The University of Notre Dame

Thomas E. Blantz

Description

Thomas Blantz’s monumental The University of Notre Dame: A History tells the story of the renowned Catholic university’s growth and development from a primitive grade school and high school founded in 1842 by the Congregation of Holy Cross in the wilds of northern Indiana to the acclaimed undergraduate and research institution it became by the early twenty-first century. Its growth was not always smooth—slowed at times by wars, financial challenges, fires, and illnesses. It is the story both of a successful institution and of the men and women who made it so: Father Edward Sorin, the twenty-eight-year-old French priest and visionary founder; Father William Corby, later two-term Notre Dame president, who gave absolution to the soldiers of the Irish Brigade at the Battle of Gettysburg; the hundreds of Holy Cross brothers, sisters, and priests whose faithful service in classrooms, student residence halls, and across campus kept the university progressing through difficult years; a dedicated lay faculty teaching too many classes for too few dollars to assure the university would survive; Knute Rockne, a successful chemistry teacher but an even more successful football coach, elevating Notre Dame to national athletic prominence; Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president for thirty-five years; the 325 undergraduate young women who were the first to enroll at Notre Dame in 1972; and thousands of others.

Blantz captures the strong connections that exist between Notre Dame’s founding and early life and today’s university. Alumni, faculty, students, friends of the university, and fans of the Fighting Irish will want to own this indispensable, definitive history of one of America’s leading universities. Simultaneously detailed and documented yet lively and interesting, The University of Notre Dame: A History is the most complete and up-to-date history of the university available.

Father Hesburgh often stated that a Catholic university was where the Church did its thinking, and indeed it is. The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies sponsor scholarly conferences; faculty publications examine critical Church issues;. and controversial topics—from Evolution under Father Zahm through the Vagina Monologs during Father Malloy’s presidency to Governor Cuomo’s wrestling with abortion —have been presented and debated, and issues were clarified and beliefs strengthened from the discussions. Father Hesburgh’s “fifteen-minute rule” and the Land O’ Lakes Statement were discussed for decades, and Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal is given national, and even international, publicity each year. Thousands of graduates have entered seminaries and convents, and numerous alumni have been elevated into significant positions in the hierarchy and have influenced Church policy at home and abroad.

The University had accomplished much throughout its history but, as a living institution, it had no plans to stop when Father Malloy left office in 2005. His successor, Father John Jenkins, declared in his Inaugural Address:

With respect and gratitude for all who embraced Notre Dame’s mission in earlier times, let us rise up and embrace the mission for our times: to build a Notre Dame that is bigger and better than ever—a great Catholic university for the 21st century, one of the pre-eminent research institutions in the world, a center for learning whose intellectual and religious traditions converge to make it a healing, unifying, enlightening force for a world deeply in need. This is our goal. Let no one ever…say that we dreamed too small.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• HISTORY
• EDUCATION
• Philosophie et théologie
• Mensajería instantánea
• Higher
• Edward Sorin
• Notre Dame Fighting Irish
• Level
• Notre Dame
• South Bend, Indiana
• School
• Catholic
• Christianity
• United States
• KS
• South Bend
• IL
• ND
• IN
• NE
• OH
• MN
• SD
• MO
• MI

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268108236
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
THE
UNIVERSITY OF
NOTRE
DAME
A History
THOMAS E. BLANTZ, C.S.C.
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Published by the University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
This book is made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940873
ISBN: 978-0-268-10821-2 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10824-3 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10823-6 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
To
generations of Notre Dame students
who
have taught me much
CONTENTS

A gallery of images can be found between pages 326 and 327.
Preface
ONE
Background in France, 1789–1841
TWO
The Founding, 1841–1844
THREE
Toward an American Institution, 1845–1854
FOUR
The End of an Era (?), 1855–1865
FIVE
Father Corby to Father Corby, 1866–1881
SIX
A New Notre Dame
SEVEN
The 1890s: A Contest for Identity
EIGHT
The First Father John Cavanaugh

NINE
World War I and the “Burns Revolution”
TEN
The Emergence of Football
ELEVEN
The 1920s
TWELVE
The Depression Years
THIRTEEN
Notre Dame, the Navy, and World War II
FOURTEEN
The Postwar Years and the Second Father John Cavanaugh
FIFTEEN
The Early Presidency of Father Theodore M. Hesburgh
SIXTEEN
The 1960s: Progress and Controversy
SEVENTEEN
The 1970s: Coeducation, Vietnam, and More
EIGHTEEN
The 1980s: Father Hesburgh’s Homestretch
NINETEEN
A President Called “Monk”: The First Five Years
TWENTY
The 1990s
TWENTY-ONE
Entering the New Millennium
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE

A few years ago, when speaking with a group of his former students, the author mentioned that, at age eighty, he had decided to write a history of the university. One suggested, facetiously, that he did have the advantage of having lived through most of it. The author was not quite that old, of course, but he did have other advantages. He is a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious community that founded the university in 1842 and has governed or staffed it ever since. He has resided at the university as student, professor, or administrator for more than sixty years. He served as university archivist throughout the 1970s and gained wide acquaintance with the records housed there. And for a number of years, he offered an undergraduate seminar on the history of the university, learning much from the students’ original research.
The author has acquired many obligations in this research. He profited immensely from—and at times relied heavily on—the work of others, especially James E. Armstrong’s Onward to Victory: A Chronicle of the Alumni of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, 1842–1973 ; David Joseph Arthur’s “The University of Notre Dame, 1919–1933: An Administrative History”; Robert E. Burns’s Being Catholic, Being American ; Philip Gleason’s Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century ; Arthur J. Hope, C.S.C.’s Notre Dame: One Hundred Years ; Anna Rose Kearney’s “James A. Burns, C.S.C., Educator”; George Klawitter’s After Holy Cross, Only Notre Dame: The Life of Brother Gatian (Urbain Monsimer) ; Thomas Timothy McAvoy’s Father O’Hara of Notre Dame: The Cardinal-Archbishop of Philadelphia ; Philip S. Moore’s Academic Development, University of Notre Dame: Past, Present, and Future ; Michael O’Brien’s Hesburgh: A Biography ; Marvin R. O’Connell’s Edward Sorin ; Thomas J. Schlereth’s The University of Notre Dame: A Portrait of its History and Campus ; James M. Schmidt’s Notre Dame and the Civil War: Marching Onward to Victory ; John Theodore Wack’s “The University of Notre Dame du Lac: Foundation, 1842–1857”; and Ralph Edward Weber’s Notre Dame’s John Zahm: American Catholic Apologist and Educator .
Most of the research was conducted in the University of Notre Dame Archives, and the author is deeply grateful to archivists Wendy Schlereth, Angela Fritz, Kevin Cawley, Elizabeth Hogan, Angela Kindig, Charles Lamb, Peter Lysy, Joseph Smith, and Sharon Sumpter. Most record groups of the recent seventy years are not open for research but the archives hold an excellent collection of student and administration publications, and these proved most beneficial.
The staffs of other archives were invariably accommodating also: Christopher Kuhn and Deborah Buzzard at the United States Province of Priests and Brothers Provincial Archives; Sister Kathryn Callahan at the Sisters of the Holy Cross Archives; Lawrence Stewart at the Midwest Brothers’ Archives; Suzanne Isaacs at the National Archives in Washington, DC; and Leo L. Belleville, III, at the National Archives at Chicago. The author is grateful to the University of Notre Dame Archives, the United States Province of Priests and Brothers of the Congregation of Holy Cross, and Professor Thomas Schlereth for providing the photographs used in the gallery. James Blantz, Mary Kay Blantz, John Conley, John Deak, Carl Ebey, and Thomas Kselman read all or parts of the manuscript and made valuable suggestions. It was a pleasure to work closely with the professional staff at the University of Notre Dame Press: managing editor Matthew Dowd, Stephanie Hoffman, Wendy McMillen, Kathryn Pitts, Michelle Sybert, and especially manuscript editor Elizabeth Sain. The comments and recommendations of the outside readers improved the manuscript immensely. All errors that remain, of course, are the author’s own.
With a generous discretionary fund from the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, the author was able to hire several undergraduate assistants over the semesters who did valuable research and put the handwritten manuscript into computer form: Moira Griffith, Evelyn Heck, Elliot Marie Kane, Lindsey Mathew, Tara Hunt McMullen, Hope Moon, Sara Quasni, and Elizabeth Weicher. Madelyn Lugli efficiently and professionally prepared the long and at times poorly organized manuscript for the publisher. Notre Dame students have been a significant and beneficial part of the author’s life for more than fifty years, and this book is gratefully dedicated to them.
CHAPTER 1

Background in France, 1789–1841
Father Edward Sorin, C.S.C., an immigrant from France and, with seven companion religious brothers, founder of the University of Notre Dame in 1842, confided to his religious colleagues years later: “I bless God that I was not baptized under a French saint’s name. What makes my English St. Edward’s Feast so pleasant to us all is the total absence of every vestige of nationality.” 1 His comment was sincere—and accurate. From the first day he stepped ashore, he wanted to be an American, not an émigré Frenchman, and he remained an American the rest of his life. He wrote in his Chronicles that, on arriving, “one of his first acts on this soil so much desired was to fall prostrate and embrace it as a sign of adoption.” 2 He opened Notre Dame’s first end-of-year celebration in 1845—not a graduation since no one had yet qualified to graduate—with a formal reading of the Declaration of Independence. He became an American citizen in 1850 and was soon appointed local postmaster and superintendent of the roads, both government positions. He named one of the early buildings he constructed, Washington Hall, not for a Catholic saint but in honor of the first American president. During the tragic Civil War of the 1860s, he permitted seven priests and approximately eighty sisters to volunteer as chaplains and nurses, although their absences caused serious hardships at Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s, and other Holy Cross ministries. He was sufficiently respected in the American Church to be invited to the Provincial Council of Cincinnati in 1882 and the Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, and Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul paid high tribute to him on the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination: 3
I will be permitted, before I conclude, to note in Father Sorin’s life a characteristic that proves his high-mindedness and contributed in no small degree to his success. It is his sincere and thorough Americanism. From the moment he landed on our shores he ceased to be a foreigner. At once he was an American, heart and soul, as one to the manor born. The Republic of the United States never protected a more loyal and devoted citizen. He understood and appreciated our liberal institutions; there was in his heart no lingering fondness for old regimes, or worn-out legalisms. . . . Father Sorin, I thank you for your American patriotism, your love of American institutions.
Proudly and thoroughly American though he was, he had still been shaped and influenced in his early years by his native France. French politics, culture, and society had been turned upside down in the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century, and the French Church had been so devastated that for decades after the Revolution it was challenged to find means to resurrect and revitalize long-neglected or damaged local parish churches and long abandoned parochial schools. Two French priests of the early nineteenth century devoted their lives to the reopening of the closed schools and churches, and together they founded a new religious community with this in mind. Father Sorin and other young men joined that community and eventually sailed west as missionaries to the United States. Thus it is not inaccurate to say that without the French Revolution of the 1790s, there would be no University of Notre Dame in the 1840s. The history of Notre Dame then must begin with a study of the generation before Father Sorin and the fou