There is some remarkable Catholic institution-building going on around the world.
In the States I see Thomas International with its McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies. I see the University of St Thomas Center for Catholic Studies, the Catholic University of America (where more effort rightly goes into theology than into the faculty website), and the ever-burgeoning institutes for Ethics and Culture, Liturgy, Christian Life and theology at Notre Dame. I see the International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at Gaming in Austria. This blog has links to all of these.
In Australia I see The John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in Melbourne with Tracey Rowland, whose Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II is the best discussion of the challenge that contemporary Catholic theology is taking on. The John Paul II Institute is headed worldwide by Cardinal Camillo Ruini and Livio Melina, both worth googling.
I have linked to other Catholic theological institutions in the ‘theology and the university’ category of this blog and there is a longer list under the catholic and academic tags at douglashknight at deli.cio.us
Now you UK Catholics, tell me this:
When is this new Catholic theological institution going to appear in London?
I see Heythrop College with its Institute for Religion, Ethics and Public life. I see Second Spring (Oxford) and the Society of St Catholic of Siena (UK-wide) – not, I hope, attempting any simple u-turn to tridentine liturgies.
I see the new ecclesiological institutes at Liverpool and the Durham (neither very near London). Much has been promised. I hope that these will not be so in hock to sociology of religion that they cannot offer the church the theological leadership it needs. I hope they simply relay to Catholics and Catholic theology in the UK the real theological leadership the Church is receiving from Pope Benedict.
I am looking for any theological institution in the UK examining constructively the remarkable theological teaching that has been coming from Rome for the last twenty-five years, and which has very noticeably increased the last two years. Time for you Catholics to hold yours heads up, I would say, and stop aping us Protestants. Can’t you see the trouble we have got ourselves into? Don’t look at us. We are looking to you.
