The Dominican House of Studies

History

Lively interest in theological learning and the intellectual life was bequeathed to the Order of Friars Preachers by its founder, Saint Dominic. Responding to an acute need for well-prepared preachers, Saint Dominic conceived a plan of a mobile band of friars preachers and won the formal approval of Pope Honorius III on December 22, 1216.

In the first decades of the Order’s life, St. Dominic sent friars to establish houses of study at the universities of Paris and Bologna where they could receive the strong doctrinal training necessary to support their preaching activity. These friars attracted many university professors and students to the Order, among them the brilliant young Thomas Aquinas (who entered the Order in 1244). Aquinas’s achievement crystallized the intellectual thrust of the Dominican apostolate from that time onward.

The Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception is heir to this long-standing tradition of theological excellence and preaching, and is linked to other Dominican centers of study throughout the world. Our faculty was established in 1834 in Somerset, Ohio, as the first studium generale of the Dominican Order in the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, discussions began about moving it from Ohio to a location on the East Coast, and the provincial chapter of 1892 ordained that the studium be located in New Haven, Connecticut, near Yale University. In 1902, the new provincial, Fr. Lawrence Kearney, determined that Washington, D.C., would be the site for the institution, now called the Dominican House of Studies, and that it would be built near the newly-established Catholic University of America, thus conforming to the historic Dominican practice of establishing studia in major university settings. The groundbreaking for the new building on Bunker Hill Road (now Michigan Avenue) took place on April 23, 1903, with James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia, and Father Kearney officiating.

In 1941 the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities of the Apostolic See designated the Dominican House of Studies as a Pontifical Faculty of Theology with authorization to confer ecclesiastical degrees, and we officially became the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.  At the time, we were only the second such faculty in the United States (after the Catholic University of America).  Even today, there are only six pontifical faculties of theology in the U.S.

The PFIC became a member of the Washington Theological Consortium in 1967. In 1970, it joined the theological faculties of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (O.M.I.) and the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales (O.S.F.S.) as part of the Cluster of Independent Theological Schools.  At about the same time, the House of Studies received civil accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education in order to grant the civil degree of Master of Divinity (M.Div.); this accreditation was expanded in 1993 to include granting the civil degree of Master of Arts in Theology (M.A.), and, later, the doctorate (Ph.D.) in Theology (Thomistic Studies).  The Cluster arrangement came to an end with the closing of Oblate College and De Sales Hall in 1996.  Our faculty remained a fully-independent Pontifical Faculty of Theology, and since the 1990s has expanded its staff, its impact, and its reach.  It now forms Dominicans and non-Dominicans, religious, priests, seminarians, and laity in the rich intellectual tradition of the Catholic faith.