“Ghetto” is a highly charged word conjuring many images, most of them unpleasant and angry. The word  had its origins in medieval Venice, where Jews were segregated into an area that had been a weapons foundry or “ghetto” and throughout most of history it has retained its historical reference. Perhaps the most notorious ghetto was the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II where the Nazi’s initially  herded Polish Jews and then began to starve them while they were awaiting transfer to the extermination camps. The eventual uprising of the Ghetto residents was a tribute to Jewish determination and bravery – and the studied refusal of the approaching Russian Army to intervene.

 One of the terrible truths is, that while the ghettoes of Europe may initially created involuntarily, the inhabitants of the ghettoes came to regard them as safe have havens where they could practice their “alien” religion in relative peace. Today, many of the Hassidic Jewish sects labor to create their own ghettoes in such places such as Brooklyn. They are safe havens from perceived anti-Semitism, but also safe havens from competing ideas.

 But “ghetto” has also acquired a host of secondary meanings and has expanded to include almost any segregated group that is cut-off -  whether voluntary or involuntarily - from the community at large. Inner cities in the Unites States were often called ghettoes, but resentment by Black Americans against the use of that stigmatizing term and its Judaic origins resulted in the term being discarded.

 So now I use it to describe what to me has been am increasingly alarming trend in the United States: the rise of the Ghetto Catholic, who seeks to demand either a society totally in tune with the latest dictat of the Vatican, or a Catholic community that is walled-off from the greater society. Enter Obama, Notre Dame and the furor his inviatation to speak at its commencement has caused.

 We’ve come along way from days when Mario Cuomo was invited to speak at Notre Dame on a core Catholic issue: abortion and the Catholic politician. Today, the very invitation to the President of the United States to speak at Notre Dame’s commencement ceremony and receive an honorary degree has sparked howls of outrage frorm the Ghetto Catholics and their leaders in the Church hierarchy. It is a dark moment for Catholic American education and it stokes the same anti-Catholic spirit that once blocked John F. Kennedy’s path to the White House.

 Unlike Mario Cuomo, President Obama is not now, and never has been, a baptized Catholic. Unlike Mario Cuomo he has not been invited to speak on a sensitive issue of Church doctrine. Like Mario Cuomo, he has an intellectual approach that challenges the shibboleths of the day, including positions at odds with Vatican doctrine.

 Reactionary Catholics like to stigmatize dissenters in the Church as “cafeteria Catholics.” So to all those Catholics who think that a university is a place to teach, but not debate, profound social issues; who, like the ultra-conservative Jews, believe that the path to salvation is blind obedience to the most casuistic of Church laws, be forewarned: You are creating a ghettoized Church that will be increasingly marginalized from the lives of a majority of its members; you are building a wall between yourselves and the greater community so that ideas you find distasteful will not be debated, but ignored.

 In the Warsaw Ghetto, many accomplished, talented Jews sought to live out their lives as best they could. That ghetto was perhaps for a time, the most intellectually vital island in the sea of a Nazi dominated continent. They lived there because they had no choice. But no one is forcing the Church to build walls and become an intellectual ghetto. If that’s what the Vatican and the reactionary wing of he American Church want, so be it.

 But let’s call a spade a spade. Like the original Ghetto today in Venice, a Ghetto Church may be a nice place to visit, but do you want to live there?