University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame
City:	Notre Dame, Indiana
Type:	Private
Sports:	baseball, basketball, cross country, fencing, football, golf, hockey, lacrosse, rowing, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball
Colors:	blue, gold
Mascot:	Fighting Irish
Website:	http://www.nd.edu/

University of Notre Dame is a historically Catholic university located near South Bend, Indiana. It is run by a lay board and is not controlled by the Catholic Church. Its conferral of an honoroary degree on President Obama in 2009 led to protests by some bishops, who disagree with Obama's positions.

Faculty

Father Joseph Carrier, C.S.C. was Director of the Science Museum and the Library and Professor of Chemistry and Physics in the late 19th century. Carrier taught that scientific research and its promise for progress were not antagonistic to the ideals of intellectual and moral culture endorsed by the Church. One of Carrier's students was Father John Zahm (1851-1921) who became a prominent scientist and naturalist.

Richard Sullivan taught English from 1936 to 1974 and published six novels, dozens of short stories, and various other efforts. Though published by major houses, he never became an important mainstream writer but was known as a regional writer and a Catholic spokesman.

During his long tenure as an English professor during the 1930s-60s, Frank O'Malley emerged as the exemplary American Catholic intellectual. Influenced by Jacques Maritain, John U. Nef, and others, O'Malley developed a concept of Christian philosophy that was a fundamental element in his thought. Through his course "Modern Catholic Writers" O'Malley introduced generations of undergraduates to Gabriel Marcel, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Sigrid Undset, Paul Clandel, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Father Thomas McAvoy (1903-69) was a leading historian of American Catholicism, professor of history and university archivist.

The Review of Politics was founded in 1939 by Waldemar Gurian, a German Catholic intellectual of Jewish descent. Positivism dominated American intellectual life in the 1920s onward but in marked contrast, Waldemar Gurian received a German Catholic education and wrote his doctoral dissertation under Max Scheler. The Review of Politics was modeled by Gurian after Carl Muth's Hochland and Romano Guardini's Schildgenossen and quickly emerged as part of an international Catholic intellectual revival, offering an alternative vision to the failed positivist philosophy. For 44 years, the Review was edited by Gurian, Matthew Fitzsimons, Frederick Crosson, and Thomas Stritch. Intellectual leaders included Gurian, Jacques Maritain, Frank O'Malley, Leo Richard Ward, F. A. Hermens, and John U. Nef. It became a major forum for political ideas and modern political concerns, especially from a Judeo-Christian and scholastic tradition. Gerhart Niemeyer (1907-97) was a professor of political science; his courses on communist ideology were particularly accessible to his students.

In the decade after since the Second Vatican Council (1963) the university’s basic Catholicism did not change, but its ways of emphasizing it did. Instead of merely trying to perpetuate the institution and keep its adherents obedient to the institutional church, there was an attempt to develop a laity which is informed and dedicated. Many previously ignored topics such as compulsory celibacy for the priesthood, birth control, and ecumenicity were discussed without limits.

Student life

The Catholic Total Abstinence Union was influential among students at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, from its founding in 1842, and by 1880 the campus was officially "dry." World War I changes included a lessening of interest in temperance, more off-campus freedom for students, and national prohibition, and, although the use of alcohol by students, on or off campus, was still forbidden, it was increasingly more difficult to enforce. Father John O'Hara, the Prefect of Religion, re-encouraged temperance in the early 1920s, and although he became president of Notre Dame in 1933, the temperance movement had run its course by the time he left in 1939. The influx of World War II veterans to the university in the late 1940's sealed the fate of Notre Dame's temperance movement.

Athletics

Notre Dame has 12 men's and 12 women's sports teams. The football program has won 13 bowl games (while losing 15) and 13 national championships.

George Gipp was the school’s legendary football player during 1916-20. He played semiprofessional baseball and smoked, drank, and gambled when not playing sports. He was also humble, generous to the needy, and a man of integrity. It was in 1928 that coach Knute Rockne used his final conversation with Gipp to inspire the Notre Dame team to beat the Army team and "win one for the Gipper." He was the subject of a a 1940 film, "Knute Rockne - All American," starring Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne and Ronald Reagan as Gipp.

Further reading

• Burns, Robert E. Being Catholic, Being American: The Notre Dame Story, 1934-1952, Vol. 2. (2000). 632pp.
• McAvoy, Thomas T. "Notre Dame, 1919-1922: The Burns Revolution". Review of Politics 1963 25(4): 431-450. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/1405842

in JSTOR]

• Massa, Mark S. Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team. (1999). 278 pp.
• O'Brien, Michael. Hesburgh: A Biography. (1998). 354 pp.
• O'Connell, Marvin R. Edward Sorin. (2001). 792 pp.
• Robinson, Ray. Rockne of Notre Dame: The Making of a Football Legend. (1999). 290 pp.
• Sperber, Murray. Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football. (1993) 634 pp.
• Yaeger, Don and Looney, Douglas S. Under the Tarnished Dome: How Notre Dame Betrayed Its Ideals for Football Glory. (1993). 299 pp.

External links

• University of Notre Dame