEW & OUTLOOK
God and Man and W.
President Bush on the power of faith: a message his alma mater needs to hear.
"The least that can be expected from a university graduate," Harvard President Nathan Pusey once said, is an ability to "pronounce the name of God without embarrassment." These days, of course, you pronounce the name of God at a high school football game and somebody calls in the Supreme Court. And if you happen to bestow an honorary Yale degree on a sitting Republican President, your students boo and your faculty sign a petition treating it as an act of heresy.
Yet as uncomfortable as Yale might be with George W. Bush, clearly this is a President comfortable with the G-word. It tells much about the state of play in the academy today that Notre Dame would be more receptive to the President of the United States than an Ivy that was alma mater not only to him but to President Bush Sr. In New Haven on Monday, Mr. Bush gamely chose to make light of the uproar, quipping that "If you graduate Yale, you get to become President. If you drop out, you get to be Vice President."
Notwithstanding the "noble intentions" of the War on Poverty--launched by another Texas President at another university commencement in 1964--that effort was crippled by an overreliance on government, which transformed beneficiaries into dependents, their fellow citizens into bystanders and the faith-based institutions who toil in this vineyard into second class citizens. The crabbed secular orthodoxy under which this system operates, moreover, is by no means confined to government. As Mr. Bush pointedly reminded the Notre Dame Class of 2001, "Six of the 10 largest corporate givers in America explicitly rule out or restrict donations to faith-based institutions, regardless of their effectiveness."
To his critics--almost all of whom appeared to be represented at Yale the next day--all this talk about empowering faith-based institutions conjures up images of a nation of Peyton Places ruled by federally subsidized Elmer Gantrys. But the reality of faith in America is not people imposing their views, but offering their assistance. Not least of the reasons Mr. Bush chose to make this point in South Bend is Notre Dame's own ethos of service, which the President illustrated by pointing to a local homeless shelter, founded by Notre Dame professors and staffed by Notre Dame students, that treats its occupants not simply as wards or clients, but brothers and sisters of the same Creator.
At a time when the New York City public school system is forecasting a shortage of 40,000 teachers, is it really just a coincidence that Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education--a sort of Peace Corps for inner-city Catholic schools that treats teaching as a vocation--today boasts five applicants for every available slot? Yet in the public square, secular sectarianism trumps success all too often. Even Hillary Clinton, impressed by the love and care she found at Mother Teresa's orphanage in New Delhi, commented on the irony that it would never pass inspection in any American state.
The American landscape is thick with such institutions. They range from the Salvation Army to Chuck Colson's Prison Ministries Fellowship, from Teen Challenge and the Boy Scouts to Habitat for Humanity to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, from the ministers and churches who formed the heart of the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century, to the similar coalition for civil rights led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th. As the President said Sunday, these efforts provide something that government, even at its best, simply cannot do: "attention and kindness, a touch of courtesy and a dose of grace." To those who enjoy such gifts they are easy to take for granted. But to the forgotten and marginalized they are often the only lifeline to hope.
When in 1981 Ronald Reagan delivered his now prophetic address at Notre Dame reporting the collapse of communism, there was a sense of homecoming; after all, Mr. Reagan was the Gipper long before he was the President. Mr. Bush may not have had the advantage of a stint in Hollywood. Yet manifestly he shares with Mr. Reagan a vision that sees America fundamentally as a drama, a commonweal of free men and women whose God-given rights imply equal obligations.
The headlines tell us that at Notre Dame Mr. Bush proposed a new way of looking at welfare and service. But if you follow the script, you can see that what he's really talking about is a renewal of our old ideas about citizenship. At Notre Dame, they loved it. But maybe they most need to hear it at Yale.
