American Catholic History and American Catholic Higher Education: Memories and Aspirations

I n the spring of 2009 the University of Notre Dame came under widespread criticism for its decision to bestow an honorary degree on the President of the United States. Bishops and prominent lay leaders made the case, with straight faces, that Notre Dame was no longer really Catholic. I was probably not the only alumnus of Notre Dame who wondered: if Notre Dame’s not really Catholic, where does that leave me? After many years of discussing Catholic mission and identity with faculty and staff at dozens of Catholic colleges and universities, I was shocked to realize that a very large number of my fellow American Catholics thought that Notre Dame had compromised its Catholic integrity in its pursuit of academic excellence and civic responsibility. And Notre Dame had encouraged me, when I graduated fifty years ago, to go to graduate school and pursue professional excellence and even more firmly to accept a full measure of my responsibilities as an American citizen. At graduation that year we welcomed President Eisenhower, Cardinal Montini of Milan, later Pope Paul VI, and medical missionary Tom Dooley, who was dying of cancer. Their message was the same we heard from Notre Dame’s President, Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. We Catholics were Americans and we should take full responsibility as businessmen, professionals and citizens for our country’s common life. We did so. Now, fifty years later, Notre Dame’s robust Catholic Americanism came under attack. Had I and others like me, descendents of European immigrants, now “Americanized” Catholics, had we betrayed our heritage and lost our integrity as well as identity as Catholics? Apparently a lot of people thought so. If the critics were right, then I had also lost my long argument with Notre Dame historian Philip Gleason. An honored colleague in the field of American Catholic history and recipient of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal as an outstanding Catholic leader, Gleason is also my dear friend. He is without question the premier historian of American Catholic higher education. His history covers the period before Vatican II and will long stand as the definitive study of the subject. In the book’s last chapter and in a series of remarkable essays, Gleason located contemporary Catholic higher