Growing up in northern Illinois during the 1970s, I didn't like Notre Dame. As a Midwestern
Catholic I suppose I should have felt some affinity for the place, but alumni and supporters
revered it with a pride that seemed to border on idolatry, with their blue-and-gold "ND" this and
their green "Irish" that. Notre Dame was thought better than other schools; it was special.
Moreover, when it came time for college I wanted out of the Midwest, so I left behind the small
towns and cornfields and Chicago's suburban sprawl.
At age 18, a dislike for Notre Dame and disdain for the Midwest hardly seemed to
portend a path that would eventually lead to Our Lady's University. But when leaving high
school I had no aspirations to a career in academia, nor any inkling that I would become a
historian of Christianity, nor any idea of how important my faith would become to me.
My years as an undergraduate surrounded by a Mormon religious subculture at Utah
State University forced a maturation in my understanding of the faith. Vaguely I began to regard
Notre Dame favorably from afar. A junior year abroad studying philosophy at the Catholic
University of Louvain in Belgium exposed me to the historical, intellectual and architectural
richness of the Church's European past. I began to acquire the intellectual wherewithal to
navigate the challenging pluralism of the modern world. How had we arrived at where we are,
and what does it mean to follow Christ in our world?
Once I began the doctoral program in history at Princeton, the principal challenge of my
professional transition to adulthood coalesced: Could I be who I was and succeed in the
stratosphere of American graduate education despite the typically hostile attitude of the secular
academy toward religion in general and Catholicism in particular?
It turned out that I could -- neither by acting as though I were an unbeliever nor by
making my scholarship dependent on my convictions, but rather by criticizing approaches that
assumed religion could not be what its practitioners claimed it was. From Princeton I went to the
Harvard Society of Fellows, where I finished my doctoral dissertation on Christian martyrdom in
the Reformation era. I relinquished the final year of the three-year fellowship and accepted a
tenure-track position at Stanford, where I started as an assistant professor of history in autumn
1996.
Stanford was my only other faculty position prior to coming to Notre Dame. One could
not ask for a more privileged way to enter the professoriate. My dissertation became a well-received book, and I won two teaching awards; relationships with my colleagues were good; I
had excellent research opportunities and resources; the students were smart and hard-working;
the sun shone 300 days a year; and I received tenure two years early. With the job security
afforded by tenure, I could have stayed at Stanford until I was wrinkled and tanned from the
California sun, riding off into the sunset in the future as professor emeritus. There were few
places for which I would even have considered leaving Stanford. One of them was Notre Dame.
I spent the spring semester of 2002 at Notre Dame's Erasmus Institute as a visiting
scholar. For all practical purposes, it was my first time on campus. During those months I met
some of the many scholars at the University across different departments who study Christianity
and other religious traditions, including some whose Catholicism informs their research and
teaching in sophisticated ways. This wasn't the case at Stanford, Princeton or Harvard, which
also lacked Notre Dame's dedication to programs, student activities and guest lecturers that
express an institutional mission more substantive than an abstract commitment to excellence.
Although I did not teach during my semester as a visitor, I got to know a number of
undergraduates through attending weekday Masses at the basilica. Their unpretentious holiness
combined with intelligence, their joyful love of God and willingness to spend themselves in
service, struck me as just short of miraculous. They inspired me, as did the work and witness of
colleagues. Notre Dame was special, and it was different.
A Catholic identity
Were it not for this difference -- and Notre Dame's potential to become a kind of
institution never before seen in American higher education, namely a first-rank research
university that is also genuinely Catholic -- I never would have left Stanford for it. What would
have been the point, if Notre Dame's Catholicity were as vestigial and vaporous as that of so
many other institutions that had lost their formerly robust religious character? Better simply to
stay at a great secular university to begin with.
What drew me to Notre Dame was its Catholic identity. Numerous academics think that
any university with a religious mission must be inhibiting academic freedom, marking itself as
sectarian and advertising itself as intellectually narrow. Such a characterization justly applies to
some religiously affiliated colleges and universities, which want to keep the wider world at bay.
Not so Notre Dame. In fact, in my experience, there is greater academic freedom at Notre Dame
than at leading secular universities, in ways that both derive from and reach beyond its Catholic
mission.
Because of deep-rooted assumptions in our society about religion as a private, personal
matter of individual opinion and feeling, the secular academy routinely excludes it from
consideration as religion. Instead, religion is usually studied not as what Christians, Jews or
Muslims, for example, claim that it is -- a human response to the living God -- but as a human
construction to be explained through the secular categories of the modern social sciences and
humanities. In secular institutions, even to raise questions in the classroom about whether, say,
Christian claims about reality might be true or prayer might entail experience of God is to court a
reprimand if not formal censure.
However, irreligious and atheistic ideas are discussed at Notre Dame -- for if
Catholicism is what it claims to be, it should fear no intellectual challenge (can one imagine
Aquinas refusing to read Aristotle?). As a result, a wider range of ideas, religious views, and
moral and political perspectives can be aired in academic settings without denigration or
intimidation at Notre Dame than at leading secular universities. Similarly, because of Notre
Dame's Catholic identity, many people here understand that religion is not a part of life but
rather influences the way in which all of life is understood and experienced.
This insight implies that a Catholic university can and should have scholars who raise
appropriate questions about the relationship of Catholic teachings and sensibilities to their
respective areas of expertise in the social sciences, natural sciences, arts and humanities, which
in turn should be brought into relationship with Catholicism. For nothing in reality is outside
God's creation. There is no such intellectual enterprise at secular institutions. It is liberating to
be at a University with a wider scope for academic freedom because it lets religion be religion on
its own terms.
That is one paradox that runs counter to widespread assumptions. Here is another:
Precisely because of its Catholic character, Notre Dame extends this intellectual permissiveness
to religious traditions besides Catholicism. We don't say "Catholicism is true, so we want
nothing to do with other faiths" or "you're not Catholic, so you're not welcome." No --
Catholicism affirms truth wherever it is to be found, and caritas is to be extended to everyone.
Indeed, the Catholic Church's commitment to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue since Vatican
II, which was reinforced repeatedly by Pope John Paul II, provides Notre Dame with not only the
opportunity but the obligation to be a center for the intellectual engagement of Catholicism with
other religious traditions.
Besides its significance for the Church, we should not underestimate the importance of
this work for the academy, American society and, indeed, the world at large. Despite the weary
repetition of prophecies about religion's demise and the recent renewal of dogmatic
denunciations of religion as delusion, it is not going away for the foreseeable future -- the large
majority of human beings continue to make sense of their lives through religion of one sort or
another. And although some expressions of religion in our world are dangerous, they must first
be well understood if there is to be hope that they might be defused.
Shouldn't there be somewhere in American higher education that both takes religion
seriously on its own terms and produces abundant scholarship across disciplines on it that is too
sophisticated, learned and important to be ignored even by colleagues at secular institutions who
are unfavorably disposed toward religion? Wouldn't this be a service not only to the academy
but to American society and the world in general? If this is going to happen anywhere, then
Notre Dame is going to be the place. Elsewhere the critical mass of personnel, the resources, or
the will (or all of the above) are absent. It is an exciting privilege to be part of that enterprise.
Indeed, it is a blessing.
Finally, I am at Notre Dame because, as part of its Catholic identity, the University cares
about its students and their education in ways that transcend the discovery and imparting of
knowledge. Whether it's called character building or moral education or the development of
virtue, this broader dimension of educating the whole person is something secular universities
have abandoned. That is understandable: On what basis could a profoundly individualistic and
relativistic ethos prescribe shared norms? It's not a secular university's business to instruct
students about how they should live or not live.
Not so at Notre Dame, or at any Catholic college or university worthy of the name. To be
an educated adult Catholic means to live in a manner that embodies virtues consistent with the
following of Christ. No university can or should coerce its students to become certain kinds of
people against their will. But it seems reasonable to hope that with sufficient numbers of faculty
and staff, Catholic as well as non-Catholic, who are women and men of compassion and
fortitude, self-control and good judgment, courage and generosity, faith, hope and love,
significant numbers of our students might see the beauty and goodness in a certain way of being
human such that they desire it for themselves. But not by themselves, alone, for genuine
community is both the means and the end of this way of life. "Love one another as I have loved
you" -- Christ's foundational commandment points to social relationships linked by shared
values in a common life.
Perhaps in the end, that's why I'm here. When the University is at its best, the phrase
"the Notre Dame family" is more than an empty platitude or wishful thinking. It is something
lived, beautiful and profound.
Brad Gregory is the Dorothy G. Griffin associate professor of early modern European history at
Notre Dame.
Photo of Brad Gregory by Matt Cashore.
(April 2007)
