Tim Rutten

At the nation's Roman Catholic universities, controversy over the choice of commencement speakers has become almost as regular an annual ritual as graduation itself.

Two years ago, conservative Catholics made a major issue of President Obama's speech to Notre Dame's graduating class. Their argument was that no Catholic institution ought to honor anyone who favors abortion rights. This spring's contretemps is a bit of a mirror image of that one: More than 70 leading Catholic scholars have sent a pointedly critical letter to House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, who delivered Saturday's commencement address at the Catholic University of America. The signers charge that the budget the Republican leader recently pushed through the House ignores the church's social teachings.

Elements with the State Department are attempting to silence an American diplomat who believes he was personally charged by the White House with promoting President Obama's interfaith initiatives.

The diplomat is the U.S. ambassador to Malta, Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine and former dean of the law school at Catholic University of America. He served in the Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush and, as a devout Catholic, for many years has been prominent in the antiabortion movement and among those arguing for a larger role for faith-based efforts in public life. Even though he and the president disagree on abortion, Kmiec said he found in Obama someone who had "a deep faith himself and was capable of understanding the difference among people and of having empathy for that difference."

In this digital age, speech has been globalized just as surely as commerce.

That's one of the lessons to be taken from the troubling sequence of events in which a tiny Florida church's distasteful publicity stunt of burning a Quran triggered five days of protest and mob violence across Afghanistan. Through Tuesday, more than 20 people had been killed, and the hand of our Taliban antagonists has been strengthened.

Winston Churchill famously described fanatics as those who "can't change their mind and won't change the subject." It's an appraisal that also could be applied to those deranged Americans who continue to insist that President Obama is neither a U.S. citizen nor a Christian.

"O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL." By Anonymous. Simon & Schuster. 353 pages. $25.99.

Just as there are said to be no atheists in foxholes, the truth is that there are few true cynics in American politics.

As much of the world once more prepares to celebrate the birth of Christ, it is a melancholy fact that many of the most ancient churches established in his name are being pushed to the brink of oblivion across the region where their faith was born.