Notre Dame: Faith, Football, and the Institution That Refused to Die
Near South Bend, Indiana
Father Edward Sorin arrived on a frozen lakeshore in northern Indiana in November of eighteen forty-two with a small group of Holy Cross brothers, a land grant from the bishop of Vincennes, and almost no money. He named the place Notre Dame du Lac, Our Lady of the Lake, and began building a university.
On April twenty-third, eighteen seventy-nine, a fire gutted the main building. Sorin was in his sixties. By all accounts he gathered his community the next morning and told them that they would rebuild, and rebuild it larger than what had been lost. They did. The golden dome that sits atop the rebuilt administration building has been visible across the flat northern Indiana plain ever since.
Notre Dame grew into a major research university through a combination of institutional stubbornness, Catholic immigrant identity, and football. Knute Rockne's teams in the nineteen twenties made Notre Dame's name nationally famous at a moment when Catholic immigrants were often treated as suspect citizens. The university became a symbol of Catholic American success in a Protestant country, and the football team was the vehicle.
The university admitted women in nineteen seventy-two, a hundred and thirty years after its founding. The Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on campus, a replica of the French shrine, is one of the most visited Catholic sites in the United States. The Golden Dome is still gold.
