From the Philadelphia Inquirer comes this blunt assessment of President Obama’s recent visit to Notre Dame:

I’m ultimately led to a rational, if sinister, motivation on the president’s part.

The Catholic Church has a long and unyielding position against abortion. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe legalizing abortion, Pope John Paul II recognized the difficulty of reversing that decision. In an address commemorating the fifth anniversary of the encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” in February 2000, he referred to abortion as “legalized crime,” and argued that no effort should be spared to eliminate it.

He accurately noted that “The changing of laws must be preceded and accompanied by the changing of mentalities and morals on a vast scale, in an extensive and visible way. In this area the Church will spare no effort nor can she accept negligence or guilty silence.” He said he was appealing “to scientists and doctors, to teachers and families, as well as to those who work in the media, and especially to jurists and lawmakers.”

How have the nation’s Catholic colleges and universities responded to the pope’s plea? The evidence isn’t encouraging. A survey of students at those schools showed that “60 percent agreed strongly or somewhat that abortion should be legal.”

Obama, like John Paul II, knows that legal abortion might be threatened by a change in the beliefs and politics of future generations. To combat that threat, I believe he went to one of the nation’s premier Catholic universities to urge Catholics to debate abortion rather than to follow the teachings of their church.

You’ll want to read the whole thing.