Catholicism in the College of Arts and Letters
From Our Faculty and Students
Brad Gregory
Associate Professor, Department of History, authority on Christian martyrdom in early modern Europe
Two central commitments ground Notre Dame’s identity as a Catholic university. First, as in all research universities, Notre Dame’s scholars, scientists, and students labor to expand human knowledge in the pursuit of truth never to be fully attained. Second, Roman Catholicism is a religious tradition that witnesses to the singular Truth of someone already incarnate. Notre Dame is dedicated both to seeking and professing, reasoning and believing, confident that truth cannot contradict truth. Multiple problems ensue when reason and faith, science and religion, matter and spirit are sundered from each other (see modern Western history and our contemporary world).
Those committed to Notre Dame’s mission work to integrate the two, aspiring to create an unprecedented type of institution in American higher education—a Catholic research university of the first rank. In this endeavor, Notre Dame’s Catholic identity thankfully permits greater academic freedom than at secular universities, whose epistemological and metaphysical assumptions exclude consideration of religious perspectives (and related questions about ultimate meaning, moral values, and purpose) on their own terms. It is precisely Notre Dame’s commitment to Catholicism that guarantees its ecumenical and interfaith imperatives: we welcome informed, non-Catholic religious views and learned secular perspectives at the intellectual table.
Yet however mutually illuminating the frontiers of knowledge and the truths of Catholic tradition, Notre Dame’s mission remains unfulfilled so long as the life of the mind is divorced from the lives of the embodied souls who embrace that mission. We cannot be content with truth that remains merely cognitive, theoretical, intellectual; to be real, truth must be lived in community by faculty, students, and staff. Learning and love must meet in life. All universities concern themselves with research, teaching, and service. But as a Catholic university, Notre Dame is obliged always to care about community and holiness as well.
