University of Notre Dame - Dome Yearbook (Notre Dame, IN)

Page 22 text:

PRESIDENT: Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. 18

Page 21 text:

Ad mn ration

Page 23 text:

II What Notre Dame really is ... The University, present and futureby Theodore M. Hesburgh, C .S.C. One need only page through the Dome to realize that the University is a very exciting place, where young men spend the four best years of their life. When I say best, I mean spiritually, intellectually, culturally, and physically too. The strange thing about all of this is that most Notre Dame men, at one time or another, gripe might- ily about these four years while they live through them, and then spend the rest of their lives fondly re-living these years in nostalgic recollection. Even Notre Dame ' s famous Dr. Tom Dooley wrote these lines while dying of cancer in a Chinese hospital: Notre Dame is always in my heart. That Grotto is the rock to which my life is anchored. Do the students ever appreciate what they have while they have it? I know I never did. Spent most of my time being angry at the clergy at school ... 10 p.m. bed check, absurd for a 19 year old veteran, etc., etc., etc. I imagine that only a Notre Dame man can really appreciate the Dome, for all the things that Notre Dame is are only faintly evoked in the pictures and captions that fill this book. What Notre Dame really is, what it evokes in the mind and heart of those of us who have lived here, all this cannot be captured in pictures, brief captions, or in my words either. Nonetheless, I would like to say something about the spirit of the place. First may I say that to me, and I am sure, to most Notre Dame men, it is unlike any other place on earth. I have visited the great shrines of France, Portugal, Ireland and Mexico, to name a few. But this is for me ever the greatest shrine of Our Lady, in fact a kind of living miracle of the Mother of God. Only each Notre Dame man can say what happened to him here, in the depths of his soul. Again Dr. Tom Dooley put it beautifully from his bed of pain in Hong Kong last December: But just now . . . and just so many times, how I long for the Grotto. Away from the Grotto, Dooley just prays. But at the Grotto, especially now when there must be snow everywhere and the lake is ice glass and that triangular fountain on the left is frozen solid and all the priests are bundled in their too-large, too-long old black coats and the students wear snow boots ... if I could go to the Grotto now, then I think I could sing inside. I could be full of faith and poetry and loveliness and know more beauty, tenderness and compassion. This is soggy senti- mentalism I know. Cold prayers from a hospital bed are just as pleasing to God as more youthful prayers from a Grotto on the lid of night. But like telling a mother in labor ' It ' s okay; millions have endured the labor pains and survived happy . . . you will too. ' It ' s consoling . . . but doesn ' t lessen the pain. Accordingly, knowing that prayers from here are just as good as from the Grotto EXECUTIVE VICE-PRESIDENT: Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. doesn ' t lessen my gnawing, yearning passion to be there. To be there. How many thousands of Notre Dame men have shared in this miracle of inner trans- formation by being here: the broader vision of what life really means and what it offers to him who will serve; the flowering of the mind as it opens to new and broad vistas and begins to realize its innate power of analysis, expression and appreciation of all that is good and true and beautiful; the youthful generosity and idealism and strength of character that come from daily contact with Our Lord and His Blessed Mother: in the Mass and Holy Communion, at the Grotto, in the quiet shadows of a hall chapel, under the vaulted ceiling of Sacred Heart Church, glancing up at that golden vision above the Dome, silhouetted against the blue of the heavens by day and the dark of sky by night. Who can tell of the miracles of grace wrought here in the inner depths of the human spirit. Again Dr. Dooley touches the responsive chord: Whenever my cancer acts up ... and it is certainly acting up now, I turn inward a bit ... more do I think of one Divine Doctor, and my CONTINUED 19