I attended my first Fighting Irish football game in Notre Dame Stadium in the fall of 1997. My wife and I were interviewing for jobs, and part of the gantlet was to join some possible-future colleagues for the Navy game in November. It was cold, rainy and miserable, and I remember being mystified, and impressed, by the fact that the student section stayed full and remained in place — after a thrilling, last-minute Irish win — for the singing of the Alma Mater.
With some intercessory help, I am sure, from Notre Dame, Our Mother, we got the jobs, and I have been teaching and writing about the First Amendment and other things at Our Lady’s law school ever since.
I have now been to well over 100 home games. The Alma Mater tradition is still a teary highlight, but right there with it is the earnest and endearing pregame patriotic pageant: the national anthem, “God Bless America,” the flag raising, maybe a fighter-jet flyover . . . and also a money-quote mashup of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution of the United States. (Given my day job, I particularly welcome public address announcer Chris Ackels’ rendition of this civics-education service.)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Then, no doubt to avoid killing the vibe, the recollection jumps over the lengthy litany of complaints about England’s King George III — “He has . . . sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out of their substances” is one of my favorites — and lands instead with the Declarants’ stirring and deadly serious “pledge to each other” of their “Lives . . . Fortunes and . . . sacred Honor.”
Among the rarely remarked counts contained in the indictment that launched our nation is one that contemporary readers probably need explained: King George, they charged, had signed off on various “Acts of pretended Legislation,” including one for “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.”
It turns out that the backers of American independence were specially incensed by the Quebec Act of 1774, which among other things extended to Roman Catholics in Britain’s Province of Quebec the religious toleration that the British Empire otherwise denied and, unlike the “free System of English Laws” that Americans mostly liked, permitted Catholics to hold public office and participate in political life. No surprise, I suppose, that Notre Dame fans are not reminded that the Declaration laments a relaxation of the persecution of “papists.”
It is an uncomfortable fact, but still a fact, that anti-Catholicism is among America’s oldest prejudices. From the Puritans to the Framers and beyond, anti-“popery” was thick in the cultural air breathed by colonial Americans, who were raised on tales of Armadas and Inquisitions, Puritan heroism and Bloody Mary, Jesuit schemes and gunpowder plots, lecherous confessors and baby-killing nuns. Doubts were widespread that, as John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “a free government [can] possibly exist with a Roman Catholic Religion.” “In a certain sense,” as the University’s provost and prominent historian John McGreevy ’86 has observed, “anti-Catholicism is integral to the formation of the United States.”
Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, these suspicions prompted fights — not just political and electoral ones, but riots and street clashes like the 1924 violence chronicled in Class of 1990 alumnus Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs. The Klan. Matters great and small could touch things off: immigration and parochial-school funding, Prohibition and policy in the Philippines. Paul Blanshard’s 1949 runaway bestseller, American Freedom and Catholic Power, warned that the Catholic Church posed as grave a threat to the nation’s values as did Soviet communism, and in 1960 would-be President John F. Kennedy had to promise a group of Protestant ministers in Houston that his administration would not be a puppet of the Holy See.
It might be tempting, in light of this history, to join those — some progressive, others conservative — who allege a tension, even a clash, between Catholic commitments and the Constitution. This temptation, though, should be resisted, as the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray insisted in his 1960 classic, We Hold These Truths. To be sure, the City of God is not the City of Man; this side of Heaven, we are all pilgrims; no earthly nation is our permanent home; no political community can claim our ultimate allegiance. At the same time, America’s is a constitutional experiment that, although incomplete and in progress, warrants our support and, especially this year, our celebration.
Remember what else is included in the Stadium’s pregame pageant: the preamble to our Constitution, which launched the political community toward which the Declaration could only aspire. Echoing the Quebec Act, it insisted that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office.” A few years later, the First Amendment protected religious freedom through its complementary requirements that Congress respect religious exercise and stay out of churches’ affairs. Our revolution, unlike the French Revolution, was not a secularist attack on religious faith or the role of religion in public life. Quite the contrary: As James Madison hoped it would, our embrace of religious freedom under law brings a “lustre to our country.” And as Jesus told those trying to trip him up over taxes, there are things that are not Caesar’s.
Richard Garnett is Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law and director of the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.