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CV NEWS FEED // In his final article for The Irish Rover, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus W. Joseph DeReuil offers a reflection on Notre Dame as a traditionally Catholic institution and makes an exciting announcement about his future.
In his April 24 article, “A Requiem for Notre Dame,” Dereuil explains how Notre Dame’s original character as a Catholic University is no longer what it once was.
“Notre Dame is dead,” he wrote, adding: “But only insofar as her image is herself.”
According to Dereuil, the “death” of Notre Dame’s image is one that occurred “in the eyes of the large swaths of American Catholics who have populated her quads since her founding in 1842,” in wake of bad press the University has brought upon herself in recent years.
Despite this, Dereuil said that if he were to start college over again, he would certainly choose Notre Dame, and expressed hope that the University’s soul, which he says is very much alive, might someday “revive the body.”
Widely regarded as one of The Irish Rover’s most pioneering and controversial editors-in-chief, DeReuil also announced that he would be entering the postulancy for the Norbertines of St Michael’s Abbey:
In 2021, Dereuil co-authored a defense of Notre Dame Editor-in-Chief Mary Frances Myler’s article, “No Man Can Serve Two Masters,” which, he said, “succinctly defended Church Teaching on marriage and sexuality and considered how Notre Dame had failed to promote this teaching.”
DeReuil recalled in his farewell that the editorial staff had not anticipated “such an explosion of campus controversy” following the article’s publication, which denounced Notre Dame’s apparent embrace of LGBTQ+ agenda, or the controversy which ensued following DeReuil’s own October 2022 article on a Notre Dame professor promoting abortion access to students.
“Growth comes through conflict,” DeReuil wrote, reflecting on the experience of missing class to endure a five-hour deposition in the defamation lawsuit filed against him by Professor Tamara Kay: “Even if I would rather struggle through understanding Dante than learn how to articulate a two-sentence defense of the Church’s teaching on life to the Associated Press, I have grown immensely through doing both. “
The Indiana court dismissed Tamara Kay v. The Irish Rover in January 2024, as CatholicVote previously reported.
Concluding, Dereuil admitted that while “Notre Dame often presents herself as a dead creature—body separated from soul—to be accepted by the world’s elite academic institutions, which have invariably abandoned their founding missions,” it is still the case that the University boasts “some of the finest Catholic academics and students in the country.”
“There is still a fight,” he maintained.
This article has been updated to more comprehensively reflect Mr Dereuil’s position: that Notre Dame is only dead “insofar as her image is herself.”
