In 1965, there were an estimated 60,000 Catholic priests living in the United States. By 2022, that number had dropped to around 35,000, even as the country’s population had grown by 100 million.

In a new documentary, Discerning the Call: Change in the American Priesthood, two Fordham students seek to explain why.

“Today, there are not as many men joining [the priesthood], and they join later,” said rising junior Jay Doherty, the film’s co-director.

“There are all sorts of different changes that have impacted the church and vocational discernment, and we wanted to tell the story of those changes through the lens of American history,” Doherty said.

Doherty, who majors in digital technologies and emerging media and philosophy, directed the film along with Patrick Cullihan, FCRH ’24, a fellow Duffy Fellow at Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture. They conducted 30 hours of interviews with 27 priests, many of them residents of Fordham’s Jesuit communities. The film debuted in April at a Fordham Center on Religion and Culture event at the Howard Gilman Theater in Manhattan and is now available online. 

High-profile Catholic leaders such as Cardinal Timothy Dolan and James Martin, S.J., editor at large at America magazine, make appearances, as does Fordham faculty member Bryan Massingale, S.T.D.

A Culture Long Gone

Cardinal Dolan spoke about how, in the years leading up to and during World War II, a strong “Catholic culture” made the vocation much more common than it is now. Catholics were born in their own hospitals, lived in predominantly Catholic neighborhoods, attended their own schools, and married other Catholics.

“With the collapse of the Catholic culture, that kind of external prop and encouragement to priestly vocations would have gone,” he said.

Dolan, who himself entered the seminary right out of high school, said that means fewer men are taking that path as teenagers. 

“Now, the decision to become a priest would not be something imposed from the outside. It would not be something that would just be expected. It’s something that is a radical choice,” he said.

The priesthood has also been attracting more men who identify as theologically orthodox; the filmmakers note that a recent survey found the percentage of priests who identify as such increased from 20% in 1970 to 85% in 2020.

Stricter Requirements

Father Martin noted that one of the changes that affected recruitment into the Society of Jesus was stricter entrance requirements implemented in the 1960s. That resulted in fewer men joining, which some church leaders have welcomed, as it means those who do are more committed. 

For the church to grow, though, Martin said leadership might have to also come from those in the pews.

“I think that the Holy Spirit might be calling lay people to a more active participation in the church,” he said in the film.

A Complex Issue

Father Massingale noted that many incorrectly assume the decline can be pinned on the church’s requirement that priests remain celibate.

“That’s certainly the case for a given segment, but it’s never been a complete explanation for all groups in the church,” he said, noting that racism also played a role.

“For many Black young men, another reason why they never entered the priesthood was because they were never asked.”

Doherty said the filmmakers wanted to include men spanning a wide range of ages, from 20-somethings to retired priests. 

Each one had an intensely personal reason for joining, he said, noting that he hopes to create a second film from unused footage focusing on these stories. He’s also interested in stories from women religious. 

In the meantime, the young directors are receiving recognition for their first film. It has been featured on SiriusXM’s Catholic Channel and WFUV, and in June, it was named the 2024 recipient of Fordham’s William F. DiPietra Award in Film.

Rediscovering Faith

For Doherty, the project has enabled him to explore his own faith.

“When I came to Fordham, I think I really rediscovered the faith and what it means to be Catholic,” he said. 

“I had many interactions with Jesuits, and they were all so brilliant and interesting,” he said. 

“I found myself wondering, ‘How did they come to this life?’”

“It’s a great improvement from the time when the pope was just a king in his throne surrounded by a royal court,” he said. “But with such expectations can any pope govern into his 80s and even 90s and be effective?”

“The effort to change the rigidly top-down nature of governance in Catholicism is the main reform project of the Francis papacy and its success or failure will likely be his chief legacy,” said Fordham’s Gibson. He said the jury was still out on whether it would succeed, since the transition period is “messy and absolutely exhausting.” 

“Will the sense of exhaustion overcome the inspiration that invigorates so many?” he asked.

Sister Becquart, the undersecretary of the General Secretariat of the Synod, is the highest-ranking woman at the Vatican and the first to hold a voting position. She has been a leader in promoting Pope Francis’ vision of a more “synodal,” or inclusive, church.

“We have highlighted the need to really listen to everybody, to listen to those who feel exiled from the church, especially women and young people who don’t feel their gifts are recognized,” Sister Becquart said, adding that they want a church that is relational and inclusive. “Each of us has a role to play.”

The pope called for a worldwide survey of Catholics, to be conducted in small listening and learning groups, when he launched the Synod on Synodality in 2021. Feedback from those listening sessions, which included laity and young people as well as church leaders, is being compiled for the bishops when they reconvene in October.

Those who came to hear Sister Becquart’s update on the process included Fordham students, faculty, alumni, parishioners, and the public. 

Fordham student James Haddad, who is taking the course Ignatian Spirituality this semester, asked Sister Becquart what changes she foresees in the future of the church and if women deacons are a possibility.

“In some countries,” she said, “ there is a call for women deacons. But there’s no unanimity. It takes time to build consensus, and you have to first learn to really listen to each other. But it gives me hope. I already see changes at the grassroots,” she said.

Jim Miracky, S.J., associate pastor at St. Francis Xavier Parish in lower Manhattan, said, “I hate to be the buzzkill in the room,” noting the exclusive male hierarchy of the Catholic Church. “I love what we are trying to do, but do you really believe we are going to get somewhere?”

Sister Becquart replied, “We are in a time of transition. To do this synodal process, it’s about change of mindset, and some change of structure.”

Kaitlyn Squyres, a first-year student at Fordham College at Rose Hill who was raised Catholic in Louisville, Kentucky, said after the talk that she feels very positive and that hearing a powerful female voice was “very cool.”

Baligian agreed.

“There are a lot of mixed messages,” she said. “This is why it’s so important for women to have more forward-facing roles in the church. We can do more than run committees.”

The project was spurred by a 2018 report by the Society of Jesus that publicly disclosed the names of its members who were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, as well as a report that year by a Pennsylvania grand jury that found similar findings in diocesan priests. It was funded by a $1 million gift from a private donation.

On Thursday, Jan. 26, the group released its final report, featuring research projects conducted by 18 teams from 10 Jesuit universities. In addition to Fordham, the initiative included lay and clergy faculty from Creighton, Gonzaga, Georgetown, Loyola Chicago, Loyola Maryland, Marquette, Rockhurst, Santa Clara, and Xavier universities.

The research projects addressed topics connected to the Society of Jesus, but were not limited strictly to it. There was often overlap with other parts of the Roman Catholic Church, such as specific parishes. They covered six themes: Jesuits and Jesuit Education; Education; Institutional Reform; Moral Injury and Spiritual Struggle; Race and Colonialism; and Survivors and Survivor Stories.

In addition to team projects, the initiative featured a three-day conference hosted at Fordham in April 2022 as well as eight webinars, four of which were devoted to historically marginalized U.S. communities.

Bradford Hinze, Ph.D., the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology and director of the initiative, said after two and half years, he is more impressed than ever with how much time and energy scholars have devoted to try to address past wrongs and prevent future ones. Their dedication has been “a bit overwhelming,” given how painful the subject is, but is also a source for optimism.

“My big take away is that we need to find ways of building greater relationships of collaboration and more transparency,” he said, “because here we have a lot of lay people—not all are lay people, but most are—who are committed to the Jesuit identity and mission.”

That commitment manifested itself in reports that varied from one about an individual abuser by the team at Creighton University to one examining the best way to tell survivors’ stories by Georgetown University’s Gerard J. McGlone, S.J. A report from Fordham professor C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., that focused on reforming Jesuit schools noted that “pastoral care principles influence disciplinary processes.”

“There is an emphasis on being patient and merciful that allows for inferior performance and outright misbehavior,” he wrote.

“As a member of a religious order told us, there is confusion between what is simply sinful and what is criminal.”

Key Findings and Recommendations

The report includes six key findings and specific recommendations for learning and action.

The first of the group’s findings is that there is “a divide emerging in research and practice between those focused primarily on “safeguarding” and those focused on what the group is calling “historical memory work.” Safeguarding is focused on preventing present and future abuse, while historical memory work produces research on what happened in the past, in many cases performing a very close analysis of instances of abuse.

Hinze said the group chose to emphasize the importance of historical memory work in response to the forward-facing nature of the Society of Jesus’ most recent Universal Apostolic Preferences, which are in essence the religious order’s list of priorities. He noted that representatives from the Society of Jesus in Rome had been very cooperative, but the group still felt the need to highlight the importance of looking to the past.

“The Apostolic preferences all aim to start from right now and look forward. But if you only do that, you don’t really spend time pondering, reflecting upon, and truly meditating on what were the causes and contributing factors that led up to this, and what were the historical, institutional, and cultural repercussions,” he said.

Another finding highlights the fact that although the first sexual abuse cases in the United States were widely reported as early as 2002, very little research has been done to examine how much abuse was committed against Black, Latin American, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American populations.

Fordham Faculty Perspectives

Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham, contributed in this area; his study, “Clergy Sexual Abuse in African American Communities,” will be published in October. He surveyed the literature about the sexual abuse crisis to see how many church dioceses tracked the race and ethnicity of survivors and found that only one did, and it only started doing so in 2015.

This is a glaring omission, he said.

“We know for a fact that in many cases, dioceses and religious orders deliberately sent priests with problematic histories into Latino and Black communities, precisely because these communities would be the least likely to report instances of abuse,” he said.

It’s for this reason, Massingale said, that although 4% of American Catholics are Black, it’s fair to assume that more than 4% have experienced sexual abuse. Compounding the problem, he said, is the fact that Black people may not relate to the ways others are processing their abuse. In the course of his research, he spoke informally with two Black men who’d experienced abuse, and discovered that they refused to accept the popular “victim survivor” label.

“They said ‘I’m not surviving anything. I’m coping.’ And it struck me that maybe another reason why we need to pay attention to this is because even the language we use doesn’t resonate universally across human communities,” he said.

Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., associate professor of mental health counseling and spiritual integration at Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, said her future teaching will forever be informed by the work she did with the initiative. In her research project “Bearing Witness When ‘They’ Are Us: Toward a Trauma-Informed Perspective on Complicity, Moral Injury, and Moral Witnessing,” Cataldo attempted to answer a question she asked herself when the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was published: Why am I still shocked?

“We’ve been hearing about this since 2002, if not before,” she said.

“I realized that this cycle of being OK, and then being overwhelmed with shock and horror, and then having the feeling sort of recede into the background, is the same cycle that a trauma survivor experiences.”

No solution to a trauma-based problem can work unless it addresses the trauma, she said.

“All the safeguarding that has been put in place has been very effective, and it’s absolutely vitally important. I’m not discounting any of that, but you will never heal without addressing the trauma, and that means having accountability, responsibility, dialogue, honesty, and truth telling,” she said.

“It’s like closing the barn door after the horses are out.”

Telling It Like It Feels

Cataldo suggested that a crucial part of the healing process should involve people who Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit dubbed the “moral witnesses.”

“In order to really stand up for and call attention to the suffering imposed on one group by another group of people, the moral witness has to be someone who speaks the truth,” she said.

“But the moral witness doesn’t just tell it like it is. The moral witness tells it like it feels. To be a moral witness, the person needs to have been either a survivor themselves or have something at stake. You have to have skin in the game.”

The participants in Taking Responsibility fit that bill, she said, by virtue of working for Catholic institutions and working to highlight the painful truth.

The project has inspired Cataldo to do more herself. This fall, she will oversee the unveiling of GRE’s Advanced Certificate in Trauma-Informed Care program. Importantly, she said, the certificate program explores how spirituality can be both a balm for people healing from trauma and a shield that prevents them from acknowledging their own trauma.

“It’s very important to understand how unexamined religious practices and religious structures like the Catholic Church can sometimes re-traumatize or compound the trauma of people if they don’t understand how trauma and faith intersect,” she said.

These Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists fought against issues in the early to mid-1900s that still exist today, said Moore, including European xenophobia and racism in the United States. Among them are Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay and Gabriela Mistral, the first Nobel prize laureate from Latin America. Their friendships with like-minded colleagues took place not only in person, but also in other forms of consciousness, like memory, imagination, and prayer. In a Q&A with Fordham News, Moore describes how these spiritual friendships fueled their activism and how today’s activists can learn from their predecessors who lived more than a century ago. 

How is your book relevant to today’s world?

The people in my book took stands on many issues that are still with us today. For example, poet Claude McKay was a Black Catholic who wrote prolifically about police brutality and white “friends” who are sympathetic with their Black friends, yet do nothing to help. He wrote about this more than 80 years ago in ways that are remarkably descriptive of our own time. Another example is in chapter three, where I write about a group of activists who countered anti-Islamic sentiment among Catholics and tried to come up with a more humane and sophisticated way of understanding Islam. Many of these issues continue to assail us today, but they were engaged very creatively by this early generation of activists and thinkers. As we work today to create a more inclusive world, we don’t have to start from scratch. We should look at some of the experiments that took place in the earlier part of the last century and learn from their mistakes and successes.

What can they teach us about navigating today’s politics? 

It’s really tough to engage in today’s politics. But the Catholic activists were very clear and convinced that to do the difficult work of political solidarity and making a change in the world, you have to be energized and animated by feelings of love, support, joy, pleasure, and interpersonal connection. They were very explicit that friendship was the fuel for their work. Their political organizations included the word amitié, which means friendship in French. Their political work, art and writing, and even their religious lives were sustained by what they called “spiritual friendship.” There was no way to do their work without that. 

Do they have any advice about negotiating one’s faith? 

There are those of us—myself included—who have a complicated relationship with Roman Catholicism. We are members of the Catholic church, yet we are disappointed by the church hierarchy and clerical culture, especially in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis. But these Catholic artists and activists also felt, at times, incredible disappointment and frustration with their church leadership. They often spoke out against racism, European colonialism, and anti-Semitism, in contrast to a church leadership that too often stayed silent, advocated obedience, or upheld violent societal structures. They reclaimed our Catholic heritage and made it more multicultural and just, and they point a way forward for people who might feel similarly today. 

Spiritual friendship was an important part of the activists’ lives. How did they maintain those relationships? And how did they enhance their work?

I discovered this world of friendship while reviewing some historical archives. I found some of the activists’ files, and I could see and touch all the letters that they wrote to their friends. But they weren’t simply letters. Many had sacred objects tucked inside: holy medallions, little crosses made of twigs, pictures that they painted or drew. There was a sacred materiality to both the letters and objects. Letters to friends weren’t just a casual thing—this was how holiness was communicated to one another, in these things that were touched, felt, and mailed back and forth, sometimes across the Atlantic. 

One friendship I might highlight is the friendship between Gabriela Mistral, a poet who became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Jacques Maritain, a Catholic philosopher. They first met in Paris, where people gathered from all over the world. Gabriela was a writer who was seeking intellectual collaboration in the interwar period. She became friends with Jacques, who shared similar values, including rejecting typical heterosexual matrimony and having children. Jacques was married to a woman, but they shared a vow of celibacy and never had children. Gabriela was a gay woman who never married and raised the son of a family member who had died. They both lived their lives in disjunction from the mainstream family norms at the time. 

Gabriela was very involved in bringing Jacques’ ideas about democracy and antifascism for Catholics into Latin America. She ensured that his publications were translated into Spanish and disseminated in Chilean universities, seminaries, and bookstores and helped to develop a more liberal Catholicism during this period. Her name is hidden in the history of Catholic thought, whereas Jacques is very famous. But it is through their friendship, especially their long distance correspondence, that his ideas became internationalized. 

How does your book connect to Fordham and its Jesuit mission? 

I believe the women and men in my book model the kind of Catholicism that Fordham would be proud of. They shared a passion for connecting with the long roots of the Catholic heritage, but in a way that cultivated openness to difference and courage to disrupt the status quo. These men and women took personal risks to live lives of solidarity with those who were vulnerable in the 20th century. This is the kind of faith we talk about a lot at Fordham. 

You’ve said that these friendships were sustained over long distances and long periods of time. Did that remind you of our attempts to stay connected during the pandemic? 

Many of my characters had close friendships, but they spent years apart. Some were sent into exile in Brazil; others returned to Harlem during World War II. Yet they sustained friendships over long periods of time through the realm of memory, imagination, and correspondence. It was possible for them to sustain friendships that weren’t face to face, the way many of us did during the pandemic, and that was comforting to me. 

What is a key takeaway from your book, especially for a non-religious audience? 

The people in this past world, although chronologically distant from us, address many issues that face us today. They were often critical of the church, state, and racist institutions, but they experimented with other modes of belonging, connection, and solidarity. 

Some of their utopian experiments failed, and they didn’t always live up to the ideals they had for themselves. One example is Maison Simone Weil, founded in 1962 by Nazi resistor Marie-Magdeleine Davy. It was a utopian international dormitory and summer community where students from all over the world would gather in rural France to discuss many of the pressing ideas of the 1960s: peace, war, global spirituality, existentialism. The goal was to forge relationships among international students and contribute to peacemaking. It was a successful project while it lasted, but shuttered its doors after only a few years.

Yet the activists in my book constantly experimented with alternative modes of living, in connection to one another and to God. These are people who attempted to change the world because they were dissatisfied with the status quo—the way many of us still are today.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

“Think about that question,” said Father Massingale, the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham. “Why is it that the only group that’s never supposed to feel uncomfortable in discussions about race are white people? … We have to face the fact—and this is what I try to get at in my essay,” he said, referencing his recent op-ed in the National Catholic Reporter, “is that the only reason why racism still exists is because it benefits white people, and there is no comfortable way of saying that.” 

In an hourlong online conversation on June 4—amid national protests against police brutality and racial injustice following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police—Father Massingale spoke with Olga Segura, a 2011 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill and former associate editor of America Media, on how systemic racism impacts the church and how fellow Catholics can help dismantle it. John Gehring, the Catholic program director of Faith in Public Life, a national network of nearly 50,000 clergy and faith leaders, moderated the discussion.

In his book Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Orbis Books, 2010), Father Massingale reviews and analyzes the major statements on race that the church has made since the 1950s and offers recommendations to improve Catholic engagement in racial justice. 

“It’s not true to say the Catholic Church has said nothing and done nothing. But what the Catholic Church has said and done is always predicated upon the comfort of white people and not to disturb white Catholics. And if you make that your overriding presumption and goal, then there are going to be difficult truths that will never be spoken, and we will never have an honest conversation,” said Father Massingale, who teaches theological and social ethics at Fordham. 

The online forum began with a recollection of recent events, including not only the killing of George Floyd but also the recent death of another Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed while jogging through a Georgia neighborhood, and an incident in Central Park in which a white woman called 911 to report that an unarmed “African American man” who had asked her to comply with the park’s rules to keep her dog on a leash was “threatening” her life. 

“That all moved me to the sense of, how long, how long do we have to continue to endure the humiliations and the terror that come with being Black, brown, other in America?” said Father Massingale. 

These are things that are especially important for white people to hear, said Gehring. 

“Part of white privilege, as you all know so well, is the ability not to have to think about this. I’m someone who’s tried to learn as much as I can about the history of the United States, but I will never know what it means to be a person of color in this country,” he said. 

In their conversation with Gehring, Segura and Father Massingale made several points about how Catholics and others can acknowledge white privilege and confront racism on a personal and institutional level.

Racial injustice is a pro-life issue. In a recent statement, Pope Francis said Catholics cannot “tolerate or turn a blind eye to racism and exclusion in any form and yet claim to defend the sacredness of every human life.”

When asked to comment on the pope’s statement, Father Massingale said, “At last, someone in high authority has been saying what people of color again in the Catholic Church have been saying for a long time—that racism is a life issue.”

For too long, “we’ve framed concerns of pro-life around a very narrow meaning of being anti-abortion,” said Father Massingale. But it is impossible to support policies—in education, health care, and criminal justice, for example—that are “detrimental to the lives of people of color, and yet call ourselves pro-life,” he said. Segura agreed. 

“As Catholics, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and our church when we say we’re pro-life, but are unwilling to sit with the most significant civil rights movement since the ’60s,” said Segura, who is writing a book on the Black Lives Matter movement and the Catholic Church.

Racism is a religious and spiritual challenge—not just a political issue. The civil rights movement was successful because it spoke with moral authority, said Father Massingale. To show their support for racial justice and solidarity with people of color, Catholic bishops could visit “shrines that we’ve erected where Black lives and bodies have fallen and lead a rosary there,” he said. And Catholics don’t need to wait for bishops to act. Bishops “bear a unique symbolism and responsibility,” but lay activists and leaders should participate, too. By bearing witness and walking with their Black brothers and sisters, they can send the message that “you cannot be a good Catholic and not be concerned about what’s happening here,” he added. 

Put yourself in another person’s shoes—and ask your friends and family to do the same. A good way to do this is through Ignatian spirituality, said Father Massingale. “If we use the tools of our contemplative traditions, whether it’s Ignatian or Carmelite or whatever, and have people dwell there, that’s when you have affect and faith meeting. And that gives us the tools, the possibility for a breakthrough—a breakthrough that won’t happen if you try to engage in talking points,” he said. 

One example is to imagine what it’s like to lose your child in a retail store, said Father Massingale, who once worked in retail store security. “Parents would come to us in a panic,” he recalled. “The joy, the relief … you could see people begin to breathe again when you’d reunite them with their kid. … And the kid was only gone for a matter of minutes.” He urged the audience to ask their family members to imagine another situation: what it’s like to have your child shipped out of the country, with no idea where they are. 

“To just sit in that agony, to sit in that desolation … I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a parent and to even contemplate that,” he said. 

Be careful of polarizing people, but hold them accountable. Segura said she has seen lists that separated Catholic parishes into those have either recently addressed or not addressed racism. She urged people to publicly speak about where parishes have succeeded and failed. “If you see that your priest has not mentioned race once this month or in May, talk to him about it,” said Segura.

Our national policing culture is broken. “We need to make a crucial distinction between supporting police officers and reforming the culture of policing. Too often we get distracted by saying that if we criticize the police, then we’re denigrating the good, law-abiding officers,” said Father Massingale. “We need better guidelines to train our officers on the appropriateness of lethal force, when it’s appropriate to use it, how to train people on de-escalation procedures, but then also create those mechanisms that can hold officers responsible when they abuse [their power].” 

To fight against police brutality, we also need to educate ourselves and demand that our local leaders are transparent about the funding behind police departments, added Segura.  

Listen to people’s sadness and grief. “We, as persons of color, we have marched, we have demonstrated, we have petitioned, we have boycotted, we’ve voted, we’ve written op-eds. We’ve bled, we’ve prayed, we’ve begged, we’ve pleaded, and we’ve done that for years, for decades, for centuries,” said Father Massingdale, “and still we’re in a country where a Black man can’t go jogging without being stalked and killed.” He stressed that he doesn’t advocate violence. But he added that not all of the violence done by protestors has been “done by people of color,” and in some places, there is more concern about violence done to buildings than violence “that’s been inflicted on Black and brown bodies and Black and brown communities for so, so long.”

The pandemic also makes it more difficult to grieve, especially for people of color who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, Segura said. 

“Many of us have been reporting and talking about [racial injustice] for years, but this is the first time where I’m forced to try to reconcile with what it means to privately grieve with my community, privately grieve with my family at a time when we cannot physically be together,” she said. “We have to rely on phone [and video] calls. Black and brown Catholics are very much about being in physical community with each other. So what does it mean for me to try to grieve everything that’s happening at a time when we can’t be together?”

To enact change, we must engage in a relay race. Segura said she has been inspired by Father Massingale’s work, particularly Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, which she said helped shape her faith and her understanding of what it means to care about racial justice in the church. 

“If you hadn’t written your book, I would’ve found it very hard to write my book in 2020,” she said to him over the live video chat. 

Father Massingale said it is wonderful to see someone so young and energetic add her voice to their ongoing struggle. 

“I’m not going to live forever. … I’m probably going to pass on before we reach whatever racial promised land we’re coming to,” said Father Massingale, who is 63 years old. “But I do what I do for the sake of those who both were ahead of me, to honor their work, and for those who are coming up behind me—people like Olga and so many others. … It’s going to be an intergenerational process. But we have to start now.”

The full recording of their discussion can be viewed on Facebook. 

“The U.S.-Mexico borderlands is a place where the Earth just swallows up bodies,” says Leo Guardado, Ph.D.

He doesn’t mince words about the humanitarian crisis at the border. In May, 144,278 migrants were taken into custody by the U.S. Border Patrol, the highest monthly total in more than a decade. And each year, the agency finds hundreds of corpses—the remains of men, women, and children who died traversing the vast desert and mountain regions on both sides of the dividing line.

The Trump administration’s efforts—separating migrant parents and children, deploying U.S. troops to the border, sending asylum-seekers to Mexico to await immigration court hearings—have not reduced the number of people fleeing poverty and violence in Central America to enter the U.S. without authorization.

Guardado knows all too well the pain and fear that families suffer when making the dangerous decision to migrate to the U.S. He was just 9 years old in 1991 when he and his mother made the nearly 3,000-mile trek from their mountain town in El Salvador.

Today, he is an assistant professor of theology at Fordham. And while the federal government remains deeply divided on how to handle the crisis, he views it not as a political abstraction but as a theological issue.

A Migrant’s Journey

Guardado was born in a rural town in northern El Salvador during the country’s civil war. As he approached his 10th birthday, his mother feared that he would soon be conscripted by the army or the guerrillas.

She was determined to move him from harm’s way. Family in the U.S. loaned them money, and Guardado said his grandfather probably sold what little cattle the family had to help pay for his and his mother’s journey. He remembers crying with his grandfather as they said their goodbyes, both of them knowing they might never see each other again. And they never did.

“We got on a bus, and I counted palm trees,” Guardado said. He learned two English phrases from his mother—“‘Thank you,’ ‘I’m sorry’—how to be grateful and how to ask for forgiveness,” he said. “These were the only two phrases that I had in my English vocabulary leaving El Salvador.”

He thinks he counted palm trees as a way of remembering his country. By the time he reached the hundreds, he fell asleep. He awoke in Guatemala, and from there his memory skips through a series of glimpses, mostly involving walking: “A lot. Many days. Under the moonlight.” He traveled with a group of about 15 migrants who followed a “coyote,” a paid guide, for the length of the journey.

He remembers being crammed into false compartments of trailers, packed together “like sardines” for five hours at a time. In Tijuana, they crossed beneath a barbed-wired fence patrolled by jeeps, and in darkness jammed into a small taxi like a “clown car,” which took them over back roads to a white van that ultimately brought them to San Diego.

He and his mother eventually connected with family in Los Angeles, where Guardado was educated by the De La Salle Christian Brothers at Cathedral High School. He earned a full scholarship to attend Saint Mary’s College of California, and it was in his first year there that he finally received legal residency status. He became a U.S. citizen in 2010.

Religion, Politics, and Sanctuary

Saint Mary’s is not far from a Trappist monastery, where Guardado spent a year before earning a master’s degree in theology at the University of Notre Dame. For two years, he directed the social justice ministry at a Catholic church in Tucson, Arizona. Then he returned to the monastery for what he thought would be the rest of his life. But there, in isolation, ideas began to “percolate,” he said, and he returned to Notre Dame, where he earned a doctorate in theology.

He initially studied early church history, but his focus changed after he took a course with Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the father of liberation theology, which emphasizes the perspective of the poor.

“I began to crack open the possibility that my own experience, my community’s experience, and the historical reality of Latin America—poverty, oppression, war, violence—that all of this was raw material out of which I could do theological reflection,” Guardado said.

In his dissertation, he wrote about the 1980s sanctuary movement, when hundreds of Catholic churches provided a safe haven for refugees from Central America. Today, he said, only a handful of churches in the U.S. are willing to take that risk. He said bishops will often say providing sanctuary is illegal or too political.

“The term sanctuary often mistakenly gets reduced to politics,” he said. “In light of human displacement worldwide and 11 million undocumented here in the U.S., if we’re to be a church of and for the poor, then you can’t just say ‘no.’ You have to engage with the question theologically. Otherwise, one can argue that it’s an ecclesial sin of omission.”

Guardado said the point of theology is not just to “do religious metaphysics” but to deal with contemporary issues head-on. He is developing a course on migration and theology that will include a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I want my students to ask: How does theological thinking change the world? How does it change history? How does it leave an impact so that it’s not just thinking about God but actually aims to transform the world?”

Bearing Witness at the Border

Guardado is far from being the only Fordham professor engaging with the humanitarian crisis at the border.

During spring break in March, a group of 10 faculty members went to see it for themselves. They visited the Kino Border Initiative, a consortium of six Catholic organizations in the border city of Nogales—both on the Arizona side and the Sonora, Mexico, side—that serves deportees and asylum-seekers and promotes a spirit of international solidarity.

Faculty members raised $13,000 to buy toiletries and necessities for the migrants, and Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning funded the trip. Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president for mission integration and planning, said it was a necessity, given how migration is now a major global challenge.

“Because this is such a major social issue and it impacts questions of justice, what we want to be as a society, and how a place like Fordham, as a Jesuit university, tries to develop students, we decided the border would be a great site for this immersion experience for a diverse group of faculty members,” he said.

Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Communications and Media Studies, and theology professor James McCartin, Ph.D., acting associate provost of the University, co-led the trip.

It was the second time Reich went to Nogales, having worked with the Kino Initiative in January 2018. Although only 14 months had passed, the experience was very different, she said. As before, the group stayed overnight in Arizona and crossed the border to work in a comedor, or cafeteria, in Mexico, that provided meals to people waiting for asylum claims to be heard in the United States.

In 2018, she said, they would typically have one seating of 40 to 50 people—mostly men, a few women, and very few unaccompanied minors. This time, there were multiple seatings with 300 people per meal.

“We spent a lot of time holding babies while people could eat, or entertaining children, or sitting and talking to groups of families that had left Honduras, Guatemala, or regions of Mexico that were affected by gang violence and poverty,” she said.

In addition to serving meals, the group hosted a party at a women’s shelter, met with Border Patrol agents, and hiked along the border to understand the conditions there.

They also attended an “Operation Streamline” hearing in Tucson, Arizona, where immigrants appeared in a group before a judge, who often deported them for being in the U.S. illegally after asking two quick questions.

Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., a professor of English and American studies and acting chair of the English department, said he was surprised to learn that a wall was constructed through the middle of the city of Nogales in 1994, long before President Donald Trump made building a border wall his signature campaign promise.

Although he does not speak Spanish, he was able to connect with a 6-year-old girl at the comedor whose father was washing dishes nearby.

“It was an incredible joy to make a child who was going through a horrific experience laugh,” he said. “The next day, we were serving a meal, and I heard a little girl yelling ‘hola, hola,’ and it was the same little girl again. She was happy to see me, and I was happy to see her. But there were so many people there that they just got rushed out, so I never got to say goodbye to this little girl. For some reason, that just broke my heart.”

Speaking with the Border Patrol complicated the picture for Hendler because it showed how difficult the job is, he said. But it did not change his mind about the moral implications of the situation. In fact, he said that by then he felt more emotionally connected to what had previously been an abstract concept.

‘Accompany, Humanize, Complicate’

Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of Spanish, was moved by learning specific details of the migrants’ experience, like why black water bottles are a must for those crossing the border at night. (They don’t reflect moonlight.) “We were told to accompany, humanize, and complicate,” she said. “To see those real items that our guide had collected on hikes through the desert, and also to see people get out of a van who’d been deported and go into the soup kitchen we were working in [in Mexico], was something that really stood out.”

McCartin, the theology professor who co-led the trip, recalled a conversation with a man from Honduras who asked if all Americans consider him and his fellow migrants to be criminals. “I said, ‘Oh gosh, no, I have no problem with you.’ This guy was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe that.’ I said, ‘No, I can see how you have a sense that that’s how Americans talk about you, and there are plenty of them that do, but there are also a lot of us that don’t really begrudge you trying to have a better life,’” he said.

“This moment of his being surprised that we’re not unified in our attitudes toward people at the border—a lightbulb went on for this guy, and I’ll remember that.”

—Story co-author: Patrick Verel

Cardinal Ortega, the Archbishop of Havana from 1981 to 2016, died on July 26. In 2015, Fordham conferred upon him an honorary degree in a ceremony held at the Rose Hill Gym. The University lauded the Cardinal’s strong leadership, which sustained the Church in Cuba during years of government repression. He is credited today with playing a key role in the Church’s resurgence there.

“Cardinal Ortega was a truly courageous leader whose tireless efforts to promote religious freedom in the face of relentless opposition were an inspiration for all of us,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“In a time marked by division, his ministry was a bridge that brought together members of the human family. It was an honor to host him at Fordham in 2015, and we will miss greatly.”

Born in 1936 in the province of Matanzas, Cardinal Ortega studied at the Advanced Institute for Secondary Studies of Matanzas, the seminary of San Alberto Magno, and the seminary of the Foreign Mission in Quebec, Canada, before coming home for ordination, in 1964.

As a parish priest of the Cathedral of Matanzas, he founded a youth movement that spread the Church’s message through theatrical performances. He was named Archbishop of Havana in 1981, and in that role, he created parishes, rebuilt more than 40 parish houses and churches, and established the Diocesan Council for Pastoral Initiatives. He ordained 22 Cuban priests, which was no small feat, given the Cuban government’s hostility toward the Church at the time.

Working with the Cuban Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Ortega helped organize in 1986 the Cuban National Ecclesial Encounter, an event that proved to be a milestone in the Church’s revival. It sparked a new era of dialogue and awareness among Cuban Catholics, and ultimately brought about the 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II, who four years earlier had named Ortega a Cardinal.

Under Cardinal Ortega’s leadership, the Church in Cuba became an effective mediator between the government and dissidents. In 2010, the Cardinal worked with the government of Raul Castro to secure the release of 126 political prisoners. In recent years, his role as a mediator expanded beyond the island’s shores. In 2014, when secret negotiations between the governments of Cuba and the United States were underway to re-establish diplomatic relations, he visited Washington D.C. on a trip that was ostensibly for a lecture at Georgetown University.

Instead, he hand-delivered a letter from Pope Francis, whom he helped select as a Cardinal elector, to President Obama at the White House. The Pope sent a similar letter to the President of Cuba; the outreach was key to the Pope’s efforts to bring about dialogue between the governments of the two nations.

“For the first time in the church, we talk about systematic elements [of the crisis],” said Hans Zollner, S.J. “And who is it that put it on the agenda? The pope himself.”

Father Zollner, the president of the Centre for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, delivered the Russo Family Lecture at Reckoning and Reform, a symposium organized at the Lincoln Center campus by the Center on Religion and Culture. As the head of this center in Rome, he’s responsible for the church’s efforts to provide education and training for people working to safeguard minors. Pope Francis also named Zollner to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and he is a consultor to the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy.

Examining Systems, Not Just Individuals

He noted that although the sexual abuse crisis has been ongoing in the United States since the mid-1980s, what is different now is that discussions have finally moved beyond simply holding individual priests responsible for abusing children; there have been more efforts focused on examining the system as a whole. He credited the August release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, as well as the #MeToo movement, with jolting church leadership into action.

There is a recognition that the structure of the church hierarchy, whereby each of the church’s roughly 5,000 bishops reports directly to the pope, is not working, he said. It’s one of the reasons why reforms such as the “Five Principles” that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted in 1992, failed, he said, and it’s the reason why church leaders are discussing changes such as giving archbishops more authority over other bishops.

In the near future, he said, task forces of three or four people will be deployed to each continent to help bishops’ conferences and religious orders develop guidelines for responding to the problem, and “the church in 20 years will look very different than what we know now.”

A Problem With Global Reach

Another big part of the problem is that up until very recently, Father Zollner acknowledged, the phenomenon of men using their power to prey on others has been very much under the radar globally. He noted that even in his native Germany, the abuse scandal that erupted in 2002 in the United States did not stir his fellow countrymen to examine the issue there. It took another eight years for Germans to undertake the painful process of examining abuse allegations that had been ignored.

Father Zollner attended the four-day summit of bishops that Pope Francis convened last month to address the issue, and he noted that many bishops in attendance needed to be convinced that sexual abuse is even a problem. In fact, he estimated that of the 60 countries he’s traveled to over the last few years, leaders from 75 percent of them said sexual abuse was not their highest priority.

“It’s not that there are not cases of abuse, and it’s not that they’re not reported. But it is not a number-one issue, neither in society nor in church,” he said, acknowledging that this might be surprising to an American crowd. “This is something that is very difficult to convey to an audience like yours, where you’ve been dealing with this topic since 1985 and you’re fed up. And you think, when is it over?” he said.

“What I say is, this will not be over in our lifetime, at least in countries where they have not yet started to talk about it.” But Father Zollner said the recent bishops’ summit saw movement in the right direction.

He said that although there was resistance at the meeting, conversations he had there convinced him that Pope Francis had persuaded more bishops around the world to take the problem more seriously.

And in the United States, he said, the church has made great strides in recent years in protecting children from abuse, noting that before he could celebrate Mass in the U.S. during his current visit, he had to produce a letter from his superiors verifying that there were no allegations of abuse against him.

Rebuilding Trust

The next step, Father Zollner said, is for church leaders around the world to show they’re not taking action only because they’re being forced to by activists, the press, or the authorities.

“What is lacking is the communication of the heart. Because once you believe that a person means what he says, and the heart is palpable, then you trust that we are going forward,” he said.

Part of that effort will come through what the pope has called synodality, or a coming together of the lay people and clergy, he said. The task forces for bishops and religious orders are a start.

“We need outside help. We need expert advice. We need people who can intervene and counsel what the next step is. And that is very much contrary to our normal thinking. Church thinking is, ‘Outside people don’t understand us. Therefore, we need to find our resources within,’” he said.

“This is very harmful over time, because then it is inbreeding. And you know what happens with inbreeding? At a certain point, diseases develop.”

Key Research Findings

Zollner’s talk was preceded by a panel discussion featuring Karen Terry, Ph.D., a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College, and Margaret Smith, Ph.D., a quantitative criminologist at John Jay College’s Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics. They explained the findings and recommendations of their own investigation of the sexual abuse crisis, which they detailed in the report Stained Glass: The Nature and Scope of Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church.

Their key point was that the findings of their research, which they wrote at the behest of the Vatican in 2002 and which covered every allegation of abuse from 1950 to 2002, have mirrored the data that the independent non-profit Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), reported in 2017.

This was notable, Terry said, because when she and Smith released their results in 2008, some were skeptical of their motives because they were hired by the Catholic Church and they were working with anonymous data. But CARA, which has analyzed 8,645 new complaints of abuse originating from the same period, came to the same conclusions. Similar findings have also been noted in studies conducted recently in Australia, Poland, and Germany.

Some of the most significant findings are that the highest percentage of sexual abuse took place between 1974 and 1982, and that just 3.5 percent of priests implicated in the 10,667 instances of abuse were found to have more than 10 victims, indicating that the majority of the abuse was committed by a small group.

Terry said that their findings are also consistent with the widespread abuse that has been found in other institutions where adults have the ability to interact with and mentor adolescents. The Boy Scouts and U.S. Gymnastics, for instance have had recent revelations of sexual abuse, as has the Jehovah’s Witness.

One aspect that makes the Catholic Church unique is it has more historical records than any other organization to study. Smith reiterated that homosexuality is not part of the issue, noting that when girls began serving as altar servers in the 1980s, they were victimized in equal numbers by male priests as boys.

“Everything that we know as social scientists indicates that human beings abuse others, but the nature of the sexual orientation is not a factor,” Smith said.

“Humans are capable of abusing others, and they do so regularly.”

She also rebutted the notion that the vows of celibacy that Catholic priests take might be a factor, noting that surveys show that nearly a third of all U.S. citizens are celibate.

“I think that these terms become labels, and they become easier answers than more profound questions on how it is that we allow those with power and prestige to abuse those with less,” she said.

Guardado is teaching “Christian Mystical Texts” at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and will be teaching a doctoral seminar in the fall. He is also developing a course for next year on migration and theology that will include a visit to the border.

He doesn’t mince words when it comes to his thoughts about the humanitarian crisis at the border. He knows all too well the pain families suffer when making the dangerous and painful decision to leave their home countries and migrate to the U.S. He made the nearly 3,000-mile trek when he was just 10 years old.

“Every year we have hundreds of remains that are recovered from there and so I have problems with the indifference of the church on this issue,” he said. “And by church, I mean the people of God, I mean the institutional church, but I also mean more than just Catholics. I mean the body of Christ in history that we claim to be—all of it.”

As the federal government sits in a stalemate about the fate of the border, each side claiming humanitarian concerns, Guardado views the crisis as a theological issue, not a political abstraction. He has spent years returning to help migrants in an area he knows all too well from his childhood. It’s a journey that propelled him from Los Angeles to the cloisters of a Trappist monastery, and now, to the halls of academia. But, in the end, he’s never really left the border.

“There are just so many forces coalescing at the border and such a rawness of the human experience that those are some of those questions I ended up taking to the monastery, and I think in the monastery those questions perhaps pressed themselves more fully upon me,” said Guardado, who started at Fordham last spring. “And that indirectly led me back to consider that maybe I have a lot more learning to do about deep questions of how the mystery of God, church, and faith intersect and can shine light upon of some of the ills of our world.”

The Journey

Guardado was born in El Salvador in the midst of the country’s civil war. As he approached the age of 10, his mother knew full well that he could be conscripted by either the army or the guerrillas. She was determined to move him from harm’s way. He said his grandfather probably sold what little cattle they had to pay for the journey, along with other monies lent by family in the U.S. He remembers his grandfather crying as they said their goodbyes, both knowing they might never see each other again. They never did; his grandfather died in the years that followed.

“We got on a bus and I counted palm trees, said goodbye to family, a lot of tears,” he said. “I knew two phrases that my mom knew: Thank you. I’m sorry. How to be grateful and how to ask for forgiveness. These were the only two phrases that I had in my English vocabulary leaving El Salvador.”

He said he thinks he counted palm trees as a way of remembering his country. By the time he got into the hundreds, he fell asleep and woke in Guatemala. From there his memory skips through a series of glimpses, built mostly of walking: “A lot. Many days. Under the moonlight.” The group of about 15 migrants followed a paid guide known as a “coyote,” or “coyota” in their case, as she was a woman. She stayed with them for the length of the journey. It’s a model of migration that no longer exists, he said. Today’s migrants are passed from one person to another, a series of small transactions on a journey through the hemisphere.

“It’s much more dangerous in that sense [today]and on many other levels,” he said. “That lady was with us, even if she would leave for a day or so, she would be back the next day and arrange the next stage of the journey.”

The group crammed into false compartments of trailers packed together “like sardines” for five hours at a time “hoping that thing doesn’t turn over because if it does you’re probably not going to make it out alive.” They spent a night in jail and were bailed out by the coyota.

“You paid people along the way, as needed. The federal officers, the police. They understand that you’re leaving and why you’re leaving,” he said.

In Tijuana, they crossed beneath barbed wired patrolled by jeeps. At 2 a.m. they jammed into a small taxi like a “clown car.” They traveled through backroads to a white van. Finally, Guardado got to sit up front and ride shotgun because “no one will think anything of it, he’s just like a U.S. boy.” Soon he saw Los Angeles.

“My closest neighbor in our Salvadoran village was a quarter mile away and in between were hundreds of trees and wilderness. So, arriving in L.A., where every so often there’s a street light and each house has the same amount of space between it, it just felt so artificial. It just felt like, ‘Wow. Where’s the beauty of the chaos?’”

The Calling to Monastic Life

Guardado was educated by De La Salle Christian Brothers in L.A. and then moved on to St. Mary’s College of California. The college was not far from the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux, a Trappist monastery whose abbot at the time was formed by Thomas Merton, the prolific writer and Catholic theologian. The abbot, Thomas Davis, O.C.S.O., had structured the monastery around the teachings of Merton.

“He [Merton] had this cultural and artistic sensitivity, intellectual sensitivity, and curiosity that he passed on to someone like Father Thomas Davis, so I fell in love with that vision of the monastery,” he said.

Guardado began to view the abbey as a way to question the commodified society surrounding him. To this day he cannot explain his calling. “It was a mystery,” he said. But he added that the simplicity of monastic life was “a form of resistance to U.S. values that emphasize upward mobility.”

“It’s less about being in charge of the reflection, but just allowing for a deconstruction of the self, and what emerges is something else,” he said of the prayerful silence.

After an initial year at the monastery, he began a journey that took him to the University of Notre Dame to get a master’s degree in theology and then back to his alma mater, St. Mary’s, where he served as assistant director of justice education. He returned to the borderlands as director of social justice ministry at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church, a progressive parish in Tucson, Arizona. Back at the border, in many Catholic churches he witnessed a “vast indifference” to the suffering he saw. After two years, he went back to the monastery for what he thought would be the rest of his life. But there, in isolation, ideas began to “percolate.”

His mentor knew more was in store for him.

“This place is too small for you, Leo,’” he said Davis told him. “I think you need to be open to the possibility that God may be calling you to a new place.”

He soon applied and was accepted back at Notre Dame for his doctorate.

“I didn’t want to live life wondering, ‘Should I have gone?’” he said, so he left the monastery.

Theological Reflection and Supporting Sanctuary

At Notre Dame, he began studying patristics—early church studies that reflected the readings that he immersed himself in at the abbey. But his focus changed after he took a course with Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., the father of liberation theology, which encourages the study of theology from the perspective of the poor. Guardado would go on to become an assistant to Father Gutiérrez.

“For a boy from Chalatenango, a village of El Salvador, I’ve found myself in pretty amazing circles,” he said.

With Gutiérrez, he took a doctoral seminar on Bartolomé de las Casas, a 16th-century Dominican friar who stood up to the Spanish government and the church in defense of the indigenous peoples.

“In this class, for the first time really, I would say, I got vocabulary about my own history growing up poor in a village in the mountains, without electricity, without running water, in the middle of a civil war in the midst of violence,” he said.

He began to examine the distinction between the early patristic church he had come to understand at the monastery and the 16th-century church of empire, war, and “commodification of bodies”—a church that even questioned the humanity of indigenous people. The class helped him question what theology is and what it could be.

“I began to crack open the possibility that my own experience, my community’s experience, and the historical reality of Latin America—poverty, oppression, war, violence—that all of this was raw material out of which I could do theological reflection.”

His dissertation, which informs a chapter he wrote for a forthcoming book, An Ethic of Just Peace (Georgetown University Press, 2019), examines the concept of sanctuary alongside theories of nonviolence. His primary focus is on the root of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s when hundreds of Catholic churches provided sanctuary to Salvadorian refugees. Today, he said, only a handful of churches in the U.S. are willing to take the risk. He said that bishops will often say providing sanctuary is illegal or too political.

Guardado said that his research attempts to provide theological justification for “sanctuary as an ecclesial practice.”

“The term sanctuary often mistakenly gets reduced to politics,” he said. “In light of human displacement worldwide and 11 million undocumented here in the U.S., if we’re to be a church of and for the poor, then you can’t just say, ‘No.’ You have to engage with the question theologically. Otherwise, one can argue that it’s an ecclesial sin of omission.”

But even here, Guardado taps the patristic period to back his arguments for sanctuary. He noted that the earliest mention of bishops providing sanctuary goes back to 343 at the Council of Serdica. Later that century in 399 the archbishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, gave shelter to a man named Eutropius who, ironically, had been a critic of sanctuary. The archbishop gave a sermon that took a jab at Eutropius and argued for sanctuary.

“You never know when you’re going to be the one who needs sanctuary,” Guardado said, knowingly.

“I understand this from my experience as a boy in El Salvador, but also my experience as a product of Latin America and its relationship to the U.S. and the world now.”

Those relationships are as fraught today as when he arrived, he said. And he acknowledges that it’s as impossible as ever to speak of the Latin American poor theologically without speaking about them politically.

“It is politics that creates the very structures that keep people down and that keep them dying out of injustice and other means, like lack of food,” he said. “You cannot deal, genuinely with the poor if you don’t deal with politics.”

Guardado said that the kind of theological work he does and wants to teach his students at Fordham is the kind of that deals with contemporary issues head-on.

“I want my students to ask: How does theological thinking change the world? How does it change history? How does it leave an impact so that it’s not just thinking about God, but actually aims to transform the world?”

He said that is the point of liberation theology, as well as a Jesuit education.

Echoing Gutiérrez’s words, Guardado says, “‘The point is not to do religious metaphysics. It is to figure out and to really reflect out of lived accompaniment with the poor, with the margins. How does our faith connect with that and how does it transform that reality?’”.

That was the assertion of a panel of scholars who came together on Tuesday, Jan. 15 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

The issue of whether women can become deacons is one that the Vatican had studied twice since the early 1990s. In 2016, Pope Francis announced a third commission, made up of six women and six men, to study its feasibility.

A New Look at an Old Idea

Phyllis Zagano, Ph.D., and Bernard Pottier, S.J., two members of that commission, spoke Tuesday at a Fordham panel event, The Future of Women Deacons: Views from the Papal Commission and the American Pews.

Zagano, a senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of Women Deacons? Essays with Easy Answers (Michael Glazier, 2016), said evidence of the existence of women deacons, who share many responsibilities with priests, in the churches’ earliest days is indisputable.

Documents available in Vatican libraries from the fourth and fifth centuries make clear the existence of a position that was separate and distinct from the priesthood, and was therefore open to all, she said, and specifically referenced women.

“The earliest ordination for deacons is in the apostolic constitution, which directs the bishop to lay hands on [a woman being ordained]in the presence of the presbyterate, the male deacons, and the woman deacons, and to pray a prayer that parallels the ordination of the deacon, including the Epiclesis, which is the calling down of the Holy Spirit,” she said.

“God is asked to bless her in regard to her ministry. The ordaining bishop places a stole around her neck. As I’ve said to many people, ‘If she wasn’t a deacon, they would call her something else.’” she said, but the responsibilities would have been the same.

An Upheaval Leads to Shifting Attitudes

In the middle of the 18th century, she said, scholars began rejecting the idea of a female deacon, and quibbled over whether these women had been “ordained” or “blessed.” Zagano said the words were used interchangeably at the time.

“For me, if a bishop was laying hands on a woman, invoking the Holy Spirit, putting a stole on her, giving the chalice, and calling her a deacon, I don’t know what else to say,” she said.

So why did women deacons disappear? Father Pottier, a faculty member at the Institute D’Etudes Théologiques in Brussels, said the Great Schism of 1054, when what is now the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches split, was key to the change.

“The Western church began to think by its own, without the mystical spirituality of the East, that rationality and legalistic thought was more important,” he said.

The upside of this was the rise of immensely influential philosophers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, he said.

“On the other side, we lost a little bit of what the sacrament is. What is the spirituality and the grace of the sacrament? The West wanted to do everything clear, and everything simple. So the sacrament of ordination became very simple. You have cursus honorum, a sort of scale you have to pass by all the steps, and not miss one. A deacon became only a step to priesthood,” he said, and therefore, something reserved for men.  But he cautioned that this needn’t be the end of the story.

“Our faith has roots in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in what the church has done. We do not have to be afraid of history. In history, we do not have a source of rigidity and immobility,” he said, but rather an example that change is possible.

A View From the Pews

Panelist Donna Ciangio, O.P., said conversations she’s had with lay members of the Archdiocese of Newark, where she is chancellor, have convinced her that parishes need women deacon now.

“I asked a few parishioners about the possibility of women deacons, and the first answer I got was, “Aren’t you and Sister Sandy deacons already?” she said.

Where the issue really rears its head is when she works with couples who want to have their child baptized in the church.

“We ask them, is there anything that keeps you from embracing the church wholly? One woman said to me, ‘My children ask me, ‘Why can’t women be priests or deacons?’ I have no answer that satisfies them,’” she said.

Sister Ciangio also recently oversaw the creation of a study guide to help Catholics better understand this issue, titled Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future, (Paulist Press, 2012), which Zagano co-wrote. She invited 12 parishioners from the diocese to come together to read it.

“As we discussed each chapter, they became more and more interested, but they became more and more agitated,” she said, noting that none were aware of the existence of women deacons in the past.

“The group became convinced that it’s no longer acceptable not to have women deacons in parishes or significant leadership positions in the church.”

What Next?

What if Pope Francis decides this is not the right time to let women become deacons again?

The panel has presented its report to the pontiff and is waiting for a response. Zagano said that given the church’s dire need for those who can minister to the faithful, even a delayed answer will be a negative answer.

“I think it’s up to the church to make noise. The pope has said in other cases, make noise. Well, make noise,” she said.

“I have a sense that he will know the time to say something. We have from May 6 to 10 a triennial meeting of the international union of superiors general, the women who originally asked him to examine this issue. If I were the pope, I wouldn’t want to walk into a meeting with 900 nuns without an answer.”

The panel event was sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture. David Gibson, the center’s director, said the topic is a timely one given the upheaval the church has faced recently.

“Elevating and broadening the role of the women in the church, as Pope Francis has said we must do, is especially critical today if we’re to answer the call of the spirit in this time of epochal change and challenge for the Catholic church,” said Gibson.

“It is a call that our nation and our world must respond to.”

The panel was moderated by Thomas Rosica, C.S.B., president of Salt & Light Media, and was streamed live on Salt & Light.