Tag: Notre Dame

An Open Letter to the University of Notre Dame

Dear Father Jenkins, Provost Burish, and all members of the Decennial Core Curriculum Review Committee,

I write to you today in some degree of shock, having heard from reliable sources that the core theology requirement at Notre Dame is under threat. It seems, in fact, that the decision to abolish the theology requirement is all but made, leaving the majority of Notre Dame students without any semblance of theological formation, despite the dubious assertion that courses in “Catholic Studies” will fill the same need. One begins to think that the purpose of the University is not to make saints (which is, of course, the only reason for Catholic education) or scholars (which is the purpose of all education) but to make…what? Even now I can’t be so cynical as to assert that the University is concerned only with making money. Making the top 10 in the US News and World Report, perhaps. Making “leaders” with no roots in anything but their own impressive resumes. Making a “difference,” although to what end seems unclear. And so I write to you with great concern.

I write to you as an evangelist, as one who knows that it is Christ and Christ alone who can make sense of the human experience. I know the desperate need Notre Dame students have for Christ and I know how many of them don’t truly know him. You have only two semesters to introduce them to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and this strikes you as excessive? Can it possibly be true that the leaders of Our Lady’s University are declaring that her sons and daughters have no need of her Son? “Let us study, let us serve, let us win on the field, on the court, on the ice, but let us not preach the Gospel. Not when there are secular schools to compete with and tests scores to boost. After all, what does it matter?” It matters more than anything else any person can ever learn. And you want to make it optional. You want to satisfy the requirement with a class on the Canterbury Tales or on the American Catholic experience while thousands of students leave the nation’s “greatest” Catholic university not knowing Jesus. For shame.

I write to you as a theology teacher, one whose high school apologetics class was widely considered one of the most academically rigorous offered in the school. Tell me what exactly your students have to lose by studying Aquinas and Augustine. Tell me what could be better for their intellectual formation than wrestling with the most difficult questions ever asked. How are they better prepared for law school or the business world because they avoided metaphysics in favor of some Flannery O’Connor or Hopkins?

I write to you as a Catholic. Notre Dame is the unquestioned leader in Catholic higher education (though it’s harder and harder to see why). Please consider the ramifications of dropping the theology requirement not only on your students but on all students at Catholic colleges. If Notre Dame eliminates the core theology requirement, schools that look to Notre Dame as the standard of American Catholicism will follow suit. Perhaps your “Catholic studies” courses will form hearts and minds in the Catholic tradition–though I think it unlikely. There is no guarantee that such will be the case for courses taught at the schools that will follow your lead. If you can’t remain Catholic for the sake of your students, do it for all of American Catholicism.

I write to you as an educated person. Education is not vocational training. It is not pre-professional studies. Education is the formation of the person. It’s the reason I had to take science classes and history classes and language classes–because I was in college to be educated, not to be trained. How exactly can we educate students when we remove the discipline that was at the heart of the university system at its inception, the queen of the sciences? How can we claim that our students are well-educated when their knowledge is an inch wide and a mile deep? Will you next remove the English requirement or the social studies? After all, they use English in their other classes. And really, people pick up on basic history from movies and such. And then would you call them educated? You would not. Tell me, then, why you can remove a study of the questions most often asked throughout the history of humanity and feel that you have done your job.

I write to you as a human being. I know what it is to wrestle with existence and purpose and evil. I know the questions that haunt the human heart. We can explore them using reason and the wisdom of those who have gone before. We can ignore them, pouring booze and pleasure and any other palliative we can find into the gaping hole in our hearts. Or we can answer them with Pinterest and ESPN and Nicholas Sparks novels. Can you really live with yourselves knowing that you have left a generation to find itself via Buzzfeed and Beyonce lyrics while Athanasius and Anselm, Buber and von Balthasar gather dust in the stacks? Perhaps Notre Dame students are above such drivel. And perhaps not.

I write to you as an alumna of the University. For years, I’ve endured raised eyebrows and snide remarks when I mentioned my alma mater. And I defended you. When President Obama was given an honorary degree, I defended you. When you caved before the Department of Health and Human Services, I defended you. “Notre Dame is the only school trying to be a top 20 university and authentically Catholic,” I repeated. I will not defend you now. If the University of Notre Dame thinks she can be a Catholic University without forming students in Catholic theology, she is lying to herself and to all who trust in her. She is betraying the Church that made her great.

I must apologize if my remarks are merely a response to rumors and the hysteria that has followed them. I trust that you are men and women of integrity, men and women who understand what it is to be a Catholic university, to be a university at all. I beg you to honor those who have gone before by giving their children an education worthy of the name.

Yours in Notre Dame,

Meg Hunter-Kilmer, B.A. ’04, M.T.S. ’06

Notre Dame Hesburgh

Easter Passion

October 15, 2005 was one of the worst days of my life.1 If you’re a Notre Dame fan, you know exactly what I mean. Three years in a row we’d lost to USC2 by 31 points. 31 points each time–how humiliating. But in 2005, after three pathetic years, it was over. We came out in green3 and played our guts out and as time expired, we were in the lead!

My friends, I was literally in the process of rushing the field when the announcers shouted that if we didn’t return to the stands, Notre Dame would be penalized. “Penalized?” I crowed. “How are you going to penalize us? WE WON!!”

No, as it turns out. We hadn’t. Matt “Ballroom Dancing” Leinart had fumbled the ball out of bounds, stopping the clock with seven seconds left.4 USC would get one more play. And with that play, the game. Reggie Bush shoved Leinart into the endzone5 for the win. And there we were, having climbed back into the stands, shocked and miserable.

My roommate was so upset that she just went to bed. At 7pm on a Saturday night. She said she didn’t want to be conscious any more.

It was the only time in my life I’ve ever wanted to drown my sorrows.6

For weeks, every person I met who heard I went to Notre Dame responded, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” I’m not even kidding.

I know it’s pathetic and that football shouldn’t affect me that much, but Bush Push 2005 drove me to despair. And so I think I know a little bit what the Apostles were feeling.

They thought they had this one. On Palm Sunday, Jesus walked into the city amid shouts of Hosanna and they thought that after years of eating leftover loaves and fish and sleeping in a leaky boat they had finally arrived. They were so ready for their victory, so ready for Jesus to take control.

Jesus entombedAnd then suddenly the Hosannas were replaced by angry cries of “Crucify him!” and he was snatched from their midst and stripped and beaten and before they knew it, he was lying in a tomb and what was left for them? That Holy Saturday, there was a feeling that nothing would ever be good again. That no matter what happened, nothing would ever fill the ache of emptiness that Friday had left in their hearts. Maybe they lost themselves in wine or sleep or anything to dull the pain.

But then…

It’s like we were standing in that stadium, stunned and defeated and empty, and the refs called out “Please reset the game clock” one more time. It’s like we looked out onto the field and it wasn’t just Brady and Samardzija and Zbikowski. It was all 7 ND Heisman winners. It was all 11 National Championship teams. It was Rudy and the Gipper and the 4 Horsemen and every man ever to put on blue and gold. It’s like they lined up on one side of the line of scrimmage and looked across at Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart, alone and shaking in mesh shorts and flip flops. And then the whistle blew and they pounded it in over and over again. It’s not just like we won that game but ran up the score on every game, erased every embarrassing loss. It’s like eternal victory was snatched from the jaws of crushing defeat and nothing would ever hurt that way again.

Call me strange, but that’s how I see Easter. It’s not just glowing Jesus walking out of a tomb, it’s Rambo Jesus ripping the gates off of hell. It’s demons cowering in the corner as Adam bows before his son and savior. It’s earthquakes and the dead walking out of their tombs and all creation turned on its head.

Easter bunnyEaster isn’t bunnies and lilies and butterflies–it’s a wild victory where there was no hope. It’s absolute power in the hands of a God who went to hell and back for you. It’s unending joy wrested from the bitter grasp of him who came to kill, steal and destroy.

That’s what we celebrate today, friends, and for the next 50 days: a love story that puts all romance to shame, the story of a man who gladly gave his life for his beloved and came back for her all the same. It’s an adventure so fantastic that you’d never believe it if it weren’t so clearly true. It’s drama that rips your heart out and somehow restores it new and whole like never before. It’s passion so great it takes your breath away.

When I meditate on the emptiness of Holy Saturday, the pain feels familiar. It feels like October 15, 2005 and it feels like every day of my life before I knew the Lord. But now I know what happens on the other side. Now I know that the darkness serves to amplify the light. Now I know the the emptiness and the futility are an illusion, that the only battle that matters has already been won and all I have to do is share in the spoils.

three MarysThere is nothing sweet about this story, nothing nice, nothing dull. This Easter, forget everything you know about the Resurrection and read the story with fresh eyes. Read the anguish of Friday and the desolation of Saturday but don’t stop there. Read the confusion of Sunday morning, the urgency of Mary’s sprint to the upper room, of Peter and John’s sprint back. Read the infinite tenderness of the word “Mary,” the shock of his appearance in the upper room, the shame elicited by, “Simon, do you love me?” But above all, keep reading. Read the power of Peter’s Pentecost message that brought 3,000 more into the fold. Read the confidence of “In the name of Jesus Christ, rise and walk” and the jubilation of the walking and leaping and praising God. Read the fearlessness of the cowardly apostles and the abandon of the community that held everything in common.

Then tell me: does your life shine with Easter joy? Do you radiate triumph like you’ve just witnessed a come-from-behind victory? Do you live in a hope that is stronger than your circumstances, a peace that passes understanding? Do you stare into the eyes of defeat and taunt with St. Paul, “Where, oh death, is your victory? Where, oh death, is your sting??” We are an Easter people, my friends, and alleluia is our song. How is your life going to witness to that truth this Easter season?

  1. It seems the Lord doesn’t think much of me if this is the height of the suffering I’ve endured. [↩]
  2. Some Notre Dame students call USC the University of Spoiled Children. I find this terribly ironic. [↩]
  3. Never a good idea. [↩]
  4. Bear with me, non-football fans. I’m going somewhere with this. [↩]
  5. Which is illegal, but anyone would do the same thing. [↩]
  6. I didn’t. I went to the library to read a commentary on the Code of Canon Law instead. Shut up. [↩]

In Defense of Liturgy (With a Little Help from the Irish)

I read an essay a while back in which the author said that he never understood liturgy before he went to Notre Dame.1 It was the stadium, though, and not the Basilica that taught him about the importance of ritual. As he wandered the campus, he saw that there were certain things that must be done on a football Saturday: playing corn hole at a tailgate with a red solo cup full of cheap beer in one hand; eating a charred burger cooked by some student organization at a concession stand on God Quad; watching the band step off from the steps of Bond; lighting a candle at the Grotto.2 There was a certain dress code: jeans and an ND t-shirt (polos acceptable on men of a certain age). The game itself was filled with ritual, from the holler heralding kickoff to the keys jingling on third and long, from “we are ND” shouted like they meant it to the “pushups” on top of the crowd every time the Irish found the end zone. This completely unreligious experience was as liturgical as any the writer (an Evangelical, I think) had ever had.

In this supremely ritualized celebration, we begin to see that there is something liturgical about the human person, something that demands ritual and repeated actions. Just as game days and Christmas dinner and road trips take on the same shape each time, so must our worship. It’s unnatural to try to make worship “spontaneous,” as though resisting the urge to revel in what is familiar somehow makes the familiar less sacred, as though spontaneity is the ultimate value in worship, rather than faithfulness and truth.

There is, of course, an Evangelical Protestant inclination to reject “liturgy” because the “liturgical” becomes scripted, rote, stilted. To that I can only reply that all that is holy is liturgical, if by liturgical you mean ritualized and repeated. Every new mother  gazes at her baby with tears in her eyes and murmurs, “He’s beautiful.” Every groom looks on his bride with something like wonder as she walks down the aisle. And everyone watching at a deathbed holds his breath as the dying man takes his last. That our rituals become empty is our fault, not theirs. We coast through the Mass not because it is insufficiently passionate but because we are. If we could see it with new eyes, looking on the football festivities with the eyes of a freshman, not of a professor who’s had season tickets since Ara, we might begin to appreciate the liturgy that combines the passion of a thousand Saints into the unimpassioned droning of a twenty-first century congregation.

But the worse rejection of liturgy, I think, comes from within our own ranks, from those who want to cut some parts, embellish others, and add commentary throughout. Rather than lamenting the “vain repetition” of the Catholic Mass and moving on to their own (often more passionate but rarely less “liturgical”) services, as do our Protestant detractors, they try to change the liturgy that is cherished by so many. They sit during the fight song or drink milk at the tailgate or wear sundresses and pearls. There’s nothing wrong with those things–and yet, there really is.

One consequence of my new itinerant lifestyle is that I find myself at parishes as varied as American Catholics are, often with little advance warning of what I’m about to experience. In the past 6 weeks, I’ve been to Mass in 12 different states at about 35 difference churches, and let me tell you, there are as many ways of being Catholic as there are Catholics. And despite the joys of seeing Catholics of all shapes and sizes coming together for Mass, what’s struck me most has been the liturgical abuses: the Gospel proclaimed to a seated congregation, the Eucharist distributed to EMs before the priest has received, the hand-washing omitted, the precious blood consecrated in a pitcher and then poured into wooden chalices. And I just have to wonder: why?

I know that some of these priests or liturgy committees or parishes really feel that there’s a good reason to change the way Mass is celebrated. But I just go back to football Saturdays. If the band decided that they were going to skip the fight song and play instead a recently-deceased student’s favorite U2 song after every touchdown, that would be kind, but it wouldn’t be appropriate. The stadium would erupt in boos, letters would be written to the school newspaper, and sizable donations would be withdrawn. The fight song is sacred–you don’t mess with that, no matter how compelling the cause.

How much the worse if such a dramatic change was made arbitrarily–let’s say they decided to change from the traditional student-painted golden helmets to some half-black, leprechaun-emblazoned monstrosity for no apparent reason. The outrage would flood facebook like a clever new meme. Whether you loved football or not, you’d be shocked. When I asked my friend Steve if he’d seen the new uniforms, he shrugged: “You know I don’t care much about football.” Then I showed him the new helmet. “That’s not okay!” Because while the uniform itself may change, the helmets shouldn’t. Maybe the color of the helmets doesn’t matter, but the tradition does.

What makes the fight song or the helmet or “May I have your attention please” or pushups sacred isn’t their inherent value; the Irish are no less likely to win a championship with ugly helmets as they are with the lovely gold ones. What gives every moment of every fall Saturday meaning isn’t why we do it but that we do it. That 80,000 people put their arms around each other and sway to the Alma Mater, that we pump our fists like fighting Irishmen when a certain song is played (or keep our arms crossed in an X if we have the misfortune to live in Zahm), that we risk salmonella to eat an undercooked brat–we do that, together. We join as one body and in doing so give meaning to meaningless ritual.

Now, there’s nothing meaningless about the Mass. But there are steps and words and rites whose meaning we might not grasp–or whose meaning we think we understand to be patriarchal or misogynistic or whatnot. Yet there is a sanctity even to these, not because of what they mean, in this instance, but because seeming to mean nothing they mean obedience and unity and faithfulness. They mean that the Mass is home whether I’m in Jerusalem or Jersey. They mean that we have chosen our God and our Church over our own sensibilities. They mean, in an era of jumbotrons and snazzy uniforms, a tradition that goes back generations and honors those who’ve gone before, uniting us with our ancestors in a way that the latest trends in football or worship never could.

Of course, I’m not rejecting top-down innovations like the forward pass or Vatican II. I’m just begging stylists to leave the uniforms alone, players to stay classy, and fans to keep waving the coach’s initials during the 1812 Overture, whatever you think of his coaching abilities. And I’m not condemning anybody; I try really hard not to judge anybody, especially priests, for whom I have a particular love. I’m just begging priests to say what’s in black and do what’s in red, musicians to remember that this isn’t their show, and people in the pews to rejoice in your Church, even if you think you could do it better.

What makes the liturgy magical isn’t just the consecration or the proclamation of the Gospel; it’s the whole glorious game-day package. Chipping away at the parts we don’t like doesn’t do anything but cheapen it. So here’s to glorious football traditions and deep liturgies–may our rituals ever be mystery and our hearts ever rejoice to seek understanding.

  1. I have googled and googled to no avail. Anybody know where I read this? My apologies to the author for this attempt at paraphrase, but my memory of the essay is essential to the point I’m trying to make. [↩]
  2. If you haven’t been to a home game at ND, you’re missing out. [↩]

In Defense of Notre Dame

Here’s what a Domer I am: I googled “Notre Dame” and was confused when the Parisian basilica popped up. “That’s not the Basilica….” (Props to Carroll Hall for the killer sign. Too bad nobody could see it way over on the other side of the lake.)

When I tell people I went to Notre Dame (or, you know, unintentionally scream “GO IRISH!” when someone mentions football or South Bend or politics or candy corn or…well, basically anything), I usually get one of two reactions:

  1. *awed* “Oh, wow. You must be really smart.”
  2. *skeptical* “Really? I thought you were so Catholic….”

It’s the second response I want to address here. The first is awkward, but not something I feel terribly compelled to contradict.

In honor of Saturday’s opening game (vs. Navy in Ireland–how cool is that??), I’m going to take a moment in defense of Notre Dame.

I know there’s been some shady business over the years and I know there are some heterodox professors on faculty and I know you’ll never get over the Obama debacle, but I think we have to remember something very important about Notre Dame: as far as I know, Notre Dame is the only university that’s really trying to be a top 20 research university and a school with a genuine, meaningful Catholic identity.

In fact, only Georgetown and Boston College manage to crack the top 50 colleges, according to U.S. News and World Report.1 So we’re already down to three on our list of top Catholic universities, and if you’ve spent any time at BC or Georgetown lately, I think it’s pretty easy to cross them off the list. Not that they’re not good schools, or even good places to be Catholic. I don’t know enough about the schools to deny them the title “Catholic,” but the difficulty I’ve had in finding a chapel on either campus combines with anecdotes about crucifixes removed from classrooms to leave me less than optimistic.

Now, I’m not saying that all Catholic colleges need to be nationally-ranked research universities. Our Church and our world need TAC and Franciscan and Benedictine. But I think we also need Notre Dame.

You see, not everyone’s going to fit in at Christendom. And Thomas More’s a great place, but what if you want to be an engineer? And as amazing as some of Dallas’s classes might be, there are those of us who really need to be at a school as challenging as Notre Dame.

But forget us good little Catholic kids for a minute; I think Notre Dame is uniquely able to evangelize the intellectual elite. You see, an atheist with a perfect SAT score just doesn’t go to Ave Maria. He might, however, go to Notre Dame. Because when Princeton Review asked parents their dream school for their kids, Notre Dame came in fourth. Because our undergrad business school’s been the best in the country for the past 3 years. That’s right, better than Wharton. Because our alums make bank–payscale.com rates ND 10th when it comes to a return on your investment. Because, whatever those numbers mean, rankings matter to people, and no other truly Catholic institution comes close.

And then one day he’s trying to get to lunch and there’s a Eucharistic procession in the way.

So our unchurched little brainiac (let’s call him Gus) finds himself walking across God Quad his freshman year, looking up at Mary on the top of the dome. He walks down the sidewalks that form a heart (the Sacred Heart) when his roommate asks him if he’s going to the JACC for Mass. Well, Gus sure wasn’t planning on it, but his roommate is a legacy and knows that everyone goes to the beginning of the school year Mass, so Gus goes to Mass for the first time. He takes a required theology class and goes on freshman retreat, because everybody goes on freshman retreat. He starts going to Mass in his dorm on Sunday nights because everybody else is there. He stops at the Grotto after running around the lakes; at first, it’s just because there’s a water fountain there, but eventually the aura of prayer starts to get to him. He tries to avoid religious debates, but he can’t help it–almost everyone, it seems, has a religion, and everyone has an opinion.

Gus has a good heart, so he wants to get involved in some kind of service. There’s a commissioning Mass for that. Turns out there’s a commissioning Mass for almost everything. He walks past a chapel on his way to his dorm room, his finance class, his advisor’s office, his calculus class, his service project seminar, and his philosophy class. Eventually, he starts to go in. A cute girl invites him to adoration and before he knows it, he’s stopping in before his run a few times a week.

Gus is so immersed in Catholicism–entirely by accident–that he begins to wonder. His wondering leads him to questioning. At first, his Catholic friends are enough, but eventually he starts meeting with theology professors and the ubiquitous Holy Cross priests. By the time he graduates, Gus is Catholic. Because of Notre Dame.

It’s not an unusual story, although most of my friends who converted because of Notre Dame started off as Protestants, not atheists. Most are “just” good Catholics now, although I also know a Franciscan friar, a theology professor, and, you know, Alasdair Macintyre and Knute Rockne, NBD. Not to mention the many, many lapsed Catholics I know who found the Church once more through their time at Notre Dame: priests and religion teachers and Sisters and mothers and missionaries and members of the body of Christ.

And maybe Gus would have converted eventually anyway; but there’s something about Notre Dame, something about the way Catholicism is a part of everything, that brings the Church before your eyes in a way that it wouldn’t be at Rice or Duke or Northwestern or other elite institutions. Somebody’s got to be reaching out to the brainy kids–Catholic or not–while they’re in college.

Beyond just evangelizing, Notre Dame’s status as a top 20 school gives it intellectual and even political clout, along with the ability to hire the best of the best. When Fr. Jenkins tries to walk the tightrope between Catholic identity and intellectual integrity, I don’t think he’s trying to compromise with the world–I think he’s trying to transform the world in a way that is uniquely possible at Notre Dame. Our high ranking is the very reason that this letter meant more to the media than all the others announcing lawsuits across the country. You can’t be as influential as Notre Dame is–on an individual level and a societal level–unless you can play ball academically.

In an effort to hang with the Ivies, I think Fr. Jenkins has perhaps swung too far in the direction of academic freedom a number of times. But I don’t think he has the luxury of requiring an oath of obedience to the Magisterium or inviting only speakers who uphold Catholic teaching or even banning anti-Catholic books or classes or plays. The administration of Our Lady’s University has to be in the world in a way that all the Catholic colleges mentioned above can reject. Those schools are ministering to the flock, but Notre Dame, I think, is ministering to the world.

“God, Country, Notre Dame” is one of our catch phrases. If I ever see this car, I will set up camp next to it until the owners come back. Then I will ask pathetically if they will be my friends. This license plate is awesome.

People say that Notre Dame is a microcosm of American Catholicism. You’ve got your Sunday Catholics, your social justice Catholics, your traddies, your lapsed Catholics, your charismatics, your hypocrites, your liberals, your conservatives–in the words of James Joyce, “Here comes everybody.” No, we’re not a beacon of holiness for all the world, but for all our faults, we are very, very Catholic.

And though the Irish may screw up in big and embarrassing ways, and though you may disagree with the administration’s decisions, and though there’s a lot going on at ND that isn’t very Catholic, let me leave you with this: according to my informal count, there are at least 161 Masses offered on Notre Dame’s campus every week; there are 168 hours in a week. Eucharistic adoration is available 40 hours a week. Want meat on a Friday in Lent? Better go to Burger King–there isn’t any in the dining hall. There’s a chapel in every dorm and most of the academic buildings. Confessions are scheduled at least 15 times a week and the line is usually around the corner. If you can’t make it any of those times, there are priests living in every men’s dorm and many of the women’s.2 Oh, and did I mention single sex dorms? We’re not barbarians, after all.3 At the end of the day, you can’t escape Catholicism at Notre Dame; over the years, many find that they don’t want to.

If my imaginary friend Gus had been a freshman with me, I can imagine he would have found himself swimming the Tiber a lot earlier. Less than a month into my career at Notre Dame, the Twin Towers fell. We cried and waited by phones and went to the Grotto, Catholics and non-Catholics alike. And that afternoon, 7,000 of us gathered for Mass on South Quad. On a campus of 8,000 undergrads, that speaks volumes. When tragedy struck, we ran together to God. We put our hands on the shoulders of strangers as they wept and we prayed the best way we knew how: the Catholic Mass.

Mass on September 11, 2001.

Is Notre Dame Catholic? Yes, in every sense of the word. She is flawed and blemished and made up of struggling sinners, and I love her despite–and because of–all those flaws. I pray for her and her administration and I trust that God will continue to bring good through Our Lady’s University.

Love thee, Notre Dame!

  1. Forbes–which lists Notre Dame at 12 rather than 19–includes Holy Cross as well, but they list Cornell as 51, so I’m not sure what their criteria are…. [↩]
  2. I graduated 6 years ago, but from what I can tell, this is still true. [↩]
  3. #sarcasm [↩]