To all of our readers, supporters, and friends: Merry Christmastime from the entire staff of the Irish Rover!

The Rover staff poses for a group shot after a mailing session.
The Rover staff poses for a group shot after a mailing session.

The Rover enjoyed a very successful 2013. The undoubted highlight of our year was winning the Publication of the Year award from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute subsidiary, the Collegiate Network. The Rover beat out independent student publications from University of Virginia, Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Boston College, Princeton, and other universities, the independent newspapers at some of which have been in existence for decades. The Rover earned the award for the first time in just its 10th year, under the strong leadership of Editor-in-Chief Emeritus Bob Burkett (’13).

The cornerstone of my vision for the paper this year has been to develop the Irish Rover as a community at Notre Dame, in which students who ground themselves in their Catholic faith and conservative values can come together to enjoy friendship, fellowship, and the camaraderie and support so crucial to the success of any shared project. In my four years working with the paper, I have never been a part of such an invested, vigorous staff that is truly motivated by the vision that guides the Rover’s work. Our staff Christmas party, hosted at Lilia Draime’s festively-decorated apartment, drew more staff members than any Rover function I have ever attended. Our Thursday evening mailing sessions are genuinely enjoyable social events, and many of our editors and staff writers attend daily Mass together and share meals frequently.

Now in its 11th year, the Rover is more poised than ever to expand its role as a major campus actor at Notre Dame. The paper’s national appeal, as exemplified by the CN Publication of the Year award, is broader than ever, in large part through the myriad connections the paper enjoys through our wonderful faculty advisors and other supportive colleagues and readers.  For example, in January the Intercollegiate Review, the magazine of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, will be including a feature on the Rover‘s work at Notre Dame.

As the paper and its appeal grow and expand, new horizons of opportunity loom—opportunities for campus programming, staff formation, and journalistic improvement.

As you know, Notre Dame is not doing all that it can to catechize and form its students as Catholic leaders in the midst of a contemporary environment in which the wisdom of the Church—and a conservative posture towards the riches of the classical traditions, virtues, and habits whereby citizens and communities thrive—are increasingly attacked and demeaned. Either through fear of public or professorial backlash, a lack of interior conviction, or misguided pastoral ideals, the administration has been mute on too many controversial issues that are gripping the nation.

Very few administrative efforts are being made to combat the creeping consensus that marriage is simply the most meaningful, invested relationship shared between two adults. Next to nothing is being done to combat the plague of pornography that is shattering so many young men’s ability to treat women properly and to establish healthy relational expectations and interactions. The university’s obsession with emphasizing diversity and inclusion eclipses the efforts that it pours into affecting healthy social environments in the dormitories, as is evidenced by the university’s harrowing statistics on sexual assault and rape. The culture of careerism that infests the undergraduate population and the absence of an intentional cultivation of vocational discernment on the part of the university disorient student life and warp student priorities.

None of this is to say that wonderful efforts are not being made here to combat these ills. It is simply the case that these efforts are not administrative efforts, and don’t often receive administrative support. Instead, the task falls to particular groups, institutes, and networks to “fill in the gaps” in the education of the whole person that Notre Dame wishes to provide its students.

The Rover can play, and already is playing, a large role in filling those gaps—and not just through our reporting, either.

We are currently finalizing a program (along with the generous support of Notre Dame’s Tocqueville Program) that will be held in March, for which I’ve invited Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, Ron Belgau, and Jennifer Roback Morse to speak on a panel about the conjugal view of marriage, and why the law should enshrine this view.

When Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture invited Girgis and Anderson here in November to debate marriage with Charles Reid and Jody Bottum—the latter of whom ended up not being able to come due to illness—I looked around myself in McKenna’s auditorium and could count on two hands the number of fellow students who had elected to learn about the nature and gravity of the present marriage debate. Why more students of Our Lady’s University do not grasp the immediacy of the marriage debate, I do not know; I suspect, though, that Notre Dame’s refusal to make marriage an issue worth discussing on campus is partially responsible.

Also in March, the Rover is cosponsoring, along with the Institute for Church Life, a panel presentation on the myriad destructive effects of pornography, called “Dating and Pornography.”

The paper has also organized and is hosting the day-long 2014 John Paul II Catholic Leadership Summit, which will gather together more than a dozen of Notre Dame’s most committed Catholic faculty, along with 40 Catholic student-leaders, to discuss in what areas Our Lady’s University stands most in need of Catholic student leadership.

Finally, in April, the Rover will be cosponsoring a conference on marriage and the family in modern society. Other programming is underway as I write this letter.

Without the Rover’s proactivity and engagement in these areas, these topics would go largely unaddressed.

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The Rover needs the continued financial support of its readership in order to ensure that the paper can continue to grow in these and other ways. As an independent newspaper, the paper receives no funding from the university.

To that end, as the year winds to a close, I ask that you consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Irish Rover for the coming academic year. We hope to raise $3,000 to support the above and following endeavors:

A) Increasingly facilitate the Rover’s ability to financially contribute to, sponsor, and cosponsor campus events and programming, such as invited speakers, panels, joint efforts with other campus clubs, and so forth.

B) Contribute to editors’ attendance of conferences and enrichment opportunities that will help make those editors better Catholic, conservative leaders at Notre Dame. For example, the Rover helped fund my and my brother Tim’s trip to San Diego this summer to attend a conference on marriage and the family hosted by the Ruth Institute. That experience was life-changing for me, and neither Tim nor I would have been able to attend were if not for the Rover.

C) Organize and host more staff events, such as journalism workshops, meals shared with our faculty advisors, special Masses celebrated for the Rover community, and so forth.

The Rover is a 501c(3) entity, and any donations you make are tax-deductible. You can find donation information here.

Many readers have been kind and generous supporters of the Rover’s work in the past, and I write this letter in full gratitude for your contributions. With the help of any donation you are able to make, the Rover will continue to flourish and affect change for the better at Our Lady’s University, which sits so perilously atop the ledge of effective secularization.

May God bless you in the new year. Thank you for supporting the work of the Irish Rover.

Very sincerely,

Michael Bradley

Editor-in-Chief