Mark S. Massa, SJ is an American Catholic priest who serves at Boston College. He is a member of the Jesuits.
Massa founded the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham in 2001 and served as its director until 2010. [1] [2] He was also the first holder of the Karl Rahner Chair in Theology at Fordham University.
From 2010 to 2016 he was Dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. [3] Massa currently serves as the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
Massa has written a number of books including Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice? and Catholics and American Culture: Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, and the Notre Dame Football Team, which won the AJCU/Alpha Sigma Nu Award for Outstanding Work in Theology for 1999-2001. [4]
Massa has worked on a history of Catholic theology in the United States since the Second Vatican Council. [4] He has also served as the director of the U.S. Bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

Avery Robert Dulles was an American Jesuit priest, theologian, and cardinal of the Catholic Church. Dulles served on the faculty of Woodstock College from 1960 to 1974, of the Catholic University of America from 1974 to 1988, and as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University from 1988 to 2008. He was also an internationally known author and lecturer.
The Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life is a research center at Boston College. The goal of the Boisi Center is to create opportunities where a community of scholars, policy makers, media and religious leaders in the Boston area and nationally can connect in conversations and scholarly reflection around issues at the intersection of religion and American public life. The hope is that such conversations can help to clarify the moral and normative consequences of public policies in ways that can help us to maintain the common good, while respecting our growing religious diversity.
Leo Jeremiah O'Donovan III is an American Catholic priest, Jesuit, and theologian who served as the president of Georgetown University from 1989 to 2001. Born in New York City, he graduated from Georgetown, and while studying in France, decided to enter the Society of Jesus. He went on to receive advanced degrees from Fordham University and Woodstock College, and received his doctorate in theology from the University of Münster, where he studied under Karl Rahner. Upon returning to the United States, he became a professor at Woodstock College and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, before becoming the president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a senior administrator in the Jesuit Maryland Province.
Ex corde Ecclesiae is an apostolic constitution issued by Pope John Paul II regarding Catholic colleges and universities. Promulgated on 15 August 1990 and intended to become effective in the academic year starting in 1991, its aim was to define and refine the Catholicism of Catholic institutions of higher education.
The Gloria L. and Charles I. Clough School of Theology and Ministry (CSTM) is a Jesuit school of graduate theology at Boston College. It is an ecclesiastical faculty of theology that trains men and women, both lay and religious, for scholarship and service, especially within the Catholic Church.
Richard A. McCormick was a leading liberal Catholic moral theologian who reshaped Catholic thought in the United States. He wrote many journal articles on Catholic social teachings and moral theory. He was an expert in Catholic medical ethics and for many years wrote the "Notes on Moral Theology" column in Theological Studies. He was "particularly articulate" among the five moral theologians who in 1964 at the Kennedy Compound crafted a political position for the Kennedy clan that would permit abortion in law.
Anthony Kohlmann was an Alsatian Catholic priest, missionary, theologian, and Jesuit educator. He played a decisive role in the early formation of the Archdiocese of New York, where he was the subject of a lawsuit that for the first time recognized the confessional privilege in the United States, and served as the president of Georgetown College from 1817 to 1820.
Brian Edward Daley, S.J. is an American Catholic priest, Jesuit, and theologian. He is currently the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology (Emeritus) at the University of Notre Dame and was the recipient of a Ratzinger Prize for Theology in 2012.
Father Michael Himes was a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. Himes was a theologian at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He served as professor and academic dean of the Seminary of Immaculate Conception on Long Island, New York, and as associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.
James F. Keenan is a moral theologian, bioethicist, writer, and the Canisius Professor of theology at Boston College.
Edward Bernard Bunn was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who became the president of Loyola College in Maryland and later of Georgetown University. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he was educated at Loyola College before entering the Society of Jesus in 1919. He continued his education at St. Andrew-on-Hudson Woodstock College, and the Pontifical Gregorian University and then taught at Brooklyn Preparatory School and Canisius College.
William George Read Mullan, SJ, was an American Jesuit and academic who served as President of Boston College from 1898 to 1903 and President of Loyola University Maryland from 1907 to 1908.
Mary Shawn Copeland, known professionally as M. Shawn Copeland, is a retired American womanist and Black Catholic theologian, and a former religious sister. She is professor emerita of systematic theology at Boston College and is known for her work in theological anthropology, political theology, and African American Catholicism.
Joseph Havens Richards was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who became a prominent president of Georgetown University, where he instituted major reforms and significantly enhanced the quality and stature of the university. Richards was born to a prominent Ohio family; his father was an Episcopal priest who controversially converted to Catholicism and had the infant Richards secretly baptized as a Catholic.
Joseph Hunter Guthrie was an American academic philosopher, writer, Jesuit, and Catholic priest. Born in New York City, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1917, and began his studies at Woodstock College. Following his undergraduate and graduate work there, he taught at Jesuit institutions in the Philippines until 1927. Following his ordination in 1930, he received doctorates in theology and philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of Paris, respectively. He then returned to the United States, where he became a professor of philosophy at Woodstock College and Fordham University.
Kevin Fleming O'Brien, SJ is an American Jesuit priest, theologian, educator, and former president of Santa Clara University from 2019 to 2021. He previously served as the dean of SCU's Jesuit School of Theology and as Vice President for Mission and Ministry at Georgetown University.
Neil Gerard McCluskey, a former Jesuit Catholic priest known as Reverend Neil Gerard McCluskey, S.J. from 1938 to 1975, was a prominent voice for Catholic Education in the United States in the time of Vatican II. McCluskey wrote the famous Land O'Lakes Statement, as a member of the committee headed by Fr. Theodore Hesburgh. McCluskey was also the last surviving nephew of Blessed Solanus Casey.
Andrew Joseph Christiansen was an American Jesuit priest and author. He was Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Human Development at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service, a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and the former editor-in-chief of the Jesuit magazine America. His areas of research included nuclear disarmament, nonviolence and just peacemaking, Catholic social teaching, and ecumenical public advocacy.
The Land O'Lakes Statement of 1967 was an influential manifesto published in Land o' Lakes, Wisconsin, about Catholic higher education in the United States. Inspired by the liberalization represented by the Second Vatican Council, the statement declared that "To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself." In the next few decades hundreds of Catholic schools kept the religious designation but began to operate independently from, and sometimes in opposition to, Catholic teaching.
Jay P. Dolan was an American historian and former Catholic priest who specialized in the history of Catholicism in the United States. He spent almost his entire career at the University of Notre Dame (1971–2003), where he founded and directed the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.