His PhD was awarded in 1938 by the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, on the basis of a dissertation on the Scottish philosopher Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison.
To prepare for the appointment as Professor of Catholic Sociology, a chair endowed by the Knights of Saint Columbanus but for which no immediately suitable candidate could be found, he was sent to Rome to study courses on sociology, international labour organisation, political economy, the social encyclicals, Catholic Action and the history of Russian Bolshevism.
[2] Alongside Cornelius Lucey, Maynooth’s Professor of Social Ethics, McKevitt played an important role in the instigation of the Christus Rex Society in 1941.
It related general principles of Catholic social teaching to specific Irish problems such as emigration and rural decline".
Appointed canon and monsignor (1967), he died on 3 November 1976, a few months after retiring as parish priest.