Leaving Notre Dame Behind

It’s opening Saturday for the college football season.  Nevada is in town to play Notre Dame.  Normally, I would have come up with four tickets so I could take my three sons to the game.  We’d be leaving for campus right now, in time to get some tailgating in ahead of the game.

But this year, we’re not going.  I just don’t feel right about it.  I think I will watch the game on TV, but I can’t bring myself to spend money on campus.  I’d rather send it to Hannah’s House, or somewhere similar.

As I said in the opening post, I do not intend to dwell on Notre Dame here.  This is the final post that will be specifically concerned with the article, Over at Our Place.

This quote will serve as the focus of my transition:

“It was the Declaration of Independence for American Catholic higher education, recognizing that it could not credibly enter the conversation about national goals unless it had the academic freedom enjoyed by the secular academy.”

In other words, Notre Dame determined that it had to distance itself from its religious roots in order to be involved in the secular conversation.  And then it made a very conscious decision that participation in that secular conversation was more important than a formal, public alliance with the Church.  Thus the need to “have true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”

This seems to be in direct conflict with the quote from my last post, where it was argued that Notre Dame was positioned to be “in the culture, but not of it.”  This distancing from her formal religious roots made Notre Dame firmly of the culture, and the article is quite clear that this was the very purpose of the Land O’ Lakes statement.

Why did Notre Dame have to relinquish its formal religious identity in order to participate in the secular conversation?  In 1967, was a Catholic viewpoint not welcome in the national conversation?  If so, is it more welcome now?

I was born four years before Land O’ Lakes was issued.  I have, in my lifetime, watched a steady attack on religion by secular concerns.  The banner for that attack has these words across the top, written in the biggest letters you can imagine:

“Separation of Church and State”

The current understanding of this idea is very far from what the Founders of this republic intended, which is only to be expected when institutions like Notre Dame, who should be dedicated to defending God’s role in the national discussion, instead capitulate to pressures to minimize God’s presence within their very own confines in order to gain a seat at some perceived to be essentially important table in the secular debate.

The Founders did not intend religion to be essentially absent from the national discourse.  They were adamant that government not establish a specific national church, like the Anglican Church in England.  But they also expected the people would reference God regularly in making decisions about how best to govern themselves.

Even more specifically, I believe it can be established that they believed this:

The Philosophy of American Freedom, which is the cornerstone of American society, the thing that makes America unique among all countries on Earth, is dependent on reference to God.  In other words, American Freedom is a gift from God to be cherished at every turn, to be fought for above all else.

If we abandon God as the source of our freedom, we cease to be who we are as individuals, and as a country.  This abandonment is occurring today, and as a result, American Freedom is under an ever intensifying assault that now threatens to overwhelm it.

This supposition is the place I would like to start the meat of this endeavor.

And the logical jumping off point is the birth of the country, which occurred when the real, the original Declaration of Independence, with its references to “Nature’s God” and the “Creator,” was adopted by a Congress consisting of delegates from, what until that moment, had been colonies in an English empire.

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”