Amelia Medved, a 2023 Fordham graduate, analyzed how the dead have become part of the landscape of the city in “A Breathing Place: Sanctified Burial Sites in New York City Public Space,” a research project she conducted through a Duffy Fellowship from Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture. 

Medved, a studio assistant at the landscape architecture firm SCAPE, says that honoring the collective memory of the deceased is a healthy expression of urban life—one that can “enliven our connection to place and engage the dynamic communities that inhabit New York City today.”

Hart Island 

Hart Island, located at the western end of Long Island Sound in the Bronx, has a long and morbidly fascinating history as New York City’s public cemetery, with mass graves stretching back to the Civil War. Described by Medved as a “remote, windy, indeterminate landscape far from the beating heart of the city,” the island had been controlled for many years by the city’s Department of Correction, which used prison labor to bury more than 1 million unclaimed and unidentified New Yorkers. 

The maintenance of the island came under scrutiny in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy unearthed some remains. In July of 2015, the grave sites became accessible to the families of those buried on the island, and in 2019, control of the island was transferred to the New York City Department of Parks.

Hart Island is now open to the public through small guided tours requiring lottery registration. The Hart Island Project, a public charity incorporated in 2011, has worked to destigmatize the burial ground and create an online resource to help families find the locations of their buried loved ones.   

The Enslaved African and Kingsbridge Burial Grounds, Van Cortlandt Park

Consecrated in 2021, this section of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx was nothing more than a neighborhood ghost story until a chance encounter by Kingsbridge resident Nick Dembowski. After noticing a few broken headstones against a fence, Dembowski went to the Kingsbridge Historical Society. There he learned that the fenced-off area was once home to an 18th-century burial ground, particularly for people enslaved at the estate. Their bones were discovered in the late 1870s, when the New York Northern Railroad Company broke ground in the area. 

Following Dembowski’s efforts, the Enslaved People Project was born—launched by the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, Van Cortlandt House Museum, and Kingsbridge Historical society to help shed light on the history of the burial grounds.

Medved said this site offers visitors “the chance to encounter the people who walked through the trees or stood beside the lake centuries ago.” 

Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, Fort Greene Park

Just a few blocks from Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Fort Greene Park is a 30-acre public space, filled with history dating back to the Revolutionary War. In the center sits the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, a war memorial dedicated to more than 11,500 American prisoners of war. Many of these prisoners, who died on British prison ships in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, were thrown into the bay or buried in shallow graves on the shoreline.

Their remains were left there until the 19th century, when they were collected after funding was secured for a public monument. They were briefly interred in a public tomb before being moved permanently to the newly constructed Fort Greene Park in 1873. The monument that stands today, with its massive doric column and granite stairway, was completed in 1908.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of the monument, according to Medved, is the way it “convenes the living and dead in intimate proximity to the unawareness of most visitors.”

The 9/11 Memorial

Located where the Twin Towers once stood, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum honors the lives lost at the World Trade Center during the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. The site features two reflecting pools bordered by bronze parapets engraved with the names of 2,983 people—2,977 who were killed on 9/11, and six killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

The most striking part of the memorial, according to Medved, is the sound—the white noise generated by running water  creates a pocket of “overwhelming silence” in an area bustling with foot traffic. 

The contemplative nature of the space has led to myriad improvised displays, including “missing” posters, flowers, American flags, rosaries, and even unauthorized etchings of additional names on the monument’s surface. 

Medved says that these contributions from visitors are evidence of a vital, dynamic “public grieving process.” 

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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.

Actor and director Ethan Hawke joined Fordham’s Angela O’Donnell and David Gibson at a May 3 private screening of Wildcat, a movie about Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor directed by Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke. 

In a Q&A after the screening, attended by 300 people at a Manhattan movie theater, Ethan Hawke said it was an “absolute honor” to be with O’Donnell and thanked her for writing her book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (Fordham University Press, 2020), which deepened his understanding of the writer.

The film follows the life of O’Connor, who is celebrated for short stories such as those in Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) but also criticized for her views on race.

Fordham has been a center of research and events related to O’Connor’s work since 2018, when the writer’s estate granted $450,000 for an endowment at Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, where O’Donnell is the associate director.

A Writer’s Complexities

Although his mother had introduced him to O’Connor when he was a child, Hawke said, reading Radical Ambivalence helped him better understand how complex a person O’Connor was. He mentioned the book in an essay he wrote for Variety explaining why he and Maya ultimately decided to go forward with the film.

“I’m just so grateful for your time and for your enthusiasm and open-mindedness,” he said of O’Donnell’s writings on O’Connor. “I can’t imagine knowing as much as you know about Flannery. I have to bottle it into an hour and a half.”

O’Donnell said the Variety article was the first time she learned that Hawke had read her book, and said she was deeply moved by the film. 

“When I wrote the book, I was hoping that it was going to be useful to people in some way and not just something that academics would read,” she said. 

Hawke credited Maya with pushing the film to completion and suggested that O’Connor’s faith, coupled with her unflinching exploration of the way religion and morality sometimes collide in horrific ways, makes her appealing to a generation that is otherwise turning away from organized religion.

“A lot of people are scared to talk about faith. If we were all at Thanksgiving dinner together and I said, ‘Hey, can we talk about God?’ about half of you would go to the bathroom because you’re worried people are going to have an agenda,” he said.

“What I try to do with the movie is model Ms. O’Connor, which is that she’s not trying to convince you to believe anything. She’s trying to be a good artist and present something for you.”

Disorderly Men: A Novel

In Disorderly Men, Fordham English professor Edward Cahill evokes New York City in the mid-20th century, several years before the 1969 Stonewall uprising catalyzed the movement for LGBTQ+ rights. The novel opens with a police raid on Caesar’s, a mob-owned gay bar in Greenwich Village, where Roger Moorehouse, a Wall Street banker and World War II veteran with a wife and children in Westchester, was about to leave with “the best-looking boy” in the place. “Fragments of his very good life—the fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, the house in Beechmont Woods, Corrine and the children—all presented themselves to his imagination as fitting sacrifices to the selfish pursuit of pleasure,” Cahill writes.

Also caught up in the raid are Columbia University professor Julian Prince and his boyfriend, Gus, a “serious-minded painter” from Wisconsin who gets knocked unconscious by a police baton; and Danny Duffy, a Bronx kid who helps manage the produce department at Sloan’s Supermarket. They’re charged with “disorderly behavior,” and their lives are upended—Roger is threatened by a blackmailer, Danny loses his job and family and seeks revenge, and Julian searches for Gus, who goes missing.

Cahill depicts their crises with pathos, humor, and suspense. And like the best historical fiction, Disorderly Men not only evokes a bygone era but also feels especially vital today.

Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham

The cult writer H. P. Lovecraft was not well known during his lifetime, most of which he spent in his native Providence, Rhode Island. But the so-called weird fiction he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s—a blend of horror, science fiction, and myth—has “entranced readers” and influenced artists in various media ever since, David J. Goodwin writes in Midnight Rambles.

From shows like Netflix’s Stranger Things to the films of Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro to the novels of Stephen King and beyond, artists have been inspired by Lovecraft’s “vivid world-building and bleak cosmogony.” They’ve also been repulsed by his racist and xenophobic views.

Goodwin, the assistant director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, deals with this head-on in Midnight Rambles, a chronicle of the writer’s love-hate relationship with New York and the city’s effect on him and his writing. He describes the brief period—from 1924 to 1926—when Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, drawn there by Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian Jewish émigré he met at a literary convention in Boston. Their marriage soon fell apart, and he moved back to Providence, where he died in 1937 at age 46. “An extended encounter with a great city reveals and exaggerates the strengths, foibles, attributes, and flaws of a character in a film or a person in the flesh-and-blood world,” Goodwin writes. “This is certainly true of Lovecraft and his years in New York City.”

“Students taking classes across the broad range of our undergraduate curriculum—from music, theater, and media to political science, theology, and more—saw their coursework come to life through the Met’s world-renowned productions,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. 

First-Timers at the Opera 

Most recently, nearly 200 students attended X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a musical interpretation of the life of the iconic civil rights leader. Among the students was Cambria Martinez, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who studies communications and culture. The Nov. 14 performance was her first time at an opera. 

“The closest I’ve ever gotten is listening to one song from The Phantom of the Opera,” she said, chuckling. 

Martinez attended the performance as part of the course Photography, Identity, Power. “It’s about visuals and how we can use specific artistic mediums to tell a deeper, more powerful story,” she said. “[In X] I think of the scene … an empty stage with just the chair that had fallen, and we all knew that was a symbol of [Malcolm’s] anger, his rage. … How does that simple visual mean something greater to the rest of us?” 

For Allison Anwalimhobor, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who majors in political science and minors in music, the event was an opportunity to experience not only her first opera, but one that pushed the boundaries of the art form.

“Musically, it was very different because the opera wasn’t very traditional, from what I understand,” said Anwalimhobor, who attended the opera as part of a classical vocal instruction course. “It was nice to get acquainted with a new genre and style of music.”

A Longstanding Relationship

Fordham has long held ties to the Met Opera. Ever since the famed opera house opened its doors at Lincoln Center in 1966, scores of students and staff have attended its shows, including the men’s basketball team. Others have participated in conversations surrounding the performances, including President Tania Tetlow, who recently welcomed members of the Met’s Dead Man Walking to a poignant discussion about the opera, art, and faith. In addition, former members of the Fordham community have worked with the opera house, including Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, dancer Erin Moore, FCLC ’05, director Michael Mayer, and Bronx Arts Ensemble founder William Scribner.

Through a new initiative, hundreds of members of the Fordham community were able to  experience the grandeur of the Met Opera this year. Using funds from Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s endowment from the Mellon Foundation, the FCLC Office of the Dean, Center on Religion and Culture, and the Office of Government Relations and Urban Affairs worked together to purchase group tickets for four productions, including Dialogues de Carmélites and Champion, and distribute them to courses whose curriculum intersects with the opera. 

This fall, for example, students saw a dress rehearsal of Dead Man Walking, which is based on a bestselling memoir written by a nun who tries to save the soul of a condemned murderer. The tickets were given to courses that touch on the topic of capital punishment or faith. Students were also given copies of the original bestselling book by Sister Helen Prejean. 

Encouraging Students to ‘Embrace the Arts’ 

For Samuel Scriven, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, attending the Met Opera was nothing new. (He had already attended the Met twice.) What was different this time around was the contemporary nature of X—the avant-garde musical choices, jazz elements, and political commentary—and the groundbreaking nature of the performance itself, he said. 

“Now we have the Met making intentional choices to put the work of Black composers on stage. That hadn’t happened in Met history until 2021,” said Scriven, a music major who attended X through the course Music in the Modernist Age. 

“I was really glad that [Fordham] wanted to take advantage of the fact that the opera is right next door to us—and arguably one of the best performance stages in the world for this kind of thing,” Scriven said. “I’m glad to know that they want to encourage us students to embrace the arts.”

The gathering was convened by the pope so that representatives from all areas of the church, from cardinals to lay people, could focus on synodality–the process of working together on how the church will move forward. This meeting is the first of its kind to include women as voting delegates.

“I feel so blessed to be a part of this,” said Mollie Clark, a Fordham junior.

“Women’s voices are being honored and heard for the first time in the synodal process. This is such an affirming thing,” said Clark, who acknowledged “a lot of internal struggle at times” with the church’s stance on women’s participation. “I know that God is listening to my voice.”

A Global Conference

David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and a former Vatican reporter who will accompany the group, said, “It’s simply a global conversation that is the fruit of two years of listening.” 

Pope Francis asked for churches and dioceses all over the world to survey clergy and lay members alike as a prelude to the meeting, which he opened on Oct. 4. As part of this process of synodality, or “journeying together,” the same discussions were happening in nations across the globe about how to be a more inclusive church, a less clerical church, said Gibson, as well as how to increase the role of women and young people.

Fordham is the only Jesuit university to send a student group to Rome for this synod convened by Pope Francis–the first Jesuit pope.

Church on the Go

In the spring, Vanessa Rotondo, Fordham adjunct professor and deputy chief of staff to the  University’s president, Tania Tetlow, organized a screening of the Hulu documentary The Pope: Answers and was amazed at the high student turnout.

That event inspired her to propose a course called Church on the GO: Theology in a Global Synod to further “develop student understanding of the postmodern church in tandem with and in light of the Synod on Synodality.” Earlier this year, she traveled to Rome to pursue permission for its students to take part in synod-related events.

Student Itinerary

Rotondo and Gibson developed a series of activities for the students while they are in Rome. They will hear from synodal leaders such as Sister Nathalie Becquart, a voting member who helped facilitate the pope’s canvassing of church members worldwide; join press conferences; and take part in community engagement projects with both Villa Nazareth, a house of humanistic and spiritual formation for college students, and Sant’Egidio, a social service agency focused on global peace and interfaith dialogue. The group will also spend time at the School of Peace, where they will participate in an interfaith prayer service and prepare and distribute meals to people experiencing hunger and homelessness. 

Rotondo also devised two leadership sessions with the grassroots organization Discerning Deacons that are rooted in active listening and the synodal process. The goal is to give the students a sense of how the synod is working and train them in Ignatian reflection so they can devise an action plan to enhance Fordham’s mission and Catholic identity when they return.

‘Our Church is Alive’

AnnaMarie Pacione, a Fordham sophomore in the group, said the synod gives her hope.

“Our church is alive, and it’s growing, and it’s breathing and listening to everyone, as it should,” she said. “It’s more reflective of God’s love, Jesus’s love, as I know it, with this commitment and responsibility to listen to voices that have been suppressed in the past.”

A Blog for Dispatches

The students will post to the Sapientia blog of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture throughout their weeklong trip and will document their experience on the Instagram account @synodalfordham.

In addition to Clark and Pacione, the Fordham students include Eli Taylor, a theology master’s student; Fordham College at Rose Hill seniors Augustine Preziosi and Sean Power; Fordham College at Rose Hill junior James Haddad; Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomores Abigail Adams, Seamus Dougherty, Jay Doherty, and Kaitlyn Squyres; and Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior William Gualtiere.

John Cecero, S.J., Fordham’s vice president for mission integration and ministry, and Michael Lee, Ph.D., director of the Francis & Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, are accompanying the group.

Increasing extreme weather conditions like record-high temperatures and devastating droughts are undoubtedly the result of “unchecked human intervention on nature,” Pope Francis declared in a letter published today expanding on his 2015 Laudato Si’ encyclical.

Since that publication, he said, “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

Pope Francis called out the United States, specifically, in this new apostolic exhortation, titled Laudate Deum, issued on the first day of the Synod on Synodality.

“If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” he said. 

“The ethical decadence of real power is disguised thanks to marketing and false information, useful tools in the hands of those with greater resources to employ them to shape public opinion,” he wrote.

Pope Francis’s Specificity Is ‘Not Accidental’

Christiana Zenner, an associate professor of theology, science, and ethics at Fordham, said, “This is a document that doubles down morally on the centrality of climate crises and the immediate responsibility of ‘all people of good will’ to address them.” 

“Pope Francis first dismantles climate denialism by careful arguments, data, precision of terms, and strategic citation of the climate-recidivistic U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,” Zenner said. “And the penultimate paragraph of the exhortation likewise identifies the ways that U.S.-based climate exceptionalism is problematic. This is as specific about national responsibilities as a pope ever gets, and it is definitely not accidental here.”

The publication coincides with the upcoming U.N. climate change conference that will convene in Dubai in November, much like the release of the 2015 encyclical ahead of the Paris climate conference. The pontiff laments that the Paris Agreement has been poorly implemented, lacking effective tools to force compliance. 

“International negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good,” he wrote.

Never Mind the Bedroom, ‘the Entire House Will Burn Down’

David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, said the new publication shifts the controversy among American Catholics from sex to climate change—which has the potential to be even more contentious. 

“The focus and controversy in the church that Pope Francis leads has lately been directed toward issues of sex and sexuality and his efforts to make Catholicism more inclusive. The irony is that this papal exhortation will likely be even more controversial for Americans than any issue of sexuality because it demands fundamental changes in our consumerist lifestyles.”

Gibson added, “Many American Catholics want the church to focus on what people do in the bedroom. Pope Francis is saying the entire house will burn down if we don’t change our behavior in every other aspect of our lives.”

But Sister Helen Prejean is not your typical nun.

Her bestselling memoir, Dead Man Walking, and later its Academy Award-winning film adaptation, are the basis of an opera that will open this year’s season at the Metropolitan Opera.

On Sept. 22, days before the opening, Sister Prejean discussed her work and the opera it inspired alongside composer Jake Heggie; mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who is starring as Sister Prejean in the production; and David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture.

Among her admirers in the crowd was Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University, whose opening remarks highlighted how Sister Prejean’s story has transformed lives and galvanized social action.

“My father used to tell me that most people think Jesus was just kidding, but Helen Prejean took Jesus and the Beatitudes quite literally,” she said. “As a fellow Catholic woman from New Orleans, I’ve spent my life aspiring to have the courage of Sister Helen Prejean.”

Ministry on Death Row: Meeting the ‘Ambivalence in Your Own Heart’

The opera, like the 1995 film and memoir before it, chronicles Sister Prejean’s journey as a spiritual advisor to a convicted murderer on death row and all the thorny moral contradictions that come with it. As she reflected on her story’s remarkable success and longevity, Sister Prejean pointed to her willingness to embrace contradiction as the key reason for its staying power.

“I was scared out of my mind when I first went on death row,” she recalled. “But then looking into those eyes for the first time, I went, ‘My God, he’s a human being.’ That’s what you’ve got to do on a journey. You’ve got to go into both sides and meet the ambivalence in your own heart.”

Heggie, who wrote the opera alongside the late playwright Terrence McNally, has seen it go on to more than 70 productions in countries across the world since its debut in October of 2000. Heggie believes the timeless nature of Sister Prejean’s story—and the big questions it asks—are key reasons the piece continues to resonate, as evidenced by the star-studded crowd at its Sept. 26 Met Opera premiere.

“It’s a very intimate story with large forces at work, which raise the stakes to life and death at every moment,” he said. “That’s the formula for a great tragic opera.”

A Humbling Experience for Audiences and Performers

DiDonato, a celebrated mezzo-soprano, has sung the role of Sister Prejean four times over the opera’s two-decade history and will do so again at the Met this year. An activist as much as an artist, DiDonato plans to do her part in living Sister Prejean’s mission by singing in a condensed production of Dead Man Walking at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in the near future.

“Being able to walk in those shoes is incredibly humbling,” she said of playing the role that has been a signature one in her distinguished career. “I think it’s true for all of us that encountering this piece, you leave changed … transformed, somehow.”

“People traditionally view Catholic art as enchanting, with statues, stained glass windows, and beautiful cathedrals. But there are other ways for Catholics to imagine their faith through art,” said Sullivan, a senior urban studies and theology double major at Fordham College at Rose Hill who has been working on the documentary since last summer and is planning to complete it by the end of the year. 

An Interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan 

Sullivan’s 20-minute documentary, “Questions on the Catholic Imagination(s),” offers unique perspectives from religious figures like Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York. In the film, Cardinal Dolan says that God communicates with people through whispers. And through those whispers—or hints—from the divine, Catholics create art. Some examples are the 2018 Met Gala, themed “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and the exhibit “Revelation” by artist Andy Warhol, whose Catholic upbringing is infused in some of his work, said Sullivan. 

Catholics Who Break the Mold

Sullivan, an aspiring filmmaker, was inspired to create his documentary after reading New York Times and Vox articles that offered new takes on Catholicism, targeted toward younger Catholics. (In his documentary, he also interviews the articles’ authors.) Sullivan started working on his film last summer, thanks to funding from Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and his 2022-2023 Duffy Fellowship. On May 22, he screened his work in progress at the Howard Gilman Theater. 

Coincidentally, his film premiere took place shortly before Pope Francis attended a conference on the Catholic imagination in Rome, which was attended by artist Andres Serrano and Fordham’s Angela Alaimo O’Donnell—two key people who were interviewed in Sullivan’s film.

Sullivan said he hopes his documentary, which includes some controversial perspectives, will expand the minds of his audience. 

“I want to show that there is a rainbow of Catholics out there who don’t quite fit into the perfect mold that the church might make us feel like we need to fit into,” he said, citing an example that Fordham’s Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., mentions in the film. “Father Massingale talks about how the church often tries to make mathematical equations about human morality. What it doesn’t take into account are the complexities of humanity.”

‘New York Is My Campus’

Sullivan has been familiar with the Jesuits since birth. He was born in Georgetown University’s hospital to an Irish-Catholic family, and graduated from Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. 

“Attending a Jesuit high school, which emphasized social justice, was infectious for me,” Sullivan said. “I wanted more of it. That’s what propelled me to another Jesuit school—Fordham.” 

During his first year at Fordham, he often rolled his eyes at the phrase “Fordham is my school, New York is my campus” because it felt cheesy, said Sullivan. But this year, he realized the phrase was right: 

“From seeing Andy Warhol’s exhibit sign in the Fordham subway station, to conducting all my interviews in New York City and then showing my film at Lincoln Center—that was ‘New York is my campus’ on full display.”

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.”