• U.S.

Universities: Yale’s Catholic Professor

2 minute read
TIME

The first U.S. colleges were founded by churches to train preachers and propagate particular denominations, but higher scholarship and declining sectarianism have more and more moved colleges to treat religion as a subject for study, like languages or history. Puritan-founded Yale, for example, which once banned even Episcopalians, now has a wide-ranging program of religious studies. Symbolic of the times, Yale last week announced a new chair for Roman Catholic studies—the first such permanent professorship at any non-sectarian U.S. university.*

Holder of Yale’s new T. Lawrason Riggs Professorship in Religion, a $500,000 chair set up by anonymous alumni in honor of a longtime Yale Catholic chaplain, is Stephen G. Kuttner, now at Catholic University in Washington, the nation’s only lay professor of canon law and a model of the small-c catholic manner. The son of a Jewish mother, German-born Lawyer Kuttner, 56, grew up as a Lutheran, became a Catholic after fleeing the Nazis in 1933. He learned canon law as a refugee researcher in the Vatican library, became one of the world’s top scholars in a field usually dominated by the clergy.

Kuttner, who speaks five languages and has nine children, is the founder-president of Catholic U.’s institute of medieval canon law; Yale will get the institute as well as the professor.

* Harvard’s chair for Roman Catholic studies, founded in 1959 with the appointment of British Historian Christopher Dawson, is for visiting professors at the Divinity School.

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