While many institutions of higher education made great sacrifices during the Civil War, few can boast of the dedication and effort made by the University of Notre Dame. For four years, Notre Dame gave freely of its faculty and students as soldiers, sent its Holy Cross priests to the camps and battlefields as chaplains and dispatched its sisters to the hospitals as nurses. Though far from the battlefields, the war was ever-present on campus, as Notre Dame witnessed fisticuffs among the student body, provided a home to the children of a famous general, responded to political harassment and tried to keep at least some of its community from the fray. At war's end, a proud Notre Dame welcomed back several bona fide war heroes and became home to a unique veterans' organization.
“Students of the Civil War, Catholic history, and women’s history, among others, will welcome [Soldiers of the Cross] . . . Brilliantly edited.” —Randall M. Miller, co-editor of Religion and the American Civil War Shortly after the Civil War, an Irish Catholic journalist and war veteran named David Power Conyngham began compiling the stories of Catholic chaplains and nuns who served during the conflict. His manuscript, Soldiers of the Cross, is the fullest record written during the nineteenth century of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the Civil War, as it documents the service of fourteen chaplains and six female religious communities, representing both North and South. Many of Conyngham’s chapters contain new insights into the clergy during the war that are unavailable elsewhere, either during his time or ours, making the work invaluable to Catholic and Civil War historians. The introduction contains over a dozen letters written between 1868 and 1870 from high-ranking Confederate and Union officials, such as Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Union Surgeon General William Hammond, and Union General George B. McClellan, who praise the church’s services during the war. Chapters on Fathers William Corby and Peter P. Cooney, as well as the Sisters of the Holy Cross, cover subjects relatively well known to Catholic scholars, yet other chapters are based on personal letters and other important primary sources that have not been published prior to this book. Due to Conyngham’s untimely death, Soldiers of the Cross remained unpublished, hidden away in an archive for more than a century. Now annotated and edited so as to be readable and useful to scholars and modern readers, this long-awaited publication of Soldiers of the Cross is a fitting presentation of Conyngham’s last great work
Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.
For both the Union and Confederate soldiers, religion was the greatest sustainer of morale in the Civil War, and faith was a refuge in times of need. Guarding and guiding the spiritual well-being of the fighters, the army chaplain was a voice of hope and reason in an otherwise chaotic military existence. The clerics' duties did not end after Sunday prayers; rather, many ministers could be found performing daily regimental duties, and some even found their way onto fields of battle.
A running account of the history of the U. of Notre Dame from its foundation in 1842 through the end of the Civil War written by the man honored as its founder, Edward Sorin, who left France in 1841 to head the first band of missionaries sent by the Congregation of Holy Cross to the New World. Annot
The Spanish Civil War was one of the most passionate idealogical conflicts of modern times. It was the greatest and last struggle between traditional Catholicism and liberal secularism. To many, religion became the most divisive issue of the war, the single problem that distinguished one fraction from another. The Spanish Civil War as a Religious Tragedy is the first full-length comprehensive study of the religious dimension of the Spanish conflict. Drawing on memoirs, eye-witness accounts, the religious press of the period, and a thorough reading of secondary literature, José M. Sánchez objectively examines the events, issues, attitudes, and effects of the war and corrects the mythology that has grown up around the topic. Especially vivid is Sánchez's account of the anticlerical fury in which nearly 7,000 clerics were killed, thousands of churches burned and destroyed, countless lay-persons assassinated, and the entire cultural ethic of Spanish Catholicism set upon an iconoclastic bloodletting worse than any other in the history of Christianity. The clergy's offering of pastoral and idealogical support to Franco's Nationalists as a response to the fury is also examined. Sánchez then focuses on the complexities of the Basques - an intensely Catholic people who made common cause with the anticlerical Republicans. He explores the Vatican's policy toward both sides, and analyzes the theological and moral controversy over the justice of the war as fought in the journals and the press, both in Spain and abroad. Finally, he investigates the controversies as they affected Catholics in France, England, and the United States, and concludes with an evaluation of the war's impact upon the religious consciousness of Spain, the Church, and the western world.
American politics seems like a war between irreconcilable forces and so we may suspect that political life as such is war. This book confronts these suspicions by arguing that liberal political institutions have the unique capacity to sustain social trust in diverse, open societies, undermining aggressive political partisanship.
Black Domers tells the compelling story of racial integration at the University of Notre Dame in the post–World War II era. In a series of seventy-five essays, beginning with the first African-American to graduate from Notre Dame in 1947 to a member of the class of 2017 who also served as student body president, we can trace the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the African-American experience at Notre Dame through seven decades. Don Wycliff and David Krashna’s book is a revised edition of a 2014 publication. With a few exceptions, the stories of these graduates are told in their own words, in the form of essays on their experiences at Notre Dame. The range of these experiences is broad; joys and opportunities, but also hardships and obstacles, are recounted. Notable among several themes emerging from these essays is the importance of leadership from the top in successfully bringing African-Americans into the student body and enabling them to become fully accepted, fully contributing members of the Notre Dame community. The late Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of the university from 1952 to 1987, played an indispensable role in this regard and also wrote the foreword to the book. This book will be an invaluable resource for Notre Dame graduates, especially those belonging to African-American and other minority groups, specialists in race and diversity in higher education, civil rights historians, and specialists in race relations.
