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"A Catholic university is a contradiction in terms," George Bernard Shaw once said. The Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame, can readily see Shaw's point—that religious dogma seems incompatible with the scientific spirit of skeptical, free inquiry. He can just as readily reply to Shaw. "We must cherish both values. We must reflect the 'ancient beauty, ever old and ever new,' " he says. "There is no conflict between science and theology except where there is bad science or bad theology."
By this precept, Father Hesburgh, 44, is guiding the country's best-known Roman Catholic university, and has become the most influential figure in the reshaping of Catholic higher education in the U.S. A school once known chiefly for a football team is trying to rise above the undistinguished record of U.S. Catholic colleges in general and reach for the renown of the Catholic universities of the Middle Ages.
A Spectacular Flowering. As spring semester opened last week on the campus near South Bend, Notre Dame clearly reflected St. Augustine's "ever old and ever new." In the Sacred Heart Church, young men in blue and gold jackets knelt in prayer as a priest pronounced the ancient greeting Dominus vobiscum. Across the 1,100-acre campus, bulldozers chewed the frozen earth, and riveters set steel beams arattling. Under construction: a geodesic-dome student center, a federally financed radiation laboratory, a $3,000,000 computer center, a ten-story library big enough to seat half the student body (total: 6,467 men).
Notre Dame (pronounced Noter Dayme, according to a university ruling made to help sportscasters) is the proud possession of the Congregation of the Holy Cross,* founded in France in 1837. In size (world membership: 3,300) and wealth, the order does not compare with the 422-year-old Jesuits (34,700 members), who control 28 U.S. campuses. C.S.C. has only five: Notre Dame, Oregon's Portland University, Massachusetts' Stonehill College, Pennsylvania's King's College and Texas' St. Edward's College. But in Notre Dame, C.S.C. has what is generally acknowledged as the most rapidly improving Catholic campus in the U.S.
"The Notre Dame efflorescence," says Robert M. Hutchins, former chancellor of the University of Chicago, "has been one of the most spectacular developments in higher education in the last 25 years. I suspect that Notre Dame has done more than any other institution in this period, possibly because there was more to do."
The Missing Scholars. What had to be done, and what still must be done, is clear from a steady refrain of Catholic selfcriticism. "In no Western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful," wrote Historian D. W. Brogan. "The general Catholic community in America does not know what scholarship is," said Jesuit Theologian Gustave Weigel of Maryland's Woodstock College. And the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh, Hesburgh's predecessor at Notre Dame, asked sorrowfully, "Where are the Catholic Salks, Oppenheimers, Einsteins?"