The Notre Dame Student Speech Never Given

As a survivor of the era of legalized abortion all of the successes that ever became You began with a yes.

DETROIT (Catholic Online) - In order to provide balance and equal time to the voices that opposed the honoring of President Barack Obama, the Board of Directors at Notre Dame University graciously allowed the delivery of the following speech at the commencement exercises for the class of 2009. However, due to security reasons, the actual speech could not be delivered until the following Sunday, May, 24, 2009....

Dear Fellow Students, Family and Friends, Faculty and Staff, Fr. Jenkins and President Obama,

I am honored to be here to speak on behalf of the remaining graduation class of 2009. In using that word "honored" I do not wish to add to the pain of fresh wounds. In charity I say I am honored, and out of charity I intend to honor all. Though not originally invited, it seems that enough prayers were said, and apparently heard. The power of prayer, as we sons and daughters of Notre Dame know, can accomplish even the most difficult tasks. Its power brings forth a certain humility in all of us which urges us to honor everyone, beginning with our Lady's first Son, who deserves all honor... and all thanks for letting us all share in His infinite power.

As you sit among your classmates today, I ask you to look at each one of them, and imagine the difficult struggles that had to be overcome so they could be sitting next to you. When you reflect upon the trials and tribulations through which your own personal obstacles were pushed aside, you know that you were not alone. Every worry about an exam, every hope about a success, every thought about whether you were ever good enough to become a graduate of such a prominent and excellent university--all of those experiences that you prayed through, and studied through and worked through... they were the same experiences--true feelings of weakness--that each fellow student surrounding you once lived.

A day like today is one where we, the Notre Dame family, celebrate you having recognized your weaknesses, and having grown and matured in spite of them. A day like today is when we give honor to you having gone from weakness to strength, from ignorance to wisdom, from darkness to light.

We do this in public, as a family, because this successful growth is the result of a joined effort. It takes an arena to showcase it. A body of people--You--is gathered to prove it. A collective success, it is the result of hundreds of individual successes. And each of those successes is unique, and marvelous, and miraculous. For each one is You.

You know that your own triumphs did not begin when you were accepted at this university. They started long ago--before high school, before elementary school, and even before that. For your first success is the result of many previous successes. And it culminated, really, with the actions of your mother--and your father. But mostly your mother.

As a survivor of the era of legalized abortion, all of the successes that ever became You began with a yes that was spoken in the heart of the woman who, with you today or not, has always been a part of you. And you have always been a part of her. When she said yes, when she chose to continue with you, she turned her back on any pressures or temptations to hand you over far too soon to our other mother--mother earth. You were only just beginning, and it was impossible for her to know that you would make it to this place today. As our President sits here today as proof, it is impossible to know what more any of us can ever become.

I, however, am not the success that any of you are now. It cannot be argued that I--along with those like me whom I represent--was once exactly like you, though only for a brief time. We all were exactly alike. In our uniqueness, we were forming and taking shape and adjusting to our earliest existence. Our cells were coming together, molded in the same image and likeness as yourselves, while our brains and arms and legs and fingers all began to grow. Our faces, too, were once like yours. We bathed in the same waters that protected you. And we were connected, just as you, to the woman who started us--joined with a cord, a connection that will always be the first symbol of the interdependency that defines the human species.

We know that no life can be sustained by itself. We all need some type of aid. We all need some kind of protection.

I was, by no choice of my own, formed within a mother who had little assistance. She lacked a man willing to give me protection. She sustained me until she thought she couldn't. Then she succumbed to the institutionalized pressures that our nation has allowed--pressures which give a woman the chance to give up and cave in to despair: a legalized, even subsidized, killing industry; a confused, deceived, materialistic economic system; and a secularized welfare state that erodes an already worn-down, uninspired collective conscience.

She still lives, and in her heart, she knows that I would be sitting among you today if she had been given something--a word, or a hug, or a few dollars freely given--anything at all that might have told her a pregnancy was okay, that she had the courage within her, that there really was not any reason to part from me. I needed her. She needed help. Neither of us got what we hoped for. Such is the sadness of living in this era.

We are not separated, as she knows and feels. I am on her mind often. Now, the same age as you, she pictures me with a cap. She sees a smile on my face in front of flashing cameras. She watches as I lift up a scroll in my hand on a sunny day surrounded by friends. In her heart, I am you.

Though not with her by way of touch or sight, I can never be away from her... just as you will never part from your university which is a lady who is your mother and mine. You may travel and go and, at times and over time, forget this day. But your Notre Dame will always be a part of you.

I ask, on behalf of my friends, that you always let us be a part of you as well. Carry us along. Take us on your journeys. It will be difficult. But you will bring unspeakable joy to our mother if you do.

The world, and some in it, will make you think that you are carrying with you one of two things: we will be a "difficult decision" that no one--not even those among us who've reached the highest of pay grades--can explain, and thus cannot be convinced that we are at all times worth bearing; or, we will be radical, revolutionary, terror-striking photographs of torn, bloody pieces of fetal things meant to frighten and divide. But do not listen to them. We are neither.

As for the former, we are not the burden they would have you imagine. Rather, we are light things to carry, not in need of very much except a few years of grateful dependence. If you keep us, we will indeed change your lifestyle, but not how you think. We will cause you to forget much of your own dependence. You will be like gods to us, and we will bring out the best in you. In us you will find your true independence. And if we are lucky to be together long enough, we will become your strength in your old age or sickness, and we will find our independence in your dependence on us.

As for the latter, we are a mere fraction of the photographs of fetal things. Those are two-dimensional images that they don't really want to you look at, but still, just two-dimensional. Paper-thin renderings of soul-less stuff. We have many more dimensions than that.

One day you will see this, and you will marvel.

If you take us with you, we will work with you--even through you. Sometimes, it will seem that we are more you than you are to yourself. That is because we are one. Reconciled by a decision to bring life with you, we are--together--the future.

And that is where the President is wrong. With all due respect, sir, there will be--in fact, already is happening--a reconciliation between two parties. You claim to have audacious aspirations, so it is troubling to hear that you don't even want to consider us... that you don't want to reconcile a difficult decision with the audacity of a future hope. Yes, as you say, we were the things of which hard choices are made. We were the private realities that our mothers struggled with. Do not fool yourself, however, with your own platitudes. When our mothers made their decisions, no true and gentle pastors or caring and healing physicians were there to help. Only cold, business-like clinicians whose work demands a necessary disregard for hope.

In their troubled consciences, the words of those in the business of allowing and supporting abortion are telling, especially lately. For we are now things--so they say--that ought to be rare.

Ironically, we are not rare, and never will be in your scheme of false hopes. Unless your ignorance is lifted and your eyes are opened, you will never see us. And even if there are just a thousand of us in year--instead of the million that now are--still you will not notice us. Once we have become the matter of a choice to you, we then become things to you. Not even animals. Not unhatched eggs. Not even organisms. To you we become lifeless, invisible matter.

When you refuse to look at us and recognize our fundamental right to participate in the ongoing struggle to live and to succeed, we disappear.

But we are not gone. We can never be gone. We can never be rare. Once we are conceived, we are here, in numbers that will one day shock you. Over time we may have changed. Incineration, or disposal in some landfill, or dumping into the oceans--these may have altered our original composition. But none of those things can remove us from this globe of ours that we all call home. On this beautiful planet, this gift of a dwelling that is truly the mother of our matter, we still are here. We are more a part of this environment than you know. Our tissue, our bones, our blood--all of that stuff that we were, we still are. We've just changed. The law of the conservation of matter and energy dictates it: we--in our new shape as rearranged cells and scattered atoms--are as filled with energized movement as you are in your young, vibrant, marvelous bodies. Even without our spirits, we are closer to the environment than you can imagine. We are in the air. We are in the soil. We are in the water. We are temples waiting to be re-built.

Let us then work with you, and you with us, to clean up this earth of ours. Talk to us. Sing with us. Join us. Together we can repair any damage that's been done by the arrogant, the greedy, the despairing who abort.

We cannot help you if you do not acknowledge us. And history has proven that you cannot help yourselves. Alone, ascribing to the world's new--yet so very ancient--belief that we can make with science what God makes with love, you will fail.

Yes, sir, and fellow students, we can have change. Let's just not be so haughty as to think we can cause this change by envisioning it or voting for it. Change does not happen that way. Change--good, forward, selfless change--is far more than a simple right to make a decision. It is the decision itself, the option taken to work toward an accepting of the beautiful things of life. It is a putting back together of something put together wrongly in the first place. Or a reassembly of something--like me--once torn and broken.

This is all possible. It's been done before. It's been done most beautifully throughout the ages by your holy Mother Church. As this University attests, it may not be perfect in some of its members, but it is perfect in its whole. It speaks the truth and it counters deceits. It audaciously lifts the veil on the words and speeches which prop up false and immoral principles. And it raises up new life to the weakening systems of man by underpinning them with realities that true hope has--through faith--long awaited.

You, Our Lady's class of 2009, and us--the once voiceless but always alive unborn--together we can participate with her Son each time He tells us what He will do in our hearts. Listen to Him. Let Him. Hear Him as He tells us what He does: "Behold," He says, "I make all things new." It can be done, and we have Notre Dame as our example. All it takes is the giving of a simple yes, an open and willing receiving of the greatest honor ever bestowed...

--the honor of personhood.

----------

Len Gutmann lives in the Detroit area. He is a member of the Knights of Columbus, and is active in his parish's pro-life group. A carpenter and the father of four, he writes with the support of his wife, and at the behest of JPII's call to work for the new evangelization.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'

Copyright 2021 - Distributed by Catholic Online