Is Notre Dame still a Catholic university?
As we recently reported, a famous alum of Georgetown has asked the Catholic Church to revoke its standing. Now people are beginning to wonder about Notre Dame as well.
Michael Bradley of The College Fix reports.
The Secularization of Notre Dame: Is There Hope?
The University of Notre Dame is America’s flagship Catholic university. Few contest this claim.
But an increasing number of people – devout Catholics, alumni, educators and students – question whether Notre Dame is irrevocably on the path to secularization. As a senior at Notre Dame, I count myself among the concerned.
Over my past three years here, I’ve observed that beneath the Catholic trappings of campus, disconcerting trends indicate a deeply flawed aspiration: the desire to be the best of two worlds, secular and Catholic.
Notre Dame wants to be viewed by its modern academy peers as “one of the guys,” while at the same time being distinctly and authentically Catholic. But in today’s society, this is impossible, and being on par with secular institutions has forced it to depart from its Catholic mission.
That departure can be traced in part to the Land O’ Lakes Statement on the Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University. The document, signed in 1967 by a consortium of Catholic university officials–including then-Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore Hesburgh–accelerated Notre Dame’s trajectory toward humanism.
The Lakes statement described a vision for contemporary Catholic institutions of higher learning central to which is the conviction that any “external authorities” – including the Church – inhibit Catholic universities from fully participating in the “total university life of our time.” The Catholic faith is thus seen at times as a “stained glass ceiling” that stifles Notre Dame’s potential.
The tension between the Lakes statement and John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which emphasized the Church’s authority over Catholic educational institutions, was on full display in fall of 2009, when the university chose to honor President Obama with an honorary degree against the explicit instruction of the local bishop (and more than 80 other American bishops as well).
The Obama episode has been the most public example of the tension at the heart of Notre Dame, but it was merely a fruit–not a cause–of a deeper and more gradual erosion of its Catholic mission and identity.
Comments
Is ND Catholic? No, no, no.
No more Catholic than the list of those big name schools started by the RCC, notably ND, Georgetown, Boston College, St. Louis, and others.
The best that can be said of the lot of them is each one was once a Catholic school, but that designation is long into the past. Their fading away from the faith probably began before the late 1960s, but that period, esp. after the Land of Lakes Conference (July, 1967, sponsored by Hesburgh at a ND retreat facility itself!) where these colleges agreed that taking federal student money was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than the faith itself.
I am a grad of BC and I will NEVER support the school just for that reason. Betrayal. There are many other org. out there doing the Lord’s work to which my meagre widow’s mite should go. When at BC in the late 1960s I actually saw with my own eyes the crucifixes being removed from classrooms. Aghast. Matthew 7:21-23 applies here.