Here’s the good news.

Unlike last year, celebration of the Easter octave at the University of Notre Dame will not be sullied by performances of a pornographic play on campus.

Here’s the bad news.

The play isn’t being canceled because Notre Dame’s president, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, finally realized that its staging each year on his campus causes scandal among faithful Catholics.

It’s being canceled because the student producers of the play realize that its staging each year on the campus causes scandal among faithful Catholics.

That’s right. According to the Notre Dame Observer, the student producers of the vulgarly tilted play, “The Vagina Monologues,” said they had not been denied permission to stage the play again in 2009.

But Miriam Olsen, a producer of last year’s show, told the Observer they decided not to proceed because “unfortunately, what happens when the ‘Monologues’ are put on, is they turn into more of a scandal than an action piece.”

Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., last year denounced Notre Dame’s decision to continue to allow the staging of the play.

“I am convinced that permitting performances of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ is not consistent with the identity of a Catholic university,” Bishop D’Arcy said in a statement posted here on the diocesan website.

“The play is little more than a propaganda piece for the sexual revolution and secular feminism,” Bishop D’Arcy said in his statement. “While claiming to deplore violence against women, the play at the same time violates the standards of decency and morality that safeguard a woman’s dignity and protect her, body and soul, from sexual predators.”

We applaud the fact that this pornographic play isn’t going to be staged at Notre Dame in 2009. But we wish that Father Jenkins, not the play’s student organizers, had been the person to order its cancellation because of the scandal caused by its performances on the university’s campus.