Ex Corde Ecclesiae | Thomas More College

Ex Corde Ecclesiae

Consonant with its mission and as an expression of its institutional fidelity to the Catholic Faith, Thomas More College fully accepts the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae (1990) and, as the Constitution itself dictates (General Norms, Article 1, §3), recognizes the Constitution as one of its governing documents.

The College welcomes and wholeheartedly embraces the Apostolic Constitution’s teaching about the four essential characteristics of a Catholic university or college. Therefore:

  1. The College publicly professes an institutional commitment to the Catholic Faith;
  2. The College promotes reflection upon the “growing treasury of human knowledge” in light of the Catholic Faith;
  3. The College promises fidelity to the Gospel as taught by the living Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church;
  4. The College seeks to instill in its students the desire to serve the common good through works of justice and charity, to answer the Church’s universal call to holiness, and to serve the Church’s mission of the evangelization of the world.

Thomas More College is dedicated principally to the training of undergraduate students in those liberal arts that furnish what Cardinal Newman called “discipline of mind” and to the loving transmission of the rich patrimony of Catholic culture and intellectual life. Though the Faculty is encouraged to engage in research and publishing, the College is not a research institution. Those provisions of Ex Corde Ecclesiae that presuppose a university setting, specialized faculties, and the coordination of highly-disparate endeavors are not immediately relevant to the College’s proper function. Indeed, the College’s integrated curriculum is ordered chiefly to the mutual flourishing of reason and faith envisioned not only by Ex Corde Ecclesiae, but also by John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, subsequent papal statements on education, and, in general, by the venerable Catholic tradition of faith seeking understanding.

In accord with the College’s institutional fidelity to the Catholic Faith and in obedience to the Apostolic Constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae and to the Code of Canon Law (Canon #812), all Thomas More faculty who teach courses in Sacred Scripture and Theology seek the Mandatum from the local ordinary, the Bishop of Manchester, and sign the declaration of faith below.

I hereby declare my role and responsibility as a professor of a Catholic theological discipline within the full communion of the Church. As a professor of a Catholic theological discipline, therefore, I am committed to teach authentic Catholic doctrine and to refrain from putting forth as Catholic teaching anything contrary to the Church’s magisterium.

The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts
Six Manchester Street
Merrimack, NH 03054

Phone: (603) 880-8308
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