Untrue.
If you send your child to any school, he will have to work hard to be Catholic because the Catholic faith is a hard one to live. ND offers its students many opportunities to practice their faith and, indeed, a high proportion of ND’s student body attends Mass every Sunday. However, the initiative to practice their faith remains with the students, not the school. In other words, the university treats the students as adults in this matter, as it should.
ND is one of the few Catholic universities that has a regularly scheduled Tridentine Mass. My son serves that Mass.
Academically, there is no comparison between Notre Dame and Ave Maria in the liberal arts or any other program. ND’s admission standards are higher than Ave Maria’s. It’s curriculum is more rigorous. It’s faculty is excellent. On any list, ND is ranked as one of the best schools in the country.
Overprotective parents who are afraid that their college-aged children will be too weak to withstand the temptations of college of life or too lukewarm in their faith to practice it once they leave home, probably should send their children to Ave Maria. But some of us prefer to treat our adult children as adults.
The ethos that thrives and dominates at Notre Dame is the same one that from 2002-2007 sponsored the disgusting play “The Vagina Monologues” on its campus.
It is good that the new president put a halt to that, but he had to force the issue, and the campus leadership saw nothing wrong with the plat for 5 years.
Fact: most kids at 18 will not be able to detect or resist the slick liberal profs and events that sell lies as truth.
Go ahead, encourage most people to send their average kids to a campus dominated by hook-ups, liberal theology and secularism. It is good that your kid is not typical. We need more of those. But most kids who arrive at ND fall for the hogwash and amorality that reigns there.