As if the Queer festival at Notre Dame reported here a few days ago wasn't bad enough, the latest news is that the infamous Vagina Monologues are being performed on campus.
Not only are they being performed, the author, Eva Ensler, appeared as a luncheon guest on campus yesterday to mark the beginning of the three day run of the performance.
The local ordinary, Bishop D'Arcy, has been working quietly since this past summer to try and persuade Notre Dame to cancel the event, and issued a statement condemning Notre Dame's actions a few days ago.
Regrettably, the case of Notre Dame is not unique. The scandal of the performance of Vagina Monologues on Catholic campuses across the country is chronicled at the Cardinal Newman Society web site.
Of course the scandal at Notre Dame is far worse, in light of the institution's national Catholic reputation. William McGurn did a great job making this point in a recent article in First Things. He wrote:
In the last weeks of the 2004 electoral campaign, a Notre Dame dean, Mark Roche, appeared on the New York Times op-ed page making the case that, the evil of abortion notwithstanding, Kerry’s candidacy reflected Catholic teaching better than Bush’s did. On the whole, it reminded me of Marion Barry’s defense of his mayoral record in Washington D.C.: “Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”As a newspaperman who has solicited and edited op-eds for the Wall Street Journal on three continents, I’m fairly confident that the name the Times wanted on its pro-Kerry op-ed page was not Mark Roche’s but Notre Dame’s. Which reminds us that Catholic enablers are institutions as often as individuals. Had Governor Cuomo delivered his 1984 speech at Yale or had Mark Roche been a dean at Indiana University, nobody would have paid attention.
It's no accident that of all the universities performing the Vagina Monologues, Ensler did lunch at Notre Dame. What's a Catholic to do?
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary...