One has to wonder, especially after reading this piece of news, from Catholic News Service:

Calling the protests against President Barack Obama’s planned commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame “unseemly and unhelpful,” Bishop John M. D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., advised Catholics not to attend such demonstrations.

Bishop D’Arcy released a statement on Good Friday, a few weeks after announcing he was disappointed with the Catholic university for its invitation to Obama to speak at the May 17 commencement and its decision to award him an honorary degree.

The bishop and other critics of Obama have said his support of legal abortion and embryonic stem-cell research make him an inappropriate choice to be commencement speaker at a Catholic university.

Bishop D’Arcy, in whose diocese Notre Dame is located, also announced weeks ago he would boycott the graduation ceremony as his own silent protest of Obama’s abortion policies.

“I urge all Catholics and others of good will to stay away from unseemly and unhelpful demonstrations against our nation’s president or Notre Dame or (Holy Cross) Father John I. Jenkins,” president of the university, he said in the April 10 statement. “The Notre Dame community is well-equipped to supervise and support discussions and prayer within their own campus.”

“I had a positive meeting this week with Father Jenkins, and I expect further dialogue will continue,” Bishop D’Arcy continued.

“These are days of prayer and hope when we should turn to the risen Christ for light and wisdom,” he said. “Let us all work toward a peaceful graduation experience for the class of 2009 at our beloved Notre Dame.”

Anti-abortion activist Randall Terry opened up an office in South Bend to launch a vigorous daily protest of the president’s upcoming commencement address and said he wouldn’t rule out having students disrupt the ceremony.

Meantime, over at Pajamas Media, the always-astute Elizabeth Scalia is also advising pro-lifers to take a different tack:

Adopting the noisome, perpetually insulted rage of worldly activism interferes with the Christian’s ability to hear or depend wholly and supernaturally upon God. We know that God’s ways are not our ways, and yet we very frequently get hung up on our ideas of how a given situation must play out. We do not stop to think that our well-intentioned methods may actually be getting in the way of the Holy Spirit’s work.

No Christian, if given the choice between saving Christ from the cross or allowing his Passion to go forth, would choose the former. Gifted with hindsight, we say, “Without the crucifixion, there would have been no resurrection.”

This is often the way: that a negative, even terrible event must be allowed to happen, that the Holy Spirit may work within it something positive and salvific for mankind.

Sometimes, in fighting so ardently against what we know to be a wrong, we forget that — as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection showed — the Holy Spirit must be allowed a little room to work, in order to effect confounding change.

The third person of the Triune God needs room to work, and also our trust, which we Christians are frequently slow to give. When Nancy Pelosi announced a visit with Pope Benedict XVI, many Christians assumed she would score a good-PR bonanza, but the Holy Spirit had other ideas. Currently, convinced that President Obama’s speech to Notre Dame University will provide him with cover to enact his wayward Freedom of Choice Act, Christians are once again forgetting the Easter lesson: that sometimes some things must be permitted, in order for other things to happen.

A thoughtful Newt Gingrich, in suggesting that prayer groups and nationwide pro-life meetings be scheduled for the hour of Obama’s speech, recently exhibited the mind of Christian exile to which we are called, and the sort of sharp-edged faith and trust that our political engagements with the world have dulled:

It may well be that President Obama may accidentally trigger the spark that creates a nationwide awareness on that day in a way he and his schedulers could never have imagined. … Maybe this day will turn out in a way to be a blessing by God, and maybe it’ll turn out in a providential way to be exactly the right conversation to have at Notre Dame and across America.

This is a more constructive response than petitions and rants; it is a response that brings Christians together before God, in a positive and co-creative way, in keeping with our calling.

Read the whole thing. She makes a compelling case.

You can also find some interesting arguments being made by Kevin Jones at his blog:

Perhaps many Catholics and their organizations are spending too much time throwing rocks at the malodorous fruit instead of watering the tree’s roots.

Come commencement time, we can imagine that a few dozen protesters will leave Chicago, which spawned Obama the politician, to waste a day or two by padding an ineffectual crowd in South Bend. They’d be better off inviting their neighbors and lapsed Catholic friends and relatives of ChiTown to dinner or even to prayer.

Protest is often the opposite of evangelization. While evangelism proclaims the Good News that Christ is risen and has forgiven sins, the sentiment of protest can boil down to the statement “You’ve messed up big-time, jackass!”

Protest, too, falls short of that fraternal correction which is best done in the context of an existing relationship.

Until Catholic communities produce more committed student and academic leaders, higher education will want for such salutary relationships. For every internet comment trying to “scold a new church into being,” ten times as much energy needs to be expended to advance genuine Catholic renewal.