No way to spin this one

Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon, a great lady and formidable scholar, releases an open letter to the president of the University of Notre Dame (also available here).

She has declined the Laetare Medal she was to receive at the school's graduation ceremony next month because she wants no part of the school's clumsy attempt to use her own speech to "balance" the commencement address from, and awarding of an honorary degree to, President Obama.

More proof -- as if any were needed -- that Fr. John Jenkins is in over his head (Nice Deb catalogs the ways).

Glendon did right. In Fr. Ray de Souza's words, "It is a rare personage who could ennoble an award by refusing to receive it, but Professor Glendon has done just that."

Postscript: This is not the first time that the current president of the University of Notre Dame has been spanked in an open letter.

Robert Royal has a thoughtful essay on these developments, and John Zmirak is (of course) cuttingly funny.

Here's a bit of Zmirak:

Notre Dame's craven hunger for secular esteem is hardly unique in American Catholic history. Think how giddy with joy we were when the skirt-chasing son of a bootlegging Nazi appeaser won the election in 1960 on the votes of dead Chicagoans. From the grubby, roughnecked immigrant families of eight or nine Vinnies and Patricks who'd filled the ethnic parishes and pickle factories, we'd finally made our way into the "mainstream," to join the lapsing members of the old American elite -- whose Protestant faith and natural virtues were even then dribbling down their pants leg like John Cheever's spilled seventh martini. We've arrived. There goes the neighborhood.