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Support for reflective intelligence about Catholicism has proven controversial in the Catholic Church and even in academies sponsored by the Church. Research and teaching about Catholicism requires resources, human and material, and that support has proven hard to come by. This chapter provides a short commentary on the development of Catholic Studies in the United States over the last thirty years. It focuses on the way in which debate about Catholic Studies has been an important factor in the development of American Catholic institutions and ministries, and self-understanding, since the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). It locates the movement for Catholic Studies programs at the heart of this political tumult, with the scramble for access to potential donors, the need to secure institutional and moral support and other pre-requisites for flourishing Catholic Studies programs now implicated in the cultural and religious politics of Catholic identity and mission, a struggle waged not only on campuses but also in the Church broadly construed.

Catholic Studies is an interdisciplinary program that includes, but is not limited to, theology, history, literature, political science, economics, sociology, fine arts, music, and social work. Catholic Studies courses enable students to explore the myriad ways in which Catholicism has informed people's lives and the world in which they live. Catholic Studies programs can be found at Catholic colleges and universities throughout the United States, and a growing number of Catholic and non-Catholic universities have raised money for endowed chairs in this field. English, economics, political science, and sociology are all potential vehicles for informing undergraduates about Catholic teachings, life, and culture; in other words, Catholicism is taught across the curriculum. Recently, Catholic Studies courses have become a part of the curriculum of non-Catholic colleges and universities. Catholic Studies chairs at non-Catholic universities serve as a reminder of other issues that will need to be addressed as this emerging discipline finds its place in academia.

Catholic Studies emerges in the North American context precisely at a time when the boundaries for identifying “Catholic” are contested. Under conditions of globalization when persons shift in and out of a variety of local and transnational affiliations, the identifier is not as clear as perhaps it once was. This chapter proposes a method of rigorous interrogation not only of “what is Catholic” but also “what Catholic is.” It shows that the “Catholic” in Catholic Studies never represents the totality of personal and spiritual identity for Catholic persons: it constitutes but one element among many that contribute to forging personal, spiritual, and intellectual identities. It argues that the challenge for Catholic Studies is to generate scholarly and pedagogical practices that recognize the essentially hybrid character of “Catholic,” an insight that the author intuitively shares with British scholar Paul Giles, who suggested in a 1999 essay that Catholicism in America flourishes “as a form of hybridity, modulating the very different (often antagonistic) forces with which it has come in contact.”.

Parish revivals enabled many Catholics, including blacks, to attain a deeper knowledge of their faith and to take fuller ownership of it. Catholic revivalism differed in its emphasis on the sacraments, especially Confession and the Eucharist. African Americans, especially former slaves, flocked to these events as they helped them transition from slavery to freedom, and from rudimentary knowledge of their faith to a stronger identification with and knowledge about Catholicism. Black Catholic Studies originated in the late 1960s not among academics but among African American priests, brothers, and members of women's religious communities who had for too long endured the shared experience of institutional racism in the Catholic Church. It enriched African American theology without being subsumed by it; the movement also deepened Catholic historical studies in the United States—as noted by the chapter in an assertion rich in implications for Catholic Studies practice—by prompting a recognition that the “syncretism” marking African American Catholic devotional practices was not confined to the black Catholic experience.

Can one be a Catholic and nonetheless do exigent historical and scientific work on Catholicism? More broadly, can one be religious and still do scientific work in the field of religious studies? Does commitment to a particular religion interfere with objectivity? Can one be objective about one's own religion, one's own Catholicism, about another's religion? There are all kinds of issues in Catholic Studies and various “sets” of issues. This chapter shows that the quest for a distinctly “Catholic Studies” method was anticipated in the groundbreaking work of the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan, particularly in his magisterial 1957 work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, and in Method in Theology (1972). In this latter work, Lonergan called for “integrating studies,” interdisciplinary works that linked theology with the “human sciences,” a project of special relevance for contemporary Catholic Studies. In line with Lonergan's fundamental emphases, this chapter highlights the importance of intellectual conversion or epistemological awareness in Catholic Studies.

A recent report released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life detailing the religious landscape of the modern United States found that many Americans move from one religion to another with relative ease. More than a quarter of Americans, for instance, no longer practice the religion in which they were raised and have either joined another denomination or disassociated themselves from organized religion altogether. Approximately one-third of the survey respondents who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic. A number of Catholic colleges and universities have developed Catholic Studies programs in an attempt to engage undergraduates in a study of Catholic culture while preparing them to assume leadership in the twenty-first-century Catholic Church. However, students may not be sympathetic to a traditional academic approach to the study of Catholicism. This chapter advocates for a semester-long focus on the tradition of Catholic social teaching in order to bridge the divide between Catholic Studies and Catholic campus life.

In hearing the phrase “passing on the faith,” images of more than a list of beliefs pass before the eyes of the hearers' imaginations. This chapter reconstructs debates over the nature of authentically Catholic “formation,” both intellectual and spiritual, as conducted by elite figures in Catholic higher education in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Then, as now, a desire for integration and wholeness was widely shared; the most contentious issue pitted advocates of a rigidly neoscholastic formalism against others intent on producing young Catholic apostles infused with a radical zeal for social justice and openness to engagement with the non-Catholic world. These debates, which engaged leaders from Catholic women's colleges in addition to male clerics, belie the image of “Catholic unity” often ascribed to that era, a view promoted by some intent on making Catholic Studies a vehicle for retrieving the lost world of “integral” Catholicism.

During a celebration of the University of Dayton's (UD) sesquicentennial in the year 2000, the singer-songwriter alumnus who headed the university's Center for Social Concern performed a song he had written for the occasion, “Do Whatever He Tells You.” This song has rich resonance not only for those committed personally and spiritually to Catholic tradition and its Marianist embodiment, but also for a compelling vision of intellectual life and university purpose. This chapter articulates the ideas that have both shaped and resulted from UD's practices, aimed at enlivening Catholic intellectual tradition on campus in service of sustaining and extending the university's Catholic mission. It explains why the university has chosen its particular approach to Catholic Studies, including some consideration of the benefits and risks. UD's Catholic identity pervades the university's curricular and extracurricular life, in the spirit of its founders, French priests of the Society of Mary, a religious order dedicated to education in all fields.

The author, a non-Catholic anthropologist of religion, raises some questions and concerns that have come up for her as an ethnographer who focuses on lived Christianities in the United States. She is convinced that the field of Catholic Studies can learn much from the history and ethnography of Spanish-speaking U.S. Catholics, and that studies of U.S. Hispanics must be interwoven with the histories of U.S. Catholicism and Christianity. She discovered that her status as a non-Catholic was viewed as an asset by some of her interlocutors, who sensed that a sympathetic account of their experience told from a Catholic perspective might arouse suspicion in some readers. The author's methodological self-awareness serves to reaffirm not only that interdisciplinary scholarship is arduous and complex, but also that Catholic Studies attracts practitioners from a wide array of backgrounds driven by intellectual curiosity and the desire to share meaningful stories.

This chapter explores the concept of “tradition,” a key term in negotiations to position Catholic Studies as an interdisciplinary field embedded in the spaces between well-established discourses of religious studies and theology. The relatively recent phenomenon that finds privately endowed positions in Catholic Studies ensconced in both public and private non-Catholic universities has created an unprecedented opportunity and challenge. This chapter suggests that Catholic Studies scholars at secular universities will inhabit a variety of stances in relationship to Catholic tradition. Students in turn will bring their own convictions, from religious doubt to ardent desires that coursework enhance personal faith formation along with intellectual growth. The author herself avows a preferential option for exploring the meanings invested in religious traditions over judging claims made in their name, a practice that might flourish as one among a compelling variety of approaches embraced by scholars in Catholic Studies. Catholic universities are related in some way to the Catholic Church and, thus, are positioned within the Catholic tradition.

Autobiographical works such as Augustine's Confessions are the very foundation of Catholic Studies. Our understanding of the evolution of Catholic life in North America is deeply grounded in life-writings, personal narratives presented in a variety of genres and formats, from travel narratives and traditional memoirs to autobiographical fiction and specialized hybrids. One of the primary functions served by life-writings in Catholic Studies is to remind readers from all denominations, vocations, and walks of life that the Catholic Church is a community composed of individuals whose identities are deeply informed by a common faith and sharply varying experiences of Catholic lived religion. This chapter locates the tradition of American Catholic “life-writing” at the heart of Catholic Studies practice. From the earliest accounts of European explorers to dramatic nineteenth- and twentieth-century conversion narratives by notable Protestants to contemporary chronicles of faith lost or reclaimed, the stories told by American Catholics chart the experience of a community so diverse its shared traditions are both inscribed and invented in these autobiographical narratives.

Immigrants and refugees have contributed not only to the identity of American religions, but also, and especially, to Catholicism in the United States. An examination of how Asian Americans are considered generally in American religious histories reveals a relative neglect of their experiences. This chapter shows that the presence of Asian American Catholic communities radically unsettles standard narratives of Catholic history in America while shifting the contexts informing discussions of the contemporary Catholic Church. Scholars in U.S. religious studies often discount Asian American Catholics, owing to a habitual if not exclusive focus in the religious studies academy on non-Christian Asian traditions. This chapter offers a highly compelling case for Catholic Studies engaged on two fronts simultaneously: alerting Euro-American Catholics to the salience of ethnicity in Asian American religious life while highlighting the religious identity of Asian American Catholics lest it remain overlooked in religious studies scholarship.

The public perception of Catholicism does not always incline toward a scholastic tradition. For some, the Catholic intellectual tradition is the most engaging aspect of the religious heritage, boasting such famed thinkers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For others, the combination of “Catholic” and “intellectual” yields little more than a paradox. Depending on whom you ask both inside and outside the faith, the Catholic intellectual tradition can seem a vital and lasting part of this religion or a nonsensical contradiction of terms. Is there Catholic intellectualism? Is it a religious practice? How does intellectual work function within ecclesiastical structures? This chapter explores the Catholic intellectual tradition from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas. It envisions Catholic Studies as a mode of encounter with these canonical authors marked by openness and intellectual charity, driven by concerns of the present but engaged with the very different horizons of authors past.

This chapter argues that acquisition of visual literacy should enjoy a high priority in Catholic Studies practice, not simply because of the Catholic Church's familiar role in fostering visual arts, but also because across much of Christian history, spiritually-enriching visual materials were more accessible and more efficacious than written texts; these visual materials inspired theological reflection and helped shape Catholic devotional and liturgical practices. In treating religious architecture, this chapter further demonstrates how the construction of sacred space also shapes religious experience, modeling for readers opportunities for field work undertaken by students as an integral component of Catholic Studies pedagogy.

This chapter suggests that vestiges of a Catholic imagination may be discerned in classic works of American literature authored by Protestants, and in particular, the most canonical novel of all, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It enlists the intercession of Robert A. Orsi, perhaps the most influential figure in the field of American Catholic Studies, who in his own work has treated the interior religiosity and public devotional lives of urban Italian Americans—to provide a kind of Catholic Studies rereading of The Scarlet Letter. The playful quality of this exercise only enhances the sense that American Studies has been “Catholicized” via works of Orsi, the author himself, and others who explicitly treat issues that historically bedeviled Protestants, such as the body in its various guises and (in)capacities and the interplay of suffering, erotic desire, and spirituality.

This chapter reveals how an undergraduate course on the history of American Catholic women provides students with an array of new perspectives from which to view women's experience in the Catholic Church. The course introduces students to forms of gender analysis that illuminate uniquely Catholic phenomena employing methods drawn from a range of fields that support an interdisciplinary practice of Catholic Studies. Topics include sainthood, women religious, family, ethnicity, devotional life, Catholicism, and transformations in the Church and society. The semester ends with a discussion of Catholicism and its relationship to contemporary feminism and anti-feminism. The discussion includes documents mentioned in an earlier discussion of Catholic gender ideology, such as those pertaining to Pope John Paul II and the “new feminism.”.

This chapter demonstrates how the “Catholic imagination” mode of interpretation might better serve what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary.” It suggests that the prevailing Catholic “imaginary” has failed to fully engage the range of social injustices found in places like the author's native Philadelphia. The author's account of Philadelphia's 2,800 wall murals—and her own engagement with these murals as sites of theological reflection and liberation praxis—represents a mode of Catholic Studies that both draws on the approaches described in this volume and models a new kind of Catholic humanism. The author's project is radically interdisciplinary as the work of a Christian ethicist drawn to works of visual art whose presence demands interpretive responses beyond the limits of “Catholic imagination” precedent, yet rooted in unfulfilled yearnings of Catholic activists in the tradition of the Catholic Worker movement, the liturgical movement, and the Catholic interracial apostolate, each of which sought an integration of faith, culture, community, and the work of social justice.

Caritas in veritate is the “social encyclical” of Pope Benedict XVI, following in the footsteps of his predecessors from Leo XIII to John Paul II. Benedict presents both a detailed theological basis for the tradition of Catholic social thought and concrete treatment of various particular moral problems facing the world today. In his integration of a deep life of faith with a commitment to work to improve justice in the world, Pope Benedict reaffirms the Catholic tradition’s rejection of two limits on religious faith. Some limit faith to an internal, spiritual experience in a world where so many of the people of the Earth are unable to meet their basic needs. Others limit faith to a this-worldly zeal for humanizing life in a world where so many people fail to order earthly goals to our higher destiny of life with God. This introductory chapter describes the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies and the symposium “Caritas in veritate and the United States”, which took place at the offices of the Pontifical Council in Rome, October 15–16, 2010. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.