Benedict M. Ashley

Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. is Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, Missouri. Before his conversion to Catholicism, Fr. Ashley was a professed atheist and communist. He found his way to the Church through his study of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas under Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. Before his ordination to the priesthood through the Order of Preachers in 1948, he received his Doctorate in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Fr. Ashley also holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a Master’s in Sacred Theology. He is an Associate Faculty of Philosophy for the Institute for Advanced Physics, and was a Senior Fellow of the National Catholic Center for Bioethics. Among Fr. Ashley’s books is Health Care Ethics, co-authored in 1975, a fundamental text on the topic of Catholic medical ethics, now in its fifth edition.