“My dream is to help ground justice movements through spirituality,” said Arellano, an online student in GRE’s master’s program in Christian spirituality and the daughter of immigrant blue-collar workers. “When organizers aren’t spiritually grounded, it can easily lead to burnout. The more that we can center [spirituality]… the more that people can see their work as an extension of their love for God, the Earth, and people.”

Reimagining the Catholic Church

Arellano is a first-generation Mexican American from Little Village or “La Villita,” a Mexican neighborhood in Chicago. Her mother, a former public school cafeteria worker, often took Arellano and her three sisters to labor union protests and marches, where Arellano learned how to advocate for social justice. 

“My mom modeled what it means to fight oppression with your community. That planted so many seeds about how I see the world,” Arellano said in a Zoom call from her home in Chicago, where she attends her Fordham classes remotely. 

Over the next decade, Arellano combined her Catholic spirituality with her passion for workers’ rights at several organizations, where she coordinated communication efforts and managed funding. Among them was the Archdiocese of Chicago. 

“Seeing both the light and the shadow of the church helped me form connections with like-minded people. We reimagined a church where we center the voices and experiences of Catholic people of color, launch campaigns to improve neighborhoods, hold people in power accountable, and talk openly about the systems of oppression that affect us,” Arellano said. 

She was inspired to co-found the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, a nonprofit that teaches faith leaders how to engage in local social justice campaigns related to gender, class, racism, and the environment through the lens of Catholic spiritual and theological traditions. 

While developing CSPL’s curriculum, Arellano considered what she learned from Fordham. 

“In our CSPL training programs and workshops, we use a lot of Ignatian spirituality and contemplative imagination, including works that I’ve read about in class,” said Arellano. “I’m also going to lead a program that looks at mystical texts and see how we can apply and ground them through a racial, gender, and class analysis. I attribute and credit all of that to Fordham.”

Her Fordham studies have also helped her with her full-time job as a press strategist for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, where she assists affiliates with their strategic communication and teaches domestic workers how to share their stories with the media. Arellano said it was a Fordham pastoral counseling course that strengthened her skills in deeply listening to the domestic workers that the alliance serves. 

“When they share their stories and vulnerable moments, you really need to discern how you move that conversation along and also help people who feel like they’re stuck in a repetitive trauma story cycle. The skills that I learned [from Fordham]helped me deepen how intentionally I listen during my spokesperson prep sessions with leaders,” Arellano said. “My mom was one of the spokespeople for her union, and I knew how transformative it was for her to share her experience in the media, especially when it’s tied to a call to action and to demand change. I’ve seen the transformation of working with domestic workers who felt really shy about sharing their story, but then through building trust and working with them, I’ve heard members say, ‘You can put me in front of 10,000 people, and I still want to share my story.’” 

Dear Catholic Women of Color

Arellano enrolled in GRE in 2018 to strengthen her spiritual life and identity as a Catholic woman. Her thesis paper will examine how Mexican-American Catholic women can fuel their faith by drawing from indigenous practices. 

“I come from a Mexican family and a line of women who worked closely with herbs and had a great reverence for the Earth and the elements, and I want to honor the indigenous lineage that I carry. But we’re also Catholic,” Arellano said. “My thesis will focus on how we can deepen our relationship with our [faith]and our ascended ancestors while thinking about the gifts that Mother Earth offers us through plants and the elements.” 

Arellano, who is aiming to graduate in February 2022, says she’s grateful for her time at Fordham. 

“I never imagined I would be in a theology program that is so prestigious, warm, and welcoming, where it’s constantly challenged me to be better … where I feel like the dean is actively recruiting more women of color to be theologians, more professors who are people of color,” Arellano said. “I wish I had a megaphone and could say to any other Catholic woman of color, ‘If your heart desires theological training and formation, your first thought should be Fordham.’”

For more than a decade, she had worked in the supply chain management industry in the Philippines. Lipa, who had studied electronics and communications engineering in college, helped develop hair products for two global fast-moving consumer goods companies: Unilever and L’Oréal. She was also a devout Catholic since childhood—or so she thought.

In 2013, a colleague confided in Lipa. She told her she had decided to leave the Catholic faith.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. [The problem was] my own spirituality … I couldn’t really say anything about it [to her],” Lipa recalled. “I only knew what a grade school student would know about the faith. I wasn’t really growing my faith, in terms of the church’s teachings.”

“And the thing is, I love my faith. I know how beautiful it is. So I started questioning myself: Do I know my faith in a way that I can share it with others?”

That conversation changed Lipa’s life. Since that day, she started to learn more about the Catholic faith—online, in books, in discussions with friends and family. In 2014, Lipa and her mother left the Philippines for a Marian pilgrimage across Europe. In Rome, she scaled the famous Scala Sancta steps—a set of 28 holy steps that Jesus Christ is said to have ascended—with her knees. At the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, she prayed to the woman from whom she takes her second name—Vanessa “Lourdes” Lipa. And at the holy Catholic shrine in Fatima, Portugal, she knelt towards a little chapel and prayed the rosary. 

Lipa said the goal of the pilgrimage was to rediscover Catholicism, deepen her emotions, and appreciate the beauty of her faith. It worked.  

A year later, Lipa resigned from her full-time job at L’Oréal. Instead, she devoted her days to doing research on spirituality, religious struggles, and mental health.

In 2017, she started to pursue a Ph.D. in applied theology at De La Salle University in the Philippines. Then a year into the Ph.D. program, she discovered an opportunity she said she couldn’t pass up—Fordham’s master’s program in Christian spirituality, a program abroad that would complement her studies in the Philippines

Last August, Lipa became the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s first on-campus student from the Philippines, made possible by a recent partnership with De La Salle University. She now lives in Jersey City with her husband via an F1 visa.

In just a semester-and-a-half at Fordham, Lipa has taken in-person and online classes on the Old Testament, spiritual direction, church and society, and theology of the human person. One of her favorite activities is reading the work of other biblical scholars and comparing it with the modern take on the Bible.

“It was a very different world when people wrote them [the Bible verses],” said Lipa, who will graduate from GRE in 2021. “We’re also reading them from a different context, and so you kind of have to really make sure—is this what they meant during that time? And learn from it as well, coming from where we are right now.”

She’s also met many non-Catholic classmates—a contrast from her life in the Philippines, a country that boasts one of the largest Catholic populations in the world.

“The Philippines is almost homogenous in terms of Christianity and Catholicism. In the U.S., there’s a lot of other denominations within the Christian tradition,” Lipa said. “I see that through my classes. I have classmates who are not Catholic. We get to share that in class, and share our experiences.”

After she graduates from Fordham and returns to De La Salle to finish her Ph.D. degree, she doesn’t know what’s next. Perhaps she’ll be a pastoral counselor in the Philippines, she said, or find a career that blends all her strengths—academics, religion, counseling, math, and analytics. One day, she wants to share the fruits of her Fordham education with her fellow Filipinos, the way the GRE dean, Faustino M. Cruz, S.M., a Filipino native, did.

For now, there’s one thing she doesn’t regret—the epiphany that hit her in 2013.

“It’s drawing me closer to God,” Lipa said.

“I review my day and ask myself, did my actions bring me closer to light or farther away from it?” he said. Bevilacqua, who currently serves as mayor of the City of Vaughan in Ontario, Canada, describes the ‘light’ as one’s destiny. “You can be a follower of change or an agent of change, and I prefer to be an agent of change.”

Two years ago, Bevilacqua enrolled in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s hybrid-online master’s program in Christian spirituality. Having studied various spiritual teachings throughout his life, including the spiritual practices of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius of Loyola and Lao Tzu, the founder of philosophical Taoism, Bevilacqua saw the Christian spirituality program at Fordham as a unique opportunity for personal and professional growth.

“In public life, you must always put the public interest and the public good ahead of any self-interest that you may have, so that what drives you every morning is how to make things better for people and how to strive toward excellence,” said Bevilacqua, who has held elected office for nearly 30 years. “This is very much in keeping with the Jesuit values of magis and giving of yourself in a selfless way.”

Besides fostering his own spiritual journey, Bevilacqua, who grew up Catholic, is receiving training in scripture, theology, and spirituality through the program. He said a curious mind must be nurtured at every stage in one’s life.

“You have to really go deep within your own heart and belief system to recognize who you really are,” he said.

The son of a seamstress and a champion Italian cyclist, Bevilacqua immigrated to Canada from the Italian town of Sulmona, Abruzzo, in 1970 when he was 10 years old. His zeal for service and spirituality stems from his early years as an altar boy, where he attended traditional Latin mass with his family every Sunday, he said.

“I remember that I felt very comfortable in that space,” Bevilacqua said, noting that the desire to be a servant leader was always within him. “I knew that’s what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to go, early on in life.”

At age 28, Bevilacqua became the youngest Member of Parliament (MP) in the Canadian House of Commons. As the MP for 22 consecutive years for the City of Vaughan, which has a population of more than 300,000, Bevilacqua has held a number of positions in Canadian federal government, including Minister of State for Science, Research and Development, Minister of State for Finance, and Chairman of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance. He holds the record for most votes received by a federal candidate in Canadian political history.

As he looks back at his journey from a young immigrant living in the basement of a home with his family to a public official sitting in the House of Commons 18 years later, Bevilacqua credits his own growing spiritual practices and positive approach toward life with helping him to realize his lifelong purpose—to “change lives for the better” and “be an example to others.”

“I lived through challenges in my life, but the fact that I had these thoughts, ideas, and principles ingrained in me made my journey much more meaningful and worthwhile,” he said.

For Bevilacqua, life is fueled by hope and optimism.

“One of the things that our Jesuit faith teaches us is that desolation is always followed by consolation,” he said. “That’s very important in life because if you can internalize that thought, then whenever you’re going through challenging times, you know that there are better times ahead.”