U. affiliates sign statement denouncing Trump

Six University faculty and alumni, along with twenty-six conservative Catholic leaders across the country, released a statement earlier this week in the National Review decrying the presidential candidacy of businessman Donald Trump.

University's McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George and George Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, are at the forefront of the movement.

George was unavailable for comment.

Trump’s campaign office did not respond to requests for comment.

“There is nothing in [Trump’s] campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government,” the statement reads.

In the statement, the signatories also noted that Donald Trump is unqualified for the presidency on the basis of his vulgar political discourse, his strong advocacy of torture of terrorist suspects and their families and the signatories’ belief that “his appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility.”

Stephen Barr GS ’78, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware, said that as Catholic morality is rooted in human good, many of Donald Trump’s proposals and character — from his record of being pro-choice on abortion to his solution of mass deportation — lie in contrast to Catholic doctrine and are “inhuman.”

Barr added that Trump has demonstrated “a tendency to engage in ad hominem attacks, including mocking people's physical handicaps and physical appearance, which shows a lack of basic decency.”

The signatories of the letter acknowledged that Trump does present an attractive option for those who are frustrated and disillusioned with the current state of affairs with the federal government. Even so, they maintain, Catholics and all Americans should support other Republican candidates who identify with Catholic social teaching much more than Donald Trump.

Barr noted that this does not necessarily have to mean support for candidates who hold religious beliefs specific to Catholics. Instead, “we are talking about beliefs that are Catholic because they are universal: belief in respect for others, in the value of innocent human life, in personal responsibility, in honest dealing and so forth,” he said.

Matthew Franck, director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute, explained that while Catholics may reasonably disagree about the responsibilities of the federal government regarding fiscal and social policy, they must recognize that Donald Trump is “completely untrustworthy” when it comes to the central moral concerns facing Catholics.

Frank explained that it is very hard to hear or see in anything Trump has said or done in his long business career that expresses the kind of devotion to moral principle that faithful Catholics ought to look for in a President.

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Franck voiced his concerns that this presidential campaign may fail to yield a President that, in his view, supports and defends these values.

“One very real danger is the fate of religious liberty in a Supreme Court that is reshaped by a president who is hostile to the views that our church takes on that question.”

Jim Goodness, director of communications of the Archdiocese of Newark, N.J., declined to specifically address the Catholic leaders’ announcement, citing the Catholic Church’s doctrine of refraining from endorsing a political candidate.

Goodness, however, said that the Catholic Church has always urged Catholics to form their consciences based on faith and to tie that to public faith.

Other signatories of the letter affiliated with the University include Ryan Anderson ’04, William Simonsenior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation; Francis Beckwith, professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University, member of the James Madison Society and former research fellow in the James Madison Program in the University’s Department of Politics; and Gerard Bradley, professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.

Anderson, Beckwith and Bradley did not respond to a request for comment as of press time.