The passing of Coach Lou Holtz, the leader of the last team to win a national football championship at Notre Dame, will continue to reverberate for a good while. The most important reason for that is not the resurrection of a national title for Notre Dame under his leadership but for his enduring character, his building of character in the men he led, and the way, as Father Wilson Miscamble details in his column in memoriam at First Things, his witness grew stronger as he aged and spoke to audiences of all kinds across the United States. Lou Holtz’s directness and toughness were paired with a rare gentility, rooted in his recognition that the Catholic faith itself is grounded in the love of a mother whose Son’s loss in this world was the road to victory over death for His children.

I was fortunate in my youth to attend Notre Dame, along with five of my siblings, four brothers and two sisters, spanning the era from Ara Parseghian to Holtz’s arrival there in 1986. We were fortunate to have visited the University even earlier as children. My cousin, Joe King, played for the Irish in one of its less-successful eras. Memories are hazy except for a stay overnight to attend the spring game, where a mess of us jammed into a motel room near South Bend, one of those roadside affairs with a single story and outside entrances. Our parents, Jim and Mary Donovan, and our extended family of Caseys and Donovans, needed little push to seek admission to Notre Dame and to steer our course there. I remember only too vividly the shock I unintentionally inflicted on my great high school English teacher, the Oxford-educated Jesuit Fr. Tom Savage, when I told him that I had decided to forgo attending an Ivy League college and enroll under the Golden Dome.

He shook his head, and I didn’t try to explain. It was impossible to set forth what Notre Dame meant to our family. It was an ethos that had its basis in a sense of overcoming, in the words of the fight song we had ringing in our ears from our days in bassinets, of winning over all “what though the odds be great or small.” It was only marginally about sports, even with our high school basketball hero Bob Arnzen going to Notre Dame, our cousin making the squad, our Saturdays listening on the radio as John Huarte nearly took the Irish to an undefeated season, watching a tie game in 1966 still considered one of the greatest ever played, hearing the names of player after player too long to list. No, it was about the summum bonum, the answer to the question, “What is all this for?” and Notre Dame’s answer to that question (no matter how imperfectly embodied in any human institution) — the same answer the Sisters of Mercy gave us at our parish school teeming with a thousand boys and girls — to “know, love and serve God on Earth, and be happy with Him in Heaven.”

Lou Holtz believed this too and spent his latter years not merely expounding it but exemplifying it. I met Coach only once. It is almost too neat a story to be true. From 1981 to the end of his presidency, I was a writer for President Ronald Reagan in his correspondence shop. It was a busy place, and it probably sounds glamorous, and there were days when it was. But our first-floor offices in the Old Executive Office Building were anything but — the view out our tall windows offered a vista of an interior courtyard of the massive gray building populated by, well, dumpsters and more than a few rats. We didn’t gaze out the window much, which is just as well because we had 8,000,000 letters and thousands of requests for messages to reply to each year. There was no extra time for rodent watching. Not surprisingly, a good portion of those letters and messages were about Notre Dame subject matter because of President Reagan’s most famous movie role, as George Gipp in “Knute Rockne: All American.”

As a graduate of the school, I was tasked with oversight of most of these communications to check them for accuracy and accord with the spirit of Notre Dame. That was a tremendous honor, but the way the Reagan era came to an end was on another level. On January 2, 1989, the No. 1-ranked Irish beat West Virginia and the great Major Harris in the Fiesta Bowl to secure what would prove to be their last national title for a long while. As he was wont to do, and with all his ties to Notre Dame back in his Warner Brothers days and as president, Reagan invited the Fighting Irish to celebrate their championship in the Rose Garden.

On January 18, just two days before he left office, RR greeted Coach Holtz, the Notre Dame team, and the school president Fr. Monk Malloy. I remember a sunny day and shaking Holtz’s hand as he stood alongside the Irish quarterback Tony Rice. I have to admit, it made me a schoolboy again. I blurted to Rice that I thought he was the best player on the best team in the land and should have been given the Heisman Trophy. He just smiled. I think Coach Holtz lifted one eyebrow and bit his tongue.

It was more than a fitting ending for the Reagan years, a confluence of two of Reagan’s leading roles. Knowing the Rose Garden had limited space for the ceremony, I had lobbied the West Wing so that my parents could attend as well. Jim and Mary came up from Cincinnati that day. It made all the sense in their world. They had scrimped and sacrificed from their middle-class earnings for decades so that six of their 10 children could attend Notre Dame. They were as stunned as anyone when the event unfolded, and President Malloy presented Reagan with what might have been the University’s most prized artifact of its fabled gridiron history, George Gipp’s letter sweater. Not a replica, the jersey itself. Reagan seemed taken aback. Somehow it was both stunning and fitting.

Two days later, my parents and I went to Andrews Air Force Base to witness President Reagan’s departure for California. It was another emotional day. Maybe the best phrase for it was the one in the title of the Rockne biopic — it was all American. For Reagan, then 77 years old, it was a time for fading from the public light. For Holtz, it was a high peak in a mountain range that would extend for decades more. It was only later that I learned of another commitment the two men shared. President Reagan was a champion for the sanctity of human life. He spoke and wrote with both passion and compassion for the unborn and women facing an unexpected pregnancy. In his “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation,” he described the need for pregnancy help centers to support women and families.

“As we continue to work to overturn Roe v. Wade, we must also continue to lay the groundwork for a society in which abortion is not the accepted answer to unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life people have already taken heroic steps, often at great personal sacrifice, to provide for unwed mothers.”

Reagan went on after his presidency to urge that more be done and expressed regret that the fall of Roe did not happen as he had hoped.

Coach Holtz upheld the right to life as well. Nine Aprils ago, he addressed an audience of 1,700 pro-lifers at the annual banquet of Southwest Indiana Right to Life in Evansville. He sent his prototypical volley cheer on high for unborn babies:

“The father has no say, has no vote. And the baby has no vote, and that's why we’re here! We are the vote for the baby. We’ve got to be the voice for the unborn — or nobody else will. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t talk about pro-life; live it. Be proud of it. Understand, what we’re doing is so critical.”

Another longtime admirer notes how, as he coached at Notre Dame, Holtz was a huge supporter of the Women’s Care Center in South Bend, Indiana, “a pregnancy and family resource center that started in a little blue house in South Bend & is now the nation’s largest center.” That center has now grown into a multi-state network of love and service with nearly 40 centers in a dozen states.

Today, Roe v. Wade has been upended, and several referenda on life have not gone well. Odds for protection for unborn babies sometimes feel small. That is why it is more critical than ever to appreciate the leadership of people like Lou Holtz, born in the tiny town of Follansbee, West Virginia (population 2,853 in 2020), rising to the top of collegiate football, never forgetting where he came from or where he, like all of us, was headed. Half the size of most of his players, he was larger than life.

Notre Dame has announced a series of services on March 15 and 16 to honor and remember him, including the livestreaming of his funeral Mass at 1 p.m. ET this Monday, followed by a procession and interment at Cedar Grove Cemetery on the Notre Dame campus. All will take place in the glow of the Golden Dome, which shimmers at the feet of the Lady who did indeed care about all the victories Lou Holtz earned in her name.