Notre Dame’s Identity Crisis Cancels Culture
How a controversial leadership appointment — and a pattern of honors — are reshaping Catholic identity at Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame recently appointed a professor with a public record of pro-abortion advocacy to a leadership role within the university — a decision that Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend says should disqualify her from such a position at a Catholic institution.
According to EWTN News, the bishop said the professor’s pro-abortion advocacy and her remarks about pro-life advocates “should disqualify her from an administrative and leadership role at a Catholic university,”
This isn’t the first time Notre Dame has forgotten its Catholic identity. This is not a one-time lapse. It reflects a pattern of recognition—invitations, honors, appointments—that redefine Catholic identity by treating open contradiction of Church teaching as unimportant.
What lesson do you think that teaches to young people? And that’s the issue I want to address.
A Pattern
We’ve been here before.
In 2009, Notre Dame awarded an honorary degree to President Barack Obama despite his explicit support for abortion rights — even after U.S. bishops had stated that Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of fundamental moral principles. More than 80 bishops objected.
In 2016, Vice President Joe Biden received the Laetare Medal, one of the university’s highest honors, despite his public record on abortion and same-sex marriage.
Beyond commencement stages and medals, Notre Dame has recognized LGBTQ student groups at odds with Catholic teaching and drawn sustained criticism from Catholic alumni and organizations such as the Cardinal Newman Society over the direction of campus culture and policy.
Individually, each decision can be defended as dialogue or inclusion. Taken together, they form a pattern. It’s unacceptable.
“Institutions shape culture. Culture forms persons.”
A Catholic university does not exist merely to compete with Harvard or Stanford. It exists to form students in the light of Truth revealed by God through His Church. Its leadership decisions aren’t HR matters. They’re public statements about what the institution believes is compatible with its identity. Institutions shape culture. Culture forms persons.
What are we forming of those persons—the students—at Notre Dame? When an institution acts as though the idea of living what we believe that message not only guides the formation of the students, it becomes part of the material itself.
Students absorb signals long before they absorb arguments. What is honored becomes credible. Culture is a teacher. When contradictions of the faith are elevated repeatedly, they cease to look like contradictions at all — and fidelity to Church teaching begins to look like the cultural aberration.
This is how identity erodes, and it’s what we’re seeing in many places in Catholic life—through consistent recalibration of Catholic attitude, we reform (malform) Catholic Culture, and Catholic identity becomes secularism decorated with religion.
Today’s students are tomorrow’s judges, law makers, professors, and saints. The culture that forms them will be the culture they reproduce. If Catholic distinctiveness becomes elastic at the institutional level, it will not return as steel in the next generation.
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