Mary Ann Glendon

Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard University professor of law and former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, received the Evangelium Vitae Medal from the University of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture...Glendon said the award serves to honor the many individuals involved in the pro-life movement. "You are paying tribute to the rank-and-file of the broadest-based grass-roots movement in America -- men and women who have made time in their lives to respond in whatever ways they can to the call to help build the culture of life and love," Glendon said. "It is no small achievement that Americans have become steadily more pro-life over the years."

Receiving on Saturday what is arguably the most prestigious pro-life prize in the U.S., Harvard Law professor and former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon used the occasion to honor the legacy of other women who have shared in championing the cause of human life. Glendon was awarded the Evangelium Vitae medal by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, an annual prize “honoring individuals whose outstanding efforts have served to proclaim the Gospel of Life by steadfastly affirming and defending the sanctity of human life from its earliest stages.”...In accepting the award, Glendon recalled the late Revered Richard John Neuhaus’s description of the pro-life movement as the “most broad-based, the most diverse, the most sustained expression of citizen participation America has ever seen.” “Yet, despite that great diversity, the pro-life cause has often been portrayed as indifferent to women’s concerns,” said Glendon.

The calls were placed quietly to top American diplomats who had resigned in droves over the past year. The message: Mike Pompeo, nominated to become the next secretary of state, wanted them back...Those who have long known Mr. Pompeo say he is perfectly suited for this moment. He graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy and became a tank commander in Germany. He left the military after just five years, as a captain, to attend Harvard Law School. Mary Ann Glendon, a law professor at Harvard who hired Mr. Pompeo as a research assistant, said that she “spent a lot of time talking to him about his future plans” — specifically, making his fortune and then going into politics. “And he did it,” she said.

Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon, who turned down the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal the year President Barack Obama gave the commencement address, will receive the 2018 Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal from the university's Center's for Ethics and Culture...She had been announced as the recipient of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal in 2009, but turned down the honor and did not attend the commencement ceremony because Obama was to be the primary speaker and receive an honorary degree.

An op-ed by Raymond Flynn and Mary Ann Glendon. “You can get all A’s and still flunk life,” wrote the great 20th-century Catholic novelist Walker Percy. The authors of this paper have done Catholic educators and families a tremendous service by explaining precisely why the secularized Common Core national standards, which were devised primarily for public schools, are incompatible with and unsuited for a traditional Catholic education. There are many similarities between Catholic schooling and its public K-12 educational counterpart, but the two have fundamental and profound differences. In addition to providing students with the academic knowledge and skills they need to prosper, Catholic schools have a unique spiritual and moral mission to nurture faith and prepare students to live lives illuminated by a Catholic worldview. It is that religious focus that makes the Common Core standards particularly ill-suited for Catholic schools.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s investigation into fetal-tissue sales has run into a large obstacle: a federal judge’s preliminary injunction protecting the National Abortion Federation. The injunction, issued Feb. 5, bans the pro-life Center for Medical Progress from releasing video taken at two NAF conferences. But the order is creating headaches for Mr. Brnovich and 13 other attorneys general...Those in the center’s corner include 11 legal scholars from nine U.S. universities, including Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon and Stanford Law School professor Michael W. McConnell. The professors “do not agree with one another on all aspects of the controversial issue of abortion,” said their amicus brief. “But [they] are united in insisting that all Americans — no matter what their views on abortion — have an unfettered right in our society to have access to important information about controversial matters, including abortion,” the brief said.

A group of 30 Christian leaders, including Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, has asked for a meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry in advance of the State Department's declaration of genocides taking place around the world. ..In arguing for a meeting, the letter said it was "critically important that the State Department consider the best available evidence before making any official pronouncement that rejects allegations that Christian are, along with Yazidis, targets of ongoing genocidal acts." Other Catholic signatories to the letter include Chaldean Bishops Gregory J. Mansour and Sarhad Y. Jammo of the Chaldean eparchies of St. Maron of Brooklyn, New York, and St. Peter the Apostle of San Diego, respectively; Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus; former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon, who now teaches at Harvard Law School; and Thomas F. Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University.

Robert P. George is not a political consultant. “I’m not Karl Rove or David—what’s his name?—Axelrod.” In fact, he says, “Any candidate who’d ask me for campaign advice should drop out immediately, because he’s too stupid to be running for president.” Yet few advisers are having more influence on conservative thinking this presidential campaign cycle...“What he brings to the debate is even more method than ideas,” says his friend Mary Ann Glendon, of Harvard Law School. That method being his commitment to the proposition that, as he explains it to students, “when two people who are well disposed engage in debate, despite their differences they are bound together as a little community integrated around a common good. What is that good? Getting at the truth.”

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Tuesday touted the endorsements of three former American ambassadors to the Vatican amid Pope Francis' visit to the U.S. Former ambassadors to the Holy See James Nicholson, Francis Rooney and Mary Ann Glendon have endorsed the former Florida governor's White House bid and will serve as national co-chairs of Catholics for Jeb, according to his campaign...Glendon, a law professor at Harvard, said she admired "the way Jeb holds together the two halves of the divided soul of the American project — his staunch defense of freedom and his sense of responsibility for the most vulnerable members of the human community."

Newsmax is out with its list of the top 100 Christian leaders in America who make a real impact on modern lives in 2015...23. Mary Ann Glendon, a bioethics scholar and professor at Harvard Law School and a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

An op-ed by Mary Ann Glendon. My title echoes a lecture given almost a century ago by the great German social theorist Max Weber, in which he argued that in modern constitutional states nearly everyone is engaged in politics at least by avocation - if only through voting and discussing the issues with one's friends. Granted, if politics is, as many believe, only about getting and keeping power, it would be silly to think of politics as a "calling" in any meaningful sense. And if politics is only about power, there is no particular reason why principled people should choose public service over other pursuits, or why men and women in private life should take much interest in civic matters. But, if one takes the Aristotelian definition of politics as "free men deliberating about how we ought to order our lives together" and combines it with Weber's insight that nearly all of us are drawn into politics, the idea of politics as a calling becomes more understandable. Moreover, one comes close to what Catholic social thought has been trying for the past fifty years to communicate about the political responsibilities of laymen and women.

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley joined a panel of journalists and academics Thursday night in a discussion of the new pope that was part of an event marking the launch of The Boston Globe’s new website Crux, which will cover the Roman Catholic Church across the world...The cardinal was joined on stage by Globe associate editor John L. Allen Jr., of Crux; Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand professor of law at Harvard University and the former US ambassador to the Holy See; Robert Christian, editor and blogger; and Hosffman Ospino, a Boston College assistant professor of Hispanic ministry and religious education.

The Vatican named a new head and board for its scandal-plagued bank Wednesday, capping a cleanup campaign overseen by Pope Francis that has seen hundreds of suspect accounts shut down. French financier Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, who called his new job "a mission," will oversee a two-year program to cede the bank’s asset-management business to a newly formed Vatican department, leaving the institution handling only payment services for priests and religious organizations...The new six-person board of lay experts appointed Wednesday to work with De Franssu includes Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

A group of leading American constitutional and criminal law scholars and practitioners wrote to US President Obama to urge that he commute American-Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s sentence to time served. The letter, dated June 20, was signed by seven professors from Harvard Law School, Obama’s alma mater: Alan M. Dershowitz, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Philip B. Heymann, Mary Ann Glendon, Gabriella Blum, Frank I. Michelman and Irwin Cotler (a Canadian law professor emeritus, former justice minister and attorney general of Canada, and a sometimes visiting professor at Harvard).

In a week of many developments in the world of law, Harvard Law School faculty were online, in print, and on-the-air offering analyses and opinions.

“After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory” (Duke), edited by Professor Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Contributors to the development of queer studies offer personal reflections on the potential and limitations of the field, asking to what extent it is defined by a focus on sex and sexuality.