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The History of the Congregation of Holy Cross
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The University of Notre Dame: A History
Notre Dame’s rise to prominence ranges far afield from football
Originally published in The Journal Gazette, December 13, 2020.
On Saturday, Notre Dame and Clemson play for the Atlantic Coast Conference football championship. The widely anticipated rematch of Notre Dame’s Nov. 7 overtime win over Clemson prods fans, once again, to speculate “whether the Irish are back” – to the days of Lou Holtz, Dan Devine, Ara Parseghian, Frank Leahy and, of course, Knute Rockne.
Few universities garner the following Notre Dame enjoys. Why the South Bend university’s mystique appeals to so many individuals, however, is woven into historical details rarely appreciated. To this end (and perhaps for the “Domer” on your Christmas list), Father Thomas E. Blantz offers “The University of Notre Dame: A History” and Father James T. Connelly offers “The History of the Congregation of Holy Cross.”
While the beauty both books offer will make an impressive contribution to any coffee table, their details demand initiative well worth exercising. Blantz and Connelly are accomplished historians. Readers who commit the time will not only walk away with an appreciation for Notre Dame’s mystique but also the selfless ways so many, religious and laypersons alike, labored to cultivate it.
Blantz gave his life to the university, teaching history for 46 years while also serving as a department chair, a chief student development administrator, and an archivist. Blantz witnessed and contributed to the university’s rise in the latter half of the 20th century as one of the nation’s most widely regarded research universities.
In developing his story, Blantz goes back to Notre Dame’s origins in France, not Ireland. By Catholic Church standards, the religious order that founded Notre Dame is relatively young. The Congregation of Holy Cross (Congregatio a Sancta Cruce or C.S.C.), the order of which Blantz and Connelly are both members, was founded after the French Revolution in an attempt “to resurrect or revitalize long-neglected or damaged local parish churches and long abandoned parochial schools.”
Almost a decade and a half before the Vatican formally recognized the Congregation as a religious order in 1857, founder Basil Moreau honored the request made by Bishop Simon Bruté of Vincennes, Indiana, for missionaries, sending one priest and six religious brothers. Blantz recounts how Bruté, after a year and a half, then offered the group’s leader, Father Edward Sorin, a tract of land in northern Indiana if Sorin established a college. With the winter of 1842 already underway, Sorin and now seven brothers made the 250-mile trek north, with the first of the group arriving on the now snow-covered landscape on Nov. 26, 1842.
With Sorin naming the place Our Lady of the Lake (Notre Dame du Lac), Blantz notes an irony of history. In particular, Sorin believed the lake down the embankment from the log cabin in which he and his colleagues spent that winter was but one lake. Only after that landscape thawed did Sorin discover “there were two lakes on the property – one of twenty-five acres and the other of seventeen.” Despite its humble beginnings, Sorin envisioned the university would become “one of the most powerful means of doing good in the country.”
In exacting detail, Blantz recounts over 21 chronologically organized chapters just how difficult Sorin’s vision was to accomplish as he and his descendants battled disease, fire, poverty, prejudice and war. Combatting those challenges, the Revs. William Corby, John A. Zahm and James A. Burns, to name only three, gave the majority of their lives.
Perhaps capturing the longest stretch of Blantz’s narrative are efforts made by the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh.
With the expansion of the student body, faculty, physical plant, operating budget, and endowment being comparable to the university’s meteoric rise in academic quality, Blantz argues Hesburgh’s 35-year tenure as president (1952-87) was the most revolutionary since Sorin’s.
Part of the mystique Sorin, Hesburgh and others cultivated, Blantz contends, was that “Notre Dame would suggest different things to different persons … a beautiful campus, academic achievement, a center of Catholicism – but football would rarely be absent from the public image.” To that last point, Blantz gives credit to Rockne, his successors and the individuals who hired them.
An appreciation of Blantz’s history of Notre Dame compels readers to know more about the congregation that brought the university into existence. Connelly’s “The History of the Congregation of Holy Cross” proves as compelling as necessary.
Connelly, the congregation’s archivist, is understandably able to go much deeper into the spirit of hope that not only brought the order into existence in post-Revolutionary France but defines its ministries to this day.
Over 14 chronologically ordered chapters, Connelly details how the congregation cultivated charisms or spiritual gifts for parish ministry, education and missions. That impulse compelled the congregation’s founder, Father Moreau, to commit members to service in Algeria, Canada and, of course, the United States.
In compelling detail, Connelly recounts how members of the order were called to serve in Asia in Bangladesh and India; in Africa in Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia; in South America in Brazil, Chile and Peru; and in the Caribbean in Guadeloupe and Haiti.
Quoting Moreau, Connelly concludes his story by affirming that the unpredictable yet pronounced pattern of service offered by the congregation “is an unquestionable sign that the work must be ascribed to God alone as originator.”
Long after Saturday’s cheers for old Notre Dame subside, the university’s mystique will still rally the hearts of and minds of loyal sons and daughters. To individuals seeking to understand that mystique, Blantz and Connelly’s efforts prove indispensable reading.
Todd C. Ream serves on the higher education and honors faculties at Taylor University. He is the author of the forthcoming “Hesburgh of Notre Dame: The Church’s Public Intellectual.”