The Man Who Made Notre Dame – The American Spectator

On Jul 13, 2023

Legendary University of Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz once gave an apt description of the university he loved: “For those who know Notre Dame, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.”

Holtz is right. Notre Dame is an iconic institution in the American Catholic imagination, but it is a difficult place to explain to those who keep up with the university through (usually unflattering) headlines or occasional visits to campus. Nevertheless, the life and legacy of former university president Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., can provide a preliminary explanation for the current state of Notre Dame, as well as the present landscape of Catholic higher education.

As James Keating, a professor at Providence College, discusses in a recent First Things essay, the Catholic university has been in crisis for decades, and the problems have a singular point of origin. The Land O’ Lakes Statement transformed Catholic education in America, boosting the “size and reputation of Catholic colleges and universities during the 1970s and ‘80s,” Keating writes. He doesn’t mention Fr. Hesburgh by name, but the charismatic president of Notre Dame — who also happened to be the architect of the Land O’ Lakes gathering — haunts Keating’s discussion. So who was the man who changed Catholic higher education?

University of Notre Dame (Ken Wolter/Shutterstock)

Fr. Hesburgh, who served as the president of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, is a neat profile of postconciliar Catholicism. A man of deep faith, he genuinely sought to bring Catholic education into the modern world. But Hesburgh’s approach to the Catholic university seems naively optimistic in retrospect, almost tragic in its mid-century confidence.

Hesburgh believed that institutional independence was necessary for the Catholic university. He wanted Notre Dame to be taken seriously by its secular peer institutions, but he feared that the Church hierarchy’s potential interference in academic matters could stand in the way of the school’s ability to participate on equal footing. Academic freedom, then, became Hesburgh’s rallying cry — a cry that would completely alter the landscape of Catholic higher education in America.

In 1967, during his tenure as president of the International Federation of Catholic Universities, Hesburgh gathered twenty-six other North American educators to study the “role and nature of the contemporary Catholic university.” The resulting Land O’ Lakes Statement gave Hesburgh and his like-minded peers the chance to envision the future of Catholic higher education. The document claims the necessity of “true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”

This call for academic freedom seemed to offer a rosy future for American Catholicism: unhindered by lingering suspicion about popish interference, Catholics would integrate into the broader academic community. The American academy would benefit, Hesburgh hoped, from the depth and beauty of Catholicism, and the vital energy of the Church would help the ivory tower to stand a little straighter and see a little further.

Hesburgh’s approach to the Catholic university seems naively optimistic in retrospect, almost tragic in its mid-century confidence.

He cared deeply about the religious identity of the Catholic university, and his fellow educators felt similarly. The Land O’ Lakes Statement outlines the expectation that a Catholic university should preserve its distinctive identity as an institution “in which Catholicism is perceptibly present and effectively operative.” But what followed was not so much an integration into the wider academy as it was an assimilation. The Catholic university traded submission to the Vatican for submission to secular academic standards.

Hesburgh’s cherished concept of academic freedom has brought myriad challenges to the Catholic identities of Catholic universities. Because he took cues from secular institutions, Hesburgh delivered a rather flat understanding of academic freedom nearly unrelated to the freedom proposed by the Church. True freedom is possessed not by abstract collectives like the academy, but by human beings who are given the daily choice to seek God’s will or to stray from it. And while many scholars at Notre Dame understand their research and teaching in the context of their faith, many others insist upon an academic freedom that looks more like academic license. As the culture war escalates, the university will need to evaluate the conflict between her mission of Catholic education and the secular permissive attitude that academic freedom enables.

Hesburgh’s impulses were not entirely disastrous. Despite the challenges to her Catholic identity, Notre Dame has served as a powerful credentialing institution for American Catholics for decades. The institutional prestige that Hesburgh sought has given Catholic thought a prominent platform in American discourse, whether academic, religious, or political.

It is because of this continued prestige that Catholics cannot abandon Our Lady’s university. If nothing else, Notre Dame provides young Catholics with an entry point into the nation’s elite institutions. Institutional access is waning for those who object to today’s secular orthodoxies, but Notre Dame has retained the credentialing power envisioned by Fr. Hesburgh, who rightly recognized that culture is changed from within. In opening the doors of the Catholic university, Fr. Hesburgh may have let the world in more than he let the Church out, but the impulse to silo Catholic thought into parallel institutions should not be universalized, either.

In many ways, Notre Dame dwells in the shadow of Hesburgh, haunted by his flawed intuition that conformity to the world might help the world conform to Christ. But the university also boasts robust Catholic communities, an abundance of chapels, opportunities for Mass, confession, and Eucharistic Adoration, and the top theology department in the world. This, too, was Fr. Hesburgh’s dream — that faith might flourish in tandem with academic excellence. And with a core of faculty, staff, alumni, and students who draw strength from the heart of the Church, the fate of Notre Dame’s Catholic identity is far from a foregone conclusion.

Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Traverse City, Michigan. Her work has been published in the American Conservative, the National Catholic Register, Law and Liberty, and the Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mfmyler.

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