<p>“While it may not affect students’ decisions to apply and attend, it may well have an impact on faculty and senior staff deciding to accept positions or, if they are already on campus, to move on. Sure, most faculty and senior administrators can afford to pay out of pocket for services such as these. However, ND employs many hourly wage staff in the kitchens, in landscaping and maintenance who do not have that financial flexibility; this issue affects them directly.”</p>
<pre><code>And, again, any employee who bases her employment decisions on the issue whether she will have to incur a $25-50 monthly cost for contraceptive pills is irrational at best and an idiot at worst. Employees are ALREADY paying for their own contraceptives. Low-income employees who find the costs a burden have ample access to low-cost contraceptives at local family planning clinics. Faculty and higher-level staff – all of whom are earning well above minimum wage – can obviously afford to pay for their own contraceptives. If they insist that Someone Else should bear that burden, well, what can you say. There are plenty of reasons that prospective faculty and staff decide to take a job elsewhere and current employees decide to move on, but “I don’t want to pay for my own birth control pills” is unlikely to be one of them.
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<p>“The decision to focus on this issue, to the exclusion of broader issues of social justice, poverty, etc., seems to some to be an attempt to recover favor among the conservative Catholics lost after the Obama invitation several years ago. Ten years ago, one could identify the Father Ted’s vision of justice.”</p>
<p>Fifty years ago, Fr. Ted started taking Notre Dame down the slippery slope of secularization, diluting the Catholic mission of the school in an attempt to win favor among Notre Dame’s aspirational peers. In part, it worked. Secular and nominally Catholic faculty who formerly wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like South Bend were increasingly willing to accept positions at a school with generous compensation and a politically acceptable focus on so-called “social justice” issues. But the tide has turned, and the University is determined to restore and strengthen its Catholic mission while also becoming a major research university. The focus on Catholic mission has attracted a number of prominent senior Catholic scholars from top schools around the country, who share Fr. Jenkins’ commitment to Notre Dame’s Catholic identity. A major part of this Catholic identity is connected with fidelity to Church teachings, including those on human sexuality and the sanctity of all human life. These teachings, too, are part of the “social justice” heritage of the Church. For while the Church leaves to human freedom many decisions regarding the elimination of poverty and violence, she insists that human life begins at conception, and that human sexuality must be ordered to marriage and procreation. Those who argue that questions of “social justice” must trump any focus on contraception, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and the like are simply misinformed about the purpose of the Church, which is to save souls, and not to solve temporal problems.</p>