College football is celebrating its 150th season this fall. As a result, there have been many retrospectives looking back at some of NCAA’s best teams and players. You can’t look back at the last century and a half without mentioning Notre Dame.
That takes me to a recent issue of America, a weekly Jesuit magazine, and the great job they did at looking back at Notre Dame football in the context of what the success of a Catholic school meant in a primarily Protestant America. Under the headline, A Fighting Spirit: The place of Notre Dame football in American Catholicism, the result is a wonderful reflection of how important religion, football and immigration are to the American experiment. It also manages to be nostalgic and at the same time wrap in the current realities of the clerical sex-abuse crisis and other issues plaguing the church.
The piece starts off with how the Notre Dame mystique got its start in the 1940s and what that meant to Catholics around the country. This is how writer Rachel Lu, a contributing writer for America, summed up that feeling:
U.S. Catholics embraced the Fighting Irish with enthusiasm. When the leaves started turning each September, people who had never set foot in the state of Indiana would be decked out like frat boys, raising the gold and blue for Our Lady’s loyal sons. In parochial schools across the nation, nuns led Catholic schoolchildren in prayers for Irish victory. Notre Dame was the first school in the U.S. to have a nationwide following of “subway alums,” devoted fans for whom a radio dial represented their only connection to the university. It was said in those days that every priest in the U.S. was a de facto recruiter for Notre Dame.
In the minds of their fans, Notre Dame’s stars were much more than football players. They were warriors, fighting for the honor of Catholics across the nation.
Despite living a more secular world, Notre Dame’s Catholic roots and traditions are very much a story. I made a similar point about a year ago when Notre Dame was vying for a national title.
A year later, Notre Dame isn’t anywhere close to a national championship — No. 1-ranked LSU is the favorite for now — but that doesn’t mean sports writers can’t be reminded how important religion is to the school and football in general.
Although I grew up in the 1980s, Notre Dame football was a big deal to me living as a Roman Catholic in New York City, some 640 miles away from the school’s campus in South Bend, Indiana. New York isn’t known for their college football — although Rutgers in nearby New Jersey hosted the first college football game, as pointed out here by the school in a recent news release — so I had my pick of which football team to cheer for on Saturdays.
That it was Notre Dame is no coincidence. A Catholic upbringing and games on national television (these were the pre-internet days) certainly contributed to it all. The movie Rudy, released in 1993, only added to the mystique of those golden helmets. More astute viewers will recall that Jason Miller played coach Ara Parseghian. He’s the same actor who famously played the role of Father Damien Karras in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. Like Rudy, it’s a movie also known for its Catholic connection.
What is especially good about Lu’s essay is that it unites Catholics. At a time of doctrinal divides and talk that Pope Francis wants to bring reforms that not all Catholics agree with, this was a unique take on what it means to be an American Catholic, even those of us who aren’t Irish. Lu admits that the season-long 150th anniversary of the college game is as good a time as any to look at Notre Dame’s importance and legacy.
It is a good time to reflect on the significance of a homegrown sport that has deeply influenced American culture. What has football contributed to American Catholicism? What has Catholicism contributed to American football? For Catholics, it is particularly worth revisiting Notre Dame’s unique story. In this heavily Protestant country, where “popery” has often been viewed with suspicion, Catholics spent centuries fighting for full social inclusion. That effort brought many colorful characters to the fore as Catholics worked to establish a presence in politics, business, the military, the academy and the arts. But the struggle assumed a particularly literal guise on crisp Saturday afternoons in the fall. In the old country, feuding Catholics and Protestants sometimes settled their differences with the sword. Here in the United States, they preferred the pigskin.
Growing up in New York City, I lived not far from the United Nations. It was the place where protestors — Catholic and Protestant — aired their grievances, many times on Saturdays, about the situation in Northern Ireland and the turmoil between those then-warring factions. (Journalists interested in a deeper view of what it was like to live and cover a divided Northern Ireland should read this presentation by Sky News reporter David Blevins.)
I was too young at the time to understand it all. But like many American Catholics, I wasn’t too young to watch Notre Dame on NBC. The team last won the national title in 1988 under legendary coach Lou Holtz.
Notre Dame has since fallen on hard times, especially this season where they are currently ranked 15th nationally in the latest Associated Press poll with a 8-2 record. That won’t get them into the BCS like last season, but they could very well end up playing in one of the many bowl games near the end of the year.
However. raising championship banners is only part of the story sports writers who cover college football so rarely get. Lu says, and I agree, that the issue is broader:
The Fighting Irish remind us that Cinderella stories are not always the stuff of fairy tales. In the prejudiced and class-divided first half of the 20th century, no one would have expected Irish Catholics to revolutionize a great American sport. But they did. They seized that ball and ran with it, and generations of young Catholics reaped the rewards of their success. In the chilly light of a 21st-century November, it is easy to think that such things cannot happen again. The Golden Dome does not sparkle so brightly anymore. The prospects for Catholicism in the United States can feel bleak. And nostalgia for a once-dominant sports team will not save us.
That is true, of course. Football will not save us. Sometimes God’s grace can manifest itself in surprising ways, though. A dynamic football team once brought hope into the hearts of demoralized and struggling U.S. Catholics. It could happen again, on the gridiron or in some other sphere.
Since this is Notre Dame, they remain a team with a national fan base and big-time aspirations. That’s why this is a program that continues to get attention no matter where they’re ranked. It’s also why sports writers need to read the America cover story if they hope to understand what this school’s football team means to a large portion of the American population.