“Steffano was a courageous educator, enthusiastic and hopeful, who was always dedicated to his students, even during his health-related challenges. He excelled in the art and practice of teaching, providing a perfect model of how to teach in an inclusive way and engage all students,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

Montano joined the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education in 2019 as a visiting associate professor in practical theology and religious education. Faustino “Tito” Cruz,” dean of the school said that Montano was the embodiment of the University’s mission. His work in anti-racist pedagogy and leadership was especially relevant, he said, as the school actively works toward creating a curriculum that is inclusive and confronts white supremacy. Montano was key to that effort, Cruz said, because he was willing to have conversations that others might shy away from.

“I’m so grateful that he spent the last three years of his life with us. I’ve never met anyone who was as courageous as he was,” he said.

“Having someone on the faculty who could actually name what had to be named was both affirming and challenging. He was someone who could have transformed life not only at GRE, but Fordham as a community.”

Montano was a first-generation Cuban American from Miami. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Florida International University, a master’s degree in practical theology from Barry University, and in 2019, he earned his Ph.D. in theology and education from Boston College. His dissertation was titled Theoretical Foundations for an Intercultural, Antiracist Theological Education.

Hosffman Ospino, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology and education at Boston College who mentored Montano, said that when he first asked him why he wanted to do doctoral studies in theology, Montano told him he wanted to accompany others as a scholar and show people the way to a better world and a better church.

“We journeyed side by side for several years through classes, conversations in my office and restaurants, meetings with other academics, writing projects, especially his dissertation, and family moments,” he said.

“Our daughters went to school together. We became good friends. We expanded each other’s ideas. We dreamed about possible projects and possible worlds. I feel his absence.” 

Montano joined Fordham in 2019 on a two-year Louisville Institute postdoctoral fellowship. He taught classes such as Youth and Young Adult Ministry, Education for Peace and Justice, and Intercultural Ministry and Religious Education. His research spoke to the issues of both anti-racism and the cultivation of the faithful, in publications such as “Cultivating Young Hispanic Catholic Leaders,” which was included in Our Catholic Children: Ministry with Hispanic Youth and Young Adults, (Our Sunday Visitor, 2018), and “Addressing White Supremacy On Campus: Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Theological Education,” which appeared in the journal Religious Education in 2019.

He embraced the label of “practical theologian,” which he said meant learning first what people are doing to understand God on their own.

His wife, Christina Leaño, said that teaching had a transformative effect on Montano, who taught his last class virtually from his hospital bed.

“He was just filled with this renewed energy. It was really a transformation. This opportunity to teach at Fordham was such an important opportunity, and a lifeline as well,” she said.

He was one of the kindest people she’d ever met, she said, as well as an excellent listener.

“People would open up to him because he had this kind and unjudgmental presence that made you feel comfortable. He had a real humility and a love of people that was rooted in his health struggles. He knew the limits of life and the preciousness of relationships,” she said.

Rachelle R. Green, Ph.D., assistant professor of practical theology and education, said that “Steff,” as Montano was known, lived out the commitments of cura personalis in his scholarship, teaching, and friendship.

“He challenged us to imagine and enact a school and a discipline that goes beyond speaking about anti-racism so that we might become a school and community that embodies anti-racism in all that we do,” she said.

“Steff loved Jesus, and he loved to teach, and his love for both made us all better human beings. I have personally grown in my capacity to understand the justice work of education and to imagine more life-giving purposes for scholarship because of how Steff lived before us. I am deeply saddened by the loss of my friend, brother, and colleague and also greatly inspired to continue his work to make God’s world more loving, just, generous, and kind.”

Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D., a professor at GRE, lauded Montano for challenging and inspiring the school in his commitment to the urgency of antiracist theology, education, and ministry.
“He did not want us to settle for anything less than a radical vision of equality grounded in the family of all beings, the ‘kin-dom of God.’ As I experienced him, this was the good news to which he was committed, and I believe it remains our unfinished project,” he said.

Jeniffer Wowor, a doctoral student who took Foundations for Intercultural Ministry and Religious Education with Montano this spring, said the class felt like a home for her.
“I knew that he struggled with pain in teaching, but his eyes were always shining,” she wrote via email from Indonesia.

“Although he is no longer with us, I’m sure that ‘the light’ still shines, for his profound commitments to the path of liberation and equality, in the lives of those who know him. and in his wife and daughter’s heart. He also encouraged me to find my own and authentic ‘light,’ and I hope my future students will also be able to see it in my eyes.”

In an interview with Fordham News in 2019, Montano expressed optimism that real change was happening at GRE and at Fordham as a whole.

“The students in our school are already leaders. They’re already making an impact in the communities they belong to,” he said.

“I’d like to bring some of this pedagogy into their own practice—not just to help them change their communities, but to help create those sparks that can begin to change the way we do things in this country.”
Montano is survived by Leaño, his 8-year-old daughter Malaya, his mother Lourdes, his father Jose, and his brother Gabriel.

His funeral will take place on Saturday at 11 a.m. at Barry University in Miami. His ashes will be interned at the Honey Creek Woodlands, a memorial nature preserve at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia.

A memorial website has been set up for friends, colleagues, and family to share memories of Montano, and to watch the funeral as it is livestreamed on Saturday.

Earlier this year, the school established its first named endowed scholarship in honor of Michael Fukuchi, a recently deceased alumnus who made a generous planned gift to support students at his alma mater. And in August, GRE created its first named gift fund, thanks to support from Jack Knight, a Gabelli School of Business graduate who received his MBA in 1984. The fund will support GRE’s work in the community.

“GRE is built on grace and gift. To the Ignatian vision of teaching and learning for solidarity, service, and justice, I must add gratitude. Michael Fukuchi, Jack Knight, all our benefactors for the past 50 years, as well as our colleagues at DAUR have empowered us to live our school’s vision passionately. To them, we give thanks,” said Faustino “Tito” Cruz, S.M., dean of GRE. “And now, we must give as gift the gifts we have received by becoming resonant leaders in community-engaged partnerships and transformative education.”

Fukuchi graduated from GRE in 1970 with a master’s degree in religious education. He spent nearly 40 years working at Barton College, a private liberal arts college in North Carolina, where he taught classes in freshman composition, world literature, Asian literature, Chaucer, Middle English literature, science fiction/fantasy literature and film, and more. When he passed away this past winter, he left behind a generous donation to help fund the studies of students at his alma mater, with preference given to those with ties to North Carolina or his native Hawaii. 

The Sarah and Jack Knight Fund for Pastoral Innovation and Practice, established with an initial gift from Jack Knight, will support the school’s 50th-anniversary initiative to nurture a close relationship with the University’s neighbors in the Bronx. 

“‘Pastoral’ is a faith-based response to a human need—the needs of a community. ‘Innovation’ means we’re going to address the needs of a community by directly listening to them and what they need,” said Dean Cruz, explaining the meaning behind the new fund’s name. “And ‘Practice’ because it is an invitation for the community to transform itself into a community of leaders. We’re not walking into a community to change them—we want to change them with them so they themselves become active agents of change within the community and beyond, continuing to help their neighbors and others.” 

Though Knight is not a GRE graduate, he said he was inspired by a recent discussion with Dean Cruz in which they spoke about what it means to live your faith in the community. 

“If you’re going to live the gospel, you need to do it in the community, and you need to do it through your actions—not just by speaking and spouting quotations from scripture,” Knight said by phone. 

Knight has served in various leadership roles in financial services, including senior vice president and division manager at Wells Fargo Bank and national director at First Republic Bank, since 1978. His wife, Sarah, who passed away in 2016, worked in the same industry as her husband, in addition to airline services in Los Angeles and New York. 

When the couple moved to Southern California, they taught religious education in their local parish. Knight, who earned a master’s degree in religious studies from Mount Saint Mary’s University and now serves as a board member on the school’s regents’ council, taught eighth-graders; his wife taught second graders preparing for Holy Communion. 

While teaching, Knight began to think more critically about what it means to teach religion. He said he had grown up with the Baltimore Catechism, a standard Catholic school text steeped in memorization, but as an adult, he didn’t think that was an appropriate way to communicate faith. He went to Mount Saint Mary’s to find answers. It was there that he learned the importance of going out and living the gospel. 

These days, he lives his faith in the best way he can—by giving back to the community, he said. 

“In my life, it’s the Jesuit tenet that I’ve come to appreciate more and more, the older I get,” Knight said. “To be women and men for others.”

Caballero Jaime is a pastoral mental health counseling student at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. This May, she will graduate with her master’s degree and plans to transition in the future from her full-time job as a liaison at the Mexican consulate in New York City to a job in her new field. 

“I would like to continue helping women especially, and children, to be with them in this journey they have, and try to help them in any way possible as a pastoral mental health counselor,” Caballero Jaime said. 

An Immigrant from Mexico

Caballero Jaime was born and raised in Mexico City, the fifth most densely populated city in the world, according to the United Nations. She grew up in a conservative Catholic family with her parents and two older brothers. Her father, a lawyer, passed away when she was 9 years old, but instilled a love for reading and writing in his daughter—“one of the best presents you could ever have,” said Caballero Jaime. 

She said she also found a role model in her mother, a family housewife who became a vice-director in a cosmetics company. 

“I am here because of her hard work,” she said. 

Caballero Jaime went on to serve as deputy director of public relations for the Senate of the Republic of Mexico and political adviser for the National Action Party in Mexico City. In 2008, she moved to the U.S. to work for the Consulate General of Mexico in New York, where she currently works to assist the Mexican population living in the tri-state area. The consulate provides passports, IDs, records, visas, and consultations on protection and community affairs. Its members travel to more than 60 locations, including regions that are eight hours away from its main office in Manhattan.

“She articulates a deep desire to improve the quality of life of Mexican immigrants in the United States,” said Faustino “Tito” Cruz, S.M., dean of GRE. “In many ways, she is an insider-outsider who attempts to address both the personal and systemic/communitarian quest for human dignity.”

Five years ago, she realized she wanted to help people in a different way. From 2015 to 2018, she served as a pastoral care volunteer at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where she supported patients with neurocognitive disorders, addictions, trauma, and terminal illnesses. It was an eye-opening experience that made her want to do more, she said. 

One day, she sought advice from her pastor. “I think I have this call[ing],” she remembered telling him. “I think you should look at this,” he said, pulling out a copy of Fordham Magazine and showing her a story referring to the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. Later that night, she returned home and browsed the GRE website. She was hooked. 

‘You Are Here, and You Are More Than Welcome’

For three years, she learned about a new world. Instead of studying translation and political science, as she had done for her prior degrees, she learned about psychopathology and diagnosis, trauma, and ethics. She studied religion and theology from different perspectives and learned how important it is to embrace the culture and country you come from. In a supervised clinical internship at the Family Health Centers at NYU Langone in Brooklyn this year, she said she realized the need for bilingual psychotherapists—especially with a background like her own.

“One of my patients, I remember, she told me when she first saw me, she thought, oh my goodness, she’s not going to understand where I am coming from because she’s white,” said Caballero Jaime. “She said she felt identified when I described myself. I said, ‘Well, my name is María, I’m Mexican, and I’m also an immigrant.’ That was the link. That was the click.” 

She said that experience reminds her of one of the most important lessons she learned from GRE. 

“It’s something that Fordham has taught me. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter if you are Latina, if you are Chinese, Korean, Egyptian. You are here, and you are more than welcome,” Caballero Jaime said. 

In the years ahead, Caballero Jaime said she wants to empower her clients, especially women who have been physically or sexually abused. And no matter what that role looks like, Caballero Jaime will do a great job, said one of her mentors at GRE. 

“She’s very impressive, personally, intellectually, and in her own work in pastoral counseling studies,” said Francis X. McAloon, S.J., associate professor of Christian spirituality and Ignatian studies at GRE, to whom Caballero Jaime served as a research assistant for three years. “She is a godsend, really. And I know whatever she’s going to pursue in the future—presumably some kind of pastoral counseling practice—she’ll do a great job.”

It was born in 1964 as a division of the Graduate School of Education, focused on preparing leaders in religious education, with a graduating class size of 24 and three Jesuit faculty members. Five years later, GRE became its own graduate school within Fordham University. Since then, it has taught more than 2,300 students with unique backgrounds and goals, from a Muslim imam who commutes to class from Florida, to a local pediatrician who tends to his patients’ spiritual needs, to a pastor who has helped integrate Protestant churches in the Northeast. 

“The Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education is really at the heart of Fordham’s mission, and therefore its 50th anniversary is a milestone for the entire University,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “GRE is Fordham in microcosm: a school dedicated to inward reflection upon our values, and yet deeply engaged with the community. It is an institution at the confluence of faith, leadership, and service, enriching us all with its scholarship and teaching.”

In honor of the school’s 50th anniversary this academic year, Faustino “Tito” Cruz, S.M., the dean of GRE, is pioneering a new vision for the school. 

“Our 50th anniversary is not going to be just a single event, but rather an ongoing ritual that marks the reclaiming of our vision to be in relationship with the community,” said Dean Cruz, who recently initiated a new partnership with Aquinas High School, an all-girls Catholic school in the Bronx. “This initiative, as well as others, will I think allow us to remain relevant for the next 50 years.” 

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the initiative will take on a new shape. Dean Cruz said he is hoping to co-host video conferences with Aquinas to discuss issues and challenges the students may face, including food, housing, healthcare, and educational technology insecurities. 

He said he also wants to address the psychosocial and spiritual impact of the pandemic on the lives of faculty, staff, and students. 

“It is during an unprecedented time like this that the word ‘partnership’ must be authentically embodied and intentionally put into action,” Dean Cruz said.

A Universal Reach

GRE offers a dozen programs, both in-person and online. Over the past few decades, the school has also developed global partnerships with several schools, including Ateneo de Manila University and Catholic University of Croatia.

“Father Tito Cruz has provided outstanding leadership as Dean of the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. The school offers students a breadth of innovative degree programs—ranging from pastoral counseling and ministry to religious education and spiritual direction—all to prepare its graduates to lead lives of solidarity, service, and justice,” said Dennis C. Jacobs, Ph.D., provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

The school’s alumni come from more than 20 countries around the world. GRE’s online students live as far away as Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

“I wish I had a stamp collection. We have literally placed the University’s name around the world,” GRE’s first dean, Vincent Novak, S.J., once said. 

Most students who enroll at GRE are already teachers, scholars, or practitioners. After receiving their Fordham degree, many of them return to their native countries to put into practice what they’ve learned, as was the case for Imelda Lam, a Catholic school curriculum developer from Hong Kong, and Maria Echezonachukwu Dim, IHM, a youth program director in Nigeria. 

“More than perhaps any other school of the University, [GRE] represents the University’s religious tradition and its wide-reaching international interest,” said the late Joseph O’Hare, S.J., president emeritus of Fordham, on the school’s 25th anniversary. “Its alumni/ae, although small in number, but growing, are at work in many corners of the world, carrying the Fordham tradition with them.” 

The school’s students and alumni also practice a myriad of faiths and spiritualities. Among the student body are Coptic priests, rabbis, and an imam. 

For Rachelle Green, Ph.D., an assistant professor of practical theology and religious education, it’s a one of a kind experience. 

“GRE has some of the most diverse classroom populations that I’ve ever had the opportunity to teach in or learn from,” Green said. “I’ve been in a classroom with Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and we’re learning that not in spite of, but because of our religious beliefs and differences and experiences, our learning environment is becoming enriched.”

The Changing Face of GRE

Green, an African-American woman and Protestant who has directed a theological studies program in women’s prisons, is among two new faculty members who were hired last year. The other is Steffano Montano, Ph.D., a first-generation Cuban American who specializes in anti-racist pedagogy and leadership. 

Their backgrounds have made a difference in the classroom, said students. 

“[Dr. Green is] an African-American professor from the Baptist tradition. That’s my tradition; that’s my culture. I absolutely can relate to her from that context, which I haven’t had at Fordham in the past,” said Janiqua Green, a minister and doctoral student in religious education who lives in Harlem. “It’s just a different voice that I’d never really been introduced to before.”

In addition to professors, students of color have grown in number. Among them is Joanna Arellano, an online master’s student in Christian spirituality who lives in Chicago. She works as a press strategist for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and serves as a board member of the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, a grassroots nonprofit that addresses local injustice. She first learned about GRE through her husband, a 2018 graduate of the doctor of ministry program. A few months after her husband’s graduation, Arellano and Dean Cruz connected over breakfast in Chicago, one of the many cities he visits to recruit students.

“Just hearing from Tito that he’s been on this path toward recruiting more professors and students of color—especially women of color—that, for me, resonates deeply,” Arellano said. 

Over the past five decades, GRE has developed courses that address a more diverse population: Ministry with Latinxs, Women Mystics, Meditation East/West. They are now part of a curriculum that is challenging GRE’s students to face the world, said Rachelle Green, an assistant professor. 

“What does it mean to teach in a world where, quite literally, the world was burning [in Australia]? Or to teach in a world where gun violence is common?” Green asked. “Our students are challenging us, and the world is challenging us to respond with the best that we have to our current crises and age, but also to prepare our students to respond for what we maybe can’t even predict will come.” 

Photos from reception celebrating GRE’s 50th anniversary on March 6

“We are to care for the habitat because it is essential to our care for others. To care for our habitat is to care for ourselves,” said the guest speaker, Ryan LaMothe, Ph.D., professor of pastoral care and counseling at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad, Indiana. “We can continue to care for people who are suffering from various maladies, psychological and physical, yet we must also keep in mind these larger forces and consider ways to intervene.” 

This year, the annual conference was called “Between Hope and Despair: Caring in the Age of Climate Crisis.” In a series of three hour-long lectures, LaMothe spoke about how climate change could affect pastoral theology and care, identifying challenges for caregivers and offering solutions. 

A Lesson from Mister Rogers

The effects of climate change are more significant than ever, said LaMothe. Over the past three centuries, global carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million to well over 400, he said, adding that today’s situation is serious. The rise of greenhouse gases have melted glaciers, increased sea levels, and created catastrophic storms; those who receive the brunt of the damage are the poor and people of color. And people around the world—including his clients—are starting to feel anxious, said LaMothe. 

Our biggest challenges toward making our world green again include global capitalism, which exploits people and natural resources in the pursuit of profit, and nationalism, which keeps us from working toward the common good on a global scale, he said. 

It’s also difficult to change our lives for the Earth’s well-being. We’re all busy—with our careers, with raising kids, and being involved in our local communities, he said. But people, including pastoral caregivers, can still make a difference. 

“In terms of pastoral theology and pastoral care, we need to become more versed in making use of our disciplines as we seek to organize and cooperate with others with the aim of caring for the Earth and its residents,” LaMothe said, to an audience of more than 50 educators, students, spiritual care providers, and clinical practitioners. 

With clients, pastoral caregivers can use spiritual practices to facilitate mindfulness about the environment, he said. He encouraged the audience to view their vocation through a more communal lens—to see the Earth and humanity as a whole. He asked the audience to practice “personal recognition”—recognizing every client for who they are—as most famously shown by Fred Rogers, an American television personality and Presbyterian minister who hosted the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Lastly, he described the importance of “inoperative care,” in which a caregiver supports a client without following the rules and expectations set by society. He said a good example is a scene in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood where, on a particularly hot day, Mister Rogers invites a black police officer to cool his feet in a plastic pool with him. Despite the racial tensions in their lifetime, the two share a simple, routine conversation—like any two human beings, LaMothe said. 

“Inoperative care meant that Mr. Rogers was not operating out of the dominant cultural representations of the day,” LaMothe said. “Both men, in this moment of mutual care, were not operating under the delusions and contending disciplinary apparatuses of white superiority. They were operating under a mutual personal recognition and care.”

‘The Reality of Working With Human Beings’

In response to LaMothe’s lecture, Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., director of the pastoral mental health counseling program at Fordham, spoke about how pastoral caregivers can treat clients experiencing trauma related to climate change or natural disasters. 

Climate change can cause negative psychological effects, including a decreased sense of predictability and control that can lead to acute stress and anxiety, said Werdel. She urged the audience to help clients find meaning in their post-traumatic experiences, especially those related to climate change. 

“Stress and trauma remain intrinsically negative,” Werdel said. “But it’s moving through and enduring the stress and trauma that we come to find and feel and see something different about our world, about ourselves, and about others.” 

She also encouraged the audience to explore psychological and spiritual questions with their clients—not as separate issues, but as one.

“The reality of working with human beings is this: When someone is sitting in front of you … they don’t parcel out, this is my psychological question and this is my spiritual question,” she said, to laughter from the audience. “They just come to you whole. And so we, who spend time thinking about the realities of stress and trauma induced by climate change, have to consider both of these questions together.” 

Towards the end of the conference, LaMothe and Werdel held a panel discussion with two faculty members in the pastoral mental health counseling department: Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., and Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D. 

Bingaman thanked LaMothe for encouraging the audience to neither look away from nor discount the impacts of climate change. Cataldo urged the pastoral caregivers in the room to enter every clinical encounter without memory, understanding, or desire—three things that could impede their work. 

‘The Simple Power of Connection’

An audience member, who identified herself as a hospital chaplain who has supported new amputees and young mothers with traumatic brain injuries, shared a personal story. She said she was a quadriplegic who was once told she would live in a nursing home for the rest of her life. But now, she works as a chaplain who provides emotional and spiritual support. She noted the importance of hope and the place where it is born—“the simple power of connection” with others. 

In the last minutes of the conference, another audience member commented on the positive ways that society is combating climate change, from efforts as wide as New York’s recent ban on single-use plastic bags, to the conference committee’s decision to use paper plates during the breakfast buffet. 

“Any last comments on how we can go forward and encourage our children to be positive and hopeful and do concrete actions to help the environment?” the audience member asked the panelists. 

On a projector screen, Werdel had shared her son’s recent elementary school assignment. He and his classmates were asked to write their wishes for the New Year. “My wish for 2020 is … save white rhinos,” he wrote, beneath a hand-drawn sketch of two rhinos smiling under a sunny sky.  

“I cannot save these rhinos, or the thousand other species that will die because the rhinos die,” Werdel told the woman in the audience. “But I can instill a sense of, hopefully, optimism and agency for what he can do, encourage him to speak out loud his sadness and his loss … Caring about other things—people and places and spaces—that are outside of what he normally sees.”

Being a practical theologian means connecting with people first, said Montano, who became a visiting associate professor in practical theology and religious education at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education this fall. 

“It begins with what people are doing to understand God, talk about God, and pray—at home, in churches, in their communities—rather than with the institution,” said Montano. “[Then] what might the institution have to catch up on in order to meet people at those practices and those beliefs that are on the ground?”

Faustino “Tito” Cruz, S.M., dean of GRE, said Montano’s work speaks to an integral part of Fordham’s mission. 

“Professor Montano’s work as a practical theologian and religious educator—particularly in anti-racist pedagogy and leadership—is critical in carrying out the university’s strategic commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging,” Cruz said.

Montano is a first-generation Cuban American from Miami. He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Florida International University and a master’s degree in practical theology from Barry University. This fall, he will earn his Ph.D. in theology and education from Boston College. 

Over the past decade, his research has explored how theological educators can become better prepared to discuss race and ethnicity in the classroom. 

“We often talk about intercultural and multicultural ministries and the way ministers can speak to the different cultures in their congregations,” said Montano, who also just started a two-year Louisville Institute postdoctoral fellowship at Fordham, a program for scholars in theological education. “But we haven’t really addressed the hurdle of racism and how racism taints the way that we look at each other.” 

At Boston College, he studied how anti-racist pedagogies and assessments like the intercultural development inventory can help. He interviewed five educators from different institutions who had attempted to discuss race and ethnicity with their students. Most of them felt like they didn’t have the skills to have those conversations. In addition, the emotional pressure in the room seemed too high, Montano said. 

“We need to teach theological educators—people like myself and others at Fordham, for instance—not only how to have these conversations, but how to model their curricula and pedagogies in a way that has students understand different racial, ethnic, and cultural perspectives,” Montano said. 

His other goal is to cultivate young Hispanic Catholic leaders. In a chapter of Our Catholic Children, Ministry with Hispanic Youth and Young Adults (Our Sunday Visitor, 2018), he wrote about how Hispanic youth need more opportunities to lead and get involved—not just “in their own little corner of Hispanic ministry,” but in the church at large. It’s even more critical, given the large Hispanic Catholic community in the U.S., he said. 

This semester, Montano is teaching an online course called Youth and Adult Ministry. He’s aiming to give his students—mostly middle-career adults who are ministers and educators—a good understanding of the psychological and spiritual development of youth and young adults, with a focus on helping them see the needs of youth and young adult populations that often go unnoticed. 

Next spring, he will teach a special topics course he developed himself: Foundations for Intercultural Ministry and Religious Education. Using different tools and assessments, his students will confront their hidden biases. Then, after participating in group activities that foster intercultural dialogue and perspective, they will design “anti-racist plans” for their own ministries. 

“I’ll have our students look at themselves, look at their own cultural and racial histories, tell their own stories, and then understand each other’s stories,” Montano said. 

In the two years that Montano teaches at Fordham, he said he hopes to “move the needle forward.” 

“The students in our school [GRE] are already leaders. They’re already making an impact in the communities they belong to,” Montano said. “I’d like to bring some of this pedagogy into their own practice—not just to help them change their communities, but to help create those sparks that can begin to change the way we do things in this country.” 

“Education was not just a job,” said longtime colleague Kieran Scott, Ed.D. “It was a vocation for him that gave profound meaning to his life.”

He was “one of those rare individuals” who taught in two graduate schools at Fordham—the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE) and the Graduate School of Education (GSE)—said Gerald M. Cattaro, Ed.D., executive director of the Center for Catholic School Leadership and Faith-Based Education. 

“He acted as the academic bridge between the two schools,” Cattaro said. “[And] John was a cherished colleague and mentor to me in my early academic career, in addition to being a friend.”

At GSE, he helped establish the Ph.D. program in educational leadership (now known as the Ph.D. in church and non-public school leadership). The program produced alumni who went on to become university presidents, bishops, vicars of education, and congregational and past presidents of high schools worldwide, said Cattaro. 

At GRE, Elias was a professor emeritus who was instrumental in shaping two doctoral programs: the Ph.D. in religious education and the Doctor of Ministry program.  

“He realized that to complement religious education, we needed to be doing a kind of theology that served our students in their professional practice,” said Thomas Beaudoin, Ph.D., professor of religion. “As a result of what he did, we hired more practical theologians, including our current dean.”

But Elias’ 35-year-long relationship with Fordham ran deeper than the programs he developed, said his colleagues. To Elias, Fordham was home. 

“The first phone call I got as the new dean of GRE three summers ago was from John,” said Faustino “Tito” Cruz, S.M., dean of GRE. “He simply wanted to welcome me to Fordham and express his appreciation that I accepted the leadership of the school that he dearly loved.”

‘A Real Gift’  

Elias was born on Dec. 23, 1933, in Asheville, North Carolina, to George and Josephine Elias. His early exposure to scholars in theology and education led him to become “one of the most significant writers in adult religious education of the 20th century,” said an online database of Christian educators of the 20th century. 

His life at Fordham began in 1977 when he started teaching as a visiting professor at GRE. Over the next four decades, he delivered more than 80 scholarly addresses, served on multiple doctoral dissertation committees, and mentored dozens of students. He taught at Fordham until he was 78, said one of his two daughters, Rebecca Elias, FCLC ’96. 

In phone interviews, his Fordham friends and colleagues described him as an affable, curious man who was easy to talk to. He was a “sage” who was politically savvy in academia and university life, said Gloria Durka, Ph.D., a retired GRE faculty member who knew Elias for more than three decades. With his wit and wry sense of humor, he put a twist on serious matters in the classroom. But perhaps above all, he was humble and respectful, said those who knew him. 

“[He was] a true colleague who represents everything that you would hope a colleague to be,” said Durka. “He was my closest colleague, all these years at Fordham. And that’s a real gift—to have someone like that.” 

Harold H. Horell, Ph.D., assistant professor of religious education, remembered Elias as a good listener. When Elias spoke, everyone in the room paid attention, he said. 

“He used to sit with his head cocked to his right side, with a thoughtful look on his face. And then after the discussion was over, he would speak,” recalled Horell, who also directs the Ph.D. in Religious Education program. “His words carried a lot of weight because they often rang true.” 

He was a brilliant scholar whose mind was “like a living card catalog,” said his past student Linda Baratte, GRE ’04.

“He set up the scaffolding, almost, in his coursework, and then invited you to do all the exploration and fill in all the gaps with his amazing research and resources he knew about,” Baratte said. “[But] he never wanted adulation, as much as he was worthy of it.” 

His Namesake: John Elias to Elias Gelpi 

Elias authored more than 15 books and hundreds of articles on religious education and social justice. His teaching, writing, and practices addressed three things: the university, the church, and society, said Kieran Scott, Ed.D., a retired GRE faculty member who co-developed the Ph.D. program in religious education with Elias. His writing gave “a vivid sense of history,” said Scott, and often addressed the life of the church—especially the religious education of adults. 

“He felt that it was critical to raise up a mature, intelligent form of religious life in the church,” Scott said. “[But] at the center of all his education was a concern for justice. He felt that justice was indispensable for a peaceful society.” 

Elias also advised dozens of students, from as far as Ireland, Africa, and South America. He invited them to his home for Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July so they could experience American holidays with an American family, said his daughter Rebecca at his funeral liturgy on Oct. 2. 

One student even named his son after Elias. 

David Gelpi, who earned both a master’s and a Ph.D. in religious education from Fordham, recalled the ways that Elias had shaped his life. In the first year of his Ph.D. program, he said, his older brother was killed in a car accident. Gelpi didn’t know how he could finish his degree. But Elias, in a “gentle” manner, convinced him to stay. 

Today, Gelpi is a religious studies teacher at Fordham Prep. His son Elias—named after his mentor—was born in the early 1990s, when Gelpi was in the midst of his master’s program. Now he is a firefighter in Yonkers, New York, Gelpi said. 

“[My son] quietly tries to put himself at the service of people in Yonkers, and I’d like to think that was something that John Elias helped to sharpen early on,” Gelpi said. 

‘We Will Never Forget the Way He Made Us Feel’

One of Elias’ longest mentees and friends, David L. Coppola, Ph.D., GSE ’98, gave a speech at Elias’ funeral liturgy at St. Vincent Martyr Church, where they had met 25 years ago. Elias had mentored Coppola in the Graduate School of Education, toasted Coppola at his wedding, and commemorated Coppola when he was installed as president of Keystone College in 2014. 

“No more emails, texts, or phone calls; no hand to hold; no warm embrace or spontaneous ‘Hellooohhh!’” Coppola said at the service. “But we will never forget the way he made us feel. And his witness of lifelong learning, embracing paradox, and selfless giving lives on in all of us.” 

Elias is survived by his wife of 47 years, Eleanor J. Flanigan, Ed.D., professor emerita at Montclair State University; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; and three grandchildren, Julia, Kayla, and Zachary. 

In lieu of flowers, charitable contributions may be made in John’s memory to the Fordham University Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, Fordham University, Office of Development, 45 Columbus Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10023, or to the Sr. Regina Flanigan, IHM Fund at Cristo Rey Philadelphia High School, 1717 W Allegheny Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19132. 

He became drawn to the little church building near his home. Castellano prayed the rosary, sang in the parish choir, and joined the youth ministry. By the time he reached high school, his life began to revolve around three places: home, school, and the church.

Then one day, a thought occurred to him:

“I started loving being in the church,” Castellano said, waving a hand that holds a silver devotional ring—an early gift from a fellow Passionist priest. “Before graduating from high school, I asked myself: ‘What if I consider life in the priesthood?’”

The Path to Priesthood

Today, Castellano is a 41-year-old priest of the Passionists of St. Paul of the Cross Province, an order found in more than 50 countries worldwide.

At age 28, he became ordained as a priest and, later, a vocation director: a person who helps and guides those who are discerning their vocation in the church. Over the next decade, he journeyed across the country, recruiting future priests and shepherding young seminarians to priesthood. But in his travels, he also witnessed things that could hurt the psychology of a potential priest—deep-seated poverty and “broken” families—particularly in Manila.

“Where he works in the Philippines is one of the poorest, most vulnerable communities in urban Manila,” said Faustino “Tito” Cruz, S.M., dean of the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, who was born and raised in the capital city.

There are only two places in the world where divorce is illegal: Vatican City and the Philippines. This has led to the development of “second families,” Castellano explained—conglomerate families of informal stepparents, illegitimate children, and, often times, difficult childhoods.

He recalled a young seminarian who grew up in a “second family.” Life in the seminary was difficult for the young man. He disobeyed his superiors and left the seminary at night when he wasn’t allowed to.  

“Families play an important role in vocation formation. If a child witnesses brokenness or infidelity in the family, that affects the child,” Castellano said.

Redefining the Taboo Behind Mental Illness

Castellano found a solution in Fordham’s master’s program in pastoral mental health counseling—what he called a “marriage of spirituality and mental health counseling” that could help him better guide young seminarians.

In the summer of 2017, Castellano moved to the U.S. and started school at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. Over two years, he completed 60 credits’ worth of coursework.

“There’s a warm and generous spirit about him,” said Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., who taught Castellano in the Theology of Pastoral Counseling and Spiritual Care class last fall. “He’s able to explore things comprehensively and in depth … He really had a compassionate approach to his work.”

One of Castellano’s most challenging classes was Psychopathology and Diagnosis, a course designed to help students understand mental disorder diagnosis and treatment. He said it reshaped his understanding of mental health treatment, which is widely seen as a cultural taboo in Asia.

“For Filipinos, if we have problems, we just go to the karaoke bar,” he said, letting out a short laugh. “Our country is bombarded with a lot of manmade and natural calamities. If we have floods in the Philippines, like up to this,” he said, standing up and gesturing below his chin, “we would just enjoy swimming.”

Treatment for mental health issues, he said, is especially stigmatized.

“It’s the last resort of our problems,” Castellano said. “When you go to a counselor or psychotherapist, people will tell you, ‘Are you crazy? Like, can’t you handle your life?’”

What he learned as a young man heavily shaped the way he viewed people with mental health disorders. For years, it was difficult to understand and sympathize with them—including some of the young seminarians in his care. But his time at Fordham changed his attitude.

“A person is always more than their diagnosis,” he said. “The client is a person … There is always this chance for each and every one of us to have that process of healing.”

Paving a New Path in the Philippines

At Fordham, he learned to love Rose Hill’s Gothic buildings and the small, tight-knit community at GRE. He met people who were neither Catholic nor Filipino—men and women from countries as far as Croatia, the Solomon Islands, and Ecuador.

And because Castellano’s student cohort was so small—less than 10 people—he was able to bond with each of them. He recalled the day they walked to Arthur Avenue for some chit-chat and a couple of beers. He also remembered when he connected with Kate Hoover, a Buddhist classmate, who taught him a different way of life.

“I’m amazed at how we tolerate, and how we’ve become so respectful of each other’s faiths,” Castellano said. “And how we decide to love our own faith and at the same time, be open to knowing God in different perspectives.”

In a few months, he will return home to the Philippines. Castellano plans on using his newfound skills to help him better serve his community, the church, and God. He sees himself counseling young men wrestling with emotional turmoil and the priesthood, and even helping some seminarians realize that they aren’t destined for the priesthood after all. In the future, he might obtain his doctorate in ministry.

But for now, he hopes his GRE training will especially help the young students under his wing.

“That would be a great fulfillment for me,” Castellano said. “To see a seminarian who’s undergone counseling and was able to get over, or at least manage, his issues and become a successful priest.”

The academy is a scholarly organization dedicated to the study of and critical reflection on theological thought and action. Its members, who span almost every continent, are professors and scholars who “look deeply into the heart of our religious tradition in order to interpret contemporary situations from religious and spiritual perspectives,” said Cruz. Put simply, they reflect in faith on the human condition and the natural world.

“The practical theologian’s role is to explore ways for humans and communities to be more fully alive,” said Cruz. “And to promote the integrity of all of God’s creation.”

Cruz was installed president at the academy’s biennial conference held in São Leopoldo, Brazil. Prior to his new appointment, he was vice president for two years and has been a member for more than a decade.

Cruz brings both a global and historical perspective to the international organization: He is its first president of Asian descent. Born and raised in Manila, Philippines, Cruz migrated to the United States in 1982. He serves other international organizations, both as a leader and a community member. As a teaching scholar, he has collaborated with migrant and refugee communities in the U.S. at the parish, diocesan, and national levels.

As president, he aims to expand the organization’s global reach, especially when it comes to underrepresented scholars.

“I’d like to reach out especially to scholars who are unknown and somewhat hidden, particularly those who come from under-resourced countries and institutions,” he said.

Cruz also wants to promote a more inclusive theology that encompasses perspectives from all continents, rather than focusing on Europe and North America, which has been the case for decades.

The academy’s professional theologians intend to develop and train local or grassroots theologians. Cruz said he wants to promote an approach to theology grounded in people’s indigenous environment and human experiences, as opposed to abstract theories.

“We want to have more intentional and direct conversations about how ordinary people experience God in their daily life and struggle,” said Cruz, “and how those of us who do it professionally understand God.”

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.

Those priests—all 66 of them—were murdered by communists in Bosnia and Herzegovina during World War II, said Željko Barbarić, O.F.M., GRE ’19, a young Catholic priest from the Franciscan community. “Anyone who was wearing a habit at the time—a Franciscan robe—he was killed or persecuted,” Father Barbarić said. “Communism was against religion, in any sense. Communism itself was a religion.” It happened in the 1940s, long before Father Barbarić was born. But he hasn’t forgotten the massacre of his Franciscan forefathers. It’s part of the reason why he’s currently studying pastoral counseling and spiritual care in Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

“I didn’t realize how connected mental health and my vocation are until I came here,” he said.

Father Barbarić was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country bordered by Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro and home to a multiethnic population. In the early ’90s, war broke out among the ethnic groups fighting for sovereignty. Father Barbarić calls it the War for Independence; America knows it as the Bosnian War. Given the wars that have ravaged Eastern Europe and the Balkans, he said, mental health services are vital back home.

Fifteen miles away from his house in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a war zone. He remembers uniformed men bearing weapons; the sound of sirens and shootings; the death of a cousin, who fought in the war. Every so often, he heard the explosions of bombs from his basement bedroom.

At age 14, Father Barbarić left home and joined a minor seminary. At first glance, it seems surprising. He was not raised in a household where prayers and talk of God abounded. Growing up, Father Barbarić had mulled over a few métiers, including serving in the police force and fighting among the soldiers. Yet he found his calling in God.

“It was just something that you know,” he said.

Priest vs. Psychologist

Over the next two decades, Father Barbarić has learned what it means to be a Franciscan priest. He’s lived in monasteries in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, completed a five-year degree program in theology and philosophy in Croatia, became ordained as a priest, and served in two different parishes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He’s dealt with delicate situations, like delivering a homily at the funeral of a young boy killed in a car accident. Strangers have laid bare the most intimate details of their life with Father Barbarić—their marital issues, their struggles with psychiatric disorders, their mishaps with neighbors. And as time passed, he came to a realization:

“Counseling is something that happens almost on a daily basis when you’re a priest,” Father Barbarić said. “A background in psychology can be very, very useful.”

In 2016, he moved to the U.S. and enrolled in the GRE’s pastoral counseling and spiritual care program. His coursework confirmed his suspicions that counseling training would be helpful in his role as a priest.

“People will come to us, explicitly asking for advice. ‘What am I supposed to do?’” he imitated. “And that’s a big temptation—to immediately tell people what to do, especially in a confessional setting.”

But his professors have taught him how to truly listen. Instead of instantly jumping in with an answer, Father Barbarić waits. And when a person struggles to finish his or her sentence, he is trying to let them find their own words. This skill—seemingly obvious, but difficult in practice—is especially important when speaking with people who struggle with their mental health.

“They can see things in a distorted way, and I have to really hear them to understand,” he said.

And he’s also learned that he doesn’t have to save everyone. Sometimes, sitting beside them and lending an empathetic ear is enough.

Father Barbarić is currently a priest at the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Croatian Parish, located in midtown Manhattan. Two months ago, Father Barbarić began an internship where he puts his mental health and spiritual care training into practice. On Mondays and Tuesdays, he counsels patients in a New Jersey psychiatric ward, including suicide survivors, victims of abuse and people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“Everything you say in this room will stay in this room,” he tells them.

Back to the Balkans

Next spring, Father Barbarić will graduate with his master’s degree in pastoral counseling and spiritual care. He’s also leaving a legacy behind at Fordham.

“Željko has been instrumental in helping to set up the new partnership between GRE and the Catholic University of Croatia,” said Joanna Mercuri, a GRE graduate assistant.

This international agreement allows Fordham and Croatian students and faculty to conduct research and study abroad at both universities, starting this semester. Father Barbarić is the one who connected the president of the Catholic University of Croatia, his old mentor, with Faustino M. Cruz, S.M., GRE dean.

“Through global partnerships like this one,” said Dean Cruz, “GRE is enriched by the diversity of academic, civic, and spiritual perspectives that shape today’s communities of teaching and learning.”

Father Barbarić is unsure about his next steps after graduation. He might help establish a similar program for newly ordained priests or students in training in Bosnia and Herzegovina; he might help revitalize the Franciscan high school in his hometown. But someday, he said, he’ll bring his newfound mental health and spiritual care training back to the Balkans.

“I’m a priest. I’m a Franciscan. That’s already fulfilling,” Father Barbarić said. “But now I’m adding something to it.”