Dominicans open new intellectual headquarters

Fr. Steven Boguslawski, O.P.
President, Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies

"So you have two jobs," the Pope asked him? Indeed, Father Steven Boguslawksi does.

He got to impress Benedict XVI when in Spring 2008 he welcomed the Pontiff to the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., where the friar serves as executive director. Just down the street, at the Dominican House of Studies, he is the president of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.

For many even a hard worker, either position on its own would be a full-time task. But for this 52-year-old Connecticut native, more has always been better.

He was the first religious priest to become rector of a diocesan seminary, the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit, where he started as Dean of Studies and a professor of New Testament in 2001. Embracing the Dominican's intellectual prowess and enthusiasm for the job at hand, starting an ambitious new academic program from scratch, Detroit's Cardinal Adam Maida put him in charge of the institution after a few years. (The cardinal is also the prime mover behind the John Paul II Cultural Center.)

The program he put in place in Detroit, which continues to thrive and has become a national model, gave a decidedly Dominican cast to the education of future priests and the formation of lay leaders: the program hinges on an integration of doctrine and pastoral practice; reason and faith; theology and real life.

It is precisely that combination of intellectual rigor and evangelization--pastoral sensibility--as embodied in the persons of three of his Dominican professors that attracted Father Boguslawski to the Dominican order when he studied at Providence College in the late 70s. "It was their quality of preaching, that integration of classroom learning with real life experience," he recalls, that inspired him to sign on with the friars. He loved that the Dominican approach is "more intellectual than not, but never haughty. It is a unique fusion of the charism of preaching and the intellectual calling."

Father Boguslawski proceeded deliberately even though his pastor had inspired him at a very young age to become a priest. There were the mixed feelings on the part of his mother and father. Deeply devout, they were nonetheless conflicted about their son, the first in the family to attend college, becoming a priest, rather than a doctor or lawyer and grabbing the promise of worldly success that comes with those professions.

Graduating from high school, he felt too young to enter the diocesan seminary and attended Providence College instead. He professed as a Dominican novice for a year at first and pursued a Master's degree, before fully taking the plunge. "It's all about the proper time," he said. He has not looked back since.

He was clearly called to the life of the mind; he studied at Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute and Yale, where he earned advanced degrees and where the young priest got a solid pastoral foundation thanks to six years of parish work in and around New Haven, CT.

Writing one of his dissertations, he also served in his first scholarly post when he became vice-president and academic dean at the Dominican House of Studies. Following a year teaching the New Testament at Providence College, Fr. Boguslawski was recruited by Detroit's Cardinal Maida to become dean of studies at the archdiocese's Sacred Heart Major Seminary.

It was there, as rector and president, that the friar created from scratch; he was instrumental in raising a $12M endowment in five years, a new License in Sacred Theology academic track that targets both priests and laypeople in formation. The heart of the program carries the imprint of Fr. Boguslawski's insistence that "evangelization should be at the heart of preaching" and that the Church "must engage the culture where it is and bring the light of the Gospel" to it.

What some call the best seminary in the country became a laboratory of sorts, where cultural trends and, for example, the needs of different age groups were analyzed by some of the brightest minds in the US Church. The S.T.L. program, explains Fr. Boguslawksi, was designed to heal the gap "between doctrine and pastoral practice, between doctrine and lived experience, and between reason and faith." The practice of theology, he says, "must be informed by pastoral questions and what priests must make clear is the intimate relationship between doctrine and lived human experience."

This formula, eminently Dominican as it combines the intellectual and evangelizing geniuses of the Church, will also inform the academic program at the Dominican House of Studies. This, he argues, is the way for the Church to make inroads in a society that too easily dismisses so much of Catholic teaching as rules and regulations imposed from the outside and without any obvious bearings on the day-to-day experience of most people.

Then there is job number two at the John Paul II Cultural Center, where another dialogue between faith and culture is taking place, in particular a sophisticated dialogue between Catholicism and other religious cultures at the Center's Inter Cultural Forum.

Fr. Boguslawski, whose book "Thomas Aquinas on the Jews" (Paulist Press, 2007) tackles the subject in-depth, is especially committed to the Church's relationship with Judaism and is one of the most distinguished spokespersons in the country regarding what he calls the "dual track of salvation": the Jewish people are essential to the outworking of all of salvation history, thanks to God's unbroken covenant with them; they are on their very own mysterious path, he explains.

Wherever he goes, Fr. Boguslawski is a pioneer.

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Press Information

The media are invited to interview leading Dominicans of the Province of St. Joseph as follows: Saturday, April 18 from 1:00pm-2:00 pm and Sunday, April 19 at 1:00-2:00 pm

Please meet interviewees on the 1st Floor of the Theological Library at the Dominican House of Studies (directions below), or by appointment.

For more information, or to schedule phone interview(s), please contact THOMAS PETERS or JEFF GRABOSKY.

Phone: 202-495-3877 or 202-495-3828
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Address: The Dominican House of Studies, 487 Michigan Ave, NE, Washington DC 20017