Notre Dame: Obama (2009) vs. Dolan (2013)

I ran across an article that contained Cardinal Dolan's address to the graduates of Notre Dame University.  Out of some 'vast right-wing conspiracy' operating in the depths of my soul, I thought some random comparisons might be interesting... just for kicks and giggles.  This isn't a scientific survey... I simply leafed through the speeches and picked out some key words to search with my browser's "find" function.  Maybe I counted perfectly (including plurals and singulars of the same word, etc,) maybe I didn't... but I'm fairly close and fairly representative, I think, in my counts.  I'll be happy to make any corrections or include observations that readers might point out.

Oh, FWIW, my parish has already been the subject of a "random" IRS audit... which we passed...  it cost us a bunch of time that would be better-spent doing anything else, a bunch of money in professional fees that would be better-spent on anything else, and unnecessary wear-and-tear on an already-overburdened pastor, but we got through it OK.  (It's a good thing I like to run a 'clean ship'.)  I wouldn't mind seeing some people in the government fired for this, however high it goes, if this can be proven to be an arbitrary attack on us as a church and as Catholics who are not afraid to be Catholic.

 

 

 

 

 

	President Obama, 2009	Timothy Cardinal Dolan, 2013
	Printed in NYT	speech not printed in NYT… See New Advent instead
Total Words	3539	1581
Total Time	30:30	12:30
“I”	52	19
“my” "me"	14 9	5 8
“we”	44	9
“us”	21	7
“them”	4	2
“they”	18	1
“you”/”your”	67	39
“Jesus”	0	5
“God”	7	13
“Mary”	0	12
“Notre Dame”	12	17
“Graduate”	2 (once referring to himself)	1
Interruptions for Applause	24	?
“Alum”	0	3
“abortion”	7	0
“pro-life”	2	0
“Christian”	3	1
“Muslim”/”Islam”	1	0
“Jew”	1	3
“bible”	0	0
“opportunity”	0	0
“job”	2 (once referring to himself and his ‘job’)	0
“contribute”	0	0
“Catholic”	4	4
“poor”	1	1
“Gospel”	1	2
“moral”	3	0
“value”	3	0
“gay”/”homosexual”	1	0
“love”	5	2
“cooperation”	4	0
“2009” or “2013”	5	5
“religion”	2	0
“diversity”	4	0
“(dis)/agree”	4	0

  I don't know if this survey proves anything.  My greatest interest, as you might see, was in the use of pronouns.  I suppose that a speech twice as long as the other will result in twice as much usage of these kinds of words, but what I am detecting is one orator's significantly greater use of "us" vs. "them" kind of language... assigning attributes and attitudes to what "they" do or say or believe.  I was surprised to see that, proportionally, the self-references ("I", "me", "my") between the two orators were pretty close.

   The other thing to consider is the use of 'moral' language... what "should" and "should not" be part of the graduate's life or worldview in the president's speech--content which was mostly lacking in the Cardinal's.  I would be from the school that moralizing is pretty low on the totem pole when it comes to preaching.  Yes, morals need to be taught from the pulpit, but I think there is at least as great a need, if not greater, to inculcate the "Catholic way of thinking"... sound interpretation of scripture, seeing the eschatological horizons, bringing the Good News "home", teaching Catholic culture and liturgy and history and hagiography.  Moralizing tends to be a lot of "you" talk, which tends to turn people's ears off... people have a tendency to say to themselves when they feel themselves in the cross hairs: "this doesn't apply to me" or "the priest doesn't know what he is talking about" or "quit treating talking down to us, you hypocrite"... or worse yet, "yeah, go after those (other people) sinners!"  One cannot ignore morality as a necessary component of preaching, but to simply be fed a steady, indiscriminate diet of moralizing tends to strangle the homiletic imagination and divide crowds.

   Neither speaker had much to say about what the graduates would be doing on Monday morning, i.e., getting a job and contributing to society.  I hope that's OK with all the Notre Dame parents out there and the student loan industry.  Who knows?  Maybe there were some religious vocations lurking about in the crowd?