Chilean Crucifix
This wooden crucifix by an unknown Chilean artist features a bronze-toned corpus with a gold robe, a gold halo, and blue stone details. It belonged to Fr. William (Bill) Lewers, C.S.C., the Holy Cross provincial in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted between 1973 and 1990. Fr. Lewers was legendary for his opposition to the regime and was eventually expelled from Chile for it. He did not leave the country empty-handed, however. He successfully smuggled out microfilm copies of hundreds of thousands of pages of records from the Catholic Church’s Vicaria de la Solidaridad, which documented human rights abuses that took place after the coup. The microfiche is now stored in Notre Dame’s Kresge Law Library.
In 1983, Fr. Lewers was appointed as Director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for the United States Catholic Conference. In 1988, he joined the Law School faculty, where he started Notre Dame’s LL.M. and J.S.D. programs in human rights. He also served as a member of Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees, as director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights (now the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights), and as a fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Fr. Lewers died of cancer in April of 1997.
Notre Dame Law School Professor Paolo Carozza, who deeply admired Fr. Lewers, received this crucifix from Emerita Professor of Law and former Notre Dame Law School Dean Patricia O’Hara upon her retirement. In 2023, he donated it to the Crucifix Initiative so it could be shared with the campus community.