The Integrator

January 1, 1925, is a day that lives in glory in the hearts and minds of Fighting Irish fans everywhere. It was the day the University of Notre Dame claimed its first national championship in football. 

On an unseasonably warm day in Pasadena, California, Knute Rockne’s team bested Pop Warner’s Stanford Cardinal 27–10, powered by the legendary “Four Horsemen” in its backfield.

The triumph nearly turned to tragedy a few days later, however. While still celebrating the big win, one of the Four Horsemen, halfback Jim Crowley, suddenly collapsed and stopped breathing. Fortunately, a man named John Francis O’Hara was nearby. He acted quickly and resuscitated Crowley, an act that was all the more remarkable because O’Hara was not a trainer, a team member, nor even part of the athletics staff. 

Rather, he was Notre Dame’s chief spiritual guide: the prefect of religion, today known as the University chaplain.

O’Hara’s life included many such unsung victories, and a new construction project at Notre Dame is drawing renewed attention to one in particular: His success in bringing business education to Notre Dame. 

 

The Other Coach

Even though he was just 36 at the time of the Fighting Irish’s first national championship victory, O’Hara must have looked like the antithesis of athleticism alongside nimble Rockne and his brawny team. He sported thin-rimmed pince-nez spectacles atop a nose that was perpetually plagued by sinus troubles and had a willowy physique that earned him the nickname “The Splinter” from his friend and brother priest Father Lange.

O’Hara was, nevertheless, not only welcome but actually invited by the team to join them on their championship run. Serving as chaplain, O’Hara had emerged as a kind of coach in his own right. A complement and counterpart to Rockne, O’Hara did more than his off-the-field duties, such as celebrating Mass and hearing confessions; rather, he was there to remind players that their life on the field and off the field were united, that they could live out their faith not just alongside football, but also through it.

And live it out, they did, as O’Hara himself was eager to point out. Following their championship win, he praised the players’ teamwork as “the red-blooded play of men full of life, full of hope, full of charity, of men who learn at the foot of the altar what it means to love one another.” He declared their “clean play can be offered as a prayer of honor to the Queen of Heaven,” and concluded, “Notre Dame football is a new crusade; it kills prejudice and it stimulates faith.”

That legendary 1925 win was just the first of many glorious national successes for the Fighting Irish. Likewise, for O’Hara, it was an early success in a magnificent journey to come. The young prefect of religion would go on to become University president before moving on to serve as auxiliary bishop of the United States Military Ordinariate during World War II. In his later years, he served as bishop of Buffalo and archbishop of Philadelphia before becoming the first Holy Cross priest (and first Notre Dame alumnus) to be elevated to the College of Cardinals.

 

Business at the Foundation

With such a lengthy and illustrious résumé, it is easy to overlook the earlier chapter in O’Hara’s story that laid the foundation for what was to come. In the years before O’Hara coached players to succeed on the field by integrating faith and football, he played a leading role in the development of business education at Notre Dame and devoted himself to integrating faith and professional life. 

He did so, moreover, at a time when many faculty members and administrators at the University were convinced business education did not belong at Notre Dame. O’Hara persisted and founded the Department of Commerce at just 29 years of age. Then, in 1921, he became the first dean of an entirely new college: the College of Commerce, known today as the Mendoza College of Business.

O’Hara did more than simply lay the institutional and administrative foundation of the College. Most importantly, he set forth a vision that continues to inspire the College even today. 

“Cardinal O’Hara’s influence is foundational,” said Martijn Cremers, Martin J. Gillen Dean and the Bernard J. Hank Professor of Finance at Mendoza. “He gave us a unique mission to be a distinctively Catholic college of business. That was over 100 years ago, and it’s still the mission we live by.”

Despite O’Hara’s importance to the College, its current building and grounds show relatively little evidence of his life and legacy in the College’s physical spaces. For the past three decades, the main reminder of his role in founding the College has been a bronze plaque outside the College’s Jordan Auditorium, bearing his statement: “The primary function of commerce is service to mankind.” 

That there are no other reminders of O’Hara is partly due to the fact that during his deanship, the College had no building of its own. Rather, at that time, it existed in a set of scattered borrowed spaces, including, at one point, temporary classrooms set up in the basements of Walsh and Sorin halls. It was not until 1930 that the College’s first home, Hurley Hall, began construction. And while O’Hara’s vision was part of the inspiration for the building, especially a large globe that occupies its central atrium, depicting a network of trade routes connecting the world through business, there was no direct tribute to the man himself.

Now, over a century after he founded the College, O’Hara will be recognized and memorialized in the College in a new way — through an addition to the building that is not only named for him, but also inspired by his legacy and vision.

 

Standing Out

If O’Hara had a unique ability to recognize the possibility for integration where others saw only opposition, it was partly a result of his own personal experiences standing out. He was born in 1888 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but was raised in a small Catholic immigrant community in Peru, Indiana. It was a town, as he put it later in life, with “more than its share of bigots.” 

He explained in a letter later in life that as “members of a minority group (Catholics and foreigners), we received our share of insults — and rocks — that were intended to keep us in our place.” O’Hara and his friends were not allowed by their parents to complain about these “wounds received,” either physical or emotional. Instead, they were forced to view the experience as something “to form our character.”

Then, in 1905, O’Hara experienced a dramatic reversal of his situation. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed his father, John W. O’Hara, as American consul to Uruguay. After finishing eighth grade, John Francis moved from the provincial town of Peru to the picturesque and bustling capital city of Montevideo, where he entered a Jesuit high school.

Now, among his co-religionists, he stood out in new ways. Some administrators at the school did not like the idea of educating a Yankee, or an “Inglés,” as he was often called. But he plunged himself wholeheartedly into his studies, which were conducted entirely in Spanish. When he earned top marks, he sometimes also aroused the envy of his classmates. Nevertheless, young John Francis adopted the same approach in Montevideo that he had taken back in Peru. He saw any difficulties as an opportunity for personal growth and development. He brushed off any slights and came away with a deep, lifelong love of South America and an excellent command of Spanish.

He also gained a vision in South America: a different kind of Catholic life. Catholics in Uruguay were not an embattled minority group, but builders of a culture that touched and integrated with all other aspects of life, including sports (fútbol, of course, rather than football), education and professional life.

When O’Hara returned to the United States, however, he found himself out of place in wholly new ways. Although he left high school with an excellent education, his background and preparation were very atypical for a student seeking a university education in the first decade of the 20th century, including his lack of a facility in Latin.

But in the end, O’Hara made his own way, as he often did, by drawing on what made him stand out. He managed to arrange a brief one-on-one meeting with University of Notre Dame President Rev. John W. Cavanaugh. The two struck a deal in a matter of minutes. O’Hara would start his undergraduate education at Notre Dame and would also serve as an instructor of Spanish, teaching students at the Catholic boarding school Notre Dame operated at the time.

So it was then that John Francis O’Hara found Notre Dame, which would come to be his most real and lasting home. He arrived as a little of everything — both a student and a teacher, a Hoosier, a pan-American Spanish speaker and an Irish Catholic, all rolled into one.

 

Commerce Meets the Classics

As O’Hara began teaching Spanish while also studying economics and political science, he began to explore the idea that global trade offered the world a chance to become not just more prosperous, but also more interconnected, more peaceful and more harmonious. But it was also clear that a better future was far from guaranteed. His undergraduate years occurred against the backdrop of social unrest that exposed deep problems in the world of business, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history, and the 1910 Chicago garment workers’ strike. He wrote his senior thesis arguing that labor unions, compared with socialism, offered a better, more legitimate way to address these problems. 

O’Hara was soon ordained as a priest and continued his studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He began with history, but eventually shifted his focus to business, taking a course at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and visiting businesses in New York City to learn directly from owners and managers.

O’Hara returned to Notre Dame only after World War I had broken out. The student population at the University had been reduced by a third as students left to fight. Those who stayed were interested in how their education would be relevant to the war or to the rebuilding effort that would come in its wake. It was in this environment that O’Hara founded the University’s Department of Commerce, a move that had its fair share of detractors on the faculty, though it was immediately popular among the student body.

The predominant model of education at Notre Dame at the time was still classical: Its hallmark was that students read the great works of the ancient world in their original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. O’Hara’s approach differed from this model in several striking ways. He established a “Chamber of Commerce” for the University that brought business leaders from both South Bend and Chicago companies to campus and required his commerce students to attend meetings with them. This direct, observational approach seemed inappropriate to the classically minded faculty. There was also the fact that professional education seemed to serve a narrow end; namely, making money. This was anathema to many classical and early Christian sources, which suggested that “liberal education” should stand in direct contrast to “practical education.”

O’Hara granted that “for the Catholic, education means the properly proportioned drawing-out of all the faculties of a man, spiritual and material, intellectual, moral, and physical.” But he insisted that this did not imply that a college education was simply “learning for learning’s sake.” Rather, a Catholic University could and should include business education without sacrificing its mission.

He admitted that business education was absent from the great medieval Catholic universities. But if they “did not offer lectures on such problems,” he explained, “it was because in those days commerce lacked the intricacies and merchants lacked something of the social dignity they enjoy today.” He reasoned, “If surgery, once the avocation of barbers, is now an honored profession, and the surgeon is admitted to the cultural atmosphere of the university, why cannot business and the businessman be allowed similar advantages?”

Just as earlier programs had done away with classical languages in favor of math and science courses, the commerce program would add business courses, but retain studies in history, philosophy, religion and literature. While this education would not be “classical,” it would remain “liberal” at its core.

As for the pursuit of money, O’Hara insisted that it should never be the main purpose of a Notre Dame education. He lamented in the Religious Bulletin that “the chief concern nevertheless of the candidate for a degree is the money their services can command and they get out.” He wrote, “If there is one lesson that a Notre Dame student should take away from this school for the shaping of his life, it is the lesson that there is something in life besides money.”

He used Notre Dame itself and the dedication of its faculty, which arises from motives other than profit, as examples. The power of money and the pursuit of it “could never have made this school what it is,” he said. As for “the lay professors at Notre Dame,” they “serve you for the love of God” rather than for their salary, which was likely small compared to what they could receive at a university more “endowed with the goods of the world.” And if this was true for lay faculty, it was all the more true for the priests, who were servants, of course, but not servants for hire, a fact that keeps them, as he put it, “free to tell the truth and shame the devil.”

 

The Master Marketer

During the early years that O’Hara was making his arguments in favor of integrating business with faith, an interesting change began to take place: He began to take his own advice. The concepts and practices of business began to take shape in his own life and leadership style.

One result of this shift was how O’Hara developed as a marketer of the new college. He worked alongside his friend, classmate and first-ever professor of marketing at Notre Dame, Rev. Thomas Lahey, C.S.C., who was a celebrated writer and eloquent orator. Together, they promoted the integration of faith and business at every single opportunity and to every audience they could find. They preached sermons such as, “The Catholic in Business,” lectured on Notre Dame’s approach to business leaders and published academic articles and short pieces of journalism arguing that business had a definite place at the University.

One common conviction O’Hara and Lahey stressed was that good character simply makes good business sense. Lahey declared in his classic book, “The Catholic in Business,” that “Commercial transactions depend so ultimately upon honesty and fidelity that character is universally considered as the very foundation of business.”

He acknowledged that in the United States and elsewhere, there had been a “pioneer period,” where it was easy to make money by cutting corners and ignoring ethical principles. But he held that this made Notre Dame’s mission all the more important. Lahey claimed that an era of unethical business will not end “until we can increasingly put into our various business organizations men with spiritual vision enough to labor for something more than mere money returns, men who are willing to dedicate their lives if necessary to the long hard fight against dishonesty, against listless legislators, against the power of precedent, above all against the deadly temptation of the dishonest dollar.” 

He asked rhetorically, “Where in all the world can business look for men with ability enough and with faith enough to take up that challenge if not in the commercial classrooms of our Catholic institutions?”

Lahey refused to see a career in business as anything but a high calling. He reminded his hearers that “there are no castes in the Kingdom of God.” He argued, moreover, that a business person could supply a compelling positive example of the Catholic faith — perhaps even more so than a priest. In one sermon he said, “The priest is often suspected by workingmen as one who lacks a close touch with the every-day world of struggle and labor … But if by the example of his own life a fellow workman can show these people who have no faith that a belief in and loyalty to God and the Church can aid them to attain to a greater happiness than they have ever known, they are more ready to accept our teachings.” 

The claim was so startling it was reported in the August 8, 1927, edition of The New York Times under the heading, “SAYS LAITY MAY LEAD IN SAVING OF SOULS; Father Lahey Sees Workman as Sometimes Closer Than Priest to His Fellows.”

 

Advertising Religion

Another outgrowth of O’Hara’s experience with business was the publication he is still most known for today: The Religious Bulletin. In its heyday, the publication was read by more than 150,000 people and circulated far beyond campus. But it began almost by accident. He posted the first Religious Bulletin giving practical advice on lifestyle and Mass attendance after too many students showed up to confession for the available priests to hear their confessions before Mass.

He wrote, “Three hundred students, college men, tried to go to confession this morning. Four priests were hearing confessions in the church and one priest can hear, at most, 25 confessions in 30 minutes. Figure it out for yourself.”

Students were struck to read O’Hara communicating in what he described as a “low tone,” and he continued to post bulletins, producing them daily despite a busy schedule that ran from 5:45 a.m. Mass late into the night. The students wrote to him with questions, and he would answer them directly and often with a wry or facetious tone. He explained, “It is an application of modern principles of advertising to the spiritual life. From day to day, it hammers at student foibles or suggests means of advancement in the spiritual life. It is a caricature rather than a portrait, for a portrait is too true to be comfortable, while the exaggerations of a caricature carry home a point without leaving too much sting.”

It allowed him to speak personally to a large group of students all at once — almost like a group chat or blog today. He provided advice on all aspects of life, from relationships and dating to problems with parents, and even personal conduct during trips: “There are clever ways of showing your loyalty to Notre Dame; making an ass of yourself is not one of them,” he once wrote, his words arranged to form the shape of a mule’s head.

Far from being offended by O’Hara’s good-natured jabs and finger wags, most students embraced them as expressing the high standards of a committed coach convinced of their high capabilities.

In the Religious Bulletin, O’Hara was also well served by his knowledge of the business world, which enabled him to offer practical examples of spiritual ideas. He wrote, for example, “The soul that practices repression and self-denial in this world in the belief that it will receive in return glory and luxury in the world to come doesn’t strike us as much worth saving. A businessman doesn’t look at it in that way. He won’t hire a man who isn’t willing to practice self-denial and repression. How many of us work for the love of work? How much would you give for a man who welches whenever he has to do something hard?”

O’Hara also learned from businesspeople a love of statistics, which he employed as a coach to encourage and recognize improvements in student communions and confessions over time. He plotted them on a line graph and posted it outside a basement chapel for all to see. “Business forecasters use graphs to determine trends,” he reasoned, and “spiritual forecasters use them, too.”

 

Building Business

One of his biggest announcements ever in the Religious Bulletin came on November 13, 1930, under the heading, “A Tradition Magnificently Broken.” He wrote, “A tradition of eighty-eight years was broken yesterday when Edward Nash Hurley announced the gift of two hundred thousand dollars to Notre Dame for the construction of a Commerce Building for the University. It is eighty-eight years this month since Father Sorin set foot on the shores of St. Mary’s Lake to undertake in what was practically wilderness, the establishment of a university dedicated to the Mother of God. And this is the first time since that foundation that anyone has given the University a building.”

What O’Hara did not mention was that he had been working with Hurley closely for more than a decade at the time to develop the vision, and it was mainly through his own efforts that Hurley was inspired to make the gift. It seems fitting, then, that at a remove of nearly a century, Mendoza’s new addition, given by an anonymous donor, would bear O’Hara’s name.

The addition will include the John Francis Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Auditorium, which will also feature a wraparound lounge with a bust of O’Hara and a series of panels depicting the College’s history, including two panels on O’Hara and his role as founding dean.

For many Mendoza undergraduates, this auditorium will serve as a site for foundations courses. It will also house some of the College’s new “integration” courses that explicitly invite students to think not in terms of “either/or,” but in terms of “both/and” in studying business alongside other disciplines.

“Today, our students still take about half of their credits outside the College,” Cremers explained, “and that is crucial. Our students get an elite business education. They get a liberal arts education. And there is a third element as well, which is the integration of the two.”

Some of the College’s current popular new courses that focus specifically on the task of integration include “Why Business?” which brings a philosophical lens to the question of whether and how a business contributes to a just and harmonious society. Similarly, the course, “God and Business” combs through centuries of Christian thought to understand the best ways to bring a theological perspective to bear on business’s aims and responsibilities. Likewise, Dean Cremers’ own signature course, “Corporate Governance and Catholic Social Teaching,” unites Catholic social teaching and investing principles to help students integrate faith and the discipline of finance.

 

Friends and Formation

O’Hara died in 1960, at the cusp of a new era of mass media when televisions had only recently become common in U.S. households. He would no doubt be shocked by the way personal computers, smartphones, the internet and international air travel have globalized the world. O’Hara, who relied on the use of a mimeograph to copy and distribute his Religious Bulletin, would no doubt welcome many of these developments.

At the same time, it is easy to imagine his disappointment that our globalization is so superficial. Whereas he imagined positive relationships of mutual care and benefit developing across the globe, too often our globalization is what Pope Francis called the “globalization of indifference,” an impersonal connection through technology rather than real relationships.

And it is O’Hara’s emphasis on real relationships, Cremers said, that has the most to teach us today. “The formation of the person is inherently personal,” he said. “It is always done in a particular place, with a particular community, where there is a real personal relationship among people. In order for our students to grow into the people they can be, they need us to know them, to know their names and their stories.”

The new John Francis Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Commons also seeks to create space for relationships to form and develop. “The aim is to put students first,” Cremers said, “We want to change how students think about this building, not as just a place to go to but as a place to meet and spend time in close contact with their peers and with their professors in the series of lounges and study spaces the new addition provides.”

Whatever his many other achievements, it was in this particular area — building personal relationships — that O’Hara excelled beyond all others. In his discussion of O’Hara’s legacy, former university chaplain Rev. Robert F. Griffin, C.S.C., marveled that “he knew every face, every name, every hometown, every personal history; and quite simply, nobody has ever matched his success.”

O’Hara was driven by the sheer joy he derived from being with students. He wrote, “Everyone who comes in close contact with youth, who becomes in any way their confidant and adviser, must feel the quickening influence of their very presence. The priest, most especially, to whom it is given to know the secret depths of the young heart must humbly thank God for the very marvelous power he possesses.”

Perhaps O’Hara’s personal touch is best displayed not in his own words, but in the countless little stories of students who benefited from his kindness and care. For example, there is the story of a student named Ray Geiger who reported his experience arriving at Notre Dame knowing no one on campus. He stood in line all day until 6 p.m. to register for classes, but when he reached the registration window, it slammed shut. He was told to come back in the morning. With no place to stay on campus, Geiger did not know what to do — until he chanced upon a young Father O’Hara.

Geiger said, “Perhaps at my sorriest time, some young priest put his arm around me and said, ‘What’s the matter, son?’ He [O’Hara] immediately brightened me up by telling me some of the wonders of Notre Dame and asked me to serve Mass for the following morning. This was my true introduction to Notre Dame, and he became and stayed one of my best friends.”

Perhaps in the new addition bearing a bit of O’Hara’s name, his face and his story, students will come to know him differently from the way they might if they pass by his gleaming marble tomb that rests across campus in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Perhaps, like Ray Geiger and the thousands of Notre Dame students he once knew by name, they will know him a bit more as a friend.

Illustrations by Kent Barton.

2026 Magazine Issue