Only 12 of 32 teachers in the U. of Notre Dame history department are Catholics, and last year of three new hires only one was Catholic. In English, when Kevin Hart, editor of ND-based Religion and Literature, objected to a candidate as “incompatible” with Notre Dame’s “Catholic mission,” he was “roundly criticized” and later decamped for U. of Virginia.

Except for theology and the law school, things are so bad under the golden dome that history prof Fr, Wilson D. Miscamble, a member of the Holy Cross Fathers, who founded and run the place, wants a quota — two-thirds of all future appointments to be Catholics. It would be preferential hiring for fish-eaters. As things stand, you can be too Catholic for Notre Dame, says Miscamble in the latest America Magazine.

Miscamble has a history of emphasizing the C-word, having nailed the ND president, a Holy Cross priest like himself, in 2006 for allowing performance on campus of the supremely vulgar and morality-mocking “Vagina Monologues.” The president was bowing to “the convictions of certain senior Arts and Letters faculty that any restriction on this play would damage our academic ‘reputation’ — and especially among those ‘preferred peer schools’ whose regard we crave,” Miscamble said in a public letter to him.

Those preferred peer schools, yes. Oh Harvard, how wide your influence on these distant Lake Michigan shores or not far from them! Once there was “secularism” to be beaten long past death in commencement addresses. Lecterns were pounded coast to coast, from far east Fordham to far west Santa Clara, from St. Mary’s of Winona to Loyola of the South. Happy were those preachers of the familiar, deafening was the applause they received, intensely satisfied were those tuition-paying parents and even graduates and faculties.

It’s gone, it’s almost all gone, but for a few newer bastions of old-time Catholicism. Now we may ask, Where breathes there a commencement speaker with soul so dead who has not at the podium said, “I love diversity.”

And what else? “Students emerge from Catholic schools . . . unfamiliar with the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition and with their imaginations untouched by a religious sensibility,” says Miscamble in America. It’s that way all over, a condition “replicated in all the major Catholic universities.”

What to say about this strange phenomenon? First, any self-respecting atheist or other non-Catholic, if I may use such an exclusionary term, would have to be disappointed. He (or she) would have come to the Catholic school as an anthropological explorer if nothing else. Finding no Catholic riches would be a bummer.

Second, it’s not fair, darn it. If obvious Catholics can’t get work at Notre Dame, it’s a sorry pass we have reached. Consider one who couldn’t, Eamon Duffy (begorrah), currently ensconced at Cambridge-across-the-pond, a top-drawer Reformation specialist and former president of Magdalene College, which long ago, for what it’s worth, gave us the world-class diarist Samuel Pepys.

Duffy looked good to some at ND, but in the end, cited (or exposed) as a “Catholic apologist” in the objectors’ words, unable to “increase Notre Dame’s visibility among its secular peers” in Miscamble’s, he never got the nod. Too bad. He might have joined his Cambridge colleague Jill Mann, who in 2006 picked up a five-year assignment to teach every spring at South Bend, having happily announced, guess what, her atheism in a lecture about Chaucer.

No problem. Truth is what we make it, she said in the same speech, embracing (metaphorically and in his absence) immediate past U. of Illinois at Chicago dean Stanley Fish as her intellectual bedfellow, while warning of “dangerous people” in our midst who hold for absolute truth and claim to have it.

Now that’s not embarrassing talk if you have in mind those preferred peer schools. Rather, it probably recommended her as one-of-us for the ND English-department majority, who gave her the nod. It’s the sort of thing that leads Miscamble to suspect, not unreasonably, that “prestige trumps Catholic mission in the hiring process.”

What would Knute Rockne say?