If there's a crisis in the Catholic Church today, it's the disjuncture between the imperative to live and teach the Gospel and the obsession to be fair and broad minded on moral and critical life issues.
Richards has been the head of Planned Parenthood Federation of America since 2006, and said in 2009 that the U.S. Bishops' efforts to remove abortion services from universal health care "would make American women second-class citizens and deny them access to benefits they currently have."
The Archdiocese of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., and Cardinal Wilfred Napier of Durban, South Africa have all either explicitly or implicitly spoken against the invite of Richards as hosting a speaker who contradicts the teaching of the Church.
"If there's a crisis in the Catholic Church today, it's the disjuncture between the imperative to live and teach the Gospel and the obsession to be fair and broad minded on moral and critical life issues. Georgetown's hosting Cecile Richards is an obvious case!" Cardinal Napier tweeted in response to the invite.
Persecuted Christians in the Middle East are standing by their faith as part of their very identity, Cardinal Wuerl observed in a Mar. 8 blog post, and Catholic institutions must likewise "offer this testimony of their Catholic identity."
"A Catholic university brings to the discussion a vision rooted in the Gospel that necessarily challenges other ways of life," he wrote.
However, he added, quoting from his 2015 pastoral letter "Being Catholic Today," that the world as a whole "benefits" when a Catholic university maintains its faithfulness to Church teaching "because the richness of Catholic teaching can engage the secular culture in a way that the light of the wisdom of God is brought to bear on the issues of the day."
Abortion is contrary to an authentically human society, he wrote, and "thus, it is neither authentically Catholic nor within the Catholic tradition for a university to provide a special platform to those voices that promote or support such counter values."
The Archdiocese of Washington suggested that the student group should have invited a speaker to focus instead on "the lives and ministry, focus and values of people like Blessed Óscar Romero, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and Pope Francis in place of that group's seemingly constant preoccupation with sexual activity, contraception and abortion."
Georgetown University also came under fire in 2012 for inviting then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to speak at graduation. The HHS had months before required many Catholic institutions to provide birth control to employees, and Cardinal Wuerl pointed to "the selection of a featured speaker whose actions as a public official present the most direct challenge to religious liberty in recent history."
In the fall of 2013, a Georgetown University law class required students to work with an abortion advocacy group.
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In their "Regulatory Advocacy: Women and the Affordable Care Act" course, which debuted in the spring 2014 semester, students were required to work with the National Women's Law Center, a D.C.-based advocacy group whose healthcare platform pushes for abortion, sterilization and contraceptive provision as health care.
In their recent statement, Georgetown asserted that its Catholic values continue to "maintain a privileged place in our community while at the same time providing a forum that does not limit speech either in the content of the view being expressed or the speaker expressing the view."
Mary Rezac contributed to this report.
Matt Hadro was the political editor at Catholic News Agency through October 2021. He previously worked as CNA senior D.C. correspondent and as a press secretary for U.S. Congressman Chris Smith.