Notre Dame’s student body is 80% Catholic. From my experiences this year, I would hypothesize that, either that statistic was poorly obtained, or the 20% of students who are not Catholic are putting in a lot of work to cause mischief on campus.
Coming into Notre Dame as a transfer student, I anticipated that the people I would meet here would be very kind and good-spirited. Luckily, I found this to be true. Compared to my previous university, I have met more like-minded people who have my best interests in mind. However, I have also found that the nasty people here are a lot nastier than anybody I interacted with last year.
At my last school, what you got from people was a lot more predictable. A lot of people were fake and partial, but it was easy to tell who you would jive with.
The friends that you got were mostly the friends that were advertised in your first interactions. The people who were shallow and judgmental made it clear that you should not talk to them. I appreciated this because they did not waste anybody’s time or trust. In my life, the world has mostly been like this — people are pretty readable, and I have had pretty good intuition so far.
Then, I came to Notre Dame.
I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, but I have met more two-faced people here than I have in my entire life. I am inclined to think that this is a result of Notre Dame’s culture. In my eyes, I see American popular culture and Notre Dame’s Catholic culture grinding against each other.
This tension is encapsulated by the classic Notre Dame story: you see your classmate hammered at Newf’s screaming Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” on Saturday night and then see them at 9 a.m. Basilica mass with their family on Sunday morning.
Although I think that these kinds of people desperately need help, I couldn't care less about their life choices. This is the attitude that I, as well as the majority of the people at my last school, maintained. For this reason, people were not as secretive about their life choices that might be judged heavily at a school like Notre Dame. If my last school were Catholic, onboarded priests would likely resign within weeks.
Although there were significantly fewer religious students at my last school, the biggest difference between the people there and the people here is how they carry themselves. If you were to think about people in terms of how closely their metaphorical menu photos correspond to how they turn out, my last school would be like Garbanzo, and Notre Dame would be Flip Kitchen.
I’ve been beating around the bush a little, so here is what I think. The bad people I’ve met at Notre Dame are much worse than the bad people I met at my last school because they can hide behind moral masks like involvement in the warm dorm communities or campus ministry.
I have heard sickening things about what people do behind closed doors and then gone to mass and seen them singing in the choir. I have seen cheaters and sexual assaulters be accepted and praised in campus ministry for their mere involvement. I am not complaining from a Puritan position — I have done bad things before. I am complaining because people are concealed by their religious affiliation.
I was seriously disrespected by a close friend last week. I am very close with this friend, and I would say that they know me better than most of my other friends. They are easy-going and funny, and I have always commended this friend for their good faith and spiritual practices.
Then, I got blindsided by them acting in my worst interest, and I could not help but think about how their actions went against how I understood their character as my friend and a practicing Catholic. Of course, everyone messes up, but it is hard to forgive and forget in instances where the person is malicious.
This is all to say that, in times when trust was betrayed by two-faced people at Notre Dame, I have felt the disappointment in double. Perhaps I have been, for whatever reason, particularly naive this year. But, I would say that we could do a better job at holding people to the standards they set for themselves here at Notre Dame. Nothing irks me more than seeing an unapologetic deceiver walk freely around this campus.
