The Institute was born in the mid-1960s in the imagination of Father Kilian McDonnell, OSB. Kilian's study of Protestant theology in Germany helped him see that ecumenism happens when people not only study each other's traditions but also live together and come to know each other. When he returned, he persuaded his confreres to establish a residential research institute on the grounds of Saint John's Abbey and University, linking the Benedictine heritage of scholarship to the Second Vatican Council's opening of the Roman Catholic Church to the rest of the world. Kilian, a celebrated scholar and accomplished poet, has been at the forefront of worldside ecumenical dialogue and breakthrough for three decades.