When the long-awaited, religiously incendiary sequel to The Da Vinci Code arrives in theaters and the anticipated uproar is reduced to a low roar, you know it’s gotta be a rough week for the Catholic Church.

The church’s most dedicated followers of dogma have bigger post-Lenten fish to fry at the moment than the debut of a film – even if that film is Angels & Demons, an anticipated blockbuster that features a poisoned pope, kidnapped cardinals, a threat to annihilate the Vatican, and a secret Catholic sect as the presumed bad guys. No, the threat posed to the church by another Dan Brown-Tom Hanks-Richie Cunningham collaboration is nothing next to the menace of abortion-rights infidel Barack Obama receiving an honorary doctorate from Catholicism’s most prominent academic outpost this weekend.

Venerable South Bend, Indiana, had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere nearly a week before Obama addresses Notre Dame graduates on Sunday. It’s entirely likely that the number of antiabortion protesters on hand this weekend will dwarf the 2,600 graduates in attendance – and the demonstrators already include such revered figures as never-elected-to-anything Alan Keyes and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry.

Randall Terry!!! Who exhumed that guy? Anyway, if Terry’s in the house you know the show is going to be classy – and true to form, throughout the week somebody’s been paying for a plane to be flown over South Bend, trailing a banner that depicts an aborted fetus. After all, why stop at holding up yucky posters at a rally that people can avoid, when you can put fetal remains up in the sky where everyone can see them? (more…)