In Praise of Notre Dame’s John Cavadini

Who is Notre Dame’s MVP? I don’t mean the Most Valuable Player on the football team. I mean the Most Valuable Professor on the faculty.  If there is any justice on earth, John Cavadini deserves that honor. At a time when many complain of poor university teachers and defections from Catholic truth, he has excelled not just for one season, but for over thirty years. More than any single person during that period, he has preserved and transformed Notre Dame and the Church for the better.

Cavadini earned his Ph.D. in 1988 from Yale University. As a grad student, he rose before dawn to work as a garbage collector to support his growing family. It happened that one day, one of his Yale professors spoke to him amidst a group of other Yale professors and grad students: “John, you do fantastic work.” Waiting to hear praise about his insight into Augustine or his exegesis of Origen, John heard the professor continue, “You always put the lids on the cans and return the cans right where they go.”

Indeed, the other garbage collectors also recognized his talent and elected him the president of their union. As they used to say, “Business is picking up.”

In 1990, he joined the Notre Dame Department of Theology and retired from collecting garbage (mostly). I met John in his class on ancient Christianity in the Fall of 1992 and again for a class on Augustine of Hippo. When speaking in class to his students, he called us “friends,” and he meant it. Like an older and wiser friend, he mentored us, challenged us, and nurtured us. He invited our entire class of more than 20 students to his house to share an Italian dinner and meet his wife Nancy and his seven children.

But I didn’t know then, nobody knew then, how important John Cavadini would become not just to his students, but to the Department of Theology, to the University of Notre Dame, and to the wider Church.

In 1997, he was appointed chair of the Department of Theology, the first chair who was not an ordained priest.  At this time, the overwhelming majority of Notre Dame’s theology faculty wanted to relax, abolish, or paint over in beige what is distinctive, weird, and challenging about Catholicism.

These faculty thought they would fulfill the “spirit of the Council” by pushing the Church of Rome to become like the Church of England. In academia, few things are more difficult than changing the orientation of a large department full of tenured professors. The professors determine who is hired, and they almost always want to hire scholars who think in similar ways to themselves.

But as chair, from 1997 to 2010, John hired experts in Newman, von Balthasar, Ratzinger, Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Cavadini advocated for an intellectually rigorous, historically informed, and vibrant Catholicism. Despite all odds, he transformed the department.

The nourishing fruits of these changes have been astounding.  By contrast with the theology departments at other Catholic universities which are in crisis – with few majors and minors – the theology department at Notre Dame has 306 majors and 585 minors, a full 10 percent of the student body. They have hit record highs for ten straight years. Unlike departments that have changed in reality from Catholic theology to secular religious studies, the Notre Dame Department of Theology is actually a department of theology.

This strengthening in faith has happened with a corresponding increase in reputation. The Notre Dame theology department is currently ranked number one in the world, ahead of Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, and Yale. If you are interested in the question, “How can a Department of Theology achieve top rankings given the dominant intellectual trends that are ranged against it?” you can read Cavadini’s “6 Easy Rules for Achieving a Top Ranking.”

The transformation of the Notre Dame theology department alone is enough to merit MVP status for Cavadini.

But in 2000, Cavadini also became Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life. When he became director, the Institute had just a single room, one administrative assistant, and no endowment. After more than a quarter century with John as director, the McGrath Institute has a building with a floor of its own, 56 faculty and staff, and a multimillion-dollar endowment.

The McGrath Institute for Church Life forms faithful Catholic leaders by 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 just love him. And why not?  He gives each of them a Christmas present and has them all over to his house for a Fourth of July celebration. He loves them.

In 2015, Cavadini also successfully fought a proposed core curriculum change that would have reduced the undergraduate theology requirement from two courses to one. As a result, undergraduates now have twice as many opportunities to discover or take a second look at the beauty and richness of the Catholic tradition. The requirement of two theology courses is surely part of the reason why a record number of students at Notre Dame entered the Church at the Easter vigil this year.

All these positive transformations are driven by who Cavadini is: a man of faithful prayer. At his gym, Cavadini noticed a high school student, and John started praying for him. But they never spoke.  After praying for him for a couple of years, the student walked up to Cavadini and asked him to be his sponsor when he entered the Church. That was their first conversation!

Someone once said that you could tell a real saint even by how she climbs a tree. Perhaps you can also tell a real saint by how he pumps iron.