South Bend, Indiana
I was honored to receive a research travel grant this year from the University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. It was my second time researching at Notre Dame, having received another Cushwa Grant for my dissertation research in 2013; this time I was working on a future book project about lived religion among Catholic soldiers in the Civil War.
Most exciting for me was being able to work at an institution that is actually a major subject of this research project. Notre Dame sent several chaplains, students, and alumni to serve in the Union Army during the war, so researching these individuals at the location where they lived and worked was a particular privilege.
I worked for a week at the University of Notre Dame Archives, which are housed in the Theodore Hesburgh Library. The library is named for the Holy Cross priest who served as the university’s president from 1952 to 1987.
Hesburgh Library is an impressive building adorned with an enormous mural, The Word of Life, known popularly as “Touchdown Jesus.” The position of Christ’s arms in the photograph below should explain the nickname.
Jesus’s positioning in the mural is not the only reason for the “Touchdown” nickname. The mural faces the Knute Rockne Gate of Notre Dame Stadium, a storied location in university and college football history.
I completed much of my work in the first-floor reading room, although I also spent significant time performing microfilm research in the basement and in the library’s sixth-floor special collections reading room (where I worked during my previous visit six years ago).
For those studying Civil War Catholicism, Rev. William Corby, a Holy Cross chaplain in the Union’s Irish Brigade who served on two separate occasions as Notre Dame’s president, becomes a familiar figure. Corby became well known for performing a general absolution for assembled Union soldiers during the Battle of Gettysburg. Father Corby’s sacramental feat is commemorated today on the battlefield with a statue depicting his absolution. As I planned my trip to Notre Dame, I was excited to have the opportunity to view at the university’s Snite Museum of Art a wonderful painting of the event by Paul Wood, who created the piece when he was just nineteen years old and a year before his untimely death. For an excellent analysis of Wood’s painting, I recommend Andrew Mach’s 2015 essay at the Religion in American History blog.
Paul Wood, Absolution Under Fire (1891), Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame.
Another statue of Father Corby absolving the soldiers also appears on Notre Dame’s campus. It stands outside the recently demolished Corby Hall and is presently on the edge of an active construction site.
While Father Corby now appears to be blessing heavy machinery, this statue and the Wood painting are visual evidence of the strong links between Notre Dame and lived Civil War Catholicism. I unfortunately did not have time to pay a visit to Father Corby’s burial site on campus, but I plan to talk a walk to his gravesite when I return to campus next year for another week of work – the divided research trip is a necessity for a full-time high school teacher with limited space for travel during the school year.
This research trip was altogether one of the most productive and personally satisfying of my academic career. The insights into soldiers’ lived religious experiences I gained from the papers of various Catholic chaplains and officers were invaluable, and I even had a chance to perform some additional archival work for my current book project, which was built largely on the research I completed during my first Notre Dame trip when I was in graduate school! I cannot recommend strongly enough taking a research trip to the Notre Dame Archives. It is an essential stop for scholars of Catholicism at a university significant in its own right in American religious history.
