Catholic Character

All seekers of truth are vitally important to the furtherance of the dialogue between faith and reason, a foundational aspect of Notre Dame’s academic mission.

—From “Notre Dame, Its Mission, Its Faculty”

If someone knows nothing else about Notre Dame, there is a good chance he or she can identify it as a Catholic university. What any one individual interprets that to mean will vary, however, such that there are often misconceptions about how Notre Dame being Catholic makes it different from many other institutions.

To be sure, that religious character is much more than a page in the University’s history detailing its founding by a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross; Catholicism and Catholic intellectual tradition continue to animate the scholarly, residential, and spiritual life of the campus on a daily basis.

At the same time, Notre Dame is not sectarian but welcomes all persons of good will, defending the absolute necessity of academic freedom and turning outward to embrace the larger world.