“Sometimes the classroom can be such a formal atmosphere,” said Moore, who teaches theology at Fordham, along with Seitz, her husband. “Just seeing them lying on the floor with my dog, petting her, and telling us about terrible high school summer jobs they’ve had, just being more human—it was so sweet.” 

This summer, Moore served as a faculty mentor to three undergraduates participating in Fordham’s summer research programs: Laura Oldfather, a theology student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who is revitalizing Ignatian spirituality for a new generation; Amara Overmyer, an English student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who is writing stories about a local nonprofit; and Christopher Ciaccio, a philosophy student at Fordham College at Rose Hill who is imagining alternatives to capitalism using 20th-century French mystical thought. (The students’ research is, respectively, funded by Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and Fordham College at Rose Hill.) 

In mid-July, Moore and Seitz invited the students to their home in Hastings-on-Hudson for dinner, along with their theology colleague Stephanie Arel. While eating a homemade meal prepared by Moore—roasted chicken, potatoes, goat cheese salad, and watermelon—the students and scholars shared their research and the things they care about.

“They all are readers, writers, and thinkers who are doing super cool work this summer, and it was great to have a chance to think and learn together,” said Moore, who hosted students at her home last spring, too.

Ignatian Spirituality for Gen Z

Oldfather, who is originally from Wisconsin, is a theology major. She said she is studying how scholars are adapting the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola to different cultures and audiences, particularly women, who were “often left out of the history of the Jesuits.” 

“I’m looking at the work that people have done … and focusing on how this impacts a modern-day Fordham college student, like how the exercises would be applicable. As part of my research, I am writing a translation, updating some of the language. A lot of it is changing pronouns in places, making it gender-neutral. In some places, the language is very imperial or colonial, just because of the context of it being written in the 1500s,” said Oldfather, who will present her research at Fordham’s spring symposium next year. 

An Internship That Combines Writing and Humanitarian Work 

Overmyer, an English student from California, is a summer intern at an East Harlem nonprofit that helps vulnerable families and children, where she is developing website biographies for the organization’s nearly 60 staff and board members. 

At the dinner, she shared her work with the other students, who, in turn, broadened her perspective on theology and philosophy. (Her favorite part of the get-together, however, was meeting Moore and Seitz’s three-and-a-half year old golden retriever, Mosey: “I have slobber and hair all over my skirt that I wore that day, but it was worth it,” she said.) 

Moore said that she and her husband love seeing students in their “full humanity.” 

“We are, as humanities scholars and lecturers and students, studying human culture and civilization,” said Moore, “and it’s so much more interesting to do that when we show up in our full humanity, too.”

“I don’t quite remember where I had learned about prejudice and discrimination for the first time, but I didn’t understand it and I kept asking my mom, ‘Why do people treat people differently because of the way they look?’” she said, “And she couldn’t give me the answers.”

“What she did was, she kept supplying me with books, so I was reading biographies of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, and all kinds of people who have experienced prejudice and oppression and fought to overcome it. That really stuck with me.”

In April, Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies chose Schmidt, a 2021 graduate of Loyola University, as the second winner of its New Scholars essay contest. For her paper “’Regulations for Our Black People’: Reconstructing the Experiences of Enslaved People in the United States through Jesuit Records” (International Symposium on Jesuit Studies, March 2021), Schmidt was awarded a $1,500 cash prize.

“It’s quite an honor for my work to be recognized in this way. It’s so important that this award is promoting new scholarship that focuses on underrepresented and marginalized groups in Catholic history,” said Schmidt, who is the research coordinator for the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, a joint initiative of the Society of Jesus and St. Louis University.

The research is in some ways the pinnacle of an academic career that began with the books her mother gave her. In high school, Schmidt worked as a volunteer and employee at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati and served as a community-engaged fellow at Xavier University as an undergraduate.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in history and classics, she knew she wanted to be a historian of slavery and African American history, and went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in public history. The Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, which was created in 2016 as a way to explore the Jesuits’ connections to slavery, was a natural fit, she said.

“Knowing how much the Jesuits had shaped me, I knew I needed to understand more. I had to understand what enslaved people’s lives were like with the Jesuits, and how the Jesuits justified holding people in slavery in their religious context and their mission,” she said.

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology at Fordham, said what made Schmidt’s work stand out was the way she expanded the scope of sources to tell the story of enslaved people.

“The great thing about this work is not only that it exposes a world that we’ve had a very difficult time seeing through the historical record,” he said. “But it’s also such a meticulous and creative way of reading records [bills of sale, sacramental records, correspondence between Jesuits]that ostensibly don’t really have anything to do with what she’s interested in exploring, which is the lives of enslaved Catholics people.”

Seitz noted that Schmidt’s research is in keeping with a broader national reckoning.

“With the rest of the country, Jesuit institutions more broadly are having a movement when more and more people are agreeing that it’s time to come to terms more honestly and in a more transparent way with painful histories, including Jesuit ownership of slaves. Kelly’s work is remarkable in helping this effort,” he said.

“She provides a foundation for the kinds of work that needs to be done for reconciliation, healing, and reparation, which is a long road.”

In addition, he said that Schmidt exhibited a spirit of generosity in the paper by laying out a roadmap for future scholars who might want to replicate the research.

“She’s been through all these many, many layers of papers that are scattered and diffuse. She doesn’t just hide that; she talks about the process in this essay, and in talking about the process, she provides a great gift to her fellow scholars in the future who may want to do something similar, to recreate this hidden world,” he said.

For Schmidt, the process of researching the lives of those enslaved by Jesuits in the South and Midwest was both challenging and inspiring.

“I felt challenged in my faith, seeing exploitation that happened to people through the church, but then, as I learned more and more about the enslaved people I was studying, I was just continuously blown away by how resilient they were in their faith, and how even their enslavement to Catholic slaveholders didn’t stop them,” she said.

“They were so committed to their faith and using it to uplift themselves and push for the way things ought to be.”

The larger lesson, she said, is that all history is interconnected, and one can’t simply go to the archives and find one box labeled “slavery” and learn the full story of the past.

“We have to look far and wide to piece together the story, and we have to look past different dioceses and religious orders. Slavery wasn’t isolated to one institution, so you have to look through state records, local records,” she said.

“Doing it, we pieced together the lived experiences of enslaved people whose stories haven’t been told.”

In the United States, subscribers to Life magazine opened up their issues that year and were greeted by a jarring image.

Francis Spellman, New York’s Roman Catholic Archbishop and the Vicar General of the Army and Navy, was pictured presiding over Mass not in the splendor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but at a crude, makeshift altar built of large bricks, created for troops stationed in Egypt. It contained a “portable altar stone,” the caption noted, and allowed the cardinal “to consecrate any convenient table where Mass was called for.”

To John Seitz, Ph.D, images like these are perfect examples of the way Americans were telling the world that God was on their side in the war, and that their troops were not depraved or bloodthirsty fighters.

“Americans were increasingly becoming aware of war’s damage on psyches, and they were very nervous about what would happen when all these potentially “damaged” men would come home from the war, said Seitz, an associate professor of theology.

“Religious images were really useful for communicating that they’re not that untethered from tradition, from God, from deep questions, and the things that we practice at home,” he said.

A Tradition Well-Suited to the Task

Seitz, who earlier this year published “Altars of Ammo: Catholic Materiality and the Visual Culture of World War II” in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, said that Catholicism was particularly effective at communicating this message, thanks to its overt embrace of materiality.

“When it comes to photography, Catholic ritual forms like elevated arms, long ornate robes, and specific moments of ritual posture among both the leaders and the congregation were really vivid ways of saying, ‘American troops are in tune with tradition,’” he said.

Celebrating religious diversity was a major goal of government censors, he said, and images of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews working together to fight injustice were meant to distinguish the United States from both Nazi Germany and what was seen as an atheistic Japan.

What was surprising about the popularity of these 1940s Catholic images was the fact that the materiality and elaborate rituals that made them so effective were also the reasons mainstream Protestants had been suspicious of the faith for nearly all of American history.   

From Idolatrous to Iconic

“A dominant Protestant theory about Catholic rituals is that it’s a crutch, only for weak people. It’s kind of like superstition to have all these kinds of hocus pocus ritual transformations,” he said.

“In theory, at least, Protestants can rely solely on faith. You don’t need any of these ritual elements, you don’t need a priest mediating your contact with God. So, with these wartime images, Catholic images and materiality went from being idolatrous in the Protestant American imagination to being iconic in the environment of wartime propaganda.”

While Protestant America was coming around to Catholicism, thanks in part to these images, the editors of mainstream Catholic magazines that were writing captions for these images were wrestling with the cognitive dissonance of pairing a religion based in love with efforts to promote the war. Seitz noted that in one particularly vivid image of a priest on the battleship that appeared in The Priest Goes to War, (The Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 1945) writers suggested that the ship added to the splendor of the Mass.

“They want to have the guns adding to the grandeur of the Masses, which is a really surprising thing to think about. At that the same time, they want to say the Mass is kind of in conflict with that, and the priest is only there to serve, and not to perpetuate violence,” he said.

“From my vantage point, it’s pretty hard to extricate those things from one another in this context. They can’t quite pull it off, because there they are, reprinting this image and celebrating how beautiful it is.”

Seitz said images like these complicate people’s understanding about what religion is about. He said he hopes his students appreciate the multiple ways that religious ideas and images and objects work in the world.

“There’s a risk that we approach religion as a static, rigid set of ideas you have to agree with or not, when in fact religion and religious objects are malleable, dynamic, and interact with culture,” he said.