What is a Doctor of the Church?

The title and its conditions

The title Doctor of the Church (in Latin, Doctor Ecclesiae) is conferred by the Pope upon a saint who meets three conditions:

1. Eminence of teaching. The saint's writings have made a substantial and enduring contribution to Catholic theology, spirituality, or doctrine.
2. Orthodoxy of doctrine. The teaching is in full conformity with the deposit of faith.
3. Holiness of life. The saint must already have been canonized.

The conferral of the title is an act of the universal Magisterium and is reserved to the Pope.¹

The thirty-seven Doctors

As of the most recent additions, there are thirty-seven Doctors of the Church. The list spans the patristic period (from the second century onward), the medieval period, and the modern era. Among the most prominent:

• The four Latin Fathers of the West: Saint Ambrose of Milan, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Saint Gregory the Great, and Saint Jerome.
• The four Greek Fathers of the East: Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, and Saint John Chrysostom.
• Medieval Doctors: Saint Anselm of Canterbury, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Thomas Aquinas (the Angelic Doctor), Saint Bonaventure (the Seraphic Doctor), Saint Albert the Great.
• The four women Doctors: Saint Teresa of Avila (declared 1970), Saint Catherine of Siena (1970), Saint Therese of Lisieux (1997), and Saint Hildegard of Bingen (2012).
• Recent additions: Saint John of Avila (2012), Saint Gregory of Narek (2015), Saint Irenaeus of Lyon (2022, as Doctor of Unity).

The honorary epithets

Many Doctors of the Church bear traditional epithets that summarize the character of their teaching:

• Saint Augustine: the Doctor of Grace (Doctor Gratiae).
• Saint Thomas Aquinas: the Angelic Doctor (Doctor Angelicus).
• Saint Bonaventure: the Seraphic Doctor (Doctor Seraphicus).
• Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: the Mellifluous Doctor (Doctor Mellifluus).
• Saint Catherine of Siena: the Doctor of Unity.
• Saint Therese of Lisieux: the Doctor of the Little Way.

What the title does and does not mean

The title does not imply infallibility on the part of the Doctor. A Doctor of the Church may have held views, on questions not yet settled in his or her time, that were later refined or corrected by subsequent magisterial teaching. The title attests that the saint's body of teaching, taken as a whole, is a reliable Catholic guide; it does not make every individual proposition formally binding.

The biographies of several Doctors of the Church may be found at the saints hub.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Pope Pius IX, Beatissimus Christianae Religionis (1871), establishing the modern criteria for the title. See also the Code of Canon Law (1983), c. 826. ↩