As the response to Christopher Ruddy’s recent Commonweal article on young theologians suggests (see, "Continuing the Conversation"), this is a time of great foment in the Catholic academic and intellectual world. Much of this can be attributed to last year’s decision by the U.S. bishops to endorse Ex corde ecclesiae’s demand that a juridical relationship be established between Catholic colleges and the church. But the question of how best Catholicism can engage contemporary intellectual culture is much larger than sorting out lines of authority among the Vatican, the local church, and the academy. Those who think that the juridical implementation of Ex corde is a mistake are no less concerned about the threats posed to Catholic identity by the moral agnosticism and naturalist philosophical biases of the predominant academic culture. How to engage modern secular culture while bringing the best of the Catholic tradition to bear is the more difficult and abiding dilemma. One effort, just under way, is to establish an Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies (IACS).

The project is the brainchild of James Heft, SM, University of Dayton chancellor, and Michael Lacey, director of United States Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center. It has already attracted the support of some of the most accomplished Catholic scholars, including the philosopher Charles Taylor, theologians David Tracy and Michael Buckley, SJ, and Judge John T. Noonan. (Commonweal’s editor, Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, has served on the commission advising the IACS.) Conceived as a complement to and resource for the nation’s more than two hundred Catholic colleges, the proposed institute has received the endorsement of the board of directors of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Its work will not duplicate Catholic scholarship in the university setting, but extend its intellectual reach and dramatically increase its visibility.

The IACS takes for its model the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton (long home to Albert Einstein), the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and several other independent research centers. "The goal of the institute," its creators state, "is to sponsor research and scholarship in all of those areas where the Catholic intellectual tradition encounters human culture." A broad mandate, to be sure, but a very exciting one as well. In order to pursue that goal, the founders are now trying to raise a $50 million endowment. The money would be used to establish a facility and offer stipends to twenty to twenty-five fellows each academic year. Fellows would be drawn from across the academic spectrum, and from Catholic and non-Catholic universities alike. A high priority will be placed on interdisciplinary collaboration.

Judge Noonan officially launched the fundraising effort May 9 in a speech at Harvard. Acknowledging the accomplishments and example of the established "advanced" institutes, he noted the absence of one dedicated to the study of religion. "Given the importance of religion for an understanding of the universe, an understanding of our culture and of other cultures, an understanding of the human mind as culture has shaped it, it would seem that a center cultivating advanced religious studies was an obvious lacuna," he said. Moreover, a specifically Catholic institute is needed because of the "nature of Catholicism" itself: its historical reach, philosophical sophistication, political significance, literary influence, and multifaceted manifestations. In short, Catholicism’s catholicity is both a challenge and an inexhaustible resource for the scholar. "Every believer believes there is a [Catholic] core," Noonan said, "but it would take a book to demonstrate it and an institution of advanced studies to examine and delimit it. An institute for advanced Catholic studies would look at the core and at its contexts."

That gets Catholic freedom as well as the balance between creed and the development of doctrine just about right. Noonan went on to argue that "Catholicism cannot be studied as a fossil," and that the institute would be the work of believers for the most part. Although eager for the support and counsel of the hierarchy, the institute would be independent of any direct clerical supervision. Good. It would also be good if the IACS broadened its mandate to include outstanding contributions from Catholics in the arts, the media, the professions, and elsewhere. Intellectual culture, even expressly Catholic intellectual culture, cannot live by scholarship alone.

The Catholic church in America is at a crucial juncture. A generation of scholars and intellectuals steeped in Catholic culture and educated in church-run schools in the 1950s and ’60s is approaching retirement age. The inculcation of those values and that intellectual tradition in a younger generation is much in doubt. As clerical control of education passes to the laity, a variety of new institutions must be developed to secure the handing on of that heritage in fluid and often novel circumstances. The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies is one such innovation, one that promises to bring a distinctively Catholic perspective and an authoritative voice to bear on the intellectual issues of the day. It is a voice the world—and the church—needs to hear.