In the early 1880s, the Notre Dame faculty and administration were discussing a way to engage American Catholic lay men and women with the hierarchy of the Church. University President Rev. Thomas Walsh, Rev. Edward Sorin, and Professor James Edwards decided that Notre Dame should bestow a medal of honor...
On February 6, 1814, Edouard-Frédéric Sorin was born and baptized in the small town of Ahuillé, France. He was born the seventh of nine children into a relatively well-to-do Catholic farming family, a generation or so after the bloody French Revolution. The Revolutionaries heavily persecuted the Catholic Church, sending thousands...
In 1888, Rev. Edward Sorin, CSC, celebrated his Golden Jubilee – fifty years since his ordination as a priest on May 27, 1838, in LeMans, France. Shortly after his ordination, Sorin joined Rev. Basil Moreau’s fledgling Congregation of the Holy Cross, which sent Sorin as a missionary to America in...
Notre Dame’s military ties pre-date the Civil War, so when war broke out between the North and the South, Notre Dame inevitably became involved in the conflict. Students and alumni joined the ranks, on both sides of the fighting. Members of the Congregation of Holy Cross also volunteered, but in...
On March 1, 1837, in the town of Saint-Croix near Le Mans, France, Blessed Basil Antoine-Marie Moreau joined his band of auxiliary priests with the Brothers of St. Joseph, which was founded by Father Jacques-François Dujarie. The Vatican officially recognized this group of priests, brothers, and sisters as the Congregation...
The Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America traveling exhibit stops in South Bend from September 2 – December 31, 2011, at the Northern Indiana Center for History. A number of photographs and audio-visual materials from the Notre Dame Archives make an appearance in this exhibit. Early in Notre Dame’s...
Since the development of the atomic bomb and for centuries yet to come, historians, philosophers, scientists, and everyone in between have and will debate the morality of the use of the atomic weapons. The Notre Dame Archives holds materials that also straddle both sides of the issue. Notre Dame, as...
Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774-1821) was canonized as America’s first native-born saint in 1975. As part of the mission of the Archives of University of Notre Dame to collect and maintain records that document the life of the Catholic Church and her people as lived in the American context, the...
During the past several decades, interest in parish histories has grown considerably in America. Throughout the United States, pastors and parishioners have become more keenly aware of the need to preserve the history of their parishes in written form. Consequently, the publication of parish histories has flourished. Saint Mary’s Church...
Early in the 1880’s Professor James F. Edwards, librarian of the University of Notre Dame, aware that irreplaceable items pertaining to the history of Catholicism in America were constantly in danger of being lost through neglect, carelessness or willful destruction, began to implement a plan which he had conceived for...