(CNSNews.com) – Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, who heads the nation’s largest abortion provider, has been invited to speak next month at Georgetown University, “the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit university.”
The invitation was made by the university’s student-run Lecture Fund. The Cardinal Newman Society's Catholic Education Daily reported that the event will not be open to the public or uninvited members of the media.
Last November, Richards told Yahoo! News’ Katie Couric that she aborted her fourth child because three children “was as big as our family needed to be.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) pointed out in a “Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet” that Planned Parenthood “fights even modest laws to reduce or regulate abortion” and “doesn’t believe in a ‘right to choose’ against abortion,” which the Church considers a grave sin.
CNSNews.com asked Georgetown officials how the university reconciled the invitation to Richards with its mandate as a Catholic institution to uphold Church teaching,
Georgetown “deeply values our faith tradition that encourages the free exchange of ideas,” according to a March 3 statement from the university’s Office of Communications, adding that “an appearance of any speaker or guest on campus is not an endorsement by the university.”
“We respect our students’ right to express their personal views and are committed to sustaining a forum for the free exchange of ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable to some,” the statement continued.
“We recognize that the perspectives of some speakers run counter to the Catholic and Jesuit values that animate our university. We work very hard to ensure that these values maintain a privileged place in our community while at the same time providing a forum that does not limit speech either in the content of the view being expressed or the speaker expressing the view.”
“They said the same thing when Larry Flynt and Barack Obama spoke at Georgetown,” Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick Reilly told CNSNews.com.
“Besides a clear bias in the choice of speakers, there’s no sense of moral truth, which is the central point of a Catholic university. Either you accept Catholic moral teaching as true or you do not. In the case of Georgetown, they simply do not.
“In bringing in someone with such a horrendous record of not only advocating ideas that would be contrary to Catholic teaching, but is herself responsible for the deaths of more than two million babies under her watch, Georgetown demonstrates that it does not understand the nature of a Catholic university,” Reilly said.
Last year, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a proponent of “reproductive rights” worldwide, addressed graduates of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a member of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, also gave a commencement address to graduates of the university’s McCourt School of Public Policy.