About
the VHI

The VHI is a constituent part of St Edmund’s College in the University of Cambridge. It was founded in 1987 as a means of continuing the St Edmund’s College’s mission of service to Catholic life and thought. This was thought necessary as by then the College had ceased to be owned by the Catholic Church in England. In 1985 the Church had given St Edmund’s College and all of its assets to the Fellows, this being the necessary step for the House to eventually become a fully constituent college of the university. In 1968 Cardinal Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster, had given the House the significant sum of £50,000 which had originally been intended to support a Catholic Institute of Higher Studies. In 1987 the Fellows set aside this sum for the purposes of supporting what eventually became the Von Hügel Institute.

The Master and Fellows defined the purpose of the Institute as being to assist in the preservation and development of the Roman Catholic tradition as an important aspect of the life of the college. In this sense it was entirely appropriate that the Institute should be named after Baron Anatole von Hügel (1854-1928), one of the three co-founders of St Edmund’s College, as it was thanks to his vision, energy and commitment that St Edmund’s House had been founded as a place for Catholics to study within Cambridge. The Institute was to fulfil this mission not only by undertaking relevant academic work in the fields of Christianity and society, the historical role of Christianity within society and issues of social justice but also by overseeing the Von Hügel lecture. Since its establishment in 1990 the VHI has also assumed responsibility for organising the biannual Lattey lecture. This was endowed by Fr Reginald Fuller on the occasion of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of its foundation at St Edmund’s in 1940 by its first President, Fr Cuthbert Lattey, S.J.

The Institute’s was initially housed in the White Cottage, near the main College building. Its first Director was the then Dean, the Rev Dr Christopher Moss SJ. In 1990 the Rev Dr Francis McHugh, a predecessor of Moss as Dean, was appointed VHI Director, followed by Fr Frank Carey WF (2000-2002), Professor David Bridges (2003-2008), Fr David Clark (2008-2011), Professor John Loughlin (2011-15), Dr Philip McCosker (2015-2020), and the current director Dr Vittorio Montemaggi (2020-).

On the occasion of the VHI’s thirtieth anniversary year, in 2017, the institute embarked on a major fundraising campaign and reconsidered its vision and identity with the new refreshed name of Von Hügel Institute for critical catholic inquiry. The addition of ‘critical catholic inquiry’ indicates both the Roman Catholic heritage and identity which were key to the foundation of the College and Institute, but it also the catholicity, inclusiveness and openness, as well as the rigour which characterise the deep interdisciplinary research work undertaken by the institute under its new vision.

The VHI was founded in 1987 to ‘preserve and develop’ the Catholic traditions of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Its mission is to become the first Institute of Advanced Studies in Europe inspired by a catholic worldview, and to create a home for critical catholic inquiry in the heart of the University of Cambridge.

As academic work is becoming increasingly fragmented and culture more polarized, the Von Hügel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry wants to be:

• catholic by promoting research and action across all disciplinary borders, always connecting the particular and the universal, the descriptive and the normative, the practical and the theoretical;
• critical by analysing the good, the true and the beautiful wherever they are to be found, in and through reasoned and searching dialogue with all;
• transformative by inspiring imaginations to have a measurable impact on real lives in the pursuit of a better shared global future.

There is now considerable interest across the academy—both sciences and humanities—in the resources of the Catholic intellectual, cultural and ethical traditions which have sustained, challenged, and stimulated societies around the world for two millennia. Now is the time for intensive, intellectually principled yet expansive interdisciplinary research critically exploring and developing the Catholic worldview. In wider society too, curiosity about Catholicism is at an all-time high in Pope Francis’ pontificate. That worldview aims to consider reality in all its inter-connected variety. It seeks to link up all aspects of knowledge and practice in a differentiated unity. The very word Catholic comes from the Greek kath holou – according to the whole, the universal: seeing all elements and dimensions of reality in their underlying unity and in service of the common good—seeing in the round. Catholicity thus favours conjunction over disjunction, union over division. It distinguishes in order to unite. It considers reality through the broadest possible lens. Universities – from the Latin universitas, or the universal – were founded on just this kind of joined-up optic.

Such integrated ways of thinking are needed precisely now when universities are realising how perilously fragmented and self-referential their knowledge and work can be under the pressure of relentless specialisation and commodification. We need research institutes which cultivate intellectually principled inter-disciplinarity and joined-up thinking: the Catholic traditions at their best do precisely that.

The intellectual foundation of that unity, considered theologically in the Catholic worldview, is the unity of God and creation, found paradigmatically in Christ. But considered from the point of view of the universe and our place in it, that unity is seen through the qualities, relations and interconnections of the dazzlingly diverse variety of the world we inhabit.

The VHI will research, develop, and facilitate practices of thought which integrate these plural aspects of the unity of the world. The specialised, intentionally narrow, analytic thought patterns of the modern university need to be constructively supplemented with conjunctive modes of thought which realise and promote the underlying unity between the descriptive and the normative, between the strictly academic and the social and ethical, between reality observed and reality lived—reality as it is and reality as it could be.

There is no such thing as neutral or disinterested knowledge. Thus the VHI retains its strong commitment to the venerable tradition of Catholic social thought, while at the same time leading that tradition’s rethinking for today’s very different globalised world. In our present ecological context this integral link between analytical knowledge and ethical practices will lead to an increasing emphasis on research which promotes long term sustainability through all the disciplines making up the modern worldview, from art to astrophysics. The interconnected worldview of catholicity necessarily always works for the common good.

The institute promotes projects which explore conjunctive, integrating dynamics and concepts, which cross interdisciplinary borders, especially ones which bring humanities and the various sciences into greater dialogue and collaboration for the common good. It is keen to underline the connections between the descriptive and the normative, to foster their greater integration, and to critique their false disjunctions.

The Institute aims to be a resource for the academy, for society, and for the wider church, challenging each to ever more transformative and inclusive, or catholic, ways of thinking and acting for the universal good.