The Georgetown 8

Patrick J Deneen

Patrick J. Deneen, who is soon to leave his post as Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, has launched a campaign to obtain Georgetown faculty signatures on a letter asking Georgetown President John J. DeGioia to rescind an invitation to “pro-choice” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to speak at the Jesuit university on commencement day. Sebelius’s HHS promulgated the mandate that faith-based institutions must provide health insurance policies that cover contraception and abortifacients, regardless of their moral objections to these practices. Calling the invitation to speak on commencement day “one of the greatest honors that a University community can bestow upon an individual,” the letter says, “Secretary Sebelius’s role in crafting and advancing the HHS mandate that would require religious institutions to offer insurance coverage that would provide abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraceptives, makes her a profoundly objectionable choice.”

 Only eight members of the Georgetown faculty besides Deneen himself have signed the letter, which Deneen plans to present to President DeGioia late this afternoon, have signed so far. Deneen remains technically a member of the Georgetown faculty until May 30. Georgetown has 2, 173 full- and part-time faculty (not including other staff). So 8 is 0.4 percent of the university’s faculty. “There really aren’t a lot of faculty members at Georgetown who would sign a letter like this,” Deneen told The Cardinal Newman Society. 

“That’s very sad.” Deneen announced earlier this year that he was resigning his position at Georgetown over concerns that the university has lost its Catholic identity. He has accepted a position at the University of Notre Dame. “Once I had made that announcement, I didn’t intend to make any further public statements about the decisions and activities at Georgetown. But this [invitation to Sebelius] was just so scandalous,” Deneen said in a telephone interview. Deneen wrote the letter on Sunday and has been trying to get signatures since. “I’m in touch with a lot of graduates of Georgetown,” he said, “and the thing I’ve been hearing from them is, ‘I keep telling people it’s not as bad as it seems [at Georgetown]. But this decision changes that.’”

Link (here) to The Cardinal Newman Society