Catholic bishops rebuke Notre Dame’s liberal appointees amid university mission-drift

Catholic bishops across the U.S. have joined students and professors at the University of Notre Dame to oppose the recent promotion of a liberal, pro-abortion professor to a top position at the university.

Notre Dame announced last month Associate Professor Susan Ostermann will begin as director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies starting July 1. Ostermann joined the university in 2017 as a professor of global affairs, according to Fox News.

Contrary to Catholic doctrine, she has publicly decried pro-life beliefs as based in “white-supremacy” and “racism,” according to multiple reports.

“Abortion access is freedom-enhancing, in the truest sense of the word,” Ostermann wrote in an op-ed with a Notre Dame colleague in 2022. “Consistent with integral human development that emphasizes social justice and human dignity, abortion access respects the inherent dignity of women, their freedom to make choices and to evaluate medical and other risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth.”

Bishops’ statements

Amid nationwide critique against Ostermann’s liberal and pro-abortion views, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese released a statement Wednesday rebuking Notre Dame’s decision.

“Integral human development” is a key Catholic principle of The Liu Institute at Notre Dame, Rhoades writes, explaining how Ostermann’s support for abortion on demand radically opposes Catholic teaching on the “right to life” under this principle. Ostermann’s appointment rejects Notre Dame’s principled alignment with Catholic Church teaching on the protection of human life from the moment of conception, Rhoades says.

“Professor Ostermann’s extensive public advocacy of abortion rights and her disparaging and inflammatory remarks about those who uphold the dignity of human life from the moment of conception to natural death go against a core principle of justice that is central to Notre Dame’s Catholic identity and mission,” he writes.

Rhoades exhorted Notre Dame leaders to “rectify this situation,” noting the nearly five months until Ostermann begins her new position, as sufficient time to amend the decision.

Bishop Robert Barron of the Winona-Rochester Diocese echoed Rhoades, emphasizing his “deep affection” for the university.

“I believe that going ahead with this appointment is repugnant to the identity and mission of that great center of Catholic learning,” he said in a post on X.

Students’ critiques

Notre Dame Right to Life student president Anna Kelley opposed Ostermann’s appointment, citing her life-saving experience as an adopted child from China, where many unborn children have been aborted.

“As a Catholic adoptee from China, I take personal offense at this appointment. I am so blessed to have escaped the fate that Professor Ostermann’s work has inflicted on so many innocent Chinese lives,” she said in a statement. “Because I have been given the gift of life, I am choosing to speak out with my own testimony to bring attention to the real-life consequences that her ideology promotes.”

Ostermann has worked as a consultant for the Population Council, an organization dedicated to world-wide abortion promotion and support, according to Rhoades.

Other students, in a letter to the editor to Notre Dame’s The Observer, decried the inconsistency of Ostermann’s appointment with Notre Dame’s mission.

“The work done by the Keough School of Global Affairs must be informed by the preeminent right to life and the dignity of the human person,” they write. “This right must be at the crux of all University action, both from its leadership and its professors; Ostermann’s public works are contrary to this vital right and have inherently injurious consequences. This issue is neither abstract nor ideological.”

Notre Dame’s drift

Ostermann’s appointment is not Notre Dame’s first ideological drift, according to Professor of Sociology Christian Smith, who resigned from his position at Notre Dame in December.

“Various programs, centers, and institutes scattered across campus, and a certain number of individual faculty members, do work hard to engage the Catholic intellectual tradition,” he writes in an article with First Things, published Thursday. “But at the institutional level, with the university as a whole, Notre Dame’s leaders are equivocal about that Catholic mission and make decisions and pursue practices that ­undermine it.”

Smith explains how Notre Dame attempts to compete with peer institutions, but as a result, reduces its Catholic identity to a mere hiring quota, rather than a “serious engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition.”

“In short, Notre Dame should advance its Catholic mission by means of standards and programs that involve truth-in-advertising, judicious hiring, incentives for faculty to learn about the Catholic intellectual tradition, and accountability for the expectation that faculty contribute to the Catholic mission,” Smith writes.