Geogetown's Rediscovered "Catholic Identity"

(Hat tip: Amy Welborn)

Joseph Bottom, writing at First Things, notes the irony of Georgetown University's newly rediscovered "Catholic identity":

But now, at last, Georgetown has rediscovered its Catholicism, at least long enough for a Protestant employee of Campus Ministries to send a letter to six evangelical groups, kicking them off campus. The story made the Washington Post and the Washington Times this weekend, with the kind of headlines the public-relations office hates to see: “Georgetown Bars Ministries from Campus,” “Georgetown U. Ejects Private Ministry Groups.”

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There’s an obvious irony here — employed too often to be surprising — in which people begin by protesting in the name of diversity against centralized authority, and later discover, once they’re in charge, how useful those old forms of authority can be in controlling diversity.

But it also represents a tactic we’re likely to see more of: claims of old-fashioned Catholicism, used by people who are far from old-fashioned Catholics, to maintain control of officially Catholic institutions and to ban the people whose political opinions they don’t like. Watch for it at Boston College, and Marquette, and Notre Dame, and Loyola Marymount, and on and on.

My Comments:
Before we start giving kudos to Georgetown for taking it to the "heretical protestants", let's think about 2 things:

(1) This ban applies to the most conservative (i.e. theologically orthodox) of the protestant groups, while the "mainline" protestant groups (i.e. liberal homofest sects) seem to be unaffected, and

(2) How we might feel if evangelical universities like Baylor and Wheaton decided to ban Catholic ministry groups from campus.