The Most Rev. John William Shaw became the Eighth Archbishop of New Orleans in 1918. Born to Irish immigrants in Mobile, Alabama, in 1863, Shaw was sent to Rome for priestly formation. While he was gone, his father died. He never forgot reading the letter informing him of the funeral long after traveling the slow route across the ocean by ship. Years later, as Archbishop, he promised himself that local vocations would never again have to goso far from home for their training.

In 1921, Shaw inspired eleven thousand volunteers to conduct a door-to-door fund-raiser, which brought $1,217 824.84; his plan was to use half for construction and the other half for an endowment.

Shaw recruited the Society of Mary, a French religious community founded in France in 1836, to oversee the projected seminary. They provided the faculty and all rectors for forty-four years to 1967, and individual members remained on the faculty/staff into the 1990s.

Shaw invited the Sisters of the Holy Family, an African American religious community founded in New Orleans in 1842, to care for the facility, which they did until 1982.

Dedicated to Our Lady, Notre Dame Seminary opened on 18 September 1923, with twenty-seven men from three dioceses registered for the first day of classes.

Notre Dame’s first priests were four men ordained on 14 July 1924: the Revs. Felix Ferdinand Miller and Edward C. Prendergast for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, and Revs. Lawrence M. Foumet and Maurice J. Bourgeois for the Diocese of Lafayette.

​Our founder constructed the archbishop’s residence next to the first seminary building in 1926. He died there on All Souls Day, 1934, leaving his entire estate to NDS.

The Most Rev. Joseph Francis Rummel, S.T.D., became the Ninth Archbishop of New Orleans in 1935, serving until his death in 1964.

​Centered around the seminary’s Silver Jubilee in 1948, Rummel added a convent on the campus for the Holy Family Sisters (1936), a Grotto to honor Our Lady of Lourdes (1943), twelve stained-glass windows in the seminary chapel, the Oratorio of the Immaculate Conception (1948), and a new building, St. Joseph Hall (1954), which a included a chapel, a large auditorium, a library, and two floors of residence rooms.

​On 22 November 1952, the Von Trapp Family of the Sound of Music fame visited Notre Dame and sang in that auditorium for Rummel’s silver episcopal and golden sacerdotal jubilees.

​Notre Dame Seminary received authorization to confer degrees in the Silver Jubilee Year on 25 June 1948 by Act 136, Bill No. 832, of the Louisiana State Legislature, and, beginning in 1950, has been part of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (S.A.C.S.)

​Rummel integrated Notre Dame Seminary in 1949, fifteen years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For this, and his other public stands for racial justice, the Ku Klux Klan desecrated and burned an eight-foot-tall cross in front of his house on the seminary campus (17 May 1956).

The Most Rev. John Patrick Cody became the Tenth Archbishop of New Orleans upon Rummel’s death in 1964, after having served as coadjutor since 1961 owing to Rummel’s glaucoma-induced blindness.

​In 1964, Cody added a swimming pool behind Shaw Hall, the original seminary building.

​In the same year, 1964, he completely reordered priestly formation from its then European-inspired six years of minor seminary at St. Joseph Seminary on the Northshore, followed by six years of major seminary at NDS, to align with the American practice of 4-4-4.

This meant founding a new high school seminary, St. John Vianney, which Cody did the same year, along with turning St. Joseph into a four-year college and NDS into a four-year theologate.

Meanwhile, Cody attended the annual sessions of Vatican II, which had been meeting from September to December since 1962. During the final session in 1965, Cody was informed that he was being transferred to be Archbishop (later Cardinal in 1967) of Chicago.

The Most Rev. Philip Matthew Hannan learned of his appointment as Eleventh Archbishop of New Orleans (1965-1988) during the final session of Vatican II, which he attended as Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, D.C. Planning to finish the session before taking up his new duties, he received permission to leave early after New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Betsy in the course of passing over the region on September 9 and 10, 1965.

​Hannan led the rebuilding of the many Catholic institutions damaged in the storm, including NDS. He then implemented Vatican II at NDS and in the archdiocese, including requiring the seminarians to have experience working in poor urban neighborhoods, to have female professors, to experience non-Catholics on the faculty, and to fulfill a foreign missionary experience.

​Hannan invited the Pope, now Saint John Paul II, to visit New Orleans. This took place from September 11 to 13, 1987. The Holy Father stayed in the archbishop’s residence built by Shaw next to the first Notre Dame Seminary building.

The Most Rev. Francis Bible Schulte was installed as Tthe welfth Archbishop of New Orleans on 14 February 1989, after Hannan’s retirement.

​As the church approached the millennium, NDS opened the academic year 1999 with 152 seminarians for the first time in its history and honored its largest to-date ordination class of thirty-five in May of 2001.

​Archbishop Schulte presided over the bicentennial of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (1793 to 1993), the seventieth anniversary of NDS (1993), and opened the Holy Door of St. Louis Cathedral for the turning of the millennium in the Holy Year 2000.

​Eleven months prior to the retirement of Archbishop Schulte, he received a coadjutor-archbishop, meaning his designated successor: the Most Rev. Alfred Hughes. Hughes was appointed on 16 February 2001 and succeeded as Thirteenth Archbishop of New Orleans upon Archbishop Schulte’s retirement on 3 January 2002; he served until his retirement on 12 June 2009.

​To Archbishop Hughes fell the task of rebuilding after the worst affliction to strike New Orleans since the fire of 1788, Hurricane Katrina, which, on 29 August 2005destroyed most of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama: 1,844 killed, 706 were missing. The City of New Orleans, including NDS, was completely flooded.

​When the water drained, the NDS campus was used as a military base during the rest of the calendar year 2005.

​Accepting the generous offer of help and hospitality from Abbot Justin Brown, O.S.B., in October of 2005, NDS faculty and seminarians resumed the semester on the campus of the Benedictine Abbey and College Seminary of St. Joseph (colloquially “St. Ben’s”) in Covington, LA. In January of 2006, classes resumed on the NDS campus.

Archbishop Hughes retired on 12 June 2009, and took up residence in NDS, where he has taught Spiritual Theology and served as a Spiritual Director to the seminary community.

On 20 August 2009, the Most Rev. Gregory M. Aymond was installed as the fourteenth Archbishop of New Orleans. He is the first NDS alumnus (NDS 1975) to return as Archbishop of New Orleans and the first man born in New Orleans to serve as Archbishop. He previously served as the thirteenth rector of NDS from 1986 to 2000, then Bishop of Austin, Texas, until returning home.

​With so many close associations, it is fitting that the centennial of NDS (2023) fell during his tenure as Archbishop and Chancellor of the Seminary.

​With the Archbishop fully supporting the initiative of NDS’s seventeenth rector, the Very Rev. Joshua J. Rodrigue, S.T.L., NDS has completed its first century with remarkable transitions.

​In 2022, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgated the new Program of Priestly Formation (PPF), 6th edition, which stipulated adding a new phase to priestly formation, a Propaedeutic Stage of Formation, analogous to a religious order’s novitiate, for one year prior to starting classes at the seminary. This is done in the former convent of the Holy Family Sisters on the NDS campus.

On Saturday, 16 September 2023, Archbishop Aymond presided over the seminary centennial Mass at St. Louis Cathedral.

The centennial academic year of 2023 began with 135 seminarians, plus fourteen in the new Propaedeutic Stage, sponsored by twenty-three dioceses and three Religious Orders.

The seminary Chapel of the Immaculate Conception has been completely renovated: incorporating beautiful woodwork to the lower portion of our chapel walls, making improvements to the air and heating system, installing a new audio/video system, repainting the interior to include six ceiling murals of scenes associated with the Blessed Mother and Christ, seventeen murals over the windows of holy men and women connected with priesthood and priestly formation, twelve hand-carved statues of eleven Apostles with St. Paul, a new wooden ambo, and a new marble altar.

The rededication of the chapel took place on 15 October 2024, with Archbishop Aymond presiding.

We offer thanks to all who have worked and sacrificed to keep NDS in service for its first century, at the same time we pray for wisdom and strength as we move into the second.

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, hasten to help us.