In 1926, Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II were born. President Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, Pope Pius XI was in the Vatican, and Babe Ruth was in the World Series, hitting three home runs in a single game.
Also in 1926, Fr. Edward A. Pace founded the American Catholic Philosophical Association (ACPA), which aimed at the advancement of philosophy in harmony with Catholic tradition by means of scholarship, teaching, and fellowship.
How has the American Catholic Philosophical Association fared over the years? The group has a distinguished history; Fulton Sheen served as a past president, and luminaries like Jacques Maritain, Elizabeth Anscombe, Ralph McInerny, Eleonore Stump, and Alasdair MacIntyre were associated with the organization. John F. Wippel and Robert Sokolowski were not only important teachers of Bishop Barron but winners of the association’s Aquinas Medal for outstanding scholarship.
Like any organization spanning a century, there have been ebbs. A low point was a proposal decades ago—which thankfully failed—to remove the word “Catholic” from the name of the organization. But today it finds increased vigor in both faith and philosophy.
In 2026, the American Catholic Philosophical Association will return to the place of its founding in Washington DC for a centennial celebration. We are going to gather in gratitude for our annual conference, The ACPA at 100: Living Tradition.
Some might think that to be both Catholic and philosophical is a contradiction in terms. While I was at the University of Cologne as a postdoc, someone who knew me as a philosopher was shocked to discover that I was also a Catholic. It was as if she had discovered I was both a firefighter and an arsonist, a fitness fanatic and a couch potato.
If philosophy is understood as the love of wisdom, the seeking of the truth both theoretical and practical, how could a philosopher not be helped by knowing and loving the first truth?
But to see faith as a stimulus for philosophy, to see a harmony in faith and reason, is no more problematic than to combine faith and art. Was Michelangelo’s faith an obstacle to his sculpting of the Pietà? Were the writers Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, or Flannery O’Connor blocked by their faith? Was the poet Dante hindered by his Catholicism when he wrote his Divine Comedy? On the contrary, the music of Mozart and of U2’s Bono were stimulated, not stymied, by their faith.
So too, St. Augustine’s faith helped him to gain great insights, as he wrote about in his Confessions. St. Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Augustinian theology and Aristotelian philosophy was aided, not impeded, by his faith. And in our time, philosophers like Sir Michael Dummett, Jennifer Frey, Peter Kreeft, Edward Feser, J. Budziszewski, Nicholas Rescher, Robert Koons, Mortimer Adler, John Finnis, Ronda Chervin, Candace Vogler, Jason Blakely, Alasdair MacIntyre, and David Solomon found a home as Catholics.
If God exists, then God is the most important truth because God is the first truth and the foundation of all the other truths in the created order. So, if philosophy is understood as the love of wisdom, the seeking of the truth both theoretical and practical, how could a philosopher not be helped by knowing and loving the first truth?
But, it might be retorted, a philosopher is someone who questions everything; a person of faith questions nothing. Philosophy requires unmitigated skepticism; faith requires unconditional credulity.
But this contention misunderstands both faith and philosophy. In fact, faith and asking questions are not opposed but rather go together. If someone believes in God, this belief opens up entirely new realms of questions and inquiry. How does God relate to the world? How does divine freedom relate to human freedom? What can human beings know and not know about the divine? Has God revealed himself to human beings? Indeed, the greatest summary of theology ever written is organized around questions. In his Summa theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas poses more than 2,660 queries.
Likewise, to understand philosophy as requiring pure skepticism is to misunderstand philosophy. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, did indeed begin his Meditations on First Philosophy by doubting everything. He even proposed that he was being constantly fooled by a malicious genius.
But we are not required to do philosophy like Descartes. The skeptical method of Descartes can itself be doubted. Must we always seek certitude more than understanding? Indeed, even though Descartes began by doubting everything, he himself did not end his Meditations with radical skepticism but rather with a reestablishment of knowledge of his own existence and God. Despite his use of doubt as a tool, Descartes spent his life as a believing Catholic. Moreover, as Étienne Gilson pointed out, Descartes did not in fact doubt everything but tacitly presupposed all kinds of beliefs. Descartes, despite claiming to start philosophy over from scratch, was like every philosopher past and present. As Ralph McInerny put it, “If having antecedent beliefs disqualified one from philosophy, there could be no philosophy.”
We are looking forward to joining philosophers from around the world to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the vibrant living tradition of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Professor Robert George of Princeton will receive the Aquinas Medal, and Bishop Barron has agreed to celebrate Mass for us. We have many reasons to give thanks to the God of faith and reason.