The Congregation's Course — Brothers, Sisters, and the Press

1843–1893 · the order on the ground

The university was a religious community before it was a school, and the community's working order is documented at the level of the individual shop. A student's-eye account of November 1845, preserved in the jubilee history, describes the Manual Labor establishment standing behind the college in its first years: a tailor shop under Brother Augustus, a printing office under Brother Joseph — then printing a book the account judges wretchedly — a carpenter shop under Brother William, a blacksmith shop, a gardener's house, and not thirty acres cleared in the whole section. The brothers were the institution's trades, farm, press, and building crew at once; the sisters, in half the old log church by St. Mary's Lake, were its other half. The second colony from France, which sailed on 6 June 1843 under Father Francis Cointet, brought Fathers Marivault and Gouesse, one brother, and four sisters of the Holy Cross; Sorin and Cointet, the record notes, for a long time had but one hat and one pair of boots between them.

The sisters' academy could not stand at Notre Dame — the Bishop of Vincennes barred it, the Sisters of Providence already holding Terre Haute — so with Detroit's permission it was fixed at Bertrand, Michigan, its building completed in 1846, under Mother Angela Gillespie, sister of the first graduate, who had made her novitiate in France under Moreau. In 1855 academy and mother-house transferred to the high banks of the St. Joseph a mile from Notre Dame, on ground the congregation had acquired in the lakes purchase of the cholera year. The sisters' whole course is their own file's subject; here it stands at the strength the university's record gives it, as the foundation without which the men's college is unintelligible.

The printing apostolate grew from Brother Joseph's shop into two publications that outlasted the century. The Ave Maria, founded by Sorin in May 1865, published its first two numbers in Chicago before a press was set up at Notre Dame; Sorin was himself editor at first and for a long time, aided by Mother Angela, and Father Gillespie edited it from 1866 until his death in 1874, when Daniel E. Hudson succeeded. Its weekly circulation had long passed twenty thousand by 1895, and Ave Maria Press continues today as part of the United States Province of Holy Cross. The Scholastic issued its first number on 7 September 1867 as the "Scholastic Year," at first little more than a fly-leaf of the Ave Maria; published separately from August 1868, renamed "Notre Dame Scholastic" in 1869 and "Scholastic" alone in 1872, it resumed the fuller name in September 1875 and continues as the student magazine. Above the local work stood the order's own course: the congregation's constitutions were approved by Pius IX on 13 May 1857; Sorin, president and local superior without interruption to May 1865, was elected provincial of the United States province on 15 August 1865 and, at the general chapter at Rome in the summer of 1868, Superior General of the whole congregation on 22 July 1868 — the first American, the record notes, to attain such a dignity in a religious order — and in 1872 the general chapter itself sat at Notre Dame, which the jubilee history claims as the first general chapter of a religious order held in the New World. Sorin crossed the Atlantic perhaps fifty times in the congregation's service, and his Circular Letters to the order, many published in book form at Notre Dame in 1885, carried the Indiana foundation's voice across the Catholic world.

1. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, Sorin sketch, 1893; ArchivesSpace, Congregation of Holy Cross Indiana Province records
3. Congregation of Holy Cross, United States Province, Ave Maria Press