WHITE HOUSE – White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Notre Dame’s valedictorian and a majority of its students support the Catholic university’s invitation for President Barack Obama to deliver Sunday’s commencement speech and receive an honorary doctorate.

Dozens of bishops, archbishops, and cardinals have declared that Notre Dame should not honor a leader whose support for abortion rights contradicts church teachings. But Gibbs points to a poll that suggests most American Catholics support the invitation, and adds that Notre Dame graduates who object don’t have to attend the ceremony.

At last Friday’s National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the first American to head the Vatican’s highest court, Archbishop Raymond Burke, said Notre Dame’s honoring Obama is a “source of the greatest scandal.” Burke accused the president of “aggressively advancing an anti-life and anti-family agenda.”