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."
"I know we have this sense of Benedictine hospitality, but what the president represents does not fit in," said Michelle Sciacca of Pittsburgh, who is graduating with a degree in English.
"We know people are dying there, and that's not part of our faith."
Political scientists caution against reading too much into the impact of the war on one segment of voters.
John C. Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio, said Catholics were deeply divided over the war and were "the quintessential swing voters in elections today." He studies religion's role in politics.
The war has threatened GOP outreach to Catholics because church leaders "strongly oppose the war on principle, and have done so from the beginning," Green said.
