Cardinal Edward Egan of New York believes it is a ‘mistake’ for Fordham University to honor pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

But Fordham is going ahead anyway.

Breyer is scheduled to receive the Fordham-Stein Ethics Prize at a dinner tomorrow night in New York. He was picked for the honor by the Fordham University School of Law’s Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics, despite his long-standing record of voting in favor of abortion rights in cases that have come before the court.

That record includes Breyer’s authorship in 2000 of the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s Stenberg vs. Carhart decision, which took away the right of states to pass laws restricting late-term, partial-birth abortions.

The Cardinal Newman Society has joined with Fordham’s student pro-life organization in protesting the Jesuit university’s insistence on honoring Breyer. Read the Register’s coverage of the controversy here.

In their June 2004 document “Catholics in Political Life,” the U.S. bishops specifically stated that bestowing honors on pro-abortion individuals is incompatible with the identity of an authentically Catholic institution.

“The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles,” the document states, using bold letters to highlight the bishops’ point. “They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”

Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, said yesterday that Cardinal Egan was surprised to learn Fordham had honored Breyer, Associated Press reported.

And, reiterating remarks he made earlier to the Register, Zwilling told Associated Press that Cardinal Egan had spoken with the college’s administration to ensure “that a mistake of this sort will not happen again.”

— Tom McFeely