Dissent in an unlikely place: GOP outreach to Catholics is threatened by war

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: Dissent in an unlikely place
Bush speaks today at a Catholic college led by an ally, but views on the war dampen the welcome.
By James Gerstenzang, Times Staff Writer
May 11, 2007

LATROBE, PA. — President Bush could hardly have picked a better private liberal arts college to find a welcoming audience for a commencement address than St. Vincent, a Catholic school run by a loyal former White House aide in a conservative region.

Yet consider what has taken place here since Bush was invited for today's speech: Students vigorously debated the invitation at a town-hall meeting last month. A former St. Vincent College president wrote a scathing newspaper essay saying Bush had no place on the campus. About a quarter of the tenure-rank faculty wrote an open letter to Bush challenging the Iraq war as contrary to Roman Catholic doctrine. Several dozen people held a candlelight vigil Thursday night protesting the visit. And for several Sundays, nuns protested on the edge of the campus.

The discord, polite and reasoned as it may be, is emblematic of passions across the country as the war moves further into its fifth year, with increasing military deployments and mounting death tolls among Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops.

If anything, the debate there — at a college associated with the Order of St. Benedict and led by a man who once ran Bush's faith-based initiative — suggests that dissent is spreading into places with little history of protest.

It also suggests that the Bush-led Republican drive to increase support among Catholics, built around Bush's stance on abortion and other social policy issues, could run into trouble over the Catholic doctrine of a "just war."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bush11may11,0,4185426.story?coll=la-home-center