Obama and Catholic Education

All of Barack Obama’s speeches which I have read and/or heard are vacuous.  I realize that every President has a speech writer – something I have never been able to wrap my mind around – and that the speech writer expresses what the President thinks but has trouble articulating.  It could very well be that Obama writes his own speeches or that he follows the tradition of speech writers.  Whatever the case, they have no substance.

In the last few days, the media has been full of commentary on Obama’s speech in Ireland.  The most loud criticism is that the President is calling for an end to Catholic education.  Naturally, there have been opposing view points, claiming that the President has said nothing of the sort. 

Obama spoke in Belfast Town Hall to a group of young people.  He said many things, which mostly involved self-congratulatory remarks and platitudes about unity and peace – statements that people put on their car bumpers.  The quote in question, which has caused much ruckus is this: “If towns remain divided – if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs – if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.  It discourages cooperation.”

This is not the only thing he said.  Obama spoke of “conflicts” around the world using globalized, one-size-fits-all statements, which have nothing to do with particularity of a war or conflict in each country.  He lauded these other nameless people for the fact that they are “groping to find a way to discover how to move beyond the heavy hand of history, to put aside the violence.”

I would like to point out some problems in Obama’s speech, particularly seen in these above statements. 

First, the question: did Obama call for an end of Catholic education or are people just overreacting?  On the surface, of course, Obama does not say that.  However, the genius of it – if one can call it that – is precisely the fact that Obama uses indirect language.  He has been consistently anti-Catholic, and given that pattern, Catholics not only have a right to voice a protest against his statements but also an obligation to do so.

In that one statement – “if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs” – Obama has said that neither Catholic nor Protestant education matters.  If a Catholic school does not have its own building, then where are the students supposed to go to get Catholic education?  Not only has he insulted and nullified Catholicism, he has nullified religion itself.  In one indirect statement, Obama is arguing that morality and education only comes from an organization that is not religious. 

Second issue involves Obama’s sheer arrogance in speaking to people about unity and peace.  These words (and others, like love) have been butchered and ground and made into euphemistic sausages by the milquetoast and mediocre minds.  Obama uses them as platitudes.  I am surprised that his speeches don’t have a slideshow of sunsets and sunrises and flowers and dolphins.

Being a Bosnian and a war survivor, it struck more than a chord with me when I read that it is necessary to move beyond the heaviness of past.  In other words, let it go.  Letting go is very different from forgiveness.  “Past is never dead.  It’s not even past,” as Faulkner said.  And more than anything, it is our responsibility to remember.  When extreme violence occurs and ends with the inevitable body count, the survivors have to choose how to remember, not whether they should remember.

I truly believe in dialogue, and in interconnectedness among different peoples, cultures, and religions.  But unity?  If it ever happens, it will be difficult.  As it should be.  The unity, which Obama moralistically argues for is sameness, which renders everyone mediocre.  If both Catholics and Protestants have one school building to go to, then they can all learn some watered down versions of history.  They will have no roots, no Tradition to guide them, and hence, no personal identity.  Obama’s idea of unity erases the question “who am I?” on both historical and metaphysical planes. 

The difference or alterity is necessary for the persistence of the human family.  Unity has to be understood in relation to the necessity of alterity and in the acknowledgement of unity’s own inherent difficulty.  Writing in Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism, Moses Mendelssohn states: “For the sake of your felicity and ours, a union of faiths is not tolerance; it is diametrically opposed to true tolerance!” 

If such unity is encouraged, future generations will lose their sense of selfhood because they will not have the context of the past to ask questions about the present or the future.  What is the point of trying to understand each other if what we should aim for is the annihilation of differences?  Alterity is an authentic diversity.