Sorin's Last Years and Death

1888–1893 · the founder's end

The golden jubilee of Sorin's priesthood fell on Sunday, 27 May 1888, and was celebrated on 15 August 1888, the same day the church he had raised was consecrated as the Basilica of the Sacred Heart — the consecration and the church's whole course stand in the Basilica's own record. That year the French government named him an Officer of Public Instruction. He retained the presidency of the university's trustees until his death. In June 1893 he received the Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Satolli, at Notre Dame; that October he died, on the last day of the month, 31 October 1893, in the eightieth year of his age and the fifty-first of the foundation. Gilbert Français, formerly superior of the congregation's college at Neuilly near Paris, was chosen Superior General in his place and visited Notre Dame in the autumn of 1894; Corby continued as provincial of the United States province. The first American Eucharistic Congress met at Notre Dame in the summer of 1894, and the university's exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 — Gregori's full-length portrait of Sorin, 120 photographic views, a complete twenty-five-volume set of the Scholastic, the Bishops' Memorial Hall treasures — carried the dead founder's institution before the country as a finished work.

1. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, Sorin sketch, 1893
3. New Catholic Encyclopedia, "Sorin, Edward Frederick"