Introduction
Two hundred alumni, family, and friends filled the Morris Inn ballroom during Reunion 2024 for our 16th Annual Breakfast – with another 509 watching online. The event featured Professor Patrick Deneen and Father Wilson (Bill) Miscamble, C.S.C., who discussed the challenges facing Catholic higher education and Notre Dame.
The continuing popularity of this speaker series, which began in 2007 with a panel discussion of the controversial student production of the Vagina Monologues that had been approved by Father Jenkins, reflects both the relevance of the topics and the excellence of the speakers addressing them. No exception this year!
You will find below brief descriptions and video segments of our speakers’ presentations followed by a link to the full program. There is also a concluding note about a report on “segregated graduations” by Young America’s Foundation (YAF) that includes Notre Dame.
And, if you have not already added your name to our open letter calling for Notre Dame to rescind Joe Biden’s Laetare Medal, please consider doing so before leaving.
Father Bill Miscamble, C.S.C.
Father Bill Miscamble is an award-winning historian, dedicated advocate of Notre Dame’s Catholic mission, and author of numerous books including the essential American Priest: The Ambitious Life and Conflicted Legacy of Notre Dame’s Father Ted Hesburgh. “Father Miscamble has enriched the lives of countless students with his faith, high intelligence, great good humor, and inimitable teaching style.” says Sycamore Chairman Bill Dempsey.
“Giving Thanks and Praise”
Father Miscamble’s overarching thesis was that the Notre Dame community is engaged in an “ongoing battle” between those whose lodestar is the university’s Catholic mission and those absorbed instead by the quest for secular “prestige and rankings.”
He opened his talk with thanks “that such a decent and compassionate priest [as Father Robert Dowd] will be our leader at Notre Dame,” and he continued with tributes to several faculty and students for their contributions to the school’s Catholic identity and mission.
As to faculty, Father described the major roles played by Professor Emeritus David Solomon, the founder of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture; his successor, Professor O. Carter Snead; our other speaker, Professor Patrick Deneen; and retiring law school professor Gerard Bradley.
As to students, Father commended two 2024 graduates, Merlot Fogarty and Joe DeReuil, both recipients of our Student Award for Exceptional Contribution to Notre Dame’s Catholic Identity. Merlot, a past president of Notre Dame Right to Life, led the campus protest this past year against the school’s first ever, and ever repellant, drag show, while Joe, an Editor-In-Chief of The Irish Rover, stood firm when the paper was sued for defamation by Notre Dame Professor Tamara Kay.
Father noted that, while the judge had “summarily dismissed” Kay’s “unusual, to say the least,” lawsuit against a student organization, “no one in Notre Dame’s administration objected to her action,” and she “received support from a substantial number of Notre Dame faculty members who lean in a woke, progressive direction.”
While “there are a number of good faculty members here fighting the good fight,” Father declared, “we need many more. Faculty hiring remains a crucial issue” – the issue we have repeatedly identified as key to Notre Dame’s future.
Father then turned to troubling aspects of Notre Dame 2033: A Strategic Framework, the University’s vaunted ten-year program to propel the university into the highest ranks of the world’s research universities.
While the plan “ticks the Catholic box,” Father said, “it doesn’t propose developments that will allow Notre Dame to fulfill its true promise as a catholic university.” Instead, “the sad quest for secular prestige pervades ND 2033.” It reflects a craving “to entrench [Notre Dame] further among America’s supposedly elite universities” – universities whose “woke progressive ideology” has been exposed by their reaction to the Hamas/Israel conflict.
Father spoke in particular of the ethics section in Notre Dame 2033, in which “there’s no evidence that Notre Dame’s ethical principles must be rooted fundamentally in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
And in a related aside, Father joined other critics of the new Jenkins Center for Virtue Ethics, which is in obvious tension with the existing highly praised – and robustly Catholic – de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. The new institute, he declared, is “superfluous and poorly planned, and it should be reconsidered,”
Professor Patrick Deneen
Professor Deneen is a political theorist, public intellectual, and author of numerous books, including the highly praised and widely discussed Why Liberalism Failed and, most recently, Regime Change. Before joining Notre Dame’s faculty in 2012, he taught at Princeton and Georgetown University. “Patrick stimulates the kind of debate and discussion that should take place at a Catholic university,” notes Father Miscamble. “He is not merely repeating the superficial pieties about the danger to democracy that can be read on the Washington Post editorial page any morning of the week. He asks us to go deeper.”
In his talk, Professor Deneen addressed the future of Catholic higher education, given that “the Catholic character of [Notre Dame] and so many universities seems always to wane rather than to wax.
Professor Deneen suggested a framework for analyzing the situation at Notre Dame based on three ways that the Church has existed in the world:
- Undergound in the Catacombs.
- As a dominant force in society during “Christendom.”
- As a cultural force under “Liberalism,” wherein “a place like Notre Dame can provide the moral framework for society to flourish.”
The trouble, as Professor Deneen explains, is that we are past Liberalism. “This culture that we would shape is increasingly hostile to the church” and is “anything but Christian.” It sees the Church as “filled with hate and bigotry and the exemplar of every possible phobia.” More generally, “We see all around us accelerating degradation in which what were formerly transgressions or even sins are not only normalized but increasingly celebrated. “
Under increasing persecution, Catholics are being driven back to the Catacombs. But now we have institutions like Notre Dame to preserve.
If our model today is, in some ways, life in the catacombs, nevertheless, we have to do so in a very visible and public way by defending our institutions, those that were built with the model or institutional of Christendom.
This is a daunting task, because “institutions live in the world,” not the catacombs, and “the strong tendency is for our institutions to conform themselves to the world.”
Professor Deneen is not optimistic. His prediction is that “in ten years we will talk about how much better things were at Notre Dame in 2024.” “Only if we in some sense have as our ultimate goal the forging of a new Christendom can our institutions – first and foremost Notre Dame – have any chance.
Student Awards
At our Annual Breakfast each year we announce the recipients of our Student Award for Exceptional Contribution to Notre Dame’s Catholic Identity. The recipients this year are Niko Schmitz and Merlot Fogarty, both 2024 graduates. Nico was honored for his leadership as Editor-in-Chief of The Irish Rover, and Merlot for her leadership organizing the student protest of the Film, Television and Theatre department’s campus drag show. Their dedication and courage in upholding the university’s Catholic mission are highlighted in the following video that we produced recently for The Irish Rover.
Segregated Graduation Report
Several people brought to our attention a recent report by Young America’s Foundation (YAF) about “segregated graduations” at “84 of the top 100 universities” including Notre Dame.
Since Notre Dame did not hold a separate LGBTQ+ or black graduation ceremony, we contacted YAF about their report. They explained they included “affinity events” for graduating students, which at Notre Dame took the form of a “LGBTQ Recognition Ceremony.”
This ceremony, first introduced in 2018, is a consequence of the persistent LGBTQ+ activism at Notre Dame, which has led to the establishment of an official LGBTQ student organization in 2013 (Prism) and an official LGBTQ alumni group in 2022 (ARC ND). There is also an expanding network of organized LGBTQ initiatives through the University’s Office of Human Resources (Spectrum), Graduate Student Union (GlassND), Campus Ministry (LGBTQ Ministry), LGBT Law Forum, and Student Affairs (Gender Relations Center).
With inroads like that, it should surprise no one that, instead of the University’s inviting the Notre Dame community to pray a novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in June, the Month of the Sacred Heart, we were invited to participate in the South Bend Pride Festival.
The Full Breakfast Program
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Notre Dame’s continuing to honor Joe Biden with the Laetare Medal dishonors both the Medal and the University and scandalizes her students and alumni as well as the broader Catholic community. Add your signature to our open letter calling for Notre Dame to rescind Biden’s Laetare Medal.
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Oremus
Good and gracious God, Your Son Jesus Christ loves us with an infinite love manifested to us by His suffering and death on the Cross.
On the Cross, His most Sacred Heart was pierced by the lance of a Roman soldier, a sign of the cruelty of man and the infinite love of the God-man who forgives even as He is wounded.
As we honor His pierced Heart, we acknowledge our own sins and failure to love Him as He deserves to be loved. We also make reparation to His Most Sacred Heart for all the sins, offenses, sacrileges, and blasphemies leveled against it.
In Him, every single human being—created male or female and in the image and likeness of Triune God—finds his or her true perfection. In Him, the original order and beauty of creation—marred by sin and rejected in prideful disobedience—is gloriously restored.
Grant that by our own own faithful obedience, humble witness, and fervent prayer we may honor, worship and praise His Most Sacred Heart that His grace may heal our troubled and sinful world.
We make our prayer through the same Sacred Heart of Jesus. Amen!
The above prayer is by Sycamore Trustee Father John Raphael (’89). To join us in regular prayer projects such as our Novena for Catholic Education and our Meditation on the 12-Days of Christmas, please join our Apostolate.
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Father John J. Raphael (’89) offers a monthly Mass for the intentions of our Sycamore Trust community. If you have an intention that you would like him to include at his next Mass, you may submit it by clicking on the following button.
One Response
Sadly, in the attached brief clips from the annual breakfast, both Father Wilson (Bill) Miscamble and Professor Patrick Deneen suggest/predict that it will be very difficult for the University of Notre Dame, in its vain drive for academic acclaim by secular institutions, to ever recapture its authentic Catholic character.