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Prospective Students

To: Prospective Students

Questions regarding the meaning and dignity of the human person have always been a matter of central concern for the Church and the broader culture. Today these questions have become especially intense. To be sure, the meaning of the person has never been lived in its integrity at any time in the infralapsarian period. In earlier cultures, however, and indeed in our own culture until recently, the objective meaning of the person and of the basic community in which the person naturally begins and develops—the family—was received as something given and something to be honored, even if honored often only in the breach.

In the present cultural situation, however, as Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have both pointed out, it is the foundational meaning of the human person itself and of the human body that can no longer be taken for granted: the nature of the person as born from a marriage between a man and a woman, hence from a sexually differentiated communion of persons meant to last forever; of the person as destined to live in the family that Vatican II termed a "domestic Church"; of the body as "nuptial," hence meant in its very physicality to express procreative love and fruitfulness.

John Paul II founded the Institute to probe the meaning of the human person as love in ways indicated here. What is distinctive about the Institute is its educational emphasis and its emphasis on understanding the root meaning of the person: the meaning of the person as revealed in the Trinity and in Jesus Christ, as developed in philosophy, and as illuminated in the sciences. What is distinctive about the Institute, moreover, is its effort to recover this meaning in terms of an accurate reading of the signs of the times, as urged also by John Paul II: by bringing into relief the main anthropological assumptions underpinning our political, economic, academic, and cultural institutions.

The Institute places this search for a true understanding of the person within the call to holiness. The search is conceived as an integral part of the following of Christ, In all of this, the Institute follows the lead of Benedict XVI, who says that his pontificate intends to help the Church assimilate the teachings of John Paul II as a rich treasure" that provides the "authentic interpretation of Vatican II."

In short, the Institute understands its educational mission to be a matter of developing a vision of reality as a whole, for the purpose of building a civilization of love and a culture of life.

It is in realizing its educational mission in this comprehensive sense that the Institute faculty believes it can best prepare students for work in family life bureaus and pro-life activities, in parishes and dioceses; for teaching and research in seminaries, colleges, and universities; for legal and medical work. Each of the Institute's degree programs presupposes this common educational mission, though each degree has its own distinct purpose within the common mission.

—David L. Schindler, Dean and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology