Wondering how the University of Notre Dame could ever conclude it’s acceptable to honor pro-abortion President Barack Obama by selecting him as commencement speaker?

According to The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn, it’s part of a longstanding pattern of pro-abortion accommodation at America’s best-known Catholic university.

Back in the 1970s, before pro-abortion advocacy had become settled orthodoxy for the Democratic Party, “Catholic leaders such as the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame, still enjoyed tremendous influence,” McGurn writes. “Had they used that influence to try to arrest the Democrats’ slide on life, things might have been very different today. Instead, they became classic enablers, treating abortion as an irritating issue that needed to be placed off to the side.

“Thus, in 1984, Notre Dame famously handed its platform over to then Gov. Mario Cuomo, who bequeathed to delighted pro-choice Catholics the same personally-opposed-but rationale that Stephen Douglas had used in his debates with Lincoln. A few years later, the university followed up by awarding its Laetare Medal, one of the American Catholicism’s most prestigious, to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — another Catholic who had long since cut his conscience to accommodate the pro-choice direction of his party.”

Since then Notre Dame has made “a few nods and feints” to indicate solidarity with the Church’s pro-life teachings, McGurn says. But for the most part, “time after time, Notre Dame has opted for the inner Cuomo.”

Following three decades of this institutional accommodation of pro-abortion Democratic politicians, McGurn writes, “In the end, the result is moral incoherence. It is an incoherence in which abortion-rights advocates have the most to gain, because it demoralizes those who support the cause of life while removing fears of even the slightest social sanction for those who do not. And it is an incoherence we see all across American Catholic life today.”

Continues McGurn, “In our intellectual life, this incoherence gives us a college president who tells the campus paper that honoring an abortion-rights president is consistent with the bishops’ statement that such leaders ‘should not be given awards, honors, or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.’

“In our public life, it has brought us to a day where the most prominent Catholics in America — from Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to virtually every well-known Irish Catholic in the Senate — now defend the snuffing out of tens of millions of innocent human lives as the exercise of a fundamental right.

“And on the Midwestern campus of the Golden Dome, it allows administrators and professors to tell themselves they are in ‘dialogue’ with the spirit of John F. Kennedy when they are in fact surrendering to a Ted Kennedy reality they themselves have helped create.”