The beloved founder of the Collegeville Institute, Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, passed away September 8, 2025

KILIAN McDONNELL, OSB

Dear Friend of the Collegeville Institute,

It is with deep sadness that the Board of Directors of the Collegeville Institute announces the death of Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB, our beloved founder and president. We give thanks for Fr. Kilian’s ecumenical vision, and we grieve with his monastic community and his family.

Kilian McDonnell, OSB (September 16, 1921 – September 8, 2025), age 103, spent 79 years seeking God after the monastic manner of life as a monk of Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he made his first profession on August 24, 1946. He was ordained into the priesthood in 1951. What Kilian accomplished as scholar, teacher, ecumenical visionary, and poet can be traced back to, and is held together by, Kilian the priest and monk.

When in the late 1950s the theology department at Saint John’s University discussed whether to teach its Catholic students Protestant theology too, Kilian voted against the proposal, on the grounds that they did not have enough time to teach the Catholic students Catholic theology. However, the resolution passed. Then the faculty looked around to send some member off to study Protestant theology—and chose Kilian.

With financial support from the Butler Family Foundation in St. Paul, Kilian built on his earlier graduate degree in liturgy from Notre Dame and study at Catholic University of America with study in Germany. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Trier in 1964, with a dissertation on John Calvin’s theology of the sacraments. Catholics writing on such topics these days is old hat. In 1964, it was almost unheard of.

On Kilian’s return to Collegeville, the Butlers asked, “Where do we go from here?” After consulting with his confreres, Kilian proposed the establishment at Saint John’s Abbey and University of a postdoctoral research institute, where scholars and their families would form a community of study and prayer. Ecumenism, the pursuit of the unity Christ gave the church, was at the heart of the enterprise: “You do not tag on the ecumenical dimensions after the research is all finished.” The Butler family funded it and continue to support it to this day.

The Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research celebrated its 50^th anniversary in 2017, with Kilian, at age 95, still going strong. In the years since it opened, the Collegeville Institute has hosted hundreds of religious scholars from the US and abroad, many of them living in community with their families. Additionally, the Collegeville Institute has initiated many projects of its own, including “Faith and Ferment” (a major study of church life in Minnesota), commissioning a musical work, dozens of group research projects, and workshops for the training and encouragement of religious writers and leaders. In recent years, the Collegeville Institute has actively worked to engage and develop writers working in the faith space to build community and contribute to religious dialogue in print.

On receiving the John Courtney Murray Award (its highest honor) from the Catholic Theological Society of America in 1993, Kilian said, “The thing I am proudest of is the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. It has been successful beyond all expectations.”

Kilian’s publications are numerous, many of them, especially about the Charismatic Renewal in the Catholic Church, path breaking. His book, The Other Hand of God: The Holy Spirit as the Universal Touch and Goal, is a major contribution to the twentieth century’s revival of Trinitarian theology.

Kilian logged more hours in official dialogs between the Catholic Church and others, both international and national, than just about any of his contemporaries: classical Pentecostals, Disciples of Christ, World Alliance of Reformed Churches, Lutherans, Presbyterians. For fifteen years he served as consultant to the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Vatican ecumenical office.

At age seventy-five, Kilian took on the additional vocation of a poet. He authored five published books of poems. He said he did not write “pious verse or inspirational verse.” Rather, he wrote about people who had big problems. “They had big problems with God, they had big problems with people around them, and they made terrible mistakes. People like us. Their relationship with God was not an easy one.”

It is through the efforts of the Benedictines, Kilian pre-eminent among them—their scholarship, their leadership, their dogged, unflagging engagement—that much of the ecumenical progress of the past century has happened. It is progress sealed by Pope Saint John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical, “Ut unum sint” (“That they all may be one”), where he reaffirmed the Second Vatican Council’s irrevocable commitment to ecumenism. As Kilian wrote, “Christ willed for his Church to be one. If it isn’t one, then its effectiveness in preaching the Gospel is limited and wounded. It can’t do what it was founded to do.”

Through Kilian’s 79 years of seeking God after the monastic manner of life, Kilian engaged with a myriad of Christian concepts and Christians themselves. In living a life in dialogue with people of faith, Kilian learned the fundamental ecumenical truth expressed in one of his poetic images: “All our truths need bungee cords.”

A funeral service will be held at Saint John’s Abbey and University Church, 2900 Abbey Plaza, Collegeville, MN at 3:30 pm on Tuesday, September 16. Burial will occur immediately following the funeral in the Abbey Cemetery. The Mass will be livestreamed on the Saint John’s Abbey YouTube channel HERE.

If you would like to make a gift in memory of Father Killian, please click HERE to access our secure online giving page.

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