Father John Zahm, C.S.C. (1851-1921)

Born in Ohio, the descendant of General Edward Braddock of French and Indian War fame, John Augustine Zahm joined the Holuy Cross fathers after graduating from Notre Dame and was ordained a priest in 1875. From 1898 to 1906 he was provincial of the congregation. He authored several books on science and religion, as well as his scientific travels. He was an enthusiastic student of Dante student and assembled at Notre Dame one of the three largest of the Dante libraries in America. Zahm befriended 26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, who also loved and read Dante in Italian. It was Father Zahm who talked President Roosevelt into participating in what came to be known as the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition to South America in 1913, which turned into a near disaster and almost killed Roosevelt. Throughout his life Zahm collected maps, photographs, relics, and curios pertaining to South America. In 1896, he published a book entitled Evolution and Dogma, arguing that Church teaching, the Bible, and evolution did not conflict. Within two years, it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books and Zahm was forced to recant its publication. This crisis at the University of Notre Dame was among the factors occasioning Pope Leo XIII‘s condemnation of the heresy of Americanism. Zahm planned a book on historical and archaeological study of the Holy Land, but died of bronchial pneumonia in a Munich hospital on route to the Middle East.
(From Wikipedia)