Touchdown Jesus Faith And Fandom at Notre Dame

Chapter One: Game Day A congregation of about fifty people stood in a semicircle, three and four people deep, trying to pay attention to an elderly priest murmuring important words. Draped in a white alb, a white stole around his neck, he was celebrating a Mass, and he worked off a card table unfolded in front of him. A chalice stood on the table, and he faced the tailgate of an SUV.It might have been difficult for the parishioners to hear the priest with any clarity, given their immediate surroundings -- a parking lot mostly full, boys chucking a football, men and women clustered in groups with beers inside beer cozies inside their hands, the "Victory March" playing from someone's car stereo, shouts and whoops from those of undergraduate age milling about nearby. Smoke rose from portable Weber charcoal grills and portable Coleman propane grills -- the air like some kind of briquette incense. The members of this congregation could in no way be distinguished from those of the secular tailgates. Everyone wore T-shirts of green and blue and yellow-gold, bearing leprechauns and interlocking N's and D's and the words Fighting Irish. Less than two hundred yards to the northeast rose the dish of Notre Dame Stadium. It blocked from view the spire of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the Mother Church of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious community that had founded the university. Had the priests of Notre Dame known about the site of this particular Mass -- "It's an inappropriate place at an inappropriate time," one of them said later -- they would not have given their approval.A Notre Dame alumnus of the 1970s, now a Notre Dame employee, witnessed the scene while working his way through the lots on his way to a somewhat less ritualized tailgate. Thirty years in and around the university, and he'd never seen anything like it. He did a double take; at first he couldn't quite believe what he caught sight of. Too concisely did it seem to establish the milieu, here at a place where religion and sport are so famously entwined. He likened the gathering to a hedge Mass, those Reformation-era services conducted in the fields of Ireland by priests whose churches had been torched by the English.The parishioners had likely arrived on campus from somewhere far afield -- from eastern Pennsylvania or northern Ohio or western New York or northern New Jersey, regions traditionally dense with Notre Dame fans. Doubtless the communion hosts had come from the local parish, as had the priest, who was probably a fan like the rest of them, and the local parish may very well have organized the trip, probably in a rented bus or two, the universal method for gathering all the Irish fans in a particular community and hauling them to campus. They had reached their pilgrimage destination, and they were sealing the deal with a sacrament -- the hosts consecrated on the grounds of Notre Dame, or close to them anyway, on pavement and within eyeshot.Unperturbed by the commotion around him, the priest at the tailgate read from the Gospel according to Luke. He might have read from the Sunday missal, he might have read from the Saturday, and if the latter, he said, "But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house."This was the home opener, the biggest home game of the year, versus the University of Michigan, September 11, 2004. Despite the date, the weather made the day jovial -- a few high cirrus clouds at the corners of the earth like hair on an old man's head, still summertime, leaves green, people in T-shirts, coeds in tank tops, everyone in sunglasses, eighty-four degrees in northern Indiana. Around the campus and in the parking lots and on the peripheral streets of South Bend, somewhere near a hundred thousand people wereEden, Scott is the author of 'Touchdown Jesus Faith And Fandom at Notre Dame', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743281652 and ISBN 0743281659.