The Pillar reports that Susan Ostermann, a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and a vocal advocate for legal abortion, has withdrawn from assuming the directorship of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies following widespread condemnation from students, donors, and bishops, including local Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The appointment prompted resignations from two institute-affiliated professors and a call for rescission from the university’s Right to Life executive board. Bishop Rhoades termed the appointment a “scandal,” rejecting academic freedom as a justification for an administrative role impacting the university’s Catholic witness. University president Fr. Robert Dowd was reportedly “blindsided” by both the appointment and the intensity of opposition, which included private objections from numerous bishops and major donors described as “livid.” Ostermann has linked abortion to women’s dignity and racial justice, arguing it aligns with “integral human development,” and serves as a consultant for the Population Council, an international abortion advocacy group. This incident lays bare the fatal contradiction of a “Catholic” university promoting intrinsic moral evil, a fruit of the conciliar revolution’s adulteration of Catholic identity.
The Myth of “Catholic” Identity in the Conciliar Sect
The very framing of this event as a controversy within a “Catholic university” is a theological fiction. The University of Notre Dame, like all institutions governed by the post-1958 hierarchy, operates within the conciliar sect—a structure that has systematically dismantled the integral Catholic faith. The 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 1374) explicitly required that all faculty in Catholic institutions teach in accordance with the magisterium. This was abrogated by the conciliar pseudo-code of 1983, which replaced doctrinal integrity with the principle of “academic freedom” divorced from the depositum fidei. The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX (1864) condemns the notion that “the Church has not the power of defining dogmatically that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion” (Error 21) and that “the civil power may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government” (Error 44). By hosting a professor who publicly advocates for abortion—a crime crying out to Heaven—Notre Dame does not merely suffer a “scandal”; it professes heresy and apostasy. The “Catholic” label is a sacrilegious mask, for the institution’s governing principles, derived from Vatican II’s Dignitatis humanae and Gaudium et spes, inherently reject the social reign of Christ the King as defined by Pius XI in Quas primas.
Christ the King vs. the Cult of Academic Freedom
Bishop Rhoades correctly identifies that academic freedom pertains to research, not administrative appointments affecting public witness. Yet his analysis remains fatally compromised because he accepts the conciliar premise that a “Catholic university” can exist without the explicit, exclusive, and uncompromising submission of every faculty member to the totus Christus—His rule over intellect, will, and action. Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quas primas (1925) is unequivocal: the Kingdom of Christ “encompasses all men” and demands that “all relations in the state be ordered on the basis of God’s commandments and Christian principles” (No. 31). A university department dedicated to Asian studies, if truly Catholic, must evangelize, not promote the murder of the innocent. Ostermann’s argument that abortion is consistent with “integral human development” is a direct repudiation of Catholic social teaching. The principle of integral human development, as articulated by pre-conciliar pontiffs, rests on the inviolable dignity of the human person created in God’s image—a dignity utterly annihilated by abortion. Her linkage
Source:
Notre Dame: Pro-abortion professor withdraws as institute director (pillarcatholic.com)
Date: 26.02.2026