Leo Jeremiah O'Donovan III is an American Catholic priest, Jesuit, and theologian who served as the president of Georgetown University from 1989 to 2001. Born in New York City, he graduated from Georgetown, and while studying in France, decided to enter the Society of Jesus. He went on to receive advanced degrees from Fordham University and Woodstock College, and received his doctorate in theology from the University of Münster, where he studied under Karl Rahner. Upon returning to the United States, he became a professor at Woodstock College and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, before becoming the president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a senior administrator in the Jesuit Maryland Province.
O'Donovan speaking at the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 2017
O'Donovan with Dutch Ambassador Hendrik Jan Jurriaan Schuwer and Katrina Swett
To shed its growing debt, O'Donovan sold the Georgetown University Hospital to MedStar Health in 2000.
O'Donovan with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2017
Georgetown University is a private Jesuit research university in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., United States. Founded by Bishop John Carroll in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic institution of higher education in the United States and the nation's first federally chartered university.
John Carroll, the first Archbishop of Baltimore and founder of Georgetown University in 1789
Georgetown University c. 1850
Union Army soldiers on Theodore Roosevelt Island with the Potomac River and the university visible in the background in 1861 at the beginning of the American Civil War
Patrick Francis Healy, the first African-American to become a Jesuit, helped transform the school into a modern university after the Civil War.