Statement of Purpose

The purposes of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars may be stated as follows:

(1) We Catholic scholars in various disciplines join in fellowship in order to serve Jesus Christ better by helping one another in our work and by putting our abilities more fully at the service of the Catholic faith.

(2) We wish to form a fellowship of scholars who see their intellectual work as an expression of the service that they owe to God. To Him we give thanks for our Catholic faith and for every opportunity He gives us to serve that faith.

(3) We wish to form a fellowship of Catholic scholars open to the work of the Holy Spirit within the Church. Thus we wholeheartedly accept and support the renewal of the Church of Christ undertaken by Pope John XXIII, shaped by Vatican II, and carried on by succeeding pontiffs.

(4) We accept as the rule of our life and thought the entire faith of the Catholic Church. This we see not merely in solemn definitions but in the ordinary teaching of the Pope and those bishops in union with him, and also embodied in those modes of worship and ways of Christian life and practice, of the present as of the past, which have been in harmony with the teaching of St. Peter's successors in the See of Rome.

(5) The questions raised by contemporary thought must be considered with courage and dealt with in honesty. We will seek to do this, faithful to the truth always guarded in the Church by the Holy Spirit and sensitive to the needs of the family of faith. We wish to accept a responsibility which a Catholic scholar may not evade: to assist everyone, so far as we are able, to personal assent to the mystery of Christ as made manifest through the lived faith of the Church, His Body, and through the active charity without which faith is dead.

(6) To contribute to this sacred work, our fellowship will strive to:

• come to know and welcome all who share our purpose;
• make known to one another our various competencies and interests;
• share our abilities with one another unstintingly in our efforts directed to our common purpose;
• cooperate in clarifying the challenges which must be met;
• help one another to evaluate critically the variety of responses which are proposed to these challenges;
• communicate our suggestions and evaluations to members of the Church who might find them helpful;
• respond to requests to help the Church in its task of guarding the faith as inviolable and defending it with fidelity;
• help one another to work through, in scholarly and prayerful fashion and without public dissent, any problem which may arise from magisterial teaching.

(7) With the grace of God for which we pray, we hope to assist the whole Church to understand its own identity more clearly, to proclaim the joyous Gospel of Jesus more confidently, and to carry out its redemptive mission of all humankind more effectively.