Last Friday, May 23rd, the Jesuit administered College of the Holy Cross in Worcester conferred an honorary degree on Jon Favreau, who delivered the commencement address to graduating seniors and their families. Favreau served as White House Director of Speechwriting for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. Prior to that, Favreau was a speechwriter for the Obama campaign, and a deputy speechwriter for the 2004 presidential campaign of then U. S. Senator John Kerry.
A believer in the superstition that two persons of the same gender can contract marriage, Favreau likened a recent Kansas law protecting the religious freedom rights of businessmen to segregation era Jim Crow legislation. He wrote that Catholic education is based on “guilt, shame and fear,” has called the Catholic Church a “damaged and hypocritical” institution, and excoriated Pope Benedict XVI for allegedly insulting Islam, reinstating Holocaust deniers, criticizing sodomy, and enabling child molesters. Curiously, during his commencement speech, Favreau said the greatest gift of Jesuit education was “faith in human progress.”
The Catholic Action League called Favreau’s selection “another expression of contempt for faithful Catholics struggling to protect life and marriage, and another betrayal of the Catholic immigrants who built Holy Cross.”
Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “Last Friday, the unmistakable message sent by Holy Cross to its graduates was that political power and professional success are higher values than the Catholic Faith and Christian morals. It seems the real purpose of Jesuit education is to produce financially empowered and socially respectable cultural conformists.”
“In 2014, all three Jesuit institutions of higher learning in Massachusetts, Boston College, Boston College Law School, and the College of the Holy Cross, presented as commencement speakers and conferred honorary degrees upon political figures who repudiate fundamental Catholic moral teaching. This goes far beyond mere indifference, a desire for societal acceptance, or an overriding obsession with institutional fundraising.”
“We have, sadly, arrived at the point where reasonable persons may reasonably conclude that the New England Province of the Society of Jesus, overtly and unambiguously, supports legal abortion and so-called same sex marriage. It is shameful and deplorable, a disgrace and a betrayal.”
