Father John Jenkins, CSC, the president of the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN) since 2005, will step down at end of the current academic year.
Under his leadership, the university invited President Barack Obama to be its commencement speaker in 2009 and bestowed its highest honor, the Laetare Medal, on Joe Biden in 2016—leading to a rebuke by Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who said at the time that it was “wrong for Notre Dame to honor any ‘pro-choice’ public official with the Laetare Medal.”
Upon Father Jenkins’s announcement of his retirement, Bishop Rhoades said that “I am grateful that, in promoting the growth of research at the university, Father Jenkins has promoted the moral, spiritual, and religious dimensions of that research, an important part of Notre Dame’s distinctive Catholic identity.”