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Should American Catholics cheer for old Notre Dame?

By Michael Leahy,January 04, 2013

Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o waits for the snap during the second… (Winslow Townson/ASSOCIATED…)

As a boy in Southern California during the late 1960s, I watched Notre Dame football games with a neighbor, a middle-aged rabbi named Joseph Elsant. He was many things to me: a profound moral influence, a happy raconteur and a fellow football fan fascinated by the Fighting Irish. “Kickoff!” he would announce and settle back in his big chair. He would have relished the thought of Notre Dame’s presence in Monday night’s national championship game against Alabama.

The late Rabbi Elsant regaled me with stories about key Notre Dame players from earlier in the 20th century. He loved to tick off their surnames, particularly those that signaled a family’s immigrant background: Bertelli, Lujack, Patulski, Szymanski, Mastrangelo, Tripucka, Buoniconti.

He revered Notre Dame for its part in democratizing college football, in giving chances to kids for whom college might otherwise have been out of reach. The team’s golden helmets were emblems to him of the shimmering American ideals of grit and social mobility. In the ’60s, the presence on the Notre Dame squad of African American players such as the great defensive end Alan Page evoked for Rabbi Elsant the benefits of the racial progress absent at the time in the segregated Southeastern Conference, where all-white teams such as the University of Alabama’s were commonly regarded as inferior imitations of the integrated northern powerhouses.

He appreciated, too, the preeminence of a religious university. To Rabbi Elsant, Notre Dame victories served as welcome blows on behalf of all faiths. Until the day might arrive when Yeshiva University (eventually his son’s destination) fielded a notable squad, the Fighting Irish would be his team.

The rabbi liked that I had the same last name as legendary former Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy. That coincidence made it all the more confounding to him that I regularly rooted against the Irish, especially when they faced my favorite team, the University of Southern California Trojans.

“How can you root against Notre Dame?” he groaned. “You’re Irish. They’re the Irish. They’re the Catholic team. What’s the problem?”

The question opened the door to my discomfort with Notre Dame. Part of it was coming of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It wasn’t an era crazy about rules or orthodoxy, and many of my Catholic friends and I chafed against the expectation that we would cheer for Notre Dame out of slavish loyalty to our families’ religious backgrounds. Catholic schools, catechism classes, no meat on Friday, Saturday morning detentions: We’d done our duty. Our football loyalties belonged to us.

But our coolness toward Notre Dame also reflected fissures within the Catholic Church, cracks widening to this day over birth control, abortion rights and the broader matter of whether any dissent — particularly tough questions of the Vatican — will be tolerated by the Catholic hierarchy.

And to this day, Notre Dame remains a political and social battleground for American Catholics. The university’s invitation for President Obama to deliver the 2009 commencement address became a national controversy, with conservative Catholics opposing the president’s positions on abortion rights and stem-cell research. And last year, the university filed suit against the federal government, seeking to overturn a requirement in Obama’s health-care law that employers offer insurance plans including contraception coverage — a move that more politically moderate church members resented, concerned that Notre Dame would seek to deprive women, Catholic or not, of such coverage.

So it was perhaps inevitable that the school and the football team, two of the church’s paramount American symbols, would come to be viewed with a mix of weariness and cynicism by a new generation. To some Catholics, Notre Dame is that righteous relative who arrives at the holiday dinner beating his chest over his fealty and good deeds — the one there to remind others at the table that they have not measured up.

But when the Fighting Irish football program veers off its moral course without incurring tough penalties, piety is a poor substitute for propriety. Notre Dame football has never suffered through crippling NCAA sanctions or a debilitating scandal. But that does not mean its reputation hasn’t suffered black marks in recent years, suggesting a disconnect between Notre Dame’s image and its actions.

In 2010, a student at St. Mary’s College, the all-female school across the street from Notre Dame, committed suicide after she said she had been sexually assaulted by a Notre Dame football player (reportedly still on the team), leaving friends and observers to question whether the university abdicated its responsibility to truth and the young woman in moving on with little action or explanation.