To Hell with Notre Dame?

I first visited the University of Notre Dame du Lac (to use its proper inflated style) in 2017 as a guest of some friends in the law school. By then I had already hated the place for more or less my entire life. For me, Notre Dame was synonymous with the Roman Catholic Church as I had known her in childhood: dated folk art aesthetics (has anyone ever written about how ugly the buildings are?), the Breaking Bread missalette, the so-called “Celtic” Alleluia, the thought (though not the actual writings) of Fr. Richard McBrien, jolly fat Knights of Columbus in their blue satin jackets, avuncular permanent deacons named Tom, Pat, or, occasionally, Dave. At the age of twenty-seven, I expected to find preserved something of the religious atmosphere of the middle years of John Paul II’s papacy: the quiet half-acknowledged sense of desperation, the all-pervading horror of unbelief that could never be allowed formally to take shape among the grandchildren of European immigrants who had done well for themselves in the professions—perhaps too well.

My hopes, or rather fears, were disappointed. While the architecture was more or less in line with what I had expected, I otherwise found that Notre Dame was not a time capsule of early-nineties Midwestern suburban Catholicism. It was instead a kind of miniature of the whole American Church, in all her lunatic variety. (In the halcyon days before the “monster proprio” there was even a traditional Mass on campus, celebrated in some kind of basement chapel by a priest old enough to have been ordained in the old rite.) The only thing that continues to astonish me is how apolitical the student body appears to be: in years of occasional visits to campus I have never seen a “Free Palestine” poster.

So much for the university simpliciter. My actual subject is the football team, which, for reasons that I hope will become clear, I will be supporting in the national championship game against the Ohio State Buckeyes on Monday night.

My wife considers this a shocking development, as well she should. As a proud “Walmart Wolverine” in rural southwest Michigan, I have always despised the Fighting Irish. Never mind the ancient rivalry between the schools, which is technically on hold until their next scheduled meeting sometime in the middle of the century. The real reason these two fanbases despise one another is that our two programs have so much in common: based in the Midwest rather than the South, with high-ish academic standards that have (in my view pointlessly) hampered recruiting and intensely nostalgic fans who, in some cases, pine after a golden age we are too young actually to recall—we are, in a sense, the same school.

The main difference is, of course, religion. For boring two-tiered Thomist reasons, I do not consider this a point in Notre Dame’s favor. Soberly considered, a “Catholic” football program seems to me a kind of category mistake, like a “Catholic” novel; the excellence proper to the game can and ought to be pursued for its own sake, to the glorification of God. And pace the national non-alumni fanbase—especially the Catholic Ivy Leaguers, who in my experience are the worst football casuals—football like all sport is ultimately about place, which is why I find the idea of Americans who pretend to have rooting interests in English municipal soccer leagues absurd, like insisting that one has nuanced opinions about the fate of Hungarian political parties. (This is why I am not baffled by the existence of what I think of as the “Protestant Ascendancy”: white working-class Protestants or post-Protestants who support the Irish because South Bend is the closest football school.)

Why, then, has my mind changed? The most obvious reason is that I would like to see Ohio State lose. Anyone familiar with the Michigan fanbase will know that the entire Wolverine faithful would rather go 1-12 and beat the Buckeyes than be national champions with an L on the schedule during the week of Thanksgiving. Since becoming the head coach of Ohio State in 2019, Ryan Day has embarrassed himself in more ways than I can count. But his most churlish moment came last season in week four, when, after narrowly defeating the Irish as time expired in the fourth quarter—Notre Dame, inexplicably, had only ten men on the field—he began screaming at the sideline reporter about Notre Dame’s octogenarian former head coach: “I’d like to know where Lou Holtz is right now!” (A few days earlier Holtz had predicted a close game after observing that Ohio State was not a “physical” team. This is still true.)

But this is not, in fact, an adequate explanation of my feelings. The truth is that, having experienced the worst (as well as the best) of self-selected “traditional” Catholicism, I find myself in a much better position to see the virtues of the religion of my youth. The worst thing that can be said about normative bourgeois American Catholicism is that the supernatural dimension of the faith is largely occluded. This is not a problem in traditionalist destination parishes, whose social pathologies I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss here. Suffice it to say that what I will countenance on Sunday for the sake of the one Sacrifice of Calvary, I would not welcome other days of the week. Grace, we are told, does not destroy nature but perfects it; this is very difficult to do when the latter is barely detectable beneath the odor of liturgical sanctity.

For these reasons I hope to see Notre Dame beat the Buckeyes soundly on Monday, with Coach Holtz in attendance. I say this, again, with great reluctance. “To hell with Notre Dame” was a mantra I had repeated my entire life without giving it a moment’s thought. This is something I sincerely regret. When Bo Schembechler unburdened himself of this bitter curse, he was guilty not only of blasphemy (at least technically); he was also making a kind of category mistake. In some inchoate sense, without the slightest diminishment in my loyalty to a football team I love just this side of idolatry, I believe that a deep-seated hatred of Notre Dame as such is not a viable attitude for an American Catholic. Banish Touchdown Jesus, and banish all the world.

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