“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.

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

Currently, Green is preparing to defend her dissertation this summer toward completion of her doctorate in religious education and practical theology in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her work brings together theological ethics and critical pedagogy in interdisciplinary research on liberative education for marginalized populations.

In particular, Green focuses on theological education in contexts of confinement, an area she was drawn to as the result of her work in women’s prisons. For the past two years, she has directed the Certificate in Theological Studies Program at Arrendale Prison for Women, a collaborative project among Emory’s Candler School of Theology and three other Atlanta seminaries.

“What my students [at the prison]have shown me is that theology is—in their words—a matter of life and death,” said Green, who taught in the program for five years before being appointed director.

“Religious language often gets co-opted by our criminal justice speech. Words like ‘redemption’ and ‘transformation’ come to mean something very specific in a prison. And what I’ve seen is that theology is able to provide spaces and resources to critically engage these concepts—to discern and distinguish between God’s redemptive reality for the world and what the systems of the world make us think.”

Theological education offers a kind of liberation, Green contends. She argues in her dissertation that when we analyze, engage, and confront theological discourse, we grow in our ability to critically engage with other systems and structures—such as the criminal justice system.

“Liberation is different from freedom. Freedom is a state of being, but liberation is a process,” said Green. “In my students’ case, there is ‘freedom’ as in being released from prison, but there is also freedom as a state of mind, a sense of agency—and that can be actualized inside. In their study of theology, they have found ways to do that.”

“What my students [at the prison]have shown me is that theology is—in their words—a matter of life and death . . . Theology is able to provide spaces and resources to critically engage these concepts—to discern and distinguish between God’s redemptive reality for the world and what the systems of the world make us think.”Green has also served as associate director of Theological Education Between the Times, a project funded by the Lilly Endowment, and was assistant director of the Youth Theological Initiative at Emory’s Candler School of Theology. She is a licensed minister in the National Baptist Convention USA.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Green worked in business management and strategic marketing, focusing on the needs of women and families of color.

She will complete her degree program in June and join the GRE faculty for the 2019-20 academic year.

“Jesuit pedagogy is deeply committed to social justice and to pushing the boundaries of what we mean by religious education, which is why I was drawn to Fordham,” she said.

“I’m thrilled about getting to continue my work on criminal justice so that we can think differently about what theological education looks like both for the church and for the broader community—especially the spaces we forget to think about.”

— Joanna Mercuri, GRE ’19