PETITION

Dear Father Jenkins:

We write as supporters of Project Sycamore to offer a pledge and to present a request.

As you know, Project Sycamore consists of members of the Notre Dame family dedicated to the preservation of the Catholic character of Notre Dame. We have joined in this association because of our concern over the degree of secularization that has taken place at Notre Dame over recent years. This phenomenon, as we see it, can be measured in rough but striking fashion by the precipitous decline in the proportion of Catholic members of the faculty, and its pernicious influence has become apparent through events such as The Vagina Monologues that are pervasively hostile to the teachings and traditions of the Church. Our reasons for these views are described in detail in the Project’s website, and accordingly we need not elaborate here.

The depth of our concern is matched by the hope and optimism that we have drawn from your vision of a Notre Dame unparalleled in both its academic and its religious vitality and, even more importantly, from your forthright acknowledgement of, and your determination to remedy, the attenuation of the Catholic presence on the faculty. Your tenure, we are convinced, comes at a critical time in the history of the University. Notre Dame either will follow beyond the point of no return the path to secularization that has been traveled by most, if not all, other major Catholic universities in this country, or it will fulfill its great promise and mission of becoming the leading truly Catholic center of learning and education in the world. We realize full well the enormity of the responsibility with which you have been charged, and we pledge to you our assistance in whatever way we can lend it.

At the same time, we know you would not expect us to forgo respectful criticism when in our judgment the University pursues a course that plainly and importantly collides with the demands of Catholic identity. At this point, given the significance with which the Vagina Monologues issue has been invested, the request we make of you is that, when permission is once again sought for the on-campus performance of this play, you reconsider your position.

We are encouraged in making this request by the assurances given by you and others in the administration that the issue has not been foreclosed forever. Here again, we will not set forth our reasons in any detail, relying instead on the discussion in the Project’s website materials. We will say only that, as we see it, no sufficiently weighty claims of academic freedom are implicated here. There is no question of foreclosing classroom consideration of the play or of the moral issues it raises. What is implicated is the compatibility of a Catholic sense and sensibility with an annual parading of a degrading, startlingly explicit paean to sexual gratification in a host of illicit forms.

We leave you, Father, with our prayers for you in the discharge of your heavy responsibilities and for the success of your mission.