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53 C H A P T E R 2 The Boss’s Bishops John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C. (1888–1960), spent most of his childhood in Peru, Indiana, a small farming town in the Fort Wayne diocese. After his father was appointed American consul to Uruguay in 1905, O’Hara lived with his family in South America for three years. Entering Notre Dame in 1909, he received his B.A. there and then joined the Congregation of the Holy Cross. Ordained in 1916, he went on to become Notre Dame’s prefect of religion, dean of the College of Commerce, then vice president of the university and president from 1934 to 1939. During World War II O’Hara became a military delegate, assisting Archbishop Francis Spellman, the military vicar of the U.S. Armed Forces. Appointed bishop of Buffalo in 1945, he served there until becoming the archbishop of Philadelphia in 1951. He was made a cardinal in 1958. As prefect of religion at Notre Dame for more than a decade, O’Hara was responsible for shaping the spiritual lives of the men under his care. Working within an environment quite different from that of secular educational institutions—students, for example, had to attend morning and evening prayer and Mass on Saturday as well as Sunday—O’Hara motivated them to great heights of spirituality. Through the force of his own personality, the power of his office, and the influence of the Religious Bulletin, which he originated in 1921, O’Hara was instrumental in the dramatic increase in attendance at daily Communion at Notre Dame. He was the first, moreover, to draw the explicit connection between piety and success on the football field that has become such an integral part of campus life. It was his Notre Dame that a football player and future athletic director remembered as a “man’s school.”1 54 c h a p t e r t w o In 1937 J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, spoke to Notre Dame students and received enthusiastic applause. One observer noted his “quiet mask-like face, piercing eyes, black, cropped hair, and short compact body.” After first addressing America’s crime problem, Hoover moved on to the matter of subversion through a discussion of Notre Dame’s campaign against Communism which O’Hara had initiated, and which was to begin shortly. He noted how “easy” it was for “agitators, spouting magical formulas, to seize the imagination of youth” and “lead it into false paths, making of young men and women missionaries to impossible gods.” Not so, though, at Notre Dame: it “has devoted excellent efforts toward the practical eradication of such fantasies. I am sure that its work in the future will be along the same course of common sense.” As for the future plans of these young people themselves, there “can be no higher ideal for the student of Notre Dame or any other university in America than that he should consecrate his life to the virtue of justice.”2 O’Hara liked Hoover’s speech so much that he had ten thousand copies of it printed, so it is no surprise that the Religious Bulletin reprinted a year later an article by Hoover titled “If I Had a Son.” In it, as we saw in chapter 1, he described how a father must function in the family if his son was to “grow up to be a fine, honest man, a good citizen in every sense of the word.” O’Hara “carried the matter a step further” in his sermon for the “Mission to the Freshmen.” “I told them,” he wrote Hoover, “that you had beat me to the sermon on the fourth Commandment. I then went on to draw a lesson on the whole principle of authority, and the importance of discipline as against individualism if we are to protect our country from dictatorship, whether of communistic or fascistic origin.” Hoover’s response indicated his complete agreement with O’Hara: “As you indicated , the inculcation into youthful minds of ideals and principles which are fundamentally false and which if carried to their logical conclusions would lead to the eradication of all authority, whether it be religious or civil, is fast becoming one of the greatest dangers facing the youth of our country today.”3 “Salacious magazines” were one of the influences endangering young people that O’Hara and Hoover detested. In late 1937, having misplaced the speech that Hoover had delivered...

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