Controversy has engulfed the campus of the University of Notre Dame as the school considered appointing Associate Professor Susan Ostermann, who is pro-abortion, as director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies in early January.
The choice by Notre Dame, where the motto “God, Country, Notre Dame” once echoed with unyielding fidelity to the Church’s teachings, reveals a profound lapse in judgment that strikes at the heart of the university’s Catholic identity.
While Ostermann decided on Feb. 26 to withdraw her name from the position, Notre Dame’s leadership, in first entertaining and then not reconsidering such a choice, has compromised its mission in ways that demand repentance and reform.
The fact that several bishops, faculty, students, and even the Vatican have commented on the choice shows how the Golden Dome may be losing its way.
Ostermann’s public advocacy for abortion rights, punctuated with disdain for pro-life principles, disqualifies her from any leadership role or tenured position at an institution that claims to uphold the Gospel of Life. Let us be clear about the nature of Ostermann’s offenses.
In a 2022 Chicago Tribune op-ed co-authored with former Notre Dame colleague Tamara Kay, Ostermann peddled egregious falsehoods that mock the Church’s unchanging doctrine on the inviolable dignity of life from conception.
She dismissed the truth that “abortion kills babies” as a mere “lie,” reducing the unborn to “blastocysts or embryos so tiny they are too small to be seen on an abdominal ultrasound.”
This is not scholarly utterance; it is a dehumanizing trick that echoes the very rhetoric used to justify atrocities throughout history. Claiming that nearly 90% of abortions occur before the fetal stage, she implies that these early lives are expendable — a notion utterly incompatible with Catholic teaching, which affirms that every human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image and likeness of God. To call the destruction of an embryo anything less than the taking of innocent life is to play semantic games with eternal Catholic truths.
Worse still, Ostermann and Kay vilified crisis pregnancy centers. Those heroic outposts of compassion that offer real alternatives to abortion are labeled as “anti-abortion rights and propaganda sites” that dispense “false information” to vulnerable women.
These centers, often run by dedicated Catholics and other people of faith, embody the Church’s call to accompany mothers in need and to provide material support, counseling, and hope.
Another outlandish essay co-authored with Kay cited America’s early anti-abortion laws as being pushed by white supremacy. Such inflammatory rhetoric not only “disparages” those who uphold human dignity, as Bishop Kevin Rhoades, shepherd of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, rightly noted, but actively erodes the moral foundation upon which Catholic education must stand.
As faithful Catholics, we must not mince words: This decision was not merely an oversight but a direct affront to the sanctity of human life, the dignity of the unborn, and the moral authority of the Church. How can we as Catholics ask secular governments to adhere to our basic beliefs on the sanctity of life, when our own institutions look the other way?
Catholic universities are not neutral ground; they are called to form minds and hearts in accordance with the teachings of Christ. To elevate someone who champions abortion as a “right” while she belittles its opponents is to sow confusion among students, alienate faithful alumni, and eschew Catholic social theory.