Students in the Ignatian Community of Practice participate in an interfaith dialogue on March 29 with  Vinny Marchionni, S.J., Tabatha Holley, lead pastor of New Day Church, and Hanadi Doleh, director of community partnerships at Interfaith Center of New York.

Service has always been a core part of Fordham’s Catholic American Studies concentration, a selective program designed to give undergraduate students of any major a deeper appreciation of the historical, theological, and cultural manifestations of Catholicism.

But this semester, the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, which supervises the program, partnered with the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), to expand on what it means to serve others.

“The old Jesuit motto is ‘men and women for others,’ but now at Fordham, we’re more about ‘men and women with and for others,’ said Michael Lee, Ph.D., professor of theology and director of the Curran Center.

“I think that that’s key here.”

In January, a group of eleven students in the concentration began meeting every two weeks as part of an “Ignatian Community of Practice.”

Guided conversations have focused on their responsibilities to their communities, the ways different faith traditions address social challenges, the ethical obligations that come with their academic work, and continuing along a path of discernment.

Lee said the meetings are part of a shift of the guiding philosophy of the concentration’s service requirement—from a “service-learning” model to a “community-engaged” or “community asset-based” approach. Elements from the meetings will be incorporated into the Discernment Seminar, a class that all Catholic American Studies students are required to take their sophomore year. As a result, when they engage in service in the future, all of them will work with community partners from whom they will learn as partners. This could entail assisting at organizations such as P.O.T.S., a community group near the Rose Hill campus, the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, or The Bronx is Blooming.

“I want us to think about our place in the neighborhood and within the wider public, and think about not just a service requirement, but a way of partnering with neighbors and mutually learning,” he said.

Lifting Up Community Voices

Grace Powers, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, is one of 11 students in the concentration who were invited to join the Ignatian Community of Practice. Four years ago, she left a small Kentucky town of roughly 4,500 people to find a more diverse, LGBTQ-friendly populace in New York City. A sociology and history major, Powers says Fordham’s Jesuit heritage has also expanded her perspective of her Catholic faith.

“I’ve come to really appreciate how the Jesuits incorporate Catholicism into daily life,” she said.

“Community engagement and accompaniment focuses more on going into a community and uplifting the voices that are there and listening to their perspectives about what they need.”

She has found particular appeal in the Catholic saying that there are “two feet of justice”: works of mercy and charity, and works of social action. If the first entails volunteering at a soup kitchen, the second might be discussing why a soup kitchen exists in the first place.

From the Bronx to El Salvador

Vanessa Rotondo, associate director of campus engagement and senior advisor for Ignatian Leadership at CCEL, said her partnership with the Curran Center is a natural extension of CCEL’s focus on programs that build community engagement in the Bronx through research projects on health care, housing, and education.

“We saw the students in the American Catholic Studies concentration as the perfect partners, given their intent is to understand emerging Catholic identity as it’s understood by its Greek translation of ‘universal.’”

In one of the meetings, the group covered the underpinnings of Jesuit education; another took place with Frankelly Martinez, program manager at Christian Aid in the Dominican Republic, and Francisco Mena Ugarte, executive director of Christians for Peace in El Salvador. Several members of the community also traveled with Lee to El Salvador as part of his class El Salvador: Revolutionary Faith.

The group’s final meeting will feature Fordham alumni who speak with students about how these lessons and experiences can be applied after graduation.

A Time for Quiet Reflection

Nolan Chiles, a senior integrated neuroscience major, said many students in the group have known each other since their first year at Fordham, so the dialogue tends to be richer than it might be with strangers.

“At the end of our meetings, we do a quiet reflection for a couple of minutes. Sometimes we’ll say a prayer, and then we’re all encouraged to go around in a circle and share whatever it was that came to light for us,” he said.

“It’s a great time to hear other students’ takes.”

Students in the Ignatian Community of Practice participate in an interfaith dialogue on March 29 with  Vinny Marchionni, S.J., Tabatha Holley, lead pastor of New Day Church, and Hanadi Doleh, director of community partnerships at Interfaith Center of New York.

Q: What is the most exciting thing about taking over the leadership of the Curran Center?

A: As I think about the Curran Center’s mission—advancing knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American Catholicism within the academy, the church, the broader religious community, and the general public—I think what’s exciting is that’s really at the heart of Fordham’s own mission as a Jesuit university in New York City.
Our world, the church itself, is going through so much right now. The voices of fear and despair are loud. Yet, I believe Catholicism is a deep well that has resources to speak to our times and to be a small part of the faithful-critical retrieval of that tradition is such an exciting prospect.

Q: What sort of things are you hoping to expand upon and grow?

A: I’m really fortunate to succeed two amazing directors, so in part, I just want to keep their momentum going. One of the ways that we can grow is by thinking about “American” in a hemispheric way. My parents are from Puerto Rico and so I grew up in an intercultural household, and my Catholicism was intercultural too—going to Mass in English in Florida and in Spanish in Puerto Rico.

We can rethink “Catholic” too. Catholicism has this capacious, inclusive vision, and a sacramental imagination. For me, it’s the motto of Ignatius of Loyola, “to see God in all things.” So our conversations at the center are ecumenical, interreligious, and with those who have no faith tradition. There are so many members of the Fordham family who are not Catholic and yet they’re a crucial part of who we are and that search for truth and goodness.

Q: What kind of programming would you like to see in the future?

A: The first area is American Catholic thought and Catholic history. Catholicism has an extraordinary history and some remarkable figures in it, and we have a duty to explore that legacy and hold dear that tradition, even as we do so critically. We also must retrieve marginal figures who weren’t appreciated in their time or were erased in some way.

I would like to see us continue doing work on Catholic social teaching as well. Catholicism has a strong tradition of speaking to the most important social, ethical, economic issues of our time. Issues of racism, the ecological crisis, public policy, the economy, our global interconnection—these are part and parcel of what Catholicism addresses today.

Another thing that comes to mind is this notion of a Catholic imagination. That sacramental imagination of Catholicism comes through in its art, music, and literature. For my own Curran Center class, the first reading is from Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography. Here’s a guy who has a profoundly Catholic vision of his Irish and Italian ancestry, his neighborhood, the people he grew up with, the church. [Exploring artists is] a way to expand that imagination. I think of Rosario Ferré, from my own Puerto Rico, or Isabel Allende or Carlos Santana.

There’s also the bread and butter ecclesial issues in Roman Catholicism today. What’s going on in the pews, in church leadership? Should there be women deacons or married priests? That has to be a part of what we do at the center.

Q: Your expertise is in liberation theology, which has a particular emphasis on justice and care for the poor. How will that factor into your new role at the Curran Center?

A: Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, whom many call the father of liberation theology, always says that the heart of liberation theology is the preferential option for the poor. It’s now at the bedrock of Catholic teaching, but it’s often misunderstood. It’s not condescending or simply paternalistic charity. It’s recognizing that those people at the margins are actually at the very center of the story. I would have the Curran Center really put its focus, as Pope Francis would say, on the peripheries, not as a gesture of nobility but because that’s where the real world is and that’s where we find truth.

I wrote my first book on Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., the president of the Jesuit university in San Salvador and one of the martyrs assassinated in 1989. His vision of the university is really powerful, and three things, in particular, have influenced my thinking. The first is imagining the university focused outside of itself. The second is that he used to call the university the “critical conscience” of the nation. Con-sciencia means “with science.” That is, research and knowledge is a power that we must use for good. Finally, there was a little saying he used with impatient seminarians who were very eager to be active. He understood that activist impulse, but he would say to them, “We do our work en un escritorio, pero no desde un escritorio.” We do our work in a desk, but not from a desk.

You don’t want to turn your back on the very important power that comes from study and research, but there’s always that temptation to be in the ivory tower. We want to do our work in a way that is intellectual but grounded and engaged.

Q: What would you say are some of the most pressing issues in Catholicism that you’d like to tackle?

A: The Catholic Church faces a profound crisis, and if I needed a word to sum it up, I think I’d use authenticity. Can it be meaningful by example? There’s no avoiding the clerical sex abuse scandal. The church really needs to act, and it needs to act with humility, with openness, and mercy. The center is part of a very large grant to carry out a project we’re calling Taking Responsibility, about Jesuit educational institutions and confronting the causes and the legacy of the clerical sexual abuse crisis.

The second thing is the lingering vestiges of clericalism. Many Catholics still live in a two-tiered society where priests and bishops occupy this higher place. What we need to do in is tap into the great ability, talent, and desire that is present among laypeople, and especially women, whose gifts for so long have been on the margins if not refused altogether.

Finally, our political culture wars here in the United States have infected some sectors of Catholicism. I’ve seen students who have a profoundly Catholic imagination, this amazing perception of grace, of beauty, of truth in the world around them. But they hear talk in the church that is really hateful towards LGBTQ brothers and sisters or racist, and they say to themselves, “Well, if that’s Catholicism, then I’m no Catholic.” I want the center to be part of clarifying that to be Catholic is not necessarily to participate in the culture wars in that way. Faith calls one to take important stands in terms of justice, defending human rights, of building international solidarity, but it’s a tragedy for many young people to self-disqualify because they have a distorted image of what Catholicism can and should be.

The Catholic Church has had a complicated relationship with liberation theology, said Associate Professor of Theology Michael Lee, Ph.D. On the one hand, the movement’s emphasis on economic and social justice for the poor squares with Jesus’ message in the Gospels. On the other hand, its rumored connections to communism and the occasional violent outburst made the Vatican wary.

However, through actions such as sanctioning Archbishop Romero’s beatification, Pope Francis is demonstrating that the Church ought to draw on the Gospels to find a middle ground within even the most controversial issues.

Watch Inside Fordham’s interview with Lee on the pope’s attitude toward liberation theology and its impact on the Church.

In February, Pope Benedict XVI shocked the world by announcing his decision to resign from the papacy— becoming the first pope to do so in nearly six centuries.

A month later, Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as Benedict’s successor, launching a papacy that in just six months has already been the talk of religious and secular communities around the world.

On Sept. 9, a panel of Fordham theologians gathered on the Lincoln Center campus to discuss how the newly elected Pope Francis has handled the first six months of his papacy. Moderated by Terrence Tilley, Ph.D., the Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Professor of Catholic Theology, the panel featured:

• Rachel Zoll, lead religion reporter for the Associated Press;

• Christine Firer Hinze, Ph.D., professor of theology and director of the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies;

• Michael Lee, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States; and

• Michael Peppard, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology and blog contributor for Commonweal magazine.

As the first South American and the first Jesuit to ascend to the papacy, Pope Francis represented a novelty for the church from the start.

The six months since his election have been no less unconventional.

On the flight returning from World Youth Day in July, he told reporters that although Catholic teaching is clear on the issue of homosexuality, “Who am I to judge a gay person of goodwill who seeks the Lord?” Recently, he personally phoned an Italian woman who wrote that she was concerned her unborn child would not be baptized because she was unmarried. He told her that if she received any pushback, he would baptize the child himself.

“This pope has an improvisational and simple style—something that is keeping the Vatican on its toes,” Peppard said. “He has a preference for simple vestments, simple shoes, for walking or riding the bus, and paying his own hotel bill after the conclave.

“And it’s still quite amazing that the pope does not live in the papal apartment. It’s as if we had a president who got elected and said there aren’t going to be any more inaugural balls.”
This new style has appealed to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who, Hinze said, feel more welcomed by a pope who not only acknowledges but also understands their everyday struggles.

“This pope is a pastoral genius who speaks of a God who is close, who accompanies people on their daily struggles, who assures people that they are not alone,” she said. “It’s a fleshy, shoulder-rubbing, embodied way of enacting discipleship.”

Where Pope Francis’ on-the-ground papacy might appear radical, Lee said, is in his expectation that other Catholic leaders follow suit. At a meeting in June with leaders of the Conference of Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious, the pope told participants to not be afraid of running risks and trying new approaches.

He brought the same message to World Youth Day this July in Rio de Janeiro, telling the 3 million gathered, “Become protagonists of change, work for a better world.”

“He has said, ‘I prefer a church that makes mistakes because it did something to one that sickens because it remains shut in,’” Lee cited. “It’s a remarkable set of comments.”

Though the pope’s election had galvanized the media from the start, sparking questions such as whether the departing and arriving popes would both live in Vatican City, interest within the media has not waned. Outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to BBC International have continued to call on Fordham theologians to interpret what this Everyman pope will mean for the Catholic Church.

“He’s a great story,” Zoll said. “He’s constantly doing interesting things. You can see that there’s a popular interest in the pope that goes so far beyond what typically interests people about religion.”

Tilley told the audience to pay attention as the pope appoints cardinals and bishops in the coming months and years, because his choices will set the tone for future church leadership.
In addition, papal encyclicals will contain hints about the future of the papacy, because popes often use these documents to qualify church teachings.

“If you want to know what he’s thinking, look at what’s being omitted and what’s being added in these texts,” Tilley said.

The event was hosted by the Department of Theology, in association with the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies and the Center on Religion and Culture.