Cultural issues are central for the work of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America. The Institute considers the study of culture, in particular the culture of modernity as developed in America, to be an integral part of the clarification of fundamental theological concepts. The Institute engages this cultural study in light of the history of the Church and Christian thought, with special attention to the writings of the Second Vatican Council and John Paul II.
The aim of such study is to generate a “culture of life”: a culture whose members “see life in its deeper meaning, its beauty and its invitation to freedom and responsibility”; “who do not presume to take possession of reality, but instead accept it as a gift, discovering in all things the reflection of the Creator and seeing in every person his living image” (Evangelium vitae, 83). A culture of life is a culture wherein the Church’s understanding of sexual and family ethics, the body and gender difference, fatherhood and motherhood, filiation and fraternity, birth and death, find a home. The culture of life resists the “consumerist, anti-birth mentality,” or again the “contraceptive mentality,” characteristic of the “technocratic logic” lying at the heart of what John Paul II termed a veritable “anti-civilization” (Letter to Families, 13; cf. Familiaris consortio, 6; Fides et ratio, 15).
The curriculum of the Institute encompasses the full range of fields required for a complete education in the areas of marriage and family: scripture, theology, philosophy, ethics, law and public policy, natural and life sciences, and literature. This range of fields indicates why the Institute is called an institute for “studies” on marriage and family. The “transdisciplinary” nature of the curriculum receives an (analogous) unity through the notion of the “communion of persons.” The fundamental aim of the curriculum is to develop an intelligent understanding of person, marriage, and family, as integral to a Christian vision of reality. The expectation is that the Institute’s academic programs will prepare students for work in a variety of areas: educational work as teachers and researchers in universities, theological schools, seminaries, and secondary schools; pastoral work in Life or Family Bureaus, or other specialized areas of marriage and family. Study at the Institute also provides theological, philosophical, and ethical formation for work in the biosciences, and for professional service in health care, social and community work, and law and public policy.
In a statement accompanying her application for admission, an Institute student cited a recent Catholic thinker’s observation that “sanity does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world.” The student then went on to say that she wanted to study theology at the Institute “in order to better know the real world and live in it, and to help others do the same.” This expresses the purpose of the Institute in the most comprehensive sense: to study the personal-familial love that is basic to the “real world” as created by God; and through this study to deepen one’s understanding of that world, in order the better to live in it—in order to assist in developing what John Paul II called the “civilization of love” (LF, 13).
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