On Saturday, March 15, 2025, our 6th, 7th and 8th grade students traded their usual Saturday classroom for a day at the University of Notre Dame, following in the footsteps of the great Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović.
Meštrović joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1955 as sculptor in residence and worked there until his death in 1962. His works can still be found all across the campus, which makes it a wonderful classroom for our older students. This field trip is a Hrvatska škola tradition, offered to our upper grades every two years.
After the bus ride from St. Jerome to South Bend, the group began at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, home to two of Meštrović’s sculptures. After lunch at South Dining Hall, the students walked to O’Shaughnessy Hall and the Lewis Hall courtyard to see more of his work, and finished the day at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, whose collection holds more than 500 of his sculptures and drawings.
The students were accompanied by our principal, teachers and parent chaperones.
Thank you to everyone who planned this day and to the parents who made it possible. Most of all, thank you to our students for their curiosity as they discovered a piece of Croatian heritage right here in the Midwest. Hvala!
