Academics

A Mandate for Fidelity: Pope Benedict Urges Compliance with Theologian’s Mandatum

Introduction On May 5, 2012, in his address to several American bishops during their required ad limina visit to Rome, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI spoke on “religious education and the faith formation of the next generation of Catholics” in the United States.  He said: On the level of higher education, many of you […]

Bioethics Studies in Catholic Higher Education

Executive Summary This paper examines contemporary Catholic higher education and its unique role in preparing graduates, grounded in natural moral law, to respond to the increasing bioethical questions of the day. The importance of both administrators and faculty articulat­ing and embracing the mission of Catholic higher education, as they prepare […]

Catholic Social Teaching at the Catholic University

An insistence on spreading the Church’s social doctrine among all Catholics, especially by educational programs for the laity, runs throughout the modern papal Magisterium, beginning with Leo XIII’s exhortations to the laity of the late 19th century.  At that time, it was indeed somewhat unusual for a pope to appeal directly […]

Enhancing a Catholic Intellectual Culture

Executive Summary Rejecting secular and Protestant norms and ideals, Catholic universities today must assert a distinctive Catholic intellectual culture featuring the unity of faith and reason, the acceptance of magisterial teaching and an active critique of culture. Such a Catholic intellectual culture will foster Catholic intellectuals and dispose students to […]

A Rekindling of the Light: The Past, Present and Future of a Catholic Core Curriculum

Executive Summary In his Washington address to Catholic educators, Pope Benedict XVI argued that three “goods”—those of the Church, political society and education itself—require the Church’s institutions of higher education have a strong Catholic identity. Although the Holy Father only touched on curricular matters incidentally, his argument entails important consequences […]