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In fact, the swelling flock of unlettered immigrants was not much interested in higher learning. Putting first things first, the bishops in 1884 ordered every parish to build a parochial school. Not until 1908, when Pius X converted the U.S. "mission church" to full status, did the real history of Catholic higher education begin. Various religious orders then began building colleges (all jealously independent) at a fabulous rate: since 1909, Catholic college enrollment has jumped 2,000%.
A Home in Indiana. Notre Dame got its start when the French-born Father Stephen Badin, first Catholic priest ordained in the U.S., bought several hundred acres around his Indiana log cabin, deeded it to the nearest bishop for a school. In 1842 the C.S.C. in France sent Father Edward Sorin, 28, to build the school. His endowment: an oxcart, seven religious helpers and $541.12½. Bewitched by a fresh November snow, Sorin had a vision of purity that made him call the place Notre Dame (Our Lady).
After 37 hard years, Sorin's proud achievement was a tightly disciplined college, modeled on a French boarding school. Then the place burned to the ground. Sorin concluded that the Mother of God had "to show me that my vision was too narrow." In four months flat, Sorin and the faculty raised the huge main building that still stands, topped with the golden dome that is Notre Dame's landmark. The school pushed on with its work, for many years under the Rev. William Corby, whose campus statue has long tagged him as "Fair Catch" Corby.
The next major figure in Notre Dame's history was a smash-nosed kid from Chicago, a Norwegian-American Protestant named Knute Rockne. In 1913 obscure little Notre Dame played Army in Yankee Stadium as a filler on West Point's football schedule. Captain Rockne, at left end, and Quarterback Gus Dorais passed Army to death—35 to 13. The stunning upset made Notre Dame famous. From nuns to workingmen, Catholics all over the country began praying on Saturday mornings for Notre Dame victories.
Fighting Irish. With Rockne as coach, Notre Dame became everybody's favorite underdog, then swiftly graduated from underdog ranking. Protestant Sportswriter Grantland Rice supplied the "Four Horse men"* tag; the "Seven Mules" manned the line; the "Fighting Irish," liberally assisted by Poles, Germans, Italians and an occasional Jew, were a national institution. From 1918 until he died (holding a rosary—he had become converted) in an airplane crash in 1931, Rockne's Notre Dame tackled the nation's best football teams, won 105 games, tied five, lost twelve.
Football fame, scorned as it was by intellectuals, was the key that unlocked the sources of money that now pay for Notre Dame's increasing academic quality. The more scholarly graduates nowadays like to recall that Coach Rockne was also a magna cum laude graduate ('15), a brilliant chemistry student who worked with Father Julius Nieuwland, discoverer of the base for synthetic rubber. In 1952, Notre Dame honored Nieuwland with a first-rate science building that bears his name and the inscription. "All Things God Hath Made Are Good and Each of Them Serves Its Turn."