Each year, the American Catholic Historical Association honors lifetime achievement in Catholic Studies with three awards: the Distinguished Scholar Award, the Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Distinguished Service Award. Today, the ACHA is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2025 awards. The recipients will be honored at the Association’s annual meeting this week in New York.
Distinguished Service Award
Martin Scorsese
The Distinguished Service Award recognizes outstanding service to the field of Catholic studies.
Martin Scorsese is one of the preeminent film directors of our time. Recognized throughout the world for his unique creative vision and distinctive style of filmmaking, he has also demonstrated a sustained preoccupation with religious and moral concerns in his work. Films such as Mean Streets, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Casino, Kundun, Silence, and Killers of the Flower Moon testify to the rich and varied character of Mr. Scorsese’s achievement.
Drawing upon his Catholic background, he has creatively explored the question of faith amidst the brutalities of our violent world, the longing for transcendence, and the conflict between mercy and justice. He has also been an acute chronicler of American history, sensitive to the ways religion, ethnicity, race, wealth, and mass culture shape American society and identity. As a strong and vocal advocate for film preservation, Scorsese also embodies a Catholic appreciation for the powerful role of tradition and the value of the past as resources for the present as well as the future.
Mr. Scorsese, therefore, merits recognition for Distinguished Service from the ACHA for his distinctive representation and exploration of Catholicism in film, his sustained attention over the years to religious issues in his work, the power of his historical imagination, and his commitment to preserving movies as a source of cultural memory and tradition. It is, therefore, an honor to bestow upon Martin Scorsese the 2025 ACHA Distinguished Service Award.
Distinguished Scholar Award
Paula M. Kane
The Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes lifelong contributions to the field of Catholic studies.
Paula M. Kane, John and Lucine O’Brien Marous Chair of Contemporary Catholic Studies, the University of Pittsburgh, is one of the foremost scholars in Catholic Studies. Beginning with her groundbreaking work Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism 1900-1920 (University of North Carolina, 1994) which adeptly blends cultural studies with the history of early 20th century urban Catholicism, Kane has consistently extended the boundaries of Catholic Studies. A scholar of wide-ranging interests, she has brought to bear her customary sharp analytical perspective, deeply informed theoretical rigor, and careful historical scholarship on varied subjects including sacred architecture, material culture, film, and popular religion.
Her other major works include co-editing with James Kenneally and Karen Kennelly the groundbreaking collection, Gender Identities in American Catholicism (Orbis Books, 2001), an invaluable collection of primary sources in the history of women and gender in American Catholicism. In addition, Kane’s Sister Thorn: Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) integrates a study of devotional culture, transnational Catholicism, and women’s history into an account of the American Catholic mystic and stigmatic Margaret Reilly. Kane’s scholarship has been a model for understanding Catholicism within wider contexts of modern American history and religious studies. Therefore, it is an honor to award the 2025 ACHA Distinguished Scholar Award to Dr. Paula M. Kane.
Distinguished Teaching Award
James T. Fisher
The Distinguished Teaching Award is presented to a college or university professor who has demonstrated a high commitment to teaching beyond the expected requirements of their position and through their influence and skill have promoted Catholic studies from one generation of scholars to another.
For almost four decades, James T. Fisher, Professor Emeritus at Fordham University, has been a teacher of Catholic Studies and in the process taught many of us what the historical study of American Catholicism could be. A teacher at Yale University, holder of the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at St. Louis University, and professor at Fordham since 2002, Fisher has taught countless students the value of taking Catholicism seriously in American history. He has advised and mentored numerous graduate students who have taken their own place in the field of Catholic Studies.
Beyond his classroom teaching, he has supported many more people, encouraging and mentoring creative scholarship. He possesses an unusual knack for connecting people in the field together, intuiting possibilities where often no one else sensed them and recognizing creative correspondences. Over the years, Fisher has taught by modeling a kind of Catholic Studies that invited, promoted, and practiced alternative perspectives and novel approaches. Whether in the classroom or along the waterfronts of New Jersey and New York, Fisher expanded the possibilities of what constituted the teaching of Catholic history. In his hands, teaching and learning about Catholic history became exciting, relevant, and unusual.
Above all, Fisher taught us that to teach Catholicism was to teach about place–the social, religious, emotional, and cultural places that were Catholic history. Whether they be parish neighborhoods, the docks, bars, schools, or sporting arenas, places mattered to be people because people were always shaped by the places in which they grew up, lived, worshiped, played, and struggled. For his many years of teaching and leadership, his own place within Catholic Studies is assured. Therefore, it is an honor to bestow upon Dr. James T. Fisher the 2025 ACHA Distinguished Teaching Award.