This article by Matthew G. Alderman was published in the October 1, 2004 edition of Irish Rover, a conservative campus publication at the University of Notre Dame.

Forgotten Corners of Campus: Our Gallant Dead

St. Mary’s Lake and the woods ring our little cosmos here at Notre Dame like the circular bounds of a medieval mappamundi. When I stray beyond the lake path, I go into terra incognita, a domestic Hesperides, a Midwestern torrid zone. Even hugging the irregular, branch-choked coastline of the lake, I've passed into a different world. At night, when the sky is purple and the moon is a neon-white streak on the rippling dark waters, when the trees canopy us with their contorted capillary branches, you feel a sense of mystery and wonder straying into this dark forest equal parts Dante, Tim Burton and Grant Wood.

In the rich gold of late afternoon, our forested hinterland is no less beautiful. The sun strikes the leaves, white-hot. There is a rich interplay of striated light that falls in broad streaks in the depth of the woods, and the trees themselves now turn that early autumnal yellow more green than green. I pause on the path, and move up past the vast shed the art students use for their bizarre sculptures. A large finned tin monstrosity stands glinting placidly on the grass, looking like a cross between a Christmas tree ornament and Sputnik, while a circle of fire-engine red obelisks constructed out of industrial pipe border an empty lawn like an East German fairy ring. I’m lost. But I come round the corner, past an Emergency Call Station picturesquely garlanded with deep green (techno-Bacchic) and see it.

We find our departed forbearers everywhere at Notre Dame: Our Gallant Dead / In Glory Everlasting festoons the Basilica’s eastern portal, and relics wink out at you from behind glass tucked away in one of the faceted apsidal chapels beyond the altar. We live in dorms named after dead alumni, dead priests, dead friends of the University.

There are two cemeteries here at Notre Dame. Everyone’s been to Cedar Grove for a few moments of quiet. But there’s another graveyard here, the final resting place of a sizable and hidden chunk of Notre Dame history. It’s where the Congregation of Holy Cross places its holy dead. Today, the sun is strong and the dark silhouettes of the overarching trees are backlit by boughs transfixed translucently by the dying sun. The grass is newly mowed, thick and green like the stuff at the bottom of Easter baskets. And there, before me, beyond the low iron fence, stand rank upon rank of identical stone crosses marked with the anchors of hope, the sign of the Congregation.

Some of the names of the priests and brothers buried there are almost poignant—or comic—in their anonymity. Brother Felix of Valois. Brother Charles Borromeo. Brother Jarlath. Brother Casimir. Brother Ferdinand. Below their names in religion are the sobering, staccato dates of birth and death (1979, 1979, 1979 over and over again, I notice), and below that, for the brothers, anyway, half-overgrown by grass, is the name they left behind in the world when they entered the Order. You wander up and down the well-trimmed, deserted aisles, and more familiar names startle you. Father John Zahm. Father William Corby. Father Edward Sorin, the founder. You’re walking amid the people who made Notre Dame what it is today, whose names festoon the dorms and monuments that form part of the collegiate furniture of our minds. Our gallant dead. Our dead. Friends of the University. Our friends.

The word cemetery seems to cast the whole scene into gothick black and white, a word of stale air and dying embers. But here, in the Technicolor daylight and on the carpet of Seurat-green grass, you feel perfectly at home. In a park. On a picnic. Sunday in the park with Bill Corby. And there is ample room to picnic here among these worthies.

I once spent a morning in the excavated cemetary beneath St. Peter’s in Rome, a chill, humid warren of pagan and Christian, profane and sacred that smelled of spice, mildew and a strange ancient odor like instant coffee. Faded frescoes of Isis marked one tomb while a blazing mosaic of Christ riding in triumph through the heavens domed another tiny vault. The pagans called them necropoloi, cities of the dead, and Christians named them their cœmeteria, their dormitories until the end of the world. And both alike didn’t let their dead friends molder in anonymity, visiting their sleeping relatives, sometimes even picnicking on the flat roofs of their family tombs.

We call it morbid, coming out of a century full of death, and yet unwilling to understand it. The Christian knows that there is not much to understand. Death is simple, just as life is messy. It is only us the living who struggle as the souls of our beloved relatives fly up through Purgatory to heaven, all those fantastic terraces and spheres of the Divine Comedy, of Dante wandering in the hinterlands of his private cosmos that are the center of the universe.

Our Gallant Dead. Let’s not forget them, and feel unafraid to walk amid their berths in this grassy, golden cœmeterium just as our ancestors in long-ago Rome once did.