By Christopher Kaczor
Who is the MVP of Notre Dame? I am not referring to the Most Valuable Player on the football team, but to the Most Valuable Professor on the faculty. If there is any justice in this world, John Cavadini deserves that honor. In an age filled with complaints about poor university teachers and defections from Catholic truth, he has stood out not just for a single season, but for more than thirty years. More than anyone else during that period, he has preserved and transformed Notre Dame and the Church for the better.
Cavadini earned his doctorate from Yale University in 1988. While a graduate student, he rose before dawn to work as a garbage collector to support his growing family. One day, one of his Yale professors approached him in the midst of a group of other faculty and graduate students: “John, you do a fantastic job.” Expecting to hear praise for his insight on St. Augustine or his exegesis of Origen, John heard the professor continue: “You always put the lids back on the trash cans and leave them exactly where they belong.”
In fact, the other garbage collectors also recognized his talent and elected him president of their union. As they used to say, “the business is picking up.”
In 1990 he joined the Department of Theology at Notre Dame and retired (for the most part) from garbage collection. I met John in his class on early Christianity in the fall of 1992 and, later, in a course on St. Augustine of Hippo. When addressing his students in class, he called us “friends,” and he meant it from the heart. Like an older and wiser friend, he guided us, challenged us, and formed us. He invited our entire class—more than twenty students—to his home to share an Italian dinner and introduce us to his wife, Nancy, and their seven children.
But at that time I did not know—nor did anyone else—how important John Cavadini would become not only to his students, but to the Department of Theology, to the University of Notre Dame, and to the universal Church.
In 1997 he was appointed chair of the Department of Theology, the first layperson to hold that position. At that time, the overwhelming majority of the theology faculty at Notre Dame wanted to soften, abolish, or paint a neutral color over everything that makes Catholicism distinctive, peculiar, and challenging.
These professors believed they were fulfilling the “spirit of the Council” by pushing the Church of Rome to resemble the Church of England. In academia, few things are more difficult than changing the direction of a large department filled with tenured faculty. They determine the hiring, and almost always seek to bring in scholars who think similarly to themselves.
Yet, as chair from 1997 to 2010, John hired specialists in Newman, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, St. Irenaeus, St. Ignatius of Antioch, and St. Gregory Nazianzen. Cavadini bet on a rigorously intellectual, historically grounded, and vibrant Catholicism. Against all odds, he transformed the department.
The nourishing fruits of these changes have been astonishing. Unlike theology departments at other Catholic universities that are in crisis—with very few undergraduate majors and minors—the Department of Theology at Notre Dame has 306 regular majors and 585 minors, representing no less than 10% of the total student body. They have set record highs for ten consecutive years. Unlike those departments that have effectively shifted from Catholic theology to secular religious studies, Notre Dame’s is truly an authentic department of theology.
This strengthening in faith was accompanied by a corresponding rise in prestige. The Department of Theology at Notre Dame currently ranks first in the world, ahead of Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, and Yale. For those interested in the question “How can a theology department reach the top ranks given the prevailing intellectual winds against it?”, Cavadini’s “6 Easy Rules for Achieving a Top Ranking” is worth reading.
The transformation of the Department of Theology at Notre Dame alone would be enough to make Cavadini worthy of MVP status.
But in 2000, Cavadini also assumed the directorship of the McGrath Institute for Church Life. At the time of his appointment, the institute had only a single room, one administrative assistant, and no endowment. After more than a quarter-century under John’s leadership, the McGrath Institute now has its own building, a faculty and administrative staff of 56 people, and a multi-million-dollar endowment.
The McGrath Institute for Church Life forms faithful Catholic leaders through its Echo program, online courses, conferences, service-learning, retreats, lectures, and the Church Life Journal. Like his students, those who work at the McGrath Institute simply adore him. And why wouldn’t they? He gives each of them a Christmas gift and invites everyone to his home to celebrate the Fourth of July. He truly loves them.
In 2015, Cavadini also successfully fought a proposed reform of the core curriculum that sought to reduce the theology requirement for undergraduates from two courses to one. Thanks to this, students now have twice the opportunity to discover or rediscover the beauty and richness of the Catholic tradition. The requirement of two theology courses is undoubtedly part of the reason why a record number of students at Notre Dame were received into the Church during this year’s Easter Vigil.
All these positive transformations are driven by what Cavadini is at his core: a man of faithful prayer. At his gym, Cavadini saw a high school student and began to pray for him. They had never spoken. After praying for him for a couple of years, the young man approached Cavadini and asked him to be his sponsor as he entered the Church. That was their first conversation!
Someone once said that you can recognize a true saint even by the way he climbs a tree. Perhaps you can also recognize a true saint by the way he lifts weights.
About the Author
Dr. Christopher Kaczor is president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, and co-author, with Matthew Petrusek, of Is Belief Believable?: Reasoning About God from Plato and Aquinas to C. S. Lewis and Jordan Peterson. Kaczor was awarded a von Humboldt Fellowship, is a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, and the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. He can be found on X at @Prof_Kaczor.