Category: News

Thanks to thank Mary Jo Weaver for recommending us as an archival repository to the Carmelite Sisters of Indianapolis. Since last October we have received 44 linear feet of records from their monastery, including documentation of their inclusive language psalter, their religious typesetting business, their web site, and their annual interfaith prayer service for peace.The records also include files on the history of the monastery, including chronological files, records of individual sisters (current members, former members, women who have lived at the monastery), and records of friends of the monastery; clippings and chronicles; files on initiatives of the monastery, and on the participation of Indianapolis Carmelites in national organizations, including the Association of Contemplative Sisters and Carmelite Communities Associated; with historical data on Carmelites in America, on Carmelite formation, on third-order Carmelites, now called the Secular Order of Carmel, and on the Carmelite Order in general; books including breviaries, prayer books, and ceremonials; periodicals including the  Contemplative Review and the Servitium Informativum Carmelitanum newsletter; photographs, audio-visual material, and historical artifacts such as the pre-Vatican II Carmelite habit, devotional objects, and equipment for making hosts for the eucharist.

In June we received material collected by Rev. Jeffrey M. Kemper in support of his doctoral dissertation,“Behind the Text: A Study of the Principles and Procedures of Translation, Adaptation, and Composition of Original Texts by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.”The collection, amounting to about four linear feet, includes copies of ICEL correspondence, memoranda, agenda, meeting material and texts.This new material complements other collections in our archives from the Consultation on Common Texts and the English Language Liturgical Consultation.

Gordon Zahn, one of the leaders of the Catholic peace movement, died last Dec. at the age of 89.  Many years ago he made arrangements to donate his papers to the Notre Dame Archives, and last Aug., with the help of Professor Loretta M. Morris, the first shipment has recently arrived.  Professor Morris and her student assistants at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles produced an item level description that covers more than 14,600 items (15 linear feet), among them letters written by Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton.  The collection includes Zahn’s correspondence, Pax Christi files, articles, books, photographs, digital files, and audio-visual material.  They also include material on Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian Catholic executed for his refusal to serve in Hitler’s army. Zahn’s biography of Jägerstätter helped increase devotion to him as a saint and martyr, and Jägerstätter was beatified in October 2007.  The Zahn Papers join our other collections that document the Catholic peace movement, including the papers of Gerard Vanderhaar, Eileen Egan, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, and David Bowman, S.J., and records of Zahn’s Center on Conscience and War, Pax Christi U.S.A., the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center.

In November we received the papers of James O’Gara, a former editor of Commonweal and one of the most influential American Catholic editors of the 20th century, from his daughters, Margaret and Monica O’Gara. He died in 2003 at the age of 85. His papers consist of correspondence, memoranda, reports, typed speeches, typescripts of television shows, articles, university course lectures, presentations for parish groups on the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, photographs, and printed ephemera dating from 1918 until 2003.  They amount to three linear feet.

Dr. Daniel Cherico, known for his books and articles on thanatology and ministry to people near death, spends much of his spare time compiling data on Catholic clergy and religious, so that the contributions of individuals will not be forgotten, and so that the reputations of those who have been maligned can be restored.  As a side effect of this effort, he acquires material that will be of interest to Catholic scholars in the future.  Starting in March of 2007, he has been donating this documentation to the Archives of the University of Notre Dame.  He has sent printed ephemera, books, pamphlets, newsletters, newspapers and magazines,  representing parish and diocesan anniversaries, conferences, Catholic institutions and individual bishops and priests from New York, Newark, Minneapolis / St. Paul, and other places; audio and video tapes; black-and-white and color prints and slides  of Catholic clergy, religious, laity, and buildings; medals, awards, rosaries, crucifixes, pins, and other religious objects; scrapbooks, index cards with quotations and notes from research in Catholic archives, answers to questionnaires on parish histories in the Diocese of St. Paul, photocopies of typewritten and handwritten papers and histories, and funeral sermons and obituaries.

In April we received from AnaMaria Goulet the papers of her husband, Notre Dame professor Denis Goulet, including office files representing his teaching, his interest in developing countries in Latin America, and his publications, with offprints or copies of over 160 of his articles.  Prof. Goulet held the William and Dorothy O’Neill Chair for Education for Justice and was associated with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and Nanovic Institute for European Studies.  He was widely known and respected for his pioneering contributions to the interdisciplinary study of development ethics.  In addition to his many articles, he published eleven books, including The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development (1971); The Uncertain Promise: Value Conflicts in Technology Transfer (1977); and Development Ethics at Work: Explorations 1960-2002 (2006).

In the Fall of 2006, the Archives of the University of Notre Dame received two significant new collections.  At the end of October Timothy P. Schilling sent us seven scrapbooks of clippings and a box of newspapers documenting the crisis in the ecclesiastical career of Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen.  Schilling also sent copies of his doctoral dissertation, “Conflict in the Catholic Hierarchy: Coping Strategies in the Hunthausen Affair” (University of Utrecht, 2003).  A few month later, he sent three cassette audio tapes containing an interview that he conducted with the Very Rev. Michael G. Ryan, who was closely associated with Archbishop Hunthausen, and a comprehensive summary of this interview.

Early in November John and Kathleen Ferrone donated 115 reel-to-reel audio tapes, 74 cassette audio tapes, and 2 video tapes having to do with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the South Bend area, 1972-1980s, along with related documentation consisting of correspondence, mimeographed and ditto material, printed ephemera on the People of Praise and Charismatics, some material on cults, and an anthropological study of True House by Fr. Ken McGuire, CSP: “People Prayer and Promise” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1976).

In our efforts to document the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, we need to remind ourselves sometimes that Notre Dame itself is part of that history.  Several new collections related to Notre Dame show that we do not treat the local denizens as prophets without honor in their own country.

In March of 2006 Neil McCluskey, by way of Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., donated papers having to do with the proposed merger of St. Mary’s College and Notre Dame, 1967-1972, consisting of correspondence, reports, and clippings. In April Fr. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C., donated papers he had written as a Notre Dame student, 1979-1981, with some notes and syllabi from Notre Dame courses.  In May Fr. Marvin O’Connell gave the archives papers entrusted to him by his mentor, Monsignor Philip Hughes, including the manuscripts of two unpublished books by Hughes, The Last Crisis: the British State and the Catholic Church, 1850-1851, and an edition of the letters of the English historian Fr. John Lingard (1771-1851), author of a ten-volume history of England from a Catholic perspective.  Hughes taught at Notre Dame from 1955 until his retirement in 1966.

Also in May Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute sent us files of prominent Medievalist Astrik Gabriel, O. Praem.  Abbot Gabriel’s personal papers date from the early 1950s to 2005 and include scrapbooks, files on conferences he attended, his visiting professorships, publications, scholarly associations, publications, lectures, correspondence, awards, and travels.  These papers represent his service as a scholar at Notre Dame and with the International Commission on the History of Universities, his interest in medieval universities and Hungarian academic and ecclesiastical history, and his book collecting.  We also received files dating after his retirement as Director of the Medieval Institute in 1975, documenting his continuing work in support of the Medieval Institute and the Ambrosiana Collection, continuing through the 1980s and 1990s.

Starting in June and continuing through September, with the help of Kathy Osberger, we acquired papers of Richard J. Westley, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago associated with the Institute of Pastoral Studies there.  First he sent us his CD “Homilies of Faith: Sundays with Fr. Bill Kenneally in the Spoken and Written Word.”  Fr. Kenneally was pastor of St. Gertrude Parish, near Loyola, and Westley found his sermons so good that he recorded and transcribed all of them for the years 2001 to 2006. The CD also includes audio recordings of thirty of the homilies.

In August Westley sent material, including thirty-four cassette tapes, from talks, retreats, and seminars given by Fr. Leo Mahon, some done on trips to Chicago during his time as a pastor of San Miguelito Mission in Panama, some dating from after his return to Chicago.  Westley invited Fr. Mahon to give these talks, and taped and transcribed many of them. These papers and recordings are especially valuable to us because they supplement our collection of records of San Miguelito Mission, important in the history of Liberation Theology, and particularly interesting because of the interaction between Latin American and North American Catholics.

We expressed an interest in the Catholic newsletter that Westley published, “In the Meantime,” and he sent a complete collection of all the issues on a CD. Finally, he sent files documenting retreats and workshops for thoughtful Catholic lay people, mostly from the Chicago area, organized by Westley from 1968 through 2005 and conducted chiefly at Notre Dame’s Center for Continuing Education.

Last September we received from Judge Paul V. Niemeyer the papers of his father, conservative political philosopher Gerhart Niemeyer.  Physically the collection amounts to 23 linear feet, or enough to occupy three four-drawer filing cabinets.  Gerhart Niemeyer was born in 1907 and left his native Germany when the Nazis came to power.  He came to the United States in 1937, taught at Princeton, worked for the State Department, and served on the faculty of the National War College. He became a professor of government at the University of Notre Dame starting in 1955 and continued his association with our university until he died in 1997.  He wrote about political theory, ideology, communism, totalitarianism, the modern world, and Christianity. He served as an advisor to Barry Goldwater, as a member of the Republican National Committee’s Task Force on Foreign Policy, and as chairman of the Board of Foreign Scholarships in the Reagan administration.

The Niemeyer Papers contain correspondence (1965-1997) representing his professional and personal interactions; subject files, including files on Heller, Solzhenitsyn, Voegelin, and Wittfogel; publications, lectures, research notes and drafts.  They document many facets of his life and career, including, as one might suppose, his service with the National War College, his teaching at Notre Dame, and his analysis of modern totalitarianism and communism.  But they also show his strong interest in early music, in such instruments as the recorder and the viola da gamba, and his performances as an amateur musician.  And they contain evidence of his spiritual development and the process by which he became first an Episcopalian deacon (1973), then an Episcopalian priest (1980), and finally, at the end of his life, a convert to Roman Catholicism.  The collection also includes some of his awards, plaques and medals, and 18 cassette audio tapes, including lectures and one interview.

In December we received from Jay Dolan by way of John McGreevy three reels of microfilm containing the diaries of Rev. Richard L. Burtsell, 1865-1912.  Burtsell, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and defender of the rights of priests, was born in 1840 and died in 1912.  He belonged to a circle of progressive priests whom some bishops regarded as trouble-makers. In 1890 Archbishop Corrigan removed Burtsell as pastor of the church he had built in New York City and sent him upstate. In 1978 Nelson J. Callahan published an edition of the first three years of the Burtsell diaries, but this microfilm contains the unpublished years as well.

In March of 2005 we received from Peggy Roach five linear inches of material she collected having to do with the career of Msgr. Philip J. Murnion (1938-2003).  A sociologist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Msgr. Murnion is well known as the founder and director of the National Pastoral Life Center.  We have been making efforts to acquire his papers for the Archives.