About Us

About us

The Faculty of Social Sciences (FASS) at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas - Angelicum, provides an integral formation in the major social sciences, building ethics and insights from the wisdom traditions, Christianity in particular, into its approach and which aims to contribute to peaceful, innovative societies based on social justice.

The Faculty cultivates the study of social reality, in which the human person realizes his or her potential in justice and peace and in view of the integral sustainable development of society as a whole and of its members. In the FASS we analyze and describe the interactions and interconnections among the various human groups and organizations that build up the social order. These social groups determine the cultural, ethical, political and economic life of peoples and communities which then give rise to institutions that are capable of achieving a genuine common good. 

In particular, the FASS provides an advanced level of formation in the various statistical, methodological, sociological, psychological, historical, juridical, economic and political disciplines in dialogue with Christian social thought. In its multidisciplinary approach, the Faculty aims to provide students with the theoretical and methodological instruments to analyze, compare and interpret complex social global realities and problems, ranging, for instance, from the world of work, through pastoral care, to the great questions of justice and peace, climate change and migration, and emerging issues such as artificial intelligence, all in relation to Catholic social teaching and social thought. 

Historical Highlights

For over ten years, the Faculty of Social Sciences (FASS) at the Pontifical University of St Thomas (PUST) has been providing financial support to students from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

We provide training in Catholic social teaching (CST) and in Dominican social ethics in dialogue with the main academic disciplines that help us understand modern social problems: law and international relations, sociology and psychology, economics and social communications, history and politics.

Students from the CEE who have studied with us have gone on to work in the Vatican Curia (including the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development); in civil society organisations (including Caritas internationalis, national Caritas in Belarus and Ukraine); in the UN system (including the UNDP Democratisation Programme in Ukraine); in secular (state and private) and Catholic higher education (such as a lecturer in political philosophy and Catholic Social Teaching in the LCC International University in Lithuania); and have co-founded Christian-inspired political parties (in Croatia) and Christian-inspired social enterprises (in Hungary and Ukraine).

From 2017, the FASS has started to expand its activities in the region. We ran a “baseline project” to find out what Catholic Social Thought was being taught in the Catholic Higher Education Institutions (CHEI) of Central and Eastern Europe.

To complement what was going on in the region, we started offering an annual summer school on CST for students and created an “Expert Council” to develop initiatives and to begin publishing research. 

The first book has been published in 2020, with contributions from 7 countries of the CEE region and a preface from our Polish Rector, fr Michał Paluch OP: In a Different Voice: Reflections on Catholic Social Thought from and for Europe , edited by Helen Alford OP and Marina Russo, Angelicum University Press, 2020.

The last published books are: