Part 3 provided one piece of shockingly good news coming out of Notre Dame. The second piece of shockingly good news is the number of Notre Dame students studying theology.

When I was researching the state of the Catholic Faith at Notre Dame, I ran across the following article stating that there were about 800 students majoring or minoring in theology as of April 2025: Madeline Page, “Notre Dame Revives Theology Club” (Irish Rover, Nov. 5, 2025). My immediate reaction was that 800 had to be a clerical error because 800 would be almost 9% of the 9,000 undergraduates and, if one had to be a humanities student in order to major or minor in theology, it would be 40% of the 2,000 undergraduates in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters. I asked myself, “How could this be? And, if it were true, wouldn’t it be shocking?”

My first inkling that the number of 800 might be correct is that I received for the first time in the spring of 2025 an email from the university listing all the students in Arts and Letters who had written a senior thesis. This document provided the name of the student, his or her majors and minors, the name of the adviser, and the title of the senior thesis. In looking it over, I thought there seemed to be a lot of majors and minors in theology (or maybe theology students opt to write senior theses more often than those in other majors/minors). I have now consulted this document. Among its 158 entries, there are 28 theses (18%) by students who majored or minored in theology.

The Numbers Are Even Better This Year

I contacted Professor Anthony Pagliarini, Associate Teaching Professor & Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Theology. The 800 number for 2025 was correct. Indeed, he anticipates there will be over 900 majors and minors in theology in the current school year. These 900 include 80 graduating seniors and 190 students in their first, second, and third years majoring in theology. The majors include a regular major in theology (34 credits), a major in the joint degree of philosophy/theology (60 credits with at least 21 in theology), and a “supplemental major” in theology (25 credits). The figure of 900 also includes over 600 students minoring in theology. The minors include a minor in theology (18 credits), a minor in liturgical music ministry (21 credits), and a minor in Catholic social teaching (15 credits). Given the growth of interdisciplinary study at Notre Dame, not all of these are students in the College of Arts and Letters. So, students of architecture, engineering, math, science, and business are among them. Let me add that there are a large number of students who, while not majoring or minoring in theology, take more courses than the required two.

While the number of students majoring in theology (across all four years) has grown in 20 years from about 200 in 2005 to 280 last year, the total number of majors and minors has exploded from 250 to 900. There can be a number of reasons for this explosion. One is the growth in the number of undergraduates, but this has been fairly modest — from 8,300 to 9,000. Another can be the growth in the number of programs. (Although I could not determine when the supplemental major started, the minor in Catholic Social Thought started in 1997 and the minor in liturgical music about 2005.) There’s also the change in 2014 that allowed students to begin the coursework that counts toward one’s major before junior year. And there’s the growth in interdisciplinary study. (See below regarding “CAD.”) But the real explanation for the explosion is the exceptional content of the two required courses.

The Students Are Inspired by the Two Required Courses

Only about ten students arrive at Notre Dame expecting that they will major or minor in theology (see 30-Minute Interview by Professor Leonard J. DeLorenzo of Professor Pagliarini, “How Many Students Are Studying Theology?!” Church Life Today podcast, Dec. 16, 2024). How does it happen that so many students end up majoring or minoring in theology? In his interview, Professor Pagliarini answers that the professors who teach the required theology courses show them the depth and richness of the Faith and he gives a few examples.

Notre Dame requires as part of its “Core Curriculum” that every student — humanities, science, business, engineering, architecture — take two theology courses (3 credits each). One is called “foundational” and one is “doctrine in development and dialogue.” The latter is dubbed CAD, “Catholicism and the Disciplines,” where a course discusses the relationship between the Catholic Faith and various disciplines such as economics, biology, sociology, management. Such courses show “how a disciplinary perspective illuminates Catholicism and how a knowledge of Catholicism enriches student understanding of disciplinary subject matter.”

For each theology course in the Core Curriculum, a professor shapes his/her course to meet the description the university gives. In addition to the examples Professor Pagliarini provided in his interview, you can see an example of this in the article by Professor DeLorenzo about his course on the Catholic understanding of the development of character and his description of how his students changed during the semester: “What Happened to These Catholic College Students After They Took a Required Theology Course?” (Aleteia, Jan. 2, 2019).

Only Two Courses Are Required

It may come as a surprise to you that so few theology courses are required at Notre Dame yet so many theology courses are voluntarily taken. It reminded me of the experience Father John O’Hara, C.S.C., had. He was Prefect of Religion at Notre Dame in the 1920s and had encouraged daily reception of communion, which was then a newly approved practice instigated by Pius X in 1905. His Religious Bulletins catalogued statistics such as an average, in 1927-28, of 1,300 of the 2,500 students receiving daily Communion. These were not statistics for the sake of statistics. Rather, he sought to demonstrate that, while Notre Dame was one of the first Catholic colleges to end the requirement of attendance at daily Mass, the frequent reception of Communion resulted in increased daily Mass attendance (Thomas T. McAvoy, C.S.C., “John F. O’Hara, C.S.C., and Notre Dame,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Vol. 64, No. 1 (March, 1953), pp. 13-14).

From early on until the early 1970s, all students were required to take four theology and four philosophy courses. There was no ability to major in theology until the junior year in 1965 (Class of ’67) (Notre Dame, Summer 1965, p. 2). In the fall of 1969, the courses for both theology majors and all other students were revamped (“Theology Reform,” The Observer Feb. 5, 1969, p. 1). In my class year, my fellow theology majors were 20 in a class of some 1,500. In 2015, there was a discussion at Notre Dame of changing its requirement that all graduates (of all majors) take two courses in theology and two in philosophy to one of each. Carolyn Woo, former dean of Notre Dame’s business school and then director of Catholic Relief Services wrote a thoughtful objection to this proposal (Carolyn Woo, “The Theology Requirement at Notre Dame: A Former Dean’s View,” America, March 9, 2015). Fortunately, the school retained its two courses in each subject. My, my, the good that the Department’s professors have done with just two.

Taking a Second Look

If I related to you just the following story, it would be shockingly good news all by itself. A student living in the same residence hall as Rev. Kevin Grove, C.S.C., a professor of theology, asked him if he could read St. Augustine’s Confessions and discuss the book with Father. Father agreed and, as the word got out, 180 students asked to join! Father Grove arranged to get the students one academic credit and found a venue large enough to hold them all. In the following semester, the fall of 2024, there were 450 (Mary Kinney, “’Theology Helps Provide the Words’: Rev. Kevin Grove, C.S.C., Teaches Students How to Engage Meaningfully,” Latest News, College of Arts and Letters, Nov. 27, 2024). This initiative now has the name “Take a Second Look.”

The same article by Ms. Kinney provides additional marvelous details:

Fr. Grove was inspired by Gary Anderson, the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Thought, to take students on a journey through the Bible that makes the text fresh and new. One way he accomplishes this is by showcasing art, music, and architecture, then relating it to theology.

And to make the large class feel more personal, Fr. Grove assigns seats so students sit with others who live in their residence hall…[This] helps conversations about theology go beyond the classroom, including in weekly discussion sessions led in residence halls by students who have taken the course previously.

As a way of ensuring the discussion groups were actually happening, Fr. Grove requires them to submit a photo of their meetings. One week, inspired by Fr. Grove’s ability to relate theology to art, the women of Pasquerilla East Hall sent a photo of their group recreating Michaelangelo’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. [And students from Dunne Hall recreated Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Photo provided with the article.]

* * *

When submitting their spiritual autobiography at the end of the semester, students had the option of including their mailing address, so Fr. Grove could write and send a response to their reflection. He thought only a few would take him up on the offer — but he spent most of the summer hand-writing hundreds of letters in reply.

“It was a life-changing experience, because it gave me a view into the church and young people today,” he said. “They were strikingly honest, and it’s always really edifying to me how our students are willing to think critically and beautifully about the spiritual part of their lives — and how theology can help give them the tools to do that.”

Now the Department of Theology has expanded its offerings in the current semester with a one-credit course on Graham Greene and one on C.S. Lewis. To entice the students further, the Department allows three one-credit courses to be combined into a three-credit elective to help fulfill any requirements of all students, including those majoring or minoring in theology.

Theology at Notre Dame

Last May, John C. Cavadini, Professor of Theology at Notre Dame since 1990, chair of the department 1997-2010, and director of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute on Church Life since 2000, wrote a thoughtful piece with six rules on the question of why Notre Dame’s Department of Theology is thriving (“Notre Dame Theology: 6 Easy Rules for Achieving a Top Ranking,” Church Life Journal, May 19, 2025). He bluntly writes that the first rule is “Don’t seek rankings. Don’t value rankings.” The second rule is “Seek truth, not rankings.” Here are some excerpts:

Our Department has a flourishing culture of undergraduate theology. [The students] are drawn by the encounter with mentors who show them the beauty and intellectual coherence of the faith and so also the beauty and coherence of the lives it invites us to lead…

These kinds of courses persuasively invite students to “take a second look,” as it were, at the faith of the Church, something they thought they had outgrown, left behind, or never paid much attention to in the first place. They release students from caricatured versions of the mysteries of the faith that they often unknowingly harbor, wholly unattractive banalities that they mistake, through no fault of their own, for what the Tradition actually teaches… They respond with gratitude for the gift of something they had been looking for but did not know they were looking for.

* * *

Courses [at other colleges] which take a pervasively deconstructive approach to the Tradition seem to tell students, there is nothing much here to take a second look at… Such courses deliver the message, intended or not, that there is no ideal, invitation, or meaning in revelation worth giving yourself to, no “pearl of great price” worth selling all that you have to buy it, or at least, worth minoring in, let alone majoring…

Conclusion

The Irish Rover reported last fall that student tour guides downplay the Catholic nature of Notre Dame (Lucy Spence and Clare DiFranco, “Notre Dame Admissions: Covering Up Catholicism?” Nov. 5, 2025). The guides do high school students and their parents a disservice when they badly answer questions about Catholicism and theology classes. The guides should be unembarrassed about stating the truth, namely, few incoming students plan on majoring in theology, maybe few expect much from the two required theology classes, but they find these classes so substantive, so deeply enriching, that they voluntarily seek to take more such courses and that 900 are majoring or minoring in theology and many others are taking more than the required two courses.

Professor Pagliarini says no other Catholic college in the United States has as great a percentage of its students studying theology. These students resoundingly agree with Cardinal Wojtyla’s 1977 words, “This is not a city of people who belong to no one… This is a city of the children of God…” and with the Polish people’s 1979 chant at Pope John Paul II’s first Mass in Poland: “We want God!”

Dear readers, this is shockingly good news coming out of Notre Dame. “Let us rejoice and be glad!” (Ps. 118:24)

[Links back to the previous parts are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.]