Land O'Lakes Statement

Issued September 1, 1910, by Pope St. Pius X, required of all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries of the Catholic Church from 1910 until 1967 when the Land O'Lakes Statement was issued.

​Titular name Land O’Lakes Statement
Official Title The Catholic University: A True University with Distinctive Characteristics, Statement on the Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University
Issued at University of Notre Dame, Wisconsin property

1
The Catholic University today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities as for all universities.

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Father Hesburgh of the University of Notre Dame led the group.

“Some of the signers were especially notable: Archbishop Paul Hallinan of Atlanta, Father Theodore McCarrick (then president of the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico and later Archbishop of Washington) and Father Vincent O’Keefe, S.J. (later Vicar General of the Society of Jesus).

“Also intriguing is the signature by John Cogley, a leftist scholar representing the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...He had been religion editor of the New York Times and a principal writer of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech advocating the separation of church and state. He later dissented from Humanae Vitae and became an Episcopalian….”

https://www.ncregister.com/blog/the-land-o-lakes-statement-has-caused-devastation-for-49-years#:~:text=It%20was%2049%20years%20ago,to%20the%20academic%20community%20itself.%E2%80%9D

My dad was a big fan of Notre Dame football. If he had known what was going on behind closed doors, loyalty might have tanked. The same tactic occurred with the inauguration of the New Mass in 1969. No one knew, and tenability was lost. Many Catholics are too lazy and complacent to research any of this, but at the time many knew instinctively that something was wrong and left the Church.