SOUTH BEND, Ind. —They turn toward the Notre Dame Stadium video board at the end of the third quarter, knowing what’s coming and hopeful for it all the same. Atop the south end zone, a video rolls, a priest facing his congregation in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, just across campus. Only his green vestments show. A 90-second sermon begins, both an advertisement for Notre Dame and an invitation to Mass.
On its own, this call is not a new tradition. The stadium has been welcoming fans to become postgame parishioners for years, long before the video board changed the medium. But those bygone invitations, played over the stadium’s public address system, were met with the enthusiasm of a flight attendant asking passengers to review the safety instructions card in the seat pocket in front of them. They were background noise.
Reverend Pete McCormick helped change all that.
Thirty seconds into the video, the camera shows Father Pete — to call him anything else is to barely know him — striding into the Basilica. He’s as identifiable by his buzz cut and black-rimmed glasses as he is by his perpetual smile. Sunlight follows him through the doors.
That’s when the student section loses its collective mind, cheering as if running back Jeremiyah Love just went for another 98-yard touchdown. This is the recent tradition at Notre Dame, an embrace of the school’s assistant vice president for campus ministry. From the confessional to the DJ booth, he seems to be everywhere all the time, exactly when he’s needed. The invitation to Mass doesn’t interrupt the football game that’s still got a quarter to go; it’s organically become part of the ceremony.
When he welcomes 77,622 souls in this football cathedral to offer one another the sign of peace, the students erupt again. Some turn to shake hands, as is custom. Most just scream.
“I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know why. I really don’t know,” McCormick said. “I’m quite convinced that you could put any number of Holy Cross (priests) in that same spot and the same reaction would happen.”
That’s debatable.
When Notre Dame approached McCormick about being in the first iteration of this video, he figured it was just part of his job description. When Notre Dame’s in-house digital media platform, the Grotto Network, wanted to professionalize the Mass call three years ago with a full-fledged shoot inside the Basilica, it’s not like McCormick could decline.
After more than two decades at Notre Dame, McCormick had become a fixture on campus. The video board just broadcast that to a new audience.
“A great mentor of mine years ago said, ‘The gospel does not change, but the way you communicate it does.’ And I’m always thinking about that,” McCormick said. “How can we speak to the hearts of today’s disciples? How do we get in front of people?”
McCormick arrived at Notre Dame in the fall of 2002 to begin his master’s of Divinity program, a basketball guy from Grand Rapids, Mich., who grew up around Wolverines. He knew about Notre Dame, mainly because it played Michigan. And that was about it.
After two years in South Bend, McCormick spent a pastoral year at the St. John Vianney Catholic Parish outside Phoenix. He taught math. He figured the desert would be a fine escape from the Midwest after graduation a year later.
Notre Dame had other plans, assigning McCormick as assistant rector of Dillon Hall, one of 17 male dorms on campus, in the fall of 2006. His only relocations since have been around campus as the rector of Keough Hall, the priest in residence of Stanford Hall and now holding the same role in Baumer Hall. He’s been there since 2020.
“I’m done moving,” McCormick said.
That’s not entirely true.
Notre Dame’s students respond to McCormick because he never sits still. His alter ego of “DJ McSwish” worked the booth during the Texas A&M game. He’s a fixture on his bike around campus, maximizing the number of students he can meet, shouting them out from across the quad.
He’s been the team chaplain for the men’s basketball program for more than a decade. When he celebrates dorm masses on Sunday nights, students track his location via Instagram to attend. When a program needs a fundraiser, McCormick is among the first to raise his hand. He took a pie in the face for science research during USC weekend. He blessed the pie thrower first.
“You just can’t be the person who hides behind a video screen. And we saw how well that worked out in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” McCormick said. “Students on this campus are the greatest gift that I’ve ever received in my vocation, period, hard stop. And so I will spend the rest of my life trying to repay that great debt.”
In truth, McCormick probably paid it off long ago.
Michael Danonico walked into the Basilica in February of his senior year for confession. This wasn’t a moment of crisis, just a gray winter day with the semester’s grind underway. Danonico knew McCormick from living in Stanford Hall, but not well. He figured McCormick knew his face and his name, but probably not his voice. When Danonico kneeled to confess to McCormick on the other side of the screen, he wasn’t sure what to expect.
“Father Pete immediately is like, ‘Yo, what’s up, man! You ready to do this? Let’s go!’ I get out of confession and I’m ready to run through a brick wall for this guy,” Danonico said. “He’s got coaching vibes, like Marcus Freeman.”
This is the connective tissue between McCormick and the student body: those acts, large and small, that become roars on Saturday. He does about 10 weddings per year, sometimes three in a single weekend. One Notre Dame couple flew McCormick to Miami to marry them. He’s often the first to congratulate couples on their first anniversary a year later. There are plenty of baptisms to follow.
McCormick also teaches the Moreau course for first-year students, which serves as an introduction to Notre Dame, taught by an administrator, priest or faculty member once a week. Students who draw McCormick consider themselves lucky — those who don’t try to rearrange their schedules to get in.
Emma Eckstein, a 2024 graduate, met McCormick around campus while walking with a friend during her freshman year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when masks made it hard to remember anyone’s face. However, when McCormick saw Eckstein around campus, he’d shout hello, even from a couple of sidewalks over.
Eckstein wanted to be in McCormick’s Moreau course so badly that she switched into 8 a.m. organic chemistry midweek so she could take Moreau with McCormick at 9:20 a.m. on Fridays in Corbett Hall.
The class took a field trip to Rocco’s for pizza and made matching blue T-shirts with “9:20 a.m.” on the front and “Best Time Ever” on the back with McCormick’s name and the course’s other instructor, Kate Barrett. McCormick met the students in his Moreau course one-on-one and then tailored the semester around them.
It was the same with his homilies at dorm masses and hanging afterward to watch NFL games or talk about classes or campus life. Sometimes he’d bring a basketball into the chapel.
“He’s not one size fits all,” Eckstein said. “When he shows up on the video board, not many things bring people together like that. You might be upset about the game or the defense being sloppy, but that’s something everyone is excited about.”
Rev. Pete McCormick has formed a connection with Notre Dame students as the school’s assistant vice president for campus ministry. (Michael Hickey / Getty Images)
Nick Sansone, another recent graduate, didn’t really get it during his freshman year when the student section erupted for McCormick. He wasn’t involved in campus ministry and didn’t live in McCormick’s dorm.
However, during his sophomore year during COVID-19, Sansone was quarantined and missed a home game against Clemson, when students rushed the field after beating No. 1. Isolated at the Embassy Suites, Sansone got a random call from McCormick to check in. They’d never spoken before. Then the two spent the next 45 minutes dissecting the NBA. McCormick is a Boston Celtics fan, and Sansone backed the Washington Wizards.
“No one knows anything about Wizards other than Wizards fans because we suck, but he was talking about guys coming off the bench,” Sansone said. “I remember hanging up the phone thinking, ‘Oh, that’s why people like him.’ It was awesome.”
John Mahoney, a 2021 grad, was a walk-on safety on the football team who lived in Stanford during his sophomore year. Knee surgery as a freshman had relegated him to rehab instead of practice. Mahoney would leave the dorm early most mornings for treatment, slipping out the door before 6 a.m. McCormick’s light would be on, and the priest would step out to check on Mahoney. It barely mattered what McCormick said, just that he made sure their paths crossed.
“When you feel like you’re going at it alone, feeling like someone is there with small words of encouragement, it meant a lot,” Mahoney said. “It is always funny when you bring people who aren’t from Notre Dame and don’t understand the video. That’s Father Pete’s time. It’s a sacred thing.”
Junior Nick Adams has lived in Baumer Hall all three of his years at Notre Dame, getting to know McCormick’s quirks along the way. He attends Sundaes on Mondays, when McCormick imports gallons of ice cream and a few dozen residents show up to connect over dessert.
“It actually used to be Meatball Sub Mondays,” Adams said. “But Father Pete didn’t want his apartment smelling like meatballs every week.
“He’s a guy I feel I could talk to about anything at any time. He’s that open to listening to you. He wants to be present every moment.”
When the Irish made the national championship game in 2012, students in Keough Hall chanted, “We’re going to the ’ship!” after Notre Dame beat USC. McCormick didn’t get the reference, so he pulled a student aside to ask about it. Once he understood, McCormick jumped in two-footed, as loud as any of his residents.
When he once spotted a handle of vodka in the room of a resident, McCormick matter-of-factly stated, “I forgive you, God forgives you, but I’d put that out of sight.”
McCormick insists he’s retired from DJ duties, but students remember listening to him spin at Legends bar on campus. Some remember him from the basketball courts, never turning down a chance to set a hard screen.
Hank Assaf, a 2019 Notre Dame graduate, mostly knew McCormick from Sunday night Mass in Stanford Hall, which he’d trek to every week from his dorm room across campus. The homilies marked the weeks. Sometimes Assaf would hang around afterward to chat with McCormick before heading home.
During Assaf’s junior year, a close friend from back home in Atlanta died of brain cancer, about the same time as deaths in his extended family. Assaf didn’t know how to process it all, so he showed up at McCormick’s office in the Coleman-Morse Center unannounced. McCormick welcomed him in, but needed to get to basketball practice in the Joyce Center. He invited Assaf to walk with him.
“I knew people loved him, but it was crazy how many people he knew along the way, knowing every single person by name,” Assaf said. “This guy barely knows me, but he rerouted his schedule because I’m having a bad day. He’s omnipresent; how does anyone have that much time?”
For McCormick, this is more than his life’s work. It’s a calling that’s never let him get away from Notre Dame, with no plans to depart now. There are more students to greet from across the quad, more confessions to take, more connections to make. And then McCormick will be there on the video board, inviting everyone to Mass.
Maybe they’ll take McCormick up on that. Perhaps they won’t. He’ll keep showing up either way, and not just on football Saturdays.
“It’s the key to what I do, and so that’s an everyday commitment,” McCormick said. “You never know what kind of day someone else is going through. And by being intentional and saying hello, trying to love them up a little bit, you just never know the impact that that’s gonna have.”
Actually, you do. It’s clear at the end of every third quarter. Just listen.