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Students wait in line outside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame in 2015. (CNS/University of Notre Dame/Barbara Johnston) The University of Notre Dame changed its mind again earlier this year. Holy Cross Fr. John Jenkins, the school’s president, addressed a letter to the university community in February stating Notre Dame would offer contraceptives through its university health care plan, except for what he termed abortion-inducing drugs. Since 2013, the university has gone from opposition to offering contraceptive coverage, to allowing them through a third party, to ending the third-party coverage, to bringing it back fully, to, now, somewhere in the middle, causing consternation among students, faculty and alumni. Receive this free special report when you sign up for daily NCR news emails .
"It’s an unhappy situation," said Bill Dempsey, president of Sycamore Trust, a Notre Dame alumni group seeking to preserve the Indiana university’s Catholic identity, "if people can’t believe what the administration of Notre Dame says."
And it all began with a mandate from the federal government and a legal challenge from the university.
In the last few years, many notable Catholic colleges and universities have fought similar battles. Some, like Notre Dame, argued against the Affordable Care Act rule regarding contraceptive coverage in health insurance plans, while others targeted gender equity components of Title IX requirements, labor rulings, and the application of discrimination statutes. The common thread among the schools is their attempt to be exempt from mandates and laws they claim conflict with their Catholic missions.
Though moves by the Trump administration have soothed some of these concerns, increasingly progressive Catholic constituents and the likelihood of Title IX and anti-discrimination regulations expanding in the future could place Catholic institutions of higher education in vulnerable positions, testing the importance they attach to conserving their Catholic identities and whether law will back them up.
"They sort of feel the world shifting underneath them," said Mark Goldfeder, the Spruill Family Fellow in Law and Religion at Emory University.
Litigation for religious liberty
The universities that have mounted challenges span a wide spectrum, big and […]