After Forty Years: Notre Dame and The Review of Politics

Extract

The Review of Politics, which with this issue closes its fortieth year of publication, bears an interesting and faintly exotic relationship to the modern history of Notre Dame and of the Church. At first glance nothing could seem further from what many regarded as the somnolent provincialismof a Midwest Catholic college than the background and career of the founding editor of The Review, Waldemar Gurian. Had Notre Dame been the offspring of a small and youthful religious sect, there could have been no Gurian and no Review. What helped to make both possible was the universal Church, more especially the Church of the Western world. Many observers thought the universal Church itself steeped in somnolent, albeit worldwide provincialism. But the fact is that the Church was, in the 1930's, stirring with change, change which reflected and in turn influenced changes in the intellectual temper of the secular world.