President Obama gave a particularly Catholic talk at Notre Dame last weekend, says sociologist Michele Dillon over at The Immanent Frame, because he grounded it in stories (think: Father Hesburgh’s fish tale) rather than philosophical abstractions.

Dillon says: “During his speech, Obama exemplified the translation that necessarily occurs in everyday lived experience between universal principles of morality and the particularistic ways in which those principles get worked out on the ground by (imperfect) human beings. This he accomplished not by abstract talk about lofty principles but by the stories he told, two in particular.”

I agree with Dillon up to a point, but don’t understand what’s particularly “Catholic” about stories over abstractions. As a victim, I mean student, of Catholic schools, we learned about plenty of categories but precious few characters. And I haven’t seen any contemporary Catholic leader of note take Obama’s approach. In fact, Pope Benedict XVI notably went the other way during his visit to Yad Veshem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.