Professor Hayden Ramsay was recently appointed President of the Catholic Institute of Sydney, bringing with him decades of experience in philosophy, Catholic higher education, and ecclesial leadership in Australia and abroad.
He now joins The Catholic Weekly as a new regular columnist, to tackle life, faith, reason and contemporary culture through a Catholic lens.
He recently sat down with us to discuss his inseparability of faith and reason, the purpose of Catholic education, and why the church’s deepest challenge is much closer to home than we might expect.
But first, some background. Professor Hayden grew up in rural Fife, in Scotland, in a modest Presbyterian household. He first encountered the Catholic intellectual tradition as a young man through the Dominican-run chaplaincy University of Edinburgh where he was studying philosophy. He entered the Catholic Church at age 21.
After completing a PhD and lecturing in philosophy at Scottish universities, he moved to Australia in 1994 for a fellowship at the University of Melbourne.
From there, his path led into Catholic higher education and ecclesial leadership, including work in the private office of then-Archbishop George Pell in Melbourne and Sydney, senior roles at the Catholic Institute of Sydney and Good Shepherd Seminary, leadership of the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Sydney campus, and most recently a deputy vice-chancellorship at ACU.
Last year he was awarded a papal honour for service to the church and Catholic education in Australia.
Q: Professor Ramsay, you often speak about faith and reason as fully compatible. Why is this so important to emphasise?
A: I’ve always believed that faith without reason quickly becomes incoherent. The moment you speak about faith, you are already using reason. The real question is whether your reasoning is integrated with faith and enriched by it, or cut off from it.
The life of faith is fundamentally a life of the mind – even your pastoral and charitable endeavours depend on good thinking and judging.
Every human person has a mind with extraordinary potential, far more impressive than any artificial intelligence. We are made to think, to question, to seek truth. We do philosophy constantly, even when we don’t realise that’s what we’re doing.
Education, therefore, never stops.
If you’re not being formed intellectually in places like the church or institutions such as CIS, for instance, you’ll be formed elsewhere – by media, social platforms, AI, or casual conversation. No one is ever intellectually neutral.
Q: What then, is the role of an institution like the Catholic Institute of Sydney in the church and society generally?
A: Most of our thinking is quite ordinary and practical. But some thinking is so good, so deeply connected to truth, that it deserves to be preserved, examined, critiqued, and passed on. That’s the heart of formal education.
Catholic institutions exist to gather the best thinking within the Catholic tradition and present it coherently. Unlike purely secular models of education, Catholic education consciously safeguards and promotes a tradition – one that we believe not only contains human wisdom, but communicates divine revelation.
At CIS, that responsibility is intensified because we teach within a tradition that includes Scripture and authoritative, magisterial teaching as part of its intellectual inheritance.
Q: You’ve said you want to expand opportunities for intellectual formation for lay people. What does that look like in practice?
A: For too long we’ve assumed that deep theological and philosophical study is only for clergy. That’s no longer tenable. Many lay people are deeply serious about their faith and want to understand it from the ground up.
CIS is unique in Australia and Oceania in offering ecclesiastical degrees. These are qualifications granted in the name of the Holy Father. These were once almost exclusively for priests, but we’re seeing growing interest from lay people, including those working in or alongside the church.
But it’s valuable for anyone to have the chance, once in their life, to take time to step back and say: “Why do I believe what I believe?” That kind of intellectual spring cleaning can be transformative.
The best classes I ever taught were those where students felt free to ask the hardest questions, about God, suffering, sexuality, death, or anything. I encouraged them to say whatever they wanted, provided they were willing to give reasons for their views.
That exchange of reasons is a form of respect. Dialogue isn’t simply asserting your position; it’s explaining why you hold it and being open to challenge.
I’ve also come to believe strongly in what I call the “democratisation of the life of the mind.” Academic knowledge shouldn’t only be locked away behind technical language for other academics to unravel. Scholars have a responsibility to translate complex ideas into forms that ordinary people of good will and clear mind can engage with.
Q: What can readers expect from your columns?
A: I’m interested in the things that actually concern people: work, rest, leisure, sleep, money and consumption, concern for our appearance and other’s appearances, relationships. Catholic tradition has profound insights into all of these areas, far beyond the small areas of tradition we often hear quoted.
I LIKE to write philosophy in a narrative, accessible way. Not dumbing it down, but opening it up. If I can help people think more clearly and honestly about ordinary human life, I’M satisfied.
Q: You’re following Sr Isabel Naumann as President at CIS. How do you see her legacy?
A: Sr Isabel led with great dignity and grace and made important changes, particularly around the staffing of the institute and its relationship with UNDA. She was also, of course, the first woman to hold this role. I’ll be building on her work, with a focus that includes expanding digital education carefully, significantly increasing lay participation, establishing a new Centre for Faith and Reason for adult education, strengthening relationships across Oceania, and promoting a major Eucharistic research project in preparation for the International Eucharistic Congress in 2028.
Q: What do you see as the deepest challenges facing the church in Australia today?
A: Public controversies come and go. The deeper challenge is evangelisation – whether people who are seeking are actually finding – encountering truth that sustains them.
Beneath even that is the challenge of prayer itself. In the quiet of an empty church, do more and more of us pray honestly, for what we truly want, not just what we think we should want? God is not offended by honesty in prayer. In fact, he requires it.
If we can encourage truthful prayer, serious thinking – Catholic reason in Catholic faith –and confidence in the church’s intellectual tradition, much else will follow.
