Professor Charles Rice Circulates Blistering Open Letter to Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins

Professor Emeritus Charles E. Rice of Notre Dame Law School is circulating an Open Letter to Notre Dame President Father John M. Jenkins in which he highlights the "deficiencies" in Jenkins recent "pro-life" announcement. We will get to that in a moment but let's skip right to the best part -- a scathing passage which comes at the end of what is an absolutely relentless, methodical 2,500-word annihilation of the flimsy and now-teetering justifications put forward by the University for sitting on their hands while the criminal justice systems grinds down on the 88 people arrested last May now facing trial for criminal trespass.

Your decision to present an official Notre Dame presence at the March could be beneficial, but not in the context of an unrelenting criminalization by Notre Dame of sincere and peaceful friends of Notre Dame whose offense was their desire to pray, on the campus, for the University and all concerned including yourself. If you appear at the March as the continuing criminalizer of those pro-life witnesses, you predictably will earn not approbation but scorn—a scorn which will surely be directed toward Notre Dame as well. As long as you pursue the criminalization of those pro-life witnesses, your newest pro-life statements will be regarded reasonably as a cosmetic covering of the institutional anatomy in the wake of the continuing backlash arising from your conferral of Notre Dame’s highest honor on the most relentlessly pro-abortion public official in the world.

In listing the ways in which Jenkins' announcement is defecient, Rice notes that while praising the Women’s Care Center and of its leader, Ann Murphy Manion, Notre Dame has not extended an invitation to the WCC to establish an office on the Notre Dame campus to serve students, faculty and staff.

In creating the Task Force on Supporting the Choice for Life Rice cites the analysis of William Dempsey, ND ’52, President of the Sycamore Trust in pointing out notes:

A project that deliberately excludes from participation those who have courageously manned organizations standing against the faculty attitude toward the pro-life cause ought to be regarded with suspicion.

Rice quotes Dempsey further:

...the obviously deliberate exclusion from Task Force membership of anyone associated with the ND organizations that have been unashamedly and actively pro-life and that the student selected is not from among the leadership of the student right to life organizations or from anyone active in last year’s student alliance protesting the honoring of the President, ND Response.

Rice goes on to respond to a misleading statement put out by Fr. Jenkins' assistant, Dr. Frances L. Shavers, Chief of Staff and Special Assistant to the President.

Dr. Shavers states "these protesters were arrested for trespassing and not for expressing their pro-life position.” That is misleading. This is not an ordinary case of trespass to land such as would occur if a commuter walks across your lawn and flower bed as a short-cut to the train station. Notre Dame is ordinarily an open campus. Those 88 persons, 82 of whom are represented by Tom Dixon, ND ’84, ND Law School ’93, were arrested not because they were there, but because of who they were, why they were there and what they were saying. Other persons with pro-Obama signs were there but were not arrested and not disturbed. Serious legal and constitutional questions are involved, arising especially from the symbiotic relationship between the Notre Dame Security Police, who made the arrests, and the County Police. This letter is not a legal brief. Rather I merely note that it is disingenuous for Notre Dame to pretend that this is merely a routine trespass case (emphasis added).

There is much, much more. Read the entire letter here:

Rice Open Letter to Fr. Jenkins (pdf)