Cheer, Cheer For Old Notre Dame!
It’s been a rough ride, but the Fighting Irish finally have something to celebrate this St. Paddy’s Day.
In recent weeks, The Wanderer has reported on the latest controversy that has embroiled Our Lady’s University.
In January, Notre Dame Provost John T. McGreevy appointed Susan Ostermann as the new director of the university’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.
Professor Ostermann is an ardent abortion advocate who scarcely veils her disdain for pro-lifers. Of course, that community includes a sizable number of Notre Dame students.
As we will see below, university officials have often ignored such concerns in the past, but this time around the campus pro-life community, supported by a surprising number of members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, decided enough was enough.
Catholic Notre Dame came to life.
On Feb. 11, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend issued a public statement objecting to the Ostermann appointment. By Feb. 24, when he led students gathered at the Grotto on campus to pray for the preservation of the school’s Catholic identity, over a dozen bishops had joined him.
Pressure increased when Notre Dame Students for Life planned a candlelight “March on the Dome” for Feb. 27, calling on university President Fr. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., to rescind the appointment. Over 1,000 students were expected to join the march.
When news broke on Feb. 26 that Professor Ostermann had “decided not to move forward” on her appointment, the “March on the Dome” became a prayer service at the Grotto led by Notre Dame Students for Life.
A welcome sidebar to the controversy has been the extensive and surprisingly honest coverage by the media. In many instances in which such scandals have occurred on “Catholic” campuses, The Wanderer has been alone in reporting on them. In the Ostermann case, the most surprising contribution has been made by Notre Dame’s official campus newspaper, The Observer.
And that is a pleasant surprise.
Founded in 1966, my sophomore year at Notre Dame, The Observer quickly adapted to the radical standards that became the warp and woof of journalism schools in the United States during the Vietnam War. It proudly proclaimed its independence from the university, and was supported solely by subscriptions and advertising — a promising marketing strategy, claiming the brand as the “official student paper of the Fighting Irish.”
We recall that “conservatism” was scarcely heard of, much less popular, on college campuses at the time. Young Americans for Freedom, founded in 1960, was slowly spreading its wings, coming into its own during the campaigns of Barry Goldwater (1964) and Ronald Reagan (1968) (the author worked in both campaigns, on and off the Notre Dame campus).
In the 1960s, campus newspapers became the training ground for prospective careers in the trade, as professional journalism left “shoe leather reporting” behind to become a subsidiary of the Democrat Party living off leaks from the Deep State.
So the students at Notre Dame’s Observer deserve a tip of the hat, as does Jonathan Liedl, a 2011 Notre Dame graduate who now reports for the National Catholic Register (Liedl never wrote for The Observer, although he was managing editor of the Irish Rover, an independent Catholic newspaper at Notre Dame, as an undergraduate).
What comes next? Will this scandal go away quietly with the withdrawal of Professor Ostermann’s appointment? Or will it find its place among similar events of years past that have become landmarks on the rugged road of Notre Dame’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its Catholic identity with the decisions reached by university leaders over the years?
The Past Haunts The Present
Unfortunately, the Ostermann appointment was just the latest in a long line of mishaps at “Notre Dame du Lac.”
The visit of Barack Obama to the campus in June 2009 still sears the memory of many American Catholics. If Fr. Dowd had showered Professor Ostermann with the same sanctimony that his predecessor, Fr. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., bestowed upon Obama, he would have invited her to be the university’s 2026 commencement speaker; awarded her an honorary doctor of laws degree, canonizing her before graduates and their parents; have anyone daring to attempt any processions at all arrested by campus police, turned over to the local prosecutor, and dragged through the courts for years before quietly agreeing to withdraw trespassing charges.
But Fr. Dowd did not. Perhaps he knew that the Obama scandal had profoundly scarred Fr. Jenkins’ credibility — over 80 bishops had criticized the invitation — even though it did help keep the federal taxpayer millions rolling in.
Campus Democrats
Do Their Homework
While the Ostermann controversy was at its height, the Notre Dame Observer reported that “Jorden Poulson, political director for College Democrats, called upon the Land O’ Lakes statement to justify [the assertion] that ‘being a Catholic university means having the academic freedom and independence to pursue truth without fear.”
Undoubtedly, that invocation left many students scratching their heads. “Land O’ Who?”
That casts our memories back to the 1960s, when John D. Rockefeller III put then-Notre Dame President Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., in the bull’s-eye of his campaign to advance population control throughout the world.
Rockefeller had founded the Population Council in 1954, but the support of his family for the movement goes back decades farther. It was only after World War II that he persuaded serious thinkers on both sides of the political aisle that unchecked population growth was a fundamental cause of war (after all, the “Greatest Generation” had just come home from defeating Adolf Hitler and his murderous campaign to gain “lebensraum,” or “living space,” for the expanding German population).
I’d known Fr. Hesburgh since I was three years old. He was chaplain of Vetville, the tent camp on campus where veterans returning from the war lived with their young families while dad finished his degree. My dad used to visit his law students there after Sunday Mass on campus, while we would play with their kids.
No, population control did not play a major role in Rockefeller’s romancing of “Fr. Ted.” It would have been a bad sell.
The savvy J. D. R. III had a much more persuasive portfolio up his sleeve: he offered influence and access to the eastern elites, both financial and academic, which Fr. Hesburgh had decided were indispensable for Notre Dame’s rise above “mediocrity.”
Yes, for real — “mediocrity.” In 2017, the same John McGreevy who made the Ostermann appointment last January told a Notre Dame symposium that the Notre Dame of 1967 was “mediocre” and — astonishingly — that the Notre Dame of today is more Catholic than it was then.
McGreevy’s audience had gathered to celebrate the “Land O’ Lakes Declaration,” which some two dozen Catholic university presidents (including, of curious note, Fr. Theodore E. McCarrick) had adopted at Notre Dame’s Wisconsin retreat in the summer of 1967.
Land O’ Lakes made the independence of Catholic education from the Church’s magisterial teaching official. The document was designed not only to assuage the hostility of secular elites toward the Catholic Church, but to grease the skids for private funding from eastern financial giants, as well as to make the institutions eligible for massive funding from Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs for which religious organizations were ineligible.
In the spirit of Land O’ Lakes, Fr. Hesburgh then convinced the university’s board to replace the governing power of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which had founded the university in 1842, and replace it with a lay board.
So the campus rep of America’s radical pro-abortion party had invoked Land O’ Lakes in defense of Professor Ostermann.
Was that the spark that caused Fr. Dowd to rise from his slumber?
We will never know. But in the end, Fr. Dowd knows that Notre Dame cannot serve two masters. As Donoso Cortes put it 160 years ago, “liberalism can survive only in that brief moment that man decides, ‘Christ — or Barabbas!’ ”
A blessed Lent to all.
