It may be brand new, but the School of Theology and Ministry (STM) at Boston College incorporates three distinguished educational institutions: the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry (IREPM), which has been conducting theological research and preparing pastoral ministers since its inception at Boston College in 1971; the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, one of only two U.S. Jesuit theology schools, which spent its first 40 years in Weston, Massachusetts, and its most recent 40 in nearby Cambridge; and C21Online, which since 2004 has been providing noncredit programs in theology and spirituality to an ever-growing public.

Each entity joins bearing gifts, beginning with C21Online’s links to at least 10,000 constituents worldwide. IREPM brings with it seven full-time professors, 125 academic-year students, and 350 Summer Institute students. Weston Jesuit crosses the Charles River with 18 professors, 220 students (including seven Franciscan friars and 55 Jesuit students), a substantial endowment, and a library of 90,000 volumes that will form the basis of a new Theology and Ministry Library on BC’s Brighton Campus. (This library of 250,000 volumes in all will be a resource as well for the University’s theology department, which will continue to reside in the School of Arts & Sciences to serve graduate and undergraduate students.) The new school will also enjoy joint and dual programs with the schools of education, nursing, social work, and management.

Any organization made up of three independent units has to pay close attention to its mission statement. And I can assure you there was sufficient Sturm und Drang in drafting the School of Theology and Ministry’s statement to guarantee that it represents the real sentiments of the faculty. Here are the key elements:

The school’s mission. “The fostering of Christian faith and the promotion of justice and reconciliation”

Its students. “Jesuits and other candidates approved for ordination studies, women and men for lay ecclesial ministries and for service rooted in faith”

Its commitments. “The Catholic theological tradition, rigorous academic inquiry, interdisciplinary study, ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, and the engagement of faith and culture”—and permeating these, a commitment also to forming a community that is contemplative, critical, and collaborative

Its inspiration. The Ignatian tradition.

A school comes to life in its relationships, especially a school of theology and ministry, which, by its nature must sustain relationships in two realms, the university and the Church. From the beginning of Europe’s universities in the Middle Ages, theology played an important part in academe, not only as a discipline but also as a component of ministerial education. Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan described how these dual aspects came to raise “special problems,” in his The Melody of Theology (1988). One challenge, he noted, came with late medieval scholasticism’s conceptualizing of theology as a “science” and its reliance on logic at the expense of the Bible. To critics, this approach seemed ill suited to preparing practitioners whose role it would be to serve in parishes and preach. And so the Church adapted: In the mid-16th century, the Council of Trent set up freestanding seminaries devoted to priestly formation and Catholic theology.

In America, Protestant churches learned to adapt too. There, young men trained for ministry during the 17th and 18th centuries in independent liberal arts institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown. But the consequences for Protestant ministerial preparation, as the colleges became larger and more complex, were mixed, according to Professor Pelikan: Some faculties of divinity ended up pigeonholed as professional schools “without any role within the university as defined by the arts and sciences,” Pelikan writes. Others gained “a role in the university at the cost of their Christian particularity and of their professional mission as schools for the ministers of the Church.”

Is such a loss of particularity and mission inevitable for a Catholic school of theology and ministry today? I do not believe so. To be sure, Boston College’s school will be wholeheartedly ecumenical and wide open to other religions and religious expressions. This is in keeping with the University’s own mission statement, which holds “different religious traditions and value systems as essential to the fullness of its intellectual life.” The conviction flows from the Jesuit tradition of finding God in all things, which means that God is present in other religious expressions. Dialogue with different traditions enables one to see more clearly how God is in one’s own, and at Boston College the STM community will converse with Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other religious adherents.

The fact remains, however, that this new school’s Weston Jesuit department is an ecclesiastical faculty, canonically established by the Vatican. Its purpose is to “foster and teach sacred doctrine and the sciences connected therewith,” as the Apostolic Constitution Sapientia Christiana states, and its right to confer academic degrees—the bachelor’s, licentiate, and doctorate in sacred theology—comes from the Holy See. Weston School of Theology was established as an ecclesiastical faculty in 1932, and it retains that status as it becomes a part of Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. Now a department of STM, it is one of 134 ecclesiastical faculties (six in the United States) that are headed variously by clergy, sisters, and lay men and women. Among the more celebrated worldwide are those at the universities of Tübingen and Louvain, the Institute Catholique in Paris, Heythrop at the University of London, the Gregorian University in Rome, the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Weston Jesuit places the School of Theology and Ministry in an international network of stunning breadth—and linking the local community to an international one is a Jesuit value fully in keeping with Boston College’s mission of preparing students for “service leadership in a global society.”

The question now begs asking: Does STM’s particular commitment to Catholic doctrine and morals adversely affect the academic freedom justly prized by the University?

Let me first say that in Catholic tradition, all Catholic professors of theology, no matter where they teach, are presumed to be exploring and developing for the people of the Church an authoritative tradition reverently handed down from apostolic times. For this reason, all Catholic theology professors—not only those on an ecclesiastical faculty—are in some way responsible to Church authorities. In interpreting a community’s tradition, scholars have to take past interpreters and current interpretations seriously, especially official ones.

The teaching office of the Catholic Church, the magisterium, normally deals with specific doctrinal and ethical teachings under development—in our time, this would include topics such as the validity of non-Christian religions, the distinctiveness of priestly ordination in comparison with lay ecclesial ministry and baptismal vocation, and issues of sexuality—and with restatements of traditional formulations. What draws oversight is not so much where one is teaching (e.g., an ecclesiastical faculty) but what one is teaching.

Some tension is inevitable. As the late Georgetown University theologian Monika Hellwig pointed out, the Church “institutionalize[s] its own opposition” by recognizing Catholic universities. “Sooner or later,” she wrote, “scholarly investigation of sources will . . . raise questions about some commonly held assumptions and interpretations.” I like to put the idea differently: The Church recognizes that informed conversation is absolutely necessary in order to be, on the one hand, faithful to tradition and, on the other, responsive to the present generation. To quote the Dominican scholar Herbert McCabe: “It is a great function of debate to clean each other’s glasses; that is why hard thinking has to be a communal affair and why argument, even apart from the courtesies of debate, is itself an act of fraternal charity.”

But, as history teaches, not everybody wants their glasses cleaned. Some theologians have not been willing to explain themselves, and some Church officials have indiscriminately taken action against new ideas. A sad example of the latter was the wholesale suppression of the modernist movement at the start of the 20th century, which deferred essential debate on modernity and Catholic tradition for decades and sidelined perhaps the greatest generation of theologians—men like Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and John Courtney Murray—in modern times. Examples of the proper use of Church authority are more numerous though less often celebrated. I will mention just one that is close to my heart: the way that well-considered encyclicals and Church documents since the 1940s have modeled the integration of modern and traditional biblical interpretation.

Put succinctly, Church authorities’ criticisms and requests for clarification, so long as they are part of a back-and-forth, should be accepted as casting light on the great tradition.

How is the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry to serve the Church? It will do so—locally and globally—less by giving concise answers to contemporary problems and questions than by raising awareness of new possibilities. I see today four challenges that particularly invite imaginative interpretation, centered around the Church’s young people, its women, its new immigrants, and its clergy:

The challenge of assisting ministers in gaining intelligibility and competence. These qualities have been singled out by Fr. J. Bryan Hehir, Harvard professor and secretary for health care and social services in the Boston Archdiocese, as essential for priests and their lay ministerial colleagues. Alas, in many places they must be recovered, and trust must be restored in the aftermath of scandal. As the Bible—and common experience—tells us, a preacher must believe the message and serve others with unselfish simplicity. Only then is the message intelligible and the minister’s competence established. The best institutional route for advancing this attitude is a comprehensive formation program, and the School of Theology and Ministry runs one in accord with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ directives, as set out in Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord: A Resource for Guiding the Development of Lay Ecclesial Ministry (2005) and the Program of Priestly Formation (fifth edition, 2006). The Capuchins (of the Franciscan family) and Jesuits at the school run formation programs for their own men, as well. One of the distinctive features of STM is the influence of Jesuit spirituality on the entire school community.

The challenge of handing on the faith to the next generation. Last June, James Davidson, a sociologist at Purdue University, delivered the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America, in Miami. He argued that in the United States the greatest determinant of one’s religious values is neither race nor gender nor class, but the generation into which one was born. Connect that understanding with surveys conducted by sociologist Dean Hoge of Catholic University that show that Catholics of every generation prize highly “their relationship with God,” but that those born after 1961 (48 percent of U.S. Catholics) place way down on the list their “relationship to the Church.”

It is hard to find parents today who are not worried about their children’s seeming indifference to their religious legacy. Cardinal Avery Dulles, until recently a Fordham University theologian, has surveyed modern religious education practices and found a method called “shared Christian praxis”—rooted in individual experience and reflection, aligned with Scripture and tradition, and designed for action—to be the most balanced and satisfactory. I am happy to say that the model was developed by Professor Thomas Groome at Boston College’s IREPM; it is taught in our classrooms and disseminated through publications and workshops.

The challenges of helping women to exercise their gifts and of supporting lay ecclesial ministry. (The two endeavors are inseparable.) The major monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—took shape in a world where men generally had the public roles and women the domestic ones. Today the Catholic Church, like other religions, struggles to adapt to a world where women enjoy public roles and offer their talents to the community. The percentage of Catholics in parish ministry who are women is growing: from 44 percent in 1990, to 54 percent in 1997, to 64 percent in 2005. How are we to view this development? I can suggest a framework for discussion: the veritable explosion of “lay ecclesial ministry” (the bishops’ preferred term) in the Catholic Church. In his widely used, even standard account, Theology of Ministry (1999, rev.), Thomas O’Meara, OP, last year’s Joseph Professor at Boston College, concluded, contrary to what one might infer from the declining number of clergy, that the Catholic Church is actually experiencing an unparalleled surge in ministerial energy, a phenomenon that began even before Vatican II. Lay ministry has risen so naturally and quietly from the grass roots that only relatively recently has it become the object of explicit reflection. But more and more, lay ecclesial ministry is recognized as a profound renewal, and it is changing forever the face of ministry in the Catholic Church. One can compare similar energy bursts in his-tory: the martyrs in the early Church, the monasteries in the Middle Ages, mendicant orders and lay men’s and women’s communities in the 12th and 13th centuries, missionary orders in the 16th and 17th, lay people and sisters administering Church institutions in America and other far-flung locales, from the 17th to the 19th centuries. At present, energy seems to be entering the Church through lay ecclesial ministry, and it seems to me to recover the multiple charisms of the early Church.

Historically, such bursts have not killed off other growths, but made them grow too. Hence, we can expect that clergy, whether diocesan or of an order, will draw vitality from lay ministry. The STM, with two departments long experienced in forming and educating priests and laity for ministry, can further this work of the Spirit. Patience is needed, but so is the confidence that grace is given to benefit the whole community, not the individual alone.

The challenge of enabling the burgeoning U.S. Hispanic Catholic community to flourish and enjoy pastoral leadership. From 1990 to 2005, the Hispanic population in the United States grew from 22.4 million to 42.7 million, and now constitutes 14 percent of the country’s total population. Younger on average than the non-Hispanic population, the Hispanic population can be expected to swell in the coming years. Of U.S. Catholics born between 1961 and 1982, one in five is Hispanic. Of those born since 1983, two in five are. Seventy percent of Hispanics self-identify as Catholics, and within 20 years, some demographers predict, well over half of U.S. Catholics will be Hispanic.

The U.S. bishops have responded to Hispanics differently than to immigrant ethnic groups in the past. They have not established Hispanic parishes, but instead have added Spanish Masses in non-Hispanic parishes, in general preferring integration to separate structures. The result has been unsettling transitions, as priests from Latin America try to accommodate to a new culture, their U.S. congregations try to adjust to them, and Hispanic members of a parish try to work with non-Hispanic parishioners.

The School of Theology and Ministry is unusually well-positioned to help address this situation. It has two professors of Hispanic theology and ministry, as well as a Hispanic ministry program with 32 students and the promise of more through recruitment. What the school has already accomplished is impressive; this was brought home to me in a conversation with the recruitment director at a major divinity school that, despite serious effort, has not succeeded in recruiting or retaining Hispanic students. We can look forward to the growth of our program and to the enrichment it will provide to STM, Boston College, and the Church in the United States.

Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry is young. Yet because the school’s components—IREPM, Weston Jesuit, and C21Online—have accomplished much already as separate entities, there is every indication they will achieve more as they work together.

Richard Clifford, SJ, is dean of Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. His essay is drawn and adapted from the text of a talk prepared for the school’s inauguration on October 21.