Villanova, Pennsylvania, basketball teams to open season in Rome against Notre Dame

At Villanova University, many roads seem to lead to Rome, thanks to alumnus Pope Leo XIV and the school’s growing ties to the Vatican. The university’s basketball program is also part of that connection. The Rev. Peter Donohue, Villanova’s president, said, “We certainly have a bigger footprint there now than we used to. People do know who we are, just because it’s the pope’s school.”

The pope graduated from Villanova with a mathematics degree in 1977. He belongs to the Augustinians, the religious order that founded the university near Philadelphia in 1842. Since his election in 2025, the school has found new connections to his papacy. Villanova saw applications rise more than 10% during the first admissions cycle after that election. It is the only American university that can claim a pope as a graduate, a distinction that has raised its profile alongside a run of athletic success. The school won the NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1985, 2016 and 2018.

On Sunday, Villanova’s men’s and women’s basketball teams will open their season in Rome against Notre Dame, a fellow Catholic university, playing six miles (9.6 kilometers) from the Vatican. Organizers are calling the doubleheader the Eternal City Tip-Off. The event follows a sustainability conference that Villanova hosted in Rome weeks earlier, at which the school awarded a cardinal the inaugural Pope Leo XIV Sustainability Medal. Two Catholic universities meeting on one court, a picture of unity (Psalm 133:1).

The festivities were planned long before Leo’s recent cancer diagnosis and surgery. The pope is scheduled, health permitting, to hold a private audience inside the Vatican on Saturday for the teams and their traveling fans. Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson Perez will also celebrate a private Mass for them in St. Peter’s Basilica. Leo said in September, “The voice of the people of God will be very strong on the Villanova side.”

Ed Hastings, who played on Villanova’s 1971 basketball team that lost the national championship to UCLA, now teaches at the university. He will appear on a sold-out panel in Rome discussing sports and spirituality, which he described as bringing together “the passions of my life.” He noted that St. Augustine, who inspired the Augustinian order, wrote about self-knowledge. “And I learned a lot about myself through sports,” Hastings said.

The Rev. Bernie Scianna, Villanova’s vice president for mission and ministry, is a friend of the pope; the two met almost three decades ago through their Augustinian order. Scianna has seen increased interest in Catholicism on campus, which has about 10,000 students and a large Catholic population. Last year, 24 people joined the Catholic Church there, most of them students, though fewer than 10 typically do each year. The current class of potential new members has 56 people.

Villanova has long sent students to Italy and the Vatican for internships and study-abroad programs, and those opportunities are growing. Senior Mike Whaley recently returned from a fall break trip there with his humanities class. He had visited the Vatican on an earlier student trip, when he served as an altar server at a private Mass for Villanova students celebrated by then-Cardinal Robert Prevost. “So, my fun fact at parties is that I served Mass for the now Pope Leo XIV,” Whaley said. Another senior, Megan Zuzarth, was also in Rome recently with her business school class.

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