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"Natural Doubt." One result of better students is a more intellectual Catholicism, an increase in the "natural doubt" that sometimes hits parochial school graduates in college and even produces some apostates. According to Hesburgh, "practically all" of his students believe in God. But "you run a hazard working with kids," he says. Real belief comes from experience, perhaps from "darkness, not light." With a 19-year-old, "you can't just saw off the top of his head and pour it in. All you can do is give him a basis of order that will prepare him to under stand." To assist that process, Notre Dame has 33 chapels, prayers before classes, courses in theology that are required except for the 2% who are not Catholics. Eight crosses stand atop the administration building.
Ironically, Notre Dame's theology department, theoretically the core of the school, is regarded by all students and most faculty members as the worst department on campus. Staffed entirely by 24 priests, it offers no major—for fear nobody will seek it. But Notre Dame is working toward improvement: some 25 young C.S.C. priests are studying for their S.T.D.s at foreign universities, and Hesburgh hopes to snap up 10 or 15 of them. "We've got our Jacques Maritains coming up," he says.
Notre Dame has long given science its due. Its famed Lobund Laboratories were created 30 years ago to develop germ-free animals as a tool for medical research. Its radiation lab claims the nation's largest radiation chemistry program, and is now being expanded by the AEC to the tune of $2,200,000. Notre Dame also gets good grades in chemistry, English, history and math. But it still cannot afford sabbaticals for research or a psychology department (launching cost: $220,000). It is notably weak in social sciences.
Knowing & Being. Whether or not the "moral dimension" enters teaching at Notre Dame is up to the 398 lay teachers (including some 60 Protestants and several Jews) and the 89 priest or brother teachers. In the classes of Historian Aaron Abell, a Catholic, "the Christian ethic is not stressed at all." A political science course, on the other hand, devotes half its reading to Augustine and Aquinas. Papal encyclicals on social justice show up in economics. Biology and the dogma of virgin birth do not conflict because, in Hesburgh's view, "biology does not study miracles." Historian Matthew Fitzsimons hopes that "a Christian view of man makes sense out of sacrifice and suffering."
Perhaps no one else has better conveyed that sense to Notre Dame students than witty, incisive English Professor Frank O'Malley, 28 years on the faculty and the university's most inspiring undergraduate teacher. O'Malley plumbs life's most basic emotions, using Charles Peguy to examine the virtue of hope, Claudel to plumb suffering, Kierkegaard to emphasize the shallowness of religion without love. When he reaches students, O'Malley often changes their lives, teaching them to love learning and learn love. "The totality of life has hit me," said one of his students last week. "The act of knowing and the act of being are becoming one."