A Providential Beginning

McCaig did not grow up surrounded by lawyers, nor did he follow a carefully mapped route to the profession. While completing a master’s degree in Ithaca, New York, he received a call from a friend from Franciscan University of Steubenville. A new Catholic law school was opening in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Would he consider going?

Within months, McCaig had finished collecting data for his thesis, loaded his car and driven to Michigan with little certainty about what awaited him. Looking back during a 2025 interview at Ave Maria Law, he described the decision as providential – “God’s hand at work” in placing him where he was called to be.

The inaugural students accepted a genuine risk. The school was new, accreditation was not yet assured and there was no established path to follow. That uncertainty also created a distinctive bond. Students, faculty and supporters were working together to build a law school rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition and committed to forming lawyers who understood their work as a vocation.

“We didn’t appreciate it at the time,” McCaig recalled. “But it was just this culture that was created of individuals truly being on mission.”

Creating the Community He Missed

After graduating in 2003 and eventually moving to Kansas City, McCaig began to miss the fellowship he had known at Ave Maria Law – relationships with people who shared both his Catholic faith and his legal vocation. He helped establish the Catholic Lawyers Guild of Kansas City, and over time began speaking with bishops, Catholic legal organizations and local guilds about forming a national association.

On March 6, 2015, McCaig convened a national meeting of Catholic attorneys at Polsinelli in Kansas City. Those conversations led to the formation of the Catholic Bar Association, now recognized as the first national association of Catholic attorneys in the United States.

The goal was never simply to create another professional organization. As McCaig explained in Dallas, the vision was to unite Catholic lawyers and local guilds so members could “share our profession and our faith.” The association provides formation, friendship and support for lawyers who may otherwise feel isolated in their professional lives.

That need for authentic connection has remained at the center of McCaig’s work. “Sometimes to find a community, you have to create it,” he said in the earlier Ave Maria Law conversation.

A Place to Be Formed and Sent Forth

The 2026 gathering in Dallas showed what that original vision has become. From professional and faith-centered presentations to shared prayer and the closing Red Mass at the National Shrine Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the conference offered Catholic members of the legal profession an opportunity to learn, worship and strengthen relationships with one another.

For McCaig, however, community is not an escape from professional life. It prepares lawyers to return to it with greater courage and clarity. He describes Catholic lawyers as missionaries – not necessarily through public declarations, but through the way they practice, treat their clients and encounter every person involved in their work.

He sees Ave Maria Law serving a similar purpose: forming students in faith and reason, then sending them into the profession as what he calls “missionaries of justice.” Twenty-three years after McCaig graduated with the law school’s first class, the Catholic Bar Association reflects how that formation can continue to bear fruit far beyond campus.

To Catholic attorneys and law students seeking that fellowship, McCaig’s message from Dallas was direct: “There’s a lot of Catholic lawyers out in the country that feel isolated, that don’t have community, and that’s what we’re here for.”

What began with the willingness to enter a new law school – and later to create the professional community he could not find – has become an invitation to Catholic lawyers across the country: You have a home.

Listen to the Full Conversation

In this extended 2025 interview with Ave Maria School of Law, Joshua McCaig discusses his unexpected path to law, the formation he received as a member of the inaugural class, the founding of the Catholic Bar Association, religious liberty, professional vocation and his advice for law students.

Listen