How the Catholics became All-Americans

The historic role of Knute Rockne's Fighting Irish football team

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team, whose logo of a bellicose drunken leprechaun putting up his dukes appears to have survived the era of Cancel Culture, are playing Ohio State for the collegiate national championship on Monday. (The Buckeyes are an 8.5 point favorite.)

Tom Piatak writes in Chronicles:

Early on, some American Protestants regarded Notre Dame and the religion it represented as anti-American. While Notre Dame generally established and maintained cordial relations with the schools it played against, Notre Dame players also encountered verbal abuse and even threats of violence in several locations in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.

But, over time, Notre Dame’s excellence in a quintessentially American sport helped to change attitudes about whether good Catholics could also be good Americans. …

Even before collegiate football was played in the United States, the Civil War had begun breaking down hostility to Catholicism. The first Catholic many Americans ever saw was the nun, working as a nurse, who brought them back to health after illness or injury in that devastating war.

An ingrained hostility to Catholicism, rooted in centuries of real historical events, was not going to disappear overnight, however. Fr. Corby, through no act of his own, is also a reminder of the role Notre Dame football played in replacing visceral associations of Catholicism with the Spanish Armada and the Inquisition with more pleasant memories of football. …

Interestingly, the person most responsible for making America safe for Catholics and vice versa through football was, for most of his life, a Lutheran. Knute Rockne was born in Norway and immigrated with his parents to Chicago …

Rockne was a coaching genius, of course, but he was even more brilliant as a marketer. By doing all he could to prevent Notre Dame from ever playing other Catholic schools, and by creating a network of radio stations across America to broadcast Notre Dame football, Rockne ensured that American Catholics would identify with the Fighting Irish and regard Notre Dame football as an important part of their identity as such.

To a great degree, Rockne’s dream came true. American Catholics of all ethnicities wanted to be Irish on Saturdays. …

Leahy’s spectacular success on the football field was definitive proof of how successful Rockne had been in making support for Notre Dame football a constitutive part of being an American Catholic. Leahy’s starting team was the best football team in America, and his practice squad was the second best. Almost every Catholic boy who could play football in those days wanted to play football at Notre Dame, and a great many did, because NCAA rules did not then place any limit on the number of football scholarships a school could award. It is because of Rockne and Leahy, augmented later by Parseghian, Devine, and Holtz, that Notre Dame has the largest fan base in the country, despite the small size of the school. For many of Notre Dame’s fans, baptismal water is thicker than blood and soil, or at least it is the most important part of their blood and soil.

Notre Dame used its football renown to build up its academic programs and become a famously rigorous educational institution, at some damage to its football team, which hasn’t won a national title since 1988. Early in this century, a Notre Dame insider pointed out that if you brought the transcript and test scores of the last quarterback to lead the Fighting Irish to the top to the admission’s office today, they’d set it on fire.

I’m not sure what the effects of the new era of outright professionalization of college football will be on Notre Dame.

In Time, historian Hunter M. Hampton points out that BYU decided in the 1920s to imitate Notre Dame to help change the image of Mormons, who had been feared and loathed in 19th Century America as polygamists, into football-playing normal Americans.

Similarly, Jerry Falwell’s evangelical Liberty University has been trying to build itself into a football powerhouse since the college was founded in the early 1970s. Last season, it made it to the big time Fiesta Bowl (where it got crushed by Oregon).

The dog that didn’t bark is any Jewish school’s college football team. American Jews founded an impressive number of hospitals and country clubs, but few universities. Quotas holding down the Jewish share at Harvard began around 1922, but in 1929 the stock market crashed and then came World War II. Finally, at the end of the war, work began on founding Brandeis U. in Waltham, MA to be the Jewish Harvard. But in the mid-50s, Harvard relaxed its Jewish quotas and Yale followed in 1965. So, the need for a Jewish Harvard declined.

Lacking a Jewish college football team to support, many rich, competitive Jews, the kind of guys who, if they lived in Alabama or Ohio, would be giving a prize linebacker recruit a new truck off their lot, became boosters of the Israel Defense Forces after Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War.