Inside Villanova in the 1970s, when the future Pope Leo XIV arrived on campus

In the summer of 1973, the war was still raging in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal was unfolding in Washington, and protests roiled college campuses nationwide. But at leafy Villanova University just outside Philadelphia, trouble was on the home front.

The staid Catholic institution on the Main Line stood at a cultural crossroads. Computers were beginning to enter classrooms, marijuana was taboo, and, perhaps most controversially, women and men could not live in the same dorms.

And it was in those turbulent days that an 18-year-old math whiz named Bob from Chicago’s South Side — a dark-haired altar boy, the son of a Franco-Italian teacher and a Spanish librarian — embarked on his freshman year.

Robert Francis Prevost began an academic journey at Villanova that would lead him to seminary, then priesthood, then through the ranks of the Catholic Church, ascending to cardinal and, this week, becoming Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States.

By all accounts, Prevost was not an attention seeker. His name appears only a handful of times in the school’s archives from that era. But it is perhaps fitting that the new leader of a divided Catholic Church attended Villanova during an acute identity crisis in the 1970s, at time when students clashed with religious leaders over social mores.

Student newspapers, archival materials, and interviews with Villanova alumni and friends of Prevost from that era paint a portrait of a Catholic school facing a reckoning.

At the time, tuition cost about $4,000 a year. Students warred with school leaders over what they viewed as outdated conservative policies. And issues from immigration to drug policy were woven into student conversations, both at Sunday Mass and at late-night parties.

In the background, a future pope watched it all unfold.

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That summer, Villanova leaders were trying to rebrand the school’s academic identity. The challenge was how to maintain “the spirit of St. Augustine” with dwindling enrollment at the famously sports-centric school.

School leaders moved to restructure the struggling academic and famed athletic programs, axing a number of courses and increasing class sizes for teachers, drawing pushback from students and faculty.

Plastered across the pages of the student newspaper were sharply worded warnings for Prevost and the incoming freshman class.

Faculty members were “great,” albeit “apathetic and dispirited.” The courses were “not particularly challenging.” The student body was a “fairly homogeneous” pool of white, Catholic kids. And the school’s “disorganized” leaders seemed unwilling to fix the “great amount of red tape that permeates every nook and cranny of the university,” to hear the jaded students tell it.

The Class of 1977 lived in jam-packed dormitories. Prevost would have likely been housed at Burns Hall, a 19th-century stone mansion on the west side of campus, once part of the estate of department store scion Morris Clothier. According to Prevost’s longtime friend and fellow Villanova alumnus the Rev. Paul Galetto, that was where the “students from Chicago” lived.

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“It wasn’t the mega-place that it is today,” Galetto said of the campus at the time. “Back in the ’70s, Villanova was not dissimilar to a Catholic high school — just with more buildings.”

It was also a time of significant social change.

William Midon, 72, a mechanical engineering major, recalled how students spent years pushing to integrate the dorm rooms, and male students had finally overturned a dress code requiring them to wear blazers.

“These were the big things we were fighting for,” said Midon, who retired to New Hampshire after a career in tech and real estate. “The world had changed to a large degree in those handful of years … but my impression was that Villanova was a relatively conservative environment.”

Church was stitched into every corner of life at Villanova. Midon said he attended Mass every Sunday and soldiered through required theology courses. For many, he recalled, it was an enjoyable part of the social fabric on campus.

“Student Masses were tremendous, part religious and part social,” said Midon.

But at the end of the day, they were still college students, not teetotalers.

“There were two kinds of Villanovas,” said Brian Kerwin, who graduated with Prevost in 1977 as a finance major.

One was “the preppy, Vanilla-nova crowd.” And the other — much to the chagrin of school leaders — had a wild side.

After the band America played on Villanova’s campus in November 1973, the Rev. Edward McCarthy, then the university’s Augustinian president, walked through the field house grounds to find a sea of empty beer cans and wine bottles.

He was fuming, students reported. And the blatant boozing led to him putting a temporary ban on concerts at the school.

Students from Prevost’s era warned one another about what they saw as the school’s outdated views on everything from coed mingling to alcohol use. They offered tips on avoiding noise complaints and hiding booze from gazing eyes. (“Main Line police are not always right,” one student warned in the Villanovan. “But they are always policemen.”)

Students did not let the Augustinian leaders stop them from having a good time.

Homecoming weekends at Villanova in the mid-’70s were a bacchanal of “two-fisted, nonstop drinking,” an Inquirer writer observed at the time. One night, the gym was packed with “serious beer drinkers” who danced along to music from Eddie Shaw’s Dixieland Band.

Empty beer kegs quickly lined the gym’s walls, the floor sticky from spilled drinks. Nearby, two men had stumbled into a dark classroom, taking turns speaking from its lectern. “Understand that beer is the essence of life,” one said, portraying a lecturer. “Without it, there is nothing.”

The Inquirer’s coverage of the boozing proved divisive, with some calling it a “biased attempt to demean” the school community. Students later ran an editorial in the Villanovan calling it “old-fashioned anti-Catholicism to emphasize whatever dubious moral point the article intends.”

But conflict over social mores at the school would soon come to a head during Prevost’s undergraduate years — in a far more serious manner.

Villanova remained generally quiet during the large-scale protests that swept through U.S. schools in the 1960s. But in 1974, a political awakening arrived on the Main Line.

And the target was the school itself.

That January, while some students lingered during Christmas break, school security guards raided a number of dorm rooms in Sullivan Hall. They were looking for stolen university property, which they found, along with a stash of marijuana. The seizure led to suspensions for more than a dozen students.

Weeks later, hundreds of students protested on campus over what they viewed as unfair university disciplinary actions. The suspensions also became a flash point to object to another Villanova policy — the rules for dormitory visitation between male and female students.

The situation escalated when roughly 500 students staged a weeklong sit-in at Tolentine Hall, the school’s administration building, demanding a change to the visitation policy and the reinstitution of the students suspended on alleged drug violations, among other ultimatums.

When those changes didn’t come, a group of male students launched a sit-in at Sheehan Hall, a women’s dormitory, with a reported “beer party” that resulted in student expulsions.

The case culminated in a civil rights lawsuit against the school. The litigation sought to push Villanova “into the 20th century,” an attorney for the students said at the time, claiming the university had used the Sheehan Hall incident to stifle other political activity. The school settled the lawsuit after a seven-month court battle and the university agreed to withdraw all disciplinary actions against the expelled or suspended students.

Villanova later allowed visitation rights, and by the late ’80s, it had decided to let male and female students live in the same dorm buildings.

Pope Leo’s friends recall a good-humored Midwesterner with a worldly sensibility that stood him apart from the pack on campus.

He worked part-time on the cemetery maintenance crew at St. Denis Catholic Church in Havertown. He paid attention to deeply felt issues like immigration and poverty.

“Young people who I admired so much took very seriously global issues, at a time when it was easier to just worry about exams or fun times on the weekend,” said Barbara Markham, now a history teacher in Wilmington.

That interest, she added, was probably nurtured “as part of the Augustinian spirit” of the school.

But when it came to college sports and being a connoisseur of good pizza, he was as Villanovan as anyone.

Markham said that back in the ’70s, even in the program’s nascent days, “we all were basketball fans.”

Galetto, Prevost’s former classmate turned fellow priest, said Prevost’s years saw the beginning of Rollie Massimino’s reign. The National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame coach arrived at Villanova in 1973, going on to lead the NCAA champion 1984-85 Wildcats team.

Whenever the Wildcats made a run for the Final Four, Prevost joined group chats with former classmates from his ministry posts in Peru.

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After hearing Prevost was named pope on Thursday, memories of their undergraduate days came rushing back.

In one text thread, a former classmate circulated a photo of the Holy Father from a 1976 Halloween party on campus. He was wearing not a papal cassock, but a Groucho Marx costume.

“He always had a sense of humor,” Markham said.