How Pope Leo has brought Villanova University closer to the Vatican
It’s the only American university with an alumnus pope.
ROME — The Rev. Peter M. Donohue, Villanova University’s president, emailed his former classmate and friend last May, congratulating him on the one-year anniversary of his new position.
“It has been quite a year,” Donohue wrote to his fellow Villanova alum.
His friend — Pope Leo XIV — responded: “It has certainly been a whirlwind... God is good.”
Since Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, became pope in May 2025, Villanova University has been in a major spotlight as the only U.S. college with an alumnus pope — a distinction it’s likely to keep for many generations. The pope graduated from Villanova, one of only two Augustinian colleges in the United States, in 1977.
For years Villanova has sent student interns to work in the Vatican — there are 12 this semester — and professors have taken classes to study in Rome. Three are there now.
But Villanova’s ties to Rome and the Vatican have grown substantially as a result of having an alumnus pope. The university this week is hosting an international conference on sustainability near the Vatican, which will cap off Tuesday evening with the presentation of Villanova’s inaugural sustainability medal, named for Pope Leo. The pope, 71, was scheduled to present the award, but he announced during his weekly Sunday prayers that he would be undergoing surgery to remove a nodule from his lung. The surgery is now scheduled for Tuesday and Villanova officials were unsure who will present the medal.
On Halloween weekend, 6,000 Villanova alumni, students, and employees will travel to Rome for a doubleheader men’s and women’s basketball game. Villanova will play Notre Dame, which is only sending 1,000 folks.
“The voice of the people of God will be very strong on the Villanova side,” Pope Leo recently told a Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter.
Neither event would have happened there if Leo weren’t the pope, Donohue said.
“His very election has opened the door to a lot of different things,” Donohue said.
Hundreds of interview requests have poured in to Villanova and the Augustinian priests who work there and are personal friends of the pope. One graduated from Villanova the same year as him, then lived with him in Peru for 10 years, visited his apartment in Rome, and rode in the Popemobile. Another, who had lived with him for six years in Rome, vacationed with him twice since he became pope at the pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, a scenic Italian town south of Rome.
The Rev. Bernie Scianna, also a longtime friend of the pope and Villanova’s vice president for mission and ministry, has been to Rome five times since Pope Leo was elected and has met with him each time. He is returning for both the sustainability conference and the basketball games.
“It has put us in the limelight in the sense that you are the pope’s university,” Scianna said. “It calls us to a greater accountability in many areas, sustainability being one of them.”
More courses, events, and programming on campus are integrating Pope Leo, Villanova officials said. There’s a Pope Leo campus committee discussing opportunities for academic programs and events related to the pope.
Students and faculty have gotten intimate audiences with Pope Leo. During a visit last fall, the pope chatted with students and pulled out his phone, showing them the purebred Arabian horse a Polish man had just gifted him because the donor had seen him on horseback when he was stationed in Peru decades ago, said Matthew Manion, faculty director of Villanova’s Center for Church Management, who accompanied the students.
And on another occasion last fall after the pope introduced a Villanova church management program for newly ordained bishops, he asked Manion and his wife to stop by for a cup of coffee afterward.
“The next thing I know there’s the Holy Father serving my wife cappuccino,” he said, signifying his “instinctive Augustinian hospitality” and “servant leadership mindset.”
Not a coffee drinker, Manion asked for tea.
“My wife’s like, if the pope offers you coffee, you drink the damn coffee,” he said.
‘The school the pope went to’
Villanova, a more than 10,000-student Catholic university on the Main Line, already was in a rarefied position in a competitive higher education market where schools are struggling with falling enrollment and financial pressures. The school has benefited from national championship basketball teams in 2016 and 2018 and the three Villanova alums who helped carry the New York Knicks to the championship this year, but also climbing applications and donations.
An alumnus pope has only enhanced its prospects.
“Every conversation I have with alumni involves Pope Leo,” said Kevin Noller, vice president of university advancement.
The last two years have been high marks for giving at Villanova, which received more than $170 million in 2024-25, the year the pope was elected, and more than $150 million in 2025-26. It’s hard to say how much is related to Pope Leo, Noller said, but “when people feel good and they feel pride... it helps in their process of making an investment.”
In 2025, the university created a Christmas ornament featuring Pope Leo, which helped bring in 6,150 donations to Villanova, compared to 2,400 gifts brought in by the prior year’s ornament appeal, Noller said. The 2024 ornament depicted a stained-glass detail from St. Thomas of Villanova Church.
Villanova saw about 1.1 million unique website visitors on the day the pope was selected, compared to about 65,000 on a typical day. The week after his election, the university was mentioned in nearly 50,000 news stories around the world.
The summer after the pope was elected very few admitted students fell away, what’s known as summer melt: “Who’s not going to come to the school the pope went to,” Donohue said.
The school received 28,870 applications for the fall 2026 class, nearly a 10% increase over the prior year and the highest number ever. Student visitors to campus increased to nearly 22,000 in 2025-26, up from 19,900 in 2024-25.
And Scianna said so far this year 50 people, most of them students, are planning to become Catholic and join the church on campus, up from 24 last year.
“I think that’s a lot to do with him being close to us as an American pope, but also close to us as a Villanova pope,” he said.
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Donohue said it’s hard to say how much of the rising numbers can be attributed to Pope Leo, but certainly some of it. The university’s website prominently highlights the connection between the pope and Villanova. And Pope Leo is mentioned on admissions tours and during information sessions for prospective students, said university spokesperson Jonathan Gust.
“Some people say it’s the Leo effect,” Donohue said. “Pope Leo became Pope and suddenly it was ‘Let’s go look at Villanova.’”
He told Pope Leo about the impact he’s had on his alma mater.
“He said, ‘Use it wisely,’” Donohue recalled.
Prayers for Pope Leo
On Monday, Villanova opened its sustainability conference, Responding to the Cries of the Earth and the Poor, at The Patristicum, a pontifical institute in Rome under the order of St. Augustine. From its rooftop is a stunning view of Vatican City, including the very window of Pope Leo’s apartment from which he sometimes addresses crowds.
“The conference brings together voices from many disciplines, cultures, and perspectives, united by a common purpose: To address some of the most urgent challenges facing our world and to do so in a way that honors both human dignity and integrity of the individuals and creation,” Donohue told the 350 conference attendees from 30 countries, including 90 people from Villanova.
Speakers are scheduled to present over the next three days on many issues facing communities around the world, including pollution and soil contamination, illegal trash dumping, community gardens, and artificial intelligence.
But at Monday’s opening, Pope Leo’s health was front and center on participants’ minds, with speaker after speaker offering prayers for the pontiff.
“We pray that this is a simple procedure, that he is OK,” said Donohue, Villanova’s president. “May God’s healing presence be with you, Pope Leo.”
‘Proud to be a Villanova student’
In a Villanova theology classroom one afternoon last week, one student said Pope Leo’s status as an alum put Villanova on her radar and influenced her decision to apply. Another, Alexandra Abraham, a freshman from Los Angeles, said it didn’t influence her decision, but that certainly her classmates knew of Villanova because of Pope Leo.
But students were especially awed that their Italian-born professor, Massimo Faggioli, had not only written a book about Pope Leo, but had the opportunity last month to personally present it to him in Rome. And it wasn’t the first time Faggioli met Pope Leo. He also interacted with the Holy Father on another occasion in Rome last December and saw him as part of a larger group at an immigration conference that Villanova hosted in Rome last year.
Faggioli, a professor of historical theology whose specialties are the church and the papacy, began writing the book after Leo was elected, knowing how consequential it is to have an American pope.
Faggioli, who has worked at Villanova for a decade, was at an event with about 30 people in Rome when he presented the pope with the book. He had never had personal interaction with a pope before Leo. Most of the popes he studied had already died.
The awe of the responsibility of writing about a pope who may read the work is heightened, he said. He plans to teach a course next year on Pope Leo.
Carlie Briere, a freshman from Boston in Faggioli’s class, hopes she, too, can meet the pope. She’s Catholic and her father met a previous pope, she said, though she’s not sure which one.
“I think that that’d be a really cool experience, not only to meet him myself, but also just to, like, feel that further connection to the church,” she said.
‘This campus went crazy’
The day that Prevost was elected pope, “this campus went crazy,” said Dylan Johnson, 21, a senior from Chichester and co-editor-in-chief of The Villanovan, the student newspaper. Now, there are signs around campus of the connection, including a large banner of Pope Leo that hangs on the graduate school building. During the recent parents’ weekends, families were taking pictures in front of it, said Johnson, who is also an intern with The Inquirer’s sports department.
“I feel like it’s made students proud to be a Villanova student,” he said. “It’s like the opportunities are limitless.”
Having an alumnus pope has opened more opportunities for students, too, he said. He’s heading to Rome to cover the basketball games for The Villanovan and potentially be in the company of the pope.
“I couldn’t miss that,” he said.
Manion, the church management faculty director and professor, said enrollment in the master’s program has risen since Pope Leo came in. The majority of the 55 enrollees are ordained and lay leaders and church business leaders from around the world.
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“We’re benefiting from the halo effect that Villanova is benefiting from,” Manion said.
The program also offers an Augustinian leadership journey for undergraduates, teaching them to live Augustinian values in business and leadership contexts, culminating in the pilgrimage in Florence, Milan, and Rome when they are seniors, he said.
Thirty of those students are in Rome this week and will stop by the sustainability conference.
Manion said the Villanova program for newly ordained bishops was actually started with the pope’s help when he was still a cardinal.
On a shelf in his Villanova business school office is a photo of Pope Leo introducing Manion and his colleague to new bishops in Rome in September 2025.
“I never thought in a million years that I’d have any interaction with the pope, let alone be collaborating with him to support his bishops,” Manion said. “You’re on stage in front of a room full of bishops in the Vatican and the Holy Father says, ‘These are our friends from Villanova and they’ve got a cool program I think you should consider.’”
About 6,000 Villanovans will visit Rome
Donohue estimates he has exchanged 25 or so emails with the Catholic Church’s highest leader since he took the position in May 2025. When Donohue in mid-September went to Rome for the sustainability medal announcement, he met with Pope Leo for an hour.
Their relationship stems back decades.
Donohue first met Prevost when they were students at Villanova. Donohue was two years ahead of him. He got to know Pope Leo better when Prevost became prior general.
“Villanova is a major place in the Augustinian world, so there were lots of meetings here and I was president ... and I had a lot of communication with him,” Donohue said.
Prevost briefly served on Villanova’s board of trustees and received an honorary Villanova degree while Donohue was president in 2014.
Most things Donohue has asked, the Pope has granted, including having the sustainability medal in his name, he said.
Donohue contacted Pope Leo on behalf of the National Constitution Center to ask if he would accept the Liberty Medal. The pope told Donohue he couldn’t attend in person or live video but would send a recorded message, Donohue recalled.
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Sometimes, the pope has said no or offered a modification. The pope told Donohue he would not attend his 50th Villanova reunion next year because it would be too difficult to fly to the United States for one event.
But the pope, Donohue said, has promised to visit Villanova when he comes to the United States, though no trips have been set.
The pope also turned down Donohue’s request to be commencement speaker via video message last May, but sent a written message to the class that Donohue read.
The promotion company setting up the basketball games solicited Donohue to ask Pope Leo to participate. The pope told Donohue he wasn’t sure. (In September, however, he said he might come, Donohue said.)
Donohue then asked if the pope would hold “an audience” with those from both schools, and he agreed, Donohue said last week. It’s now unclear though whether his health will change that. The event is scheduled Oct. 31, the day before the games. If able, the pope plans to address the crowd of 7,000 at the Vatican’s cavernous Audience Hall, Donohue said.
“I’m amazed at the number of people going and people that are taking their entire family,” Donohue said.
Many of those at the conference had looked forward to seeing the pope present the sustainability medal, but said the pope’s health is more important.
“If we were able to meet him, that would be the icing on the cake of all time,” said Frank Falcone, a professor emeritus of Villanova’s College of Engineering. “But the cake is still there. I mean the conference is wonderful.”
