Again, as I did in November, I’m posting a relevant academic conference paper, with the accompanying increase in length and change in style (see my November 10, 2009 post for more on this). It always seems like a shame for a paper’s audience to be limited to whoever is sitting in the room during its initial presentation, so while Martin and I do not envision Religious Rhetorics becoming simply a repository for our conference papers, nonetheless, from time to time we’ll post them. Now that summer is upon us, hopefully we’ll also manage to put together more posts in general.
“Catholic Identity and Abortion as a Political Legitimation Strategy in the 2009 Notre Dame Commencement Controversy,” as prepared for presentation on May 29, 2010 at the 14th Rhetoric Society of America Biennial Conference in Minneapolis, MN. (“Rhetoric: Concord and Controversy.”) Those of you who have read my pieces from last spring will find some of the content of this paper familiar, and you’ll also find that I’ve framed it differently for an explicitly academic audience. Thanks, as ever, for reading, and I welcome your feedback.
Introduction
In this paper I examine how political and institutional legitimacy can be generated rhetorically. In particular, I look at how some activists link Catholic identity with opposing abortion and how their model of Catholic identity gains legitimacy through the public statements of Catholic bishops. Last year’s controversy over President Barack Obama speaking at the University of Notre Dame’s commencement serves as my case study.
Through this paper, I illustrate how legitimacy is a valuable concept for rhetorical studies. In addition, I show how the concept of master narrative, as manifested in the discourse of these activists, is valuable for the study of rhetorical legitimation. In what follows, I first explain my theoretical framework with an overview of legitimacy and master narrative. I then offer discourse samples from the case study to illustrate how these theories manifest rhetorically.
Legitimacy and Master Narratives
Although legitimacy has received attention in political philosophy and literary theory, scholarship in rhetoric is only beginning to articulate the role of language in constructing legitimacy (see, for example, Andreea Ritivoi’s recent work). In its literal sense, legitimacy refers to the law; something is legitimate by virtue of being in accord with a society’s ruling code. In practice, though, the meaning extends beyond the law and explains what makes laws and leaders acceptable to the public they rule. As German political theorist Hannah Arendt argues, legitimacy can be lost if authorities violate the trust of the populace, because all true power is the product of popular consent. In other words, legitimacy ultimately comes from the people.
While legitimacy can be used simply to describe the sources of stability within a society, it can also be a critique of domination within that same society. For example, German sociologist Max Weber, the modern founder of legitimation theory, argues that economic violence (i.e., laissez faire capitalism) is legitimized through the so-called Protestant work ethic, while French literary theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that the 19th grand narratives of science legitimized cultural imperialism.
One fruitful way to connect the concept of legitimacy to language and rhetoric is in fact through Lyotard’s concept of grand or master narratives. Master narrative has been used within the disciplines of women’s studies (Lawless 2003), journalism (Cline 2006), and ethics (Lindemann Nelson 2001), to name a few, but it has not been prominent within the field of rhetoric. However, rhetoricians have connected rhetoric to narrative theory, as Ritivoi did in her 2002 book Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and Immigrant Identity.
Put briefly, in contrast to rationalist assumptions that knowledge is validated purely by reason, narrative theory shows us that certain underlying narratives and metaphors are at work in even the strictest logic. Some cultural narratives are particularly powerful at organizing social identity and knowledge, and these are often known as master narratives. Master narratives are problematic when they legitimize oppressive power structures. For example, Jean-Francois Lyotard, as mentioned above, criticized 19th century continental master narratives of science for how they legitimized cultural imperialism, because they were used to argue that pure “narrative” or non-scientific knowledge, as occurred in non-European societies, was inferior to scientific knowledge. As another example, Hilde Lindemann Nelson, in her 2001 work Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, writes about the medical field, in which a master narrative privileges doctors as “professionals” while nurses are simply “helpers.” Thus, when nurses offer insight into a patient’s needs, they are not listened to, because they are characterized as inferior, soft, emotional, etc. The oppressive and dominating power of the master narrative means that nurses also think of themselves this way, not trusting their own insights, despite the fact that they spend more time with patients and may have more knowledge of some areas of patient care than a doctor does. This shows how, as Lindemann Nelson puts it, their “moral agency” is damaged.
To sum up, legitimation theory can provide both description and critique of power, and master narrative helps connect legitimacy to language. The rhetorical ramifications of these theories become clearer when we look at the Notre Dame case study.
Case Study: Obama at Notre Dame
The controversy over the University of Notre Dame’s commencement last year provides a clear example of how abortion is used to legitimize a narrow understanding of Catholic identity through a compelling master narrative.
The Protesters
The Boston Globe notes that, immediately after the White House’s March 20, 2009 announcement that President Barack Obama would be speaking at Notre Dame’s commencement, a protest website was launched by the conservative Catholic Cardinal Newman Society. According to this organization’s mission statement, “the mission of The Cardinal Newman Society is to help renew and strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education.” As the website’s authors go on to explain, “the Catholic identity of many Catholic institutions of higher education in the United States has become increasingly clouded and the essential elements of Catholic education have been discarded for the sake of a mistaken notion of academic freedom.”
The Cardinal Newman Society brought this philosophy to bear on the University of Notre Dame’s invitation to Mr. Obama by setting up NotreDameScandal.com. The petition housed there called it “an outrage and a scandal” for Notre Dame to have Mr. Obama as its commencement speaker, whom it accuses of “the most anti-life actions of any American president.” By honoring Mr. Obama, “Notre Dame has chosen prestige over principles, popularity over morality.” The petition concludes by “implor[ing]” the university to “halt this travesty immediately” and “call[ing] on [Notre Dame president Fr. John Jenkins] to uphold the sacred mission of [his] Catholic university” – that is, to rescind the invitation to have Mr. Obama speak at commencement. According to the petition’s organizers, more than 300,000 people signed it before the May 17, 2009 commencement ceremony.
With this language, the Cardinal Newman Society is making a strong assertion about the meaning of Catholic identity and how Catholics should interact with politicians with whom they have disagreements. Honoring Mr. Obama, the petition organizers tell us, compromises the “sacred mission” of being a Catholic university, because Mr. Obama has no interest in overturning Roe v. Wade – even though he has stated his commitment to abortion reduction through other means. It is, in fact, a “travesty” and a “scandal” to honor him in a Catholic setting.
The underlying worldview of this petition is far more explicit in a rallying cry on the same topic from anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. In a March 24, 2009 communiqué to members titled “Our Lady of Guadalupe conquered Human Sacrifice. Notre Dame now Honors it,” Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry outlines why members must be prepared for “battle” and “war” against “Catholic treachery.” Terry tells members that, “If Obama speaks at Notre Dame, it will be akin to the political and cultural rape of true Catholicity in America.” He goes on to ask, “Who is Worse: Obama or Herod? You decide.” With language like “rape,” “treachery,” and “Herod” (not to mention “human sacrifice”), Terry clearly paints President Obama – and the Notre Dame administration for inviting him – as the worst sort of evil.
This language demonstrates a powerful master narrative of good vs. evil at work in the Catholic pro-life movement more broadly. By invoking familiar, heroic cultural models, and inviting the reader or listener to perceive him or herself in the role of hero and warrior for good, the above arguments acquire great persuasive power. They appeal, Aristotle would tell us, to our pathos. Who doesn’t want to be the knight standing for the downtrodden against an unjust power? Who wants to back Herod, or human sacrifice? And isn’t it just a simple matter of either being a “real” Catholic, standing up for the Church’s teachings – or of being “flabby and fearful”, selling out to calls for dialogue and civility? It is questions like these that are implicit in the master narrative invoked by Randall Terry.
The Bishops
Of course, it is always possible to find extremist rhetoric around hot-button issues like abortion, and extremists like Randall Terry receive media attention precisely because they’re so outrageous. What is significant about the Notre Dame controversy, however, is the fact that during the nearly two months leading up to Mr. Obama’s May commencement address, 83 Catholic bishops joined their voices to the protest, thereby offering legitimacy to this shrill model of “Catholic identity.”
For example, Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend boycotted the Notre Dame commencement ceremony. Archbishop Raymond Burke, formerly of St. Louis and now Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, called Notre Dame granting Mr. Obama an honorary degree “the source of the gravest scandal”. Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie called it a “day of shame” for Notre Dame, while Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh said the university honoring Mr. Obama resulted in “Our Lady embarrassed.” Cardinal Francis George of Chicago asserted that clearly Notre Dame “didn’t understand what it means to be Catholic,” while Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver suggested that in honoring President Obama, Notre Dame “prostitut[ed] our Catholic identity by appeals to phony dialogue that mask an abdication of our moral witness.” The list could, of course, go on. It is worth noting, however, that Rome was silent throughout the controversy, and editor-in-chief Gian Maria Vian of the semi-official Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano stated in an interview after Mr. Obama’s Notre Dame address that “Obama is not a pro-abortion president.” Thus the link between Catholic identity and particular strategies for abortion opposition may have more to do with American politics than Catholic moral theology as such. This didn’t stop these 83 bishops from entering the fray, however.
In terms of our earlier discussion of legitimacy, the U.S. bishops are clearly attempting to maintain stability and loyalty for the institutional Church with their comments about Notre Dame. However, in the process, they offer legitimacy to political partisanship by equating Republican political strategies with Catholic identity. In so doing, these bishops are actually undermining their own authority with Catholics, and they are delegitimizing their own prophetic voice in the public square.
Conclusion
The value in understanding the rhetoric at work in the Notre Dame controversy is not limited to one commencement address; this situation points to a larger cultural issue, both in the Catholic Church and in American society. Right now, the good vs. evil master narrative reifies a narrow notion of Catholic identity, while at the same time the Church’s rhetorical association with the narrative legitimates the Right’s extremism. The detriments to civil discourse and the kinds of public policies that emerge from it are obvious, and manifested again during the debates over health insurance reform this past year. I would suggest that there are also serious detriments to the Catholic Church itself in a time when it is already rocked by a crisis of trust, in light of increasingly widespread accusations of both sexual abuse of minors by priests and systematic cover-up of such abuses by bishops. Among those most hurt by this may be those who seek spiritual nourishment within the Catholic tradition but are told they are not really “Catholic.” When to dissent from the master narrative is to be aligned with the forces of evil, it is impossible for constructive dialogue and for the progress thus enabled – whether in the Catholic Church or in American society at large.
Discussion
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