Tag: manuscripts

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gave the archives papers entrusted to him by his mentor, Monsignor Philip Hughes, including the manuscripts of two unpublished books by Hughes, The Last Crisis: the British State and the Catholic Church, 1850-1851, and an edition of the letters of the English historian Fr.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.