Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, Influential Ex-President of Notre Dame, Dies at 97 - New York Times

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Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the former president of the University of Notre Dame, was considered the most influential priest in America for decades. Credit John Sotomayor/The New York Times

The Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, the scrappy former president of the University of Notre Dame who stood up to both the White House and the Vatican as he transformed Catholic higher education in America and raised a powerful moral voice in national affairs, died late Thursday. He was 97.

The university confirmed his death in a statement on its website, saying that he had died just before midnight at Holy Cross House adjacent to the university, in South Bend, Ind. It did not give a cause of death.

As an adviser to presidents, special envoy to popes, theologian, author, educator and activist, Father Hesburgh was considered the most influential priest in America for decades. In 1986, the year he retired after a record 35 years as president of Notre Dame, a survey of 485 university presidents named him the most effective college president in the country.

“In his historic service to the nation, the Church and the world, he was a steadfast champion for human rights, the cause of peace and care for the poor,” the Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, said in a statement. “Perhaps his greatest influence, though, was on the lives of generations of Notre Dame students, whom he taught, counseled and befriended.”

Father Hesburgh held more than a dozen White House appointments under six presidents. For years, he was chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy.

Yet, he was never awed by the power of the Oval Office. He tangled with the Nixon administration over busing, civil rights and other issues that eventually led to his resignation as chairman of the Civil Rights Commission, and he vehemently opposed a White House plan to use federal troops to put down campus demonstrations, eventually persuading the president to drop the idea.

He was just as willing to stand up to the Catholic hierarchy. Pope Paul VI and John Paul II called on him for help in a wide variety of ecumenical matters, yet he resisted the church’s attempts to assert greater control over American Catholic universities.

After the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s had endorsed a larger role for lay Catholics in the Mass and other aspects of the faith, Father Hesburgh handed over control of the university from the Congregation of the Holy Cross, which had founded it in 1842, to a largely secular board.

Father Hesburgh further inflamed his conservative critics by leading a group of Catholic educators to assert a degree of doctrinal independence from Rome. Meeting at the Holy Cross retreat in Land O’Lakes, Wis., in 1967, the group issued a landmark policy statement declaring that the pursuit of truth, not religious indoctrination, was the ultimate goal of Catholic higher learning in the United States. That position had implications for what could be taught at the universities, and who could be hired to teach, issues that remain contentious to this day.

Father Hesburgh understood the special role football played in Notre Dame’s reputation. But he was not a huge football fan, and he sometimes resented the influence that collegiate sports had on higher education. At his inauguration as president in 1952, he was appalled when local newspapers sent sportswriters to cover the event, and he refused to cooperate with photographers who asked him to pose with a football.

“I’m not the football coach,” he barked at the surprised journalists. “I’m the president.”

And yet, he was not averse to calling attention to Notre Dame’s football legends. When President Reagan gave the commencement address at Notre Dame in 1981, and received an honorary degree, Father Hesburgh referred in his remarks to Mr. Reagan’s role as the halfback George Gipp in the film “Knute Rockne — All American.” The dying words of Mr. Reagan’s character — “Win one for the Gipper” — had by then become stock Reagan iconography.

Theodore Martin Hesburgh was born in Syracuse on May 25, 1917, to Theodore Bernard Hesburgh and the former Anne Murphy. His father was an executive at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.

Reared in a religious home, Father Hesburgh often said he had wanted to be a priest from age 6. When he was in the eighth grade, four Holy Cross missionaries came to preach at his parish church and captivated him with their talk of Notre Dame.

After graduating from high school, he entered the Holy Cross seminary on the campus of Notre Dame, and was later sent to Rome to study for advanced degrees in philosophy and theology. But with the outbreak of World War II, he was forced to return to the United States. He was ordained at Notre Dame in 1943, when he was 26.

After taking his vows, Father Hesburgh asked to be assigned to an aircraft carrier as a chaplain. Instead, his superiors ordered him to remain on the Notre Dame campus to help teach naval officers who were being sent there for wartime training. He remained at Notre Dame throughout the war and served as chaplain to returning veterans.

Father Hesburgh initially resisted going into administration at Notre Dame, preferring to stay in the classroom. But he was made vice president and assistant to the Notre Dame president, the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh. In 1952, at age 35, he took over as president.

At the time, Notre Dame was a small university regarded as strong in football and weak in just about everything else but theology. Father Hesburgh set out to build up the faculty, upgrade the academic standards and increase the size of the school, which admitted women for the first time in 1972. He became an effective fund-raiser, inheriting a $9 million endowment and increasing it to $350 million. Today, Notre Dame has one of the largest endowments in the nation, exceeding $9 billion.