Who we are
Mission and vision
Our faculty has the following mission: “Investigate, teach, and communicate the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ, received by faith within the Church in the historical context, and studied with the appropriate scientific methodologies. This requires a thorough understanding of the Bible and the Catholic Tradition, as well as the acts and decisions of the Magisterium. It also requires being attentive to the sensus fidelium and the other loci theologici, in critical dialogue with other academic disciplines. Special attention will be paid to the most important challenges for theology nowadays, in the context of the Chilean and Latin American reality”
The Faculty of Theology of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile was inaugurated in 1935 thanks to a joint effort of the Chilean Church and the Holy See, thus becoming the first canonical faculty, the first center of high religious studies in Latin America, and a fundamental part of the training proposal of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
The immediate duty of our faculty is to "Research, teach, and communicate the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ, received by faith within the Church in the historic context and studied with the appropriate scientific methodologies. This requires a deep direct study of the Holy Writ and Tradition, as well as the acts and decisions of the Magisterium, also considering the sensus fidelium and other theological places, maintaining an open and critical contact with the different areas of the human knowledge. There will be special attention to the most important current challenges for theology, in the Chilean and Latin American reality context" (Statutes, Art. 4).
The Faculty of Theology was first established at the Ghigliotto Mansion, at 224 Alameda Av. in Santiago of Chile. During the 60s, it moved to the Main building due to the increase in the number of students. In 1973, it moved to the East Campus, staying there for 34 years. Finally, since 2008, our faculty is located in a modern building at the center of the San Joaquin Campus.
Since its conception, our faculty was formed by excellent teaching staff, both national and international, of which training Saint Alberto Hurtado, who is the patron saint of the faculty along with Saint Teresa of Avila, collaborated enthusiastically.
Besides having a great infrastructure, Theology UC has an amazing library, which stands out in Latin America, having a collection of 141,230 physical books and about 400,000 e-books. Through the online catalog, the Latin American Seminary of Documentation (SELADOC) database can also be accessed, which includes 56,197 bibliographical registries and indexes around 141 issues of Latin American journals related to the discipline.
Theology UC has the purpose to not only train the clergy for Chile and Latin America on this discipline but also the many laypeople who have attended its classrooms through the years. Among their programs, our faculty provides the academic degrees of Bachelor of Theology, Licentiate degree, and Doctoral degree. Actually, it is the first faculty of UC to provide the latter degree.
Based on its high-quality standards for research, the faculty has two publications that represent milestones in the history of theological reflection and production in our country: Anales de la Facultad de Teología (Annals of the Faculty of Theology), founded in 1940, and Teología y Vida (Theology and life), founded in 1960.
For Theology UC, interdisciplinary and international collaboration is an actual need, therefore it created three research centers in the last decades. Manuel Larraín Theological Center (jointly with the Alberto Hurtado University), Edith Stein Center, and the Center for the Study of Religion.
In 2020, and to encourage the study, academic reflection, and development of theology by women, the new Gender Equality Special Admission avenue was created. This scholarship has increased equality among our students.
