ROFR 33360 — Fr. Edward Sorin Letters Translation Project

An archive-based account of the developmental years of the University of Notre Dame. During these years, university leaders strove to find the additional resources needed to transform their succesful boarding school into an ethically diverse modern Catholic university. The history of the University of Notre Dame from 1842 to 1934 mirrors in many ways the history of American Catholicism during those years.

When Edward Sorin left France in 1841 to lead the first band of missionaries sent by the Congregation of Holy Cross to the New World, the rule of the young community required him to keep and send back to France an annual account of the significant events in the life and work of the men and women on the American mission. Chronicles of Notre Dame du Lac contains this running account of the history of the University of Notre Dame--from its foundation in 1842 through the end of the Civil War--written by the man honored as its founder.

The religious congregation that came to be known as Holy Cross began in France when Basile Moreau joined the Brothers of St. Joseph to a small band of priests he had gathered to work in the diocese of Le Mans, France. Based on their letters, Klawitter has reconstructed the lives of eleven of these courageous men whose apostolic work brought hope to children on three continents.

This sweeping book offers the definitive account of the life and labors of Edward Sorin, founder of the University of Notre Dame. Born in the west of France in 1814, Sorin was ordained in 1838 and joined the newly founded Congregation of Holy Cross shortly thereafter. In 1841, Father Sorin, along with six Holy Cross brothers, was sent to establish a mission in Indiana.

In 1837, Basile Moreau, C.S.C., founded the Congregation of Holy Cross (C.S.C.), a community of Catholic priests and brothers, to minister to and educate the people of France devastated by the French Revolution. During the centuries that followed, the Congregation expanded its mission around the globe to educate and evangelize, including the establishment in 1842 of the Congregation's first educational institution in America, the University of Notre Dame.

Seasons of Grace is a history of the catholic Church and community in southern lower Michigan from the 1830s through the 1950s. More than a chronicle of clerical successions and institutional expansion, the book also examines those social and cultural influences that affected the development of the Catholic community. To document the course of institutional growth in the diocese, Tentler devotes a portion of the book to tracing the evolution of administrative structures at the Chancery and the founding of parishes, parochial schools, and social welfare organizations.

The University of Notre Dame: A History tells the story of the renowned Catholic university's growth and development from a primitive grade school and high school founded in 1842 by the Congregation of Holy Cross in the wilds of northern Indiana to the acclaimed undergraduate and research institution it became by the early twenty-first century.

"The 150th anniversary and the long history of the diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend'may well be celebrated as an extended reflection on the mystery of what happens in the mingling of the human and the divine, of nature and grace, of the secular and the religious, in the pilgrimage of faith that has made Catholics and their leaders worthy of the Gospel of Christ.' " -- excerpt from Worthy of the Gospel of Christ