Notre Dame of Maryland University Our Lady's Mission Unit records

Our Lady’s Mission Unit (OLM) was organized at Notre Dame of Maryland as a unit of the Catholic Students Mission Crusade (CSMC) on May 16, 1919. CSMC itself had been established a year earlier. According to The New Catholic Encyclopedia, “two parallel themes permeated the organization: imagery surrounding the medieval crusaders and the promotion of missions at home and abroad.” According to minutes of the Notre Dame unit, OLM was initially called “The Mission Society of Notre Dame of Maryland;" beginning in 1932 they were simply referred to as “the Notre Dame unit of the [CSMC].” The first use of the name “Our Lady’s Mission” occurred on October 11, 1935 in its minutes. OLM’s undated constitution sets out these objectives: “to promote the interests of Home and Foreign Missions through Prayer, Study and Sacrifice, in conjunction with the [CSMC] and the Archdiocesan Students’ Mission Unit; to promote personal devotion to the Sacred Heart, in accordance with our motto, ‘the whole world for the Sacred Heart; the Sacred Heart for all the world, by the annual consecration of the Student Body and by fostering Night Adoration and Enthronement of the Sacred Heart in the home.”

Activities in OLM’s early years included participation in Crusade rallies and conventions; collecting medical supplies to send to the Catholic Medical Mission Center; a “Field Mass and Rally” on the campus; an essay contest and lecture series; an annual dance; a 1946 “Drive for Brittany” that involved sending clothing, food, medical supplies, and other articles to aid war victims; a ceremony in which “faculty and students rededicated themselves to the Sacred Heart”; and Christmas parties for underprivileged children.

By the early 1960s the conventions, rallies, masses and references to the Sacred Heart disappeared; and the group’s activities do not seem as focused on missions. According to articles in the Columns, OLM’s activities included an “International Square Dance”; sponsorship of volunteers to travel to southern states to “do catechetical work and camp counseling;" a leadership seminar for international students; and selling flowers and lemon sticks at a campus Flower Mart. Columns also referred to OLM as the “Missions Club.”

Exactly when OLM ceased to exist cannot be determined, but the termination of CSMC, as recounted in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, at least marks OLM’s outer limit: “the [CSMC] closed its national doors in 1972. New understandings of mission which surfaced at the Second Vatican Council, the demise of crusade themes and medieval imagery, a plethora of liturgical and catechetical developments following the Council, and social and political issues of the 1970s directed the attention of U.S. Catholic youth elsewhere.”