In spring 2024, the Cushwa Center’s public events provided characteristically wide-ranging perspectives on American Catholicism, pushing participants to consider the remote past as well as the global present of religious faith and practice. Garry Sparks (Princeton) spoke on the earliest encounters between Indigenous communities and European colonizers, offering new interpretations of the implications for Mayan religious practice and awareness. Jonathan Ebel (Illinois) drew from his research on the establishment of government camps in Dust Bowl-era California to develop the idea of “reform” as something of a religion of its own amid the collapse and displacement of agricultural communities. A roundtable of Notre Dame faculty discussed Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction alongside coauthors Shaun Blanchard (Notre Dame Australia) and Stephen Bullivant (St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London), prompting a lively, multidisciplinary discussion of the Second Vatican Council 60 years on. The semester’s Dolan Seminar featured Bullivant’s Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford, 2022), calling attention to developing trends in religious disaffiliation and their social causes and effects. Mauricio López explored the origins and development of the Amazon synod, both as an event of its own and as an example of Pope Francis's approach to problems in the global Church.
Indigenous–Christian encounter in the 16th century
On February 29, the Cushwa Center hosted Garry Sparks (Department of Religion, Princeton University) for the 2024 Cushwa Center Lecture, cosponsored by Notre Dame’s Departments of History and Theology. The now-annual lecture series broadly addresses the relationship between religion and public life. With this installment of the series, the Cushwa Center embraced a definition of American Catholicism much more capacious than the United States alone, as Sparks delivered a lecture titled “Five Hundred Years of Mayanized Christianity: An Ethnohistory of the Americas’ First Theology, the Theologia Indorum.” Among Sparks’s publications are Rewriting Maya Religion: Domingo de Vico, K’iché Maya Intellectuals, and the Theologia Indorum (University Press of Colorado, 2019) and The Americas’ First Theologies: Early Sources of Post-Contact Indigenous Religion (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Sparks, whose historical work focuses on early contact between Native Mesoamericans and Iberian missionaries in the 16th century, opened by acknowledging the involvement of contemporary Indigenous communities in his work, whose contributions greatly enhance the understanding of these interactions. Adapting an oft-cited aphorism about history, Sparks noted that “theology . . . is written by the victors.” However, when European missionaries brought their theologies and accompanying linguistic and conceptual systems to Mesoamerica, Sparks observed, their Indigenous interlocutors already possessed not only their own robust intellectual and cosmogonic traditions but also (particularly in the case of the Maya) a phonetic-based writing system and centuries-old practices of writing books. Furthermore, that moment of contact did not represent the first encounter between differing religious systems: The arrival of European Christianity was merely the latest in a much longer series of interreligious contacts. Neither did the appearance of Christianity immediately erase Indigenous theologies. Sparks noted the adoption of the European alphabet for written communication among the Maya, who continued to reference Indigenous spirituality without including Christianity.
Yet Christian missionaries persevered in adapting Indigenous religious worldviews to a Christian epistemology. Doing so required rendering centuries of Christian thought and teaching using Indigenous languages which, by the 16th century, had themselves described equally ancient (and profoundly different) Indigenous theologies. To illustrate various methods of this process, Sparks offered a comparison of two religious orders’ approaches to the translation of deeply nuanced theological terminology. He described the significantly contrasting methods of Dominican missionaries, who often translated European theological terms ad sensum (roughly, using Indigenous terms that conveyed a meaning analogous to the European term), and those of Franciscan missionaries, who sought more literal translations ad verbum (or “to the word”). The latter method often resulted in neologisms or the less polished insertion of Latin or Spanish into otherwise Indigenous-language texts on Christian theology. While the question of translating single words may appear so technical as to be abstracted from actual religious practice or the beliefs of actual communities, these debates highlight the contention experienced even among Europeans themselves as they attempted to bring Christianity to Indigenous cultures.
De Vico’s intimate knowledge both of Indigenous language and Indigenous religion allowed him to respond to Maya theology on its own terms.
Sparks’s most vivid illustration was the work of Dominican priest Domingo de Vico, who traveled to Mesoamerica with Bartolomé de las Casas in the middle of the 16th century. De Vico, whom Sparks described as a “brilliant linguist,” was the author of Theologia Indorum, a work structured in the manner of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica spanning over two hundred chapters across two volumes. De Vico’s Theologia did not, Sparks argued, represent a wholesale importation of European Christian theology into the Indigenous context. Instead, De Vico’s intimate knowledge both of Indigenous language and Indigenous religion allowed him to respond to Maya theology on its own terms. Sparks also described how taking Aquinas’s work as a model afforded De Vico the opportunity to reconcile, to the extent possible, Indigenous spirituality with Catholic Christianity.
Sparks clarified that De Vico’s Theologia did not simply appear for passive Indigenous consumption, nor did it go uncontested. Instead, Mayan intellectuals used the Theologia as a foil to re-present the Mayan philosophical and spiritual worldview, often without making explicit reference to the Theologia itself. Moreover, some written Indigenous sources actually incorporated elements of Christianity into the Mayan religious framework.
During the discussion period after Sparks’s lecture, Rev. Paul Kollman, C.S.C. (Theology, Notre Dame) asked about the relationship between religious texts and religious practice in actual communities—in effect, whether the writings of either European Christians or Indigenous religious authorities described what adherents did in everyday life. Sparks pointed to the difficulty of relying entirely on accounts of everyday Indigenous practice written from the perspective of an economically and militarily dominant colonizing power like the Spanish. Drawing parallels to other religiously-inflected moments in world history, Sparks mentioned Spanish accusations of Indigenous cannibalism, transgressions against sexual mores, and demonic behavior—which bear striking resemblance to how other historically powerful groups have referred to religious minorities, such as pagan Rome vis-à-vis Christianity, or civic and spiritual leaders in late 17th-century Massachusetts.
Another audience member mentioned the respect accorded to Indigenous communities by leading Christians such as Bartolomé de las Casas. Such missionaries acknowledged Indigenous beliefs that clearly showed a religious worldview structured around ideas of salvation similar to Christianity, even if those ideas were considered idolatrous from the Christian perspective. Sparks returned to De Vico as one such authority. De Vico saw much to be valued in Indigenous culture while unsurprisingly still believing that it required conversion to Christianity.
Finally, Cushwa Center co-director David Lantigua asked about differing views on conversion and explicit religious debate held by various religious orders. He mentioned specifically an early Dominican preference in other parts of the so-called “New World” for peaceful, non-coercive conversion (which eventually gave way to forced refutation of Indigenous beliefs). Sparks responded that extant sources are not always clear about how conversions were treated, especially given the ambiguity surrounding some documents’ intended recipients. He mentioned also the fierce intra-Catholic debates that sometimes arose over matters of translation, with bishops forcefully intervening to end heated debates between Dominicans and Franciscans for the sake of good order.
The work presented by Sparks is part of much broader, ongoing efforts. He is currently working with Frauke Sachse of Dumbarton Oaks Museum on the project “Pastoral Fieldnotes: A Sixteenth-century Handbook from the Maya Highlands” and coordinating Maya-to-English and -Spanish translations of the Theologia Indorum.
“Missionary modernity” during the Great Depression
On March 20, Jonathan Ebel visited campus for a workshop with Notre Dame’s Colloquium on Religion and History and to present a public lecture titled “From Dust They Came: Migration, Sanitation, and Missionary Modernity in New Deal California.” Ebel is professor and head of religion at the University of Illinois and a past president of the American Society of Church History. He previously served as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy and, in 2018, ran for election to represent the 13th Congressional District of Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Ebel’s lecture drew on research conducted for his most recent book, From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU, 2023). He introduced the lecture by commenting on California as a rich context for studying relocation, agriculture, land ownership, reform, and the intersection of religion with a wide range of other categories of human experience. He used two quotations to frame the lecture: the first from Mary Douglas’s 1966 Purity and Danger, “As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt; it exists in the eye of the beholder;” and the second from Genesis 2: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust.” Together, these quotes suggest the unavoidable presence of dirt in human life and its several possible meanings. Among the range of responses to it, Ebel highlighted the felt moral imperative to eradicate it.
Ebel contrasted the longstanding American cultural drive toward cleanliness with the economic and human geographical realities of the Great Depression. He cited Dorothea Lang and Paul Taylor’s 1939 American Exodus: An Account of Human Erosion, whose account of the decade-long economic catastrophe poignantly compared people with dust, flung around the country in search of arable land and sufficient employment to survive. By 1942, the federal government acknowledged not only the immediate effects of this “human erosion” but also its longer, psycho-social impact on dispersed communities. While the foundational text of the Judeo-Christian creation account—the Book of Genesis—linked humanity with dust in a positive way, the Great Depression unraveled this intimate connection and made dust into a sign of nearly apocalyptic failure.
Even before Lang and Taylor’s seminal book appeared, the federal government was attempting to hold back the tide of human erosion through a series of camps established in partnership with the state of California. These camps were intended to impose order on the chaos of massive immigration to California driven by agricultural failure elsewhere in the country. From a practical standpoint, the camps would supply housing such that already existing cities would not be overwhelmed by the influx of migrants. Located near farmland, they also put newly-arrived farmworkers conveniently near work. Rhetorically, however, the camps represented order and cleanliness at a time of uncertainty and perceived filth. Each camp featured a centralized sanitary unit, which housed toilets, showers, sinks, and washrooms. While they were mundane, Ebel explained—these units were glorified restrooms—the sanitary units were central to the government’s approach to social order in the camps. These were where all bodily functions and cleansing processes for clothing were to take place. If caught urinating elsewhere, for example, migrants could be punished for violating the strictures of orderly cleanliness. Similar requirements and consequences were enforced when it came to an individual or family’s camp platform and tent, which camp administrators expected denizens to keep clean and tidy.
Yet, Ebel noted, the government planners who assumed that providing an orderly system of residence and sanitation would create dirtless communities populated by compliant citizens often found themselves stymied. He used the camp at Brawley in Imperial County to illustrate this frustration. Here, camp administrators learned of migrants utilizing irrigation ditches for their excretory needs during the workday, rather than using the camp’s sanitary unit. And even within the sanitary unit itself, government authorities were perplexed by residents’ ignorance of the intended use of toilets: Children played in them, they were used for laundry, and many residents did not understand the purpose of flushing. Such differing perceptions—authorities providing sanitary facilities of “obvious” value while migrants continued to disregard flush toilets and utilize ad hoc latrines while working in fields—called into question what government officials saw as technological progress and American ingenuity.
As Ebel noted at the start of the question and answer period, the modern technology of the 1930s and 1940s did not negate the reality of biology: even in cities with complex systems designed to carry waste away from homes and businesses, raw sewage was still dumped unceremoniously —and untreated —into local waterways. Migrants carrying out bodily functions in fields therefore represented more an affront to “good order” than to public health.
Josh Specht (History, Notre Dame) asked about the introduction of industrialized agriculture and its resulting impact on labor—which was itself significantly “eroded.” Ebel replied that concern in the Great Depression centered specifically on white immigrant labor, and it was the erosion of white agricultural labor and communities that led to the system of California camps. The erosion of farm labor in other racial communities—including those heavily impacted by industrialized agriculture—was of less or no concern to the federal government.
One attendee asked about messaging and enforcement mechanisms. Did camp administrators ever attempt to soften orders to utilize camp facilities unfamiliar to migrant farmers? Ebel pointed to the use of some camp residents as “model citizens” or emissaries to migrants. He also clarified that resistance to sanitary regulations was not universal. Still, however, some camp administrators were aware that residents may not respond well to uncompromising orders delivered from on high and made genuine efforts to avoid the appearance of operating the camps like local dictators.
David Lantigua asked about examples opposite to those of resistance and rebellion: what did “success” look like according to the camp system? Ebel described the possibility of moving to larger housing units outside the more densely populated camp space; participation in communal camp life; and establishing some self-sufficient amenities like a garden. Underlying all of these “advances” were notions of migrants moving into increasingly “more white” forms of work and living.
(Re-)introducing Vatican II
On April 5, the Cushwa Center hosted Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant for a discussion of their 2023 publication Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction. The book is a recent entry in Oxford University Press’s highly-regarded series of brief and accessible overviews of complex events and ideas. Blanchard is lecturer in theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Bullivant is professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London, where he also directs the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society. The discussion, which served as the start of the spring Dolan Seminar in American Religion, was cosponsored by the Department of Theology at Notre Dame and included commentary from a panel of Notre Dame faculty: Kimberly Belcher (Theology), Ulrich Lehner (Theology), Sarah Shortall (History), and Tom Tweed (American Studies and History).
The authors include in the volume’s first pages a 1966 quote on the Second Vatican Council from convert Christopher Butler, abbot of Benedictine Downside Abbey and later auxiliary bishop of Westminster: “So there was to be a second Vatican Council. What would be its business? Nothing in particular, it would appear; or perhaps it would be truer to say: everything.”
Because Blanchard and Bullivant’s book fits into a highly specialized genre—the Oxford Very Short Introduction series—the day’s discussion ranged over the book’s historical and theological content as well as the technical process of covering so much ground in so few pages. Speaking on why he thought a book like this was necessary, Blanchard mentioned a prior lack of concise overviews of Vatican II that a survey course could cover in one or two weeks of discussion. On the timing of publication, he mentioned that firsthand memory of the Council is fading, and along with it the ability for students to learn the broad sweep of the Council from those who participated in it. Blanchard also commented on the four major “paradigms” or interpretive approaches to Vatican II laid out in the book: the “Traditionalist Paradigm,” which views Vatican II with suspicion or outright rejection; the “Failure Paradigm,” a judgment by progressive Catholics that the Council’s reform efforts were necessary but failed; the “Spirit-Event Paradigm,” which celebrates the Council per se but emphasizes it as an event unleashing a “spirit” of progress; and the “Text-Continuity Paradigm,” which sees the Council as producing a body of complete texts, ending in 1965, in full continuity with Church teaching theretofore. Blanchard noted these four positions basically hold among Catholics today—but increasing historical distance from the Council will call their sharp dividing lines into question.
Kimberly Belcher noted the significance of the Council as arising from an extant context of reform in the Church. The idea of “change” did not appear suddenly in October 1962. She used as an example Pius XII’s 1955 reforms to the liturgies of Holy Week. When the Council Fathers arrived at the start of Vatican II, diocesan bishops—who made up the majority of the Fathers—would have borne in mind the experience of those reforms, as well as their reception in local dioceses.
Ulrich Lehner lauded the book’s engaging writing even while it remains even-handed in its treatment of often contentious topics. He called attention to Blanchard and Bullivant’s deft avoidance of judgment, dismissal, or triumphalism in their assessment of the Council. For those familiar with the more colorful personalities that typically appear in histories of Vatican II, the authors’ balanced treatment of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani is ample proof of their ability to tell compelling stories without forcing the reader toward a specific conclusion about anyone’s motivations.
Sarah Shortall placed the Council within an extended historical perspective. She noted that the ecclesio-political divisions marking the postconciliar Church grew from roots established well before the Council. She also called attention to the statistical reality of demographic diversity at the Council (especially increased visibility of bishops from the Global South) contrasting with the political reality of continued Anglo-European ideological dominance. While coming together in Rome may have fostered collegiality among non-European bishops, the priorities of the Council’s agenda remained set mostly by European Council Fathers. Bullivant responded by observing that, as far as the inclusion of diverse voices went, the ecumenical nature of Vatican II was largely aspirational. Shortall also asked whether the highly academic debates that unfolded at the Council itself were relevant to ordinary people around the world. Did a disconnect obtain between what the Council Fathers were doing and what the rest of the world thought they were doing? Blanchard cited some in his parents’ generation to illustrate how those debates and the Council’s teaching were reduced by the time they reached everyday Catholics: “Before Vatican II, Protestants didn’t go to heaven. After Vatican II, everyone went to heaven.”
Tom Tweed shifted the discussion to the practical realities of explaining a major historical event within the confines of the series, drawing on his own experience writing Religion: A Very Short Introduction. He noted the processes of deciding which historical actors to include or overlook; how expert authors can navigate the demands of editorial staff working in favor of more general readers; and the implications of writing in this genre for the type and scope of audience authors should expect.
With more than 90 people in attendance from around campus and beyond, a lively question and answer period followed the panel’s initial discussion. Amirah Orozco (Theology, Notre Dame) noted that the Second Vatican Council took place at a moment of enormous social upheaval in many parts of the world. In the American context, movements like feminism and activism for civil rights had a direct impact on many peoples’ faith lives. Bullivant highlighted the significantly uneven processes of “reception” of the Council in dioceses and parishes around the world. He suggested that because of contemporary secular events, the 1960s were a fraught time to call into question what had looked like centuries of static Catholicism in order to implement Catholic reform. He gave the contemporary pastoral concerns of European bishops as an example, citing the increased alienation of youth and of the working class of all ages from the institutional Church. However, he also reminded the audience that the Council of Nicaea (325) did not eradicate Arianism overnight: Councils take time to fully exert their authority.
Rev. Louis Manzo, C.S.C., argued that the Council ushered in an end to devotions and a beginning to renewed focus on the sacraments themselves, while today the American Church seems to be experiencing a revival of devotional culture. He asked whether this represented a slowing or even rejection of the unfolding of Vatican II. Bullivant described the process as a “rebalancing,” rather than the ebbing of a conciliar spirit. Regardless of one’s own stance on devotions, they were part of the “scaffolding” of Catholic life prior to the Council, and for some their disappearance led to a total collapse of participation in the Church. Today, then, either they are being rediscovered or they never really went away in the first place.
Finally, Bridget Ritz (Center for the Study of Religion and Society, Notre Dame) asked about reception of the Council beyond the Anglophone world, and whether the framing deployed by American scholars applies elsewhere. Bullivant affirmed the value of the question, noting simply that in many parts of the world, worrying about what was happening at Vatican II and what came after was a luxury that many did not have.
In addition to their Very Short Introduction, Blanchard is author of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansenism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (Oxford, 2020); Bullivant is author of, among other works, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford, 2022) and Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II (Oxford, 2020).
Dolan Seminar on religious disaffiliation
The following morning, on April 6, the Cushwa Center hosted the recently-renamed Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion, featuring Stephen Bullivant’s Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford, 2022). The spring semester’s Dolan Seminar was cosponsored by Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society and the Department of Sociology. The seminar’s panel featured commentary from Ruth Braunstein, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut where she directs the Meanings of Democracy Lab, and David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at Notre Dame, who was recently appointed director of the University’s Democracy Initiative.
Braunstein started the morning’s discussion by lauding Bullivant’s contribution in opening up a “rich new field of inquiry.” Her praise focused on the book’s nuanced exploration of why individuals become so-called “nones,” noting that, for example, former Evangelicals leave their traditions for reasons different from those of non-practicing Catholics, mainline Protestants, and so on. In other words, the motivations underlying “nonversion” are not randomly distributed across religious traditions. Braunstein also suggested that great insight could be gained from understanding former adherents’ beliefs outside religion prior to leaving. As two examples of this approach, she cited former Catholics and Anglicans differing over Brexit and contrasting degrees of religious disaffiliation shown by political liberals and conservatives.
Braunstein also called attention to the enormous sociological complexity obfuscated by simple labels like “atheist,” “agnostic,” and “none” itself. The former religious adherent who has chosen to disaffiliate is often categorized as a “none” in the same way as one who never belonged to a tradition to begin with, despite each arriving at the “none” status by entirely different paths. She also noted the distinction between not attending a specific congregation while still considering oneself a member of a larger tradition, or holding what we might call “traditional” beliefs about divinity and prayer even without “belonging” to any particular group. Finally, Braunstein highlighted the unprecedented range of choice in religious affiliation, due not least to increasing rates of religious intermarriage. This variety can result in highly personal configurationsof religious belief, or avoidance of any belief at all because of the perception that no available system is the right fit.
Campbell’s remarks focused on probable factors motivating large-scale disaffiliation in American society. He noted the difficulty of identifying any single inflection point that marked the beginning of the present decline in religious affiliation. Many from younger generations point to the Internet as a primary cause; Campbell suggested a high rate of disaffiliation from certain groups is a result of young believers gaining access to comprehensive information about their tradition. But Campbell also noted that older generations will often indicate the end of the Cold War as the moment when Americans felt comfortable identifying as non-religious: When legally atheist Communist states were no longer viewed as immediate threats, Americans who themselves identified as atheist were less concerned by the perception of being insufficiently patriotic.
Campbell pointed to the politicized nature of religion in public discourse today, especially the conflation by some of religion as a concept with the so-called “Religious Right” that rose to enormous cultural influence and visibility in the closing decades of the 20th century. He also noted that, while seemingly counterintuitive in light of contemporary friction, Americans may actually notice less tension over religion in future decades, precisely because of the same sociological patterns noted by Braunstein: Increasing rates of interreligious and believer/non-believer relationships may map onto larger social trends of respectful interaction amid religious difference.
In his response to Braunstein and Campbell, Bullivant said that he wanted to tell the “middle” story of American religious disaffiliation—individual narratives meeting large-scale sociological trends. In this way, he could offer serious engagement with multiple academic disciplines in an accessible style. His observations on the American religious context included the rapidity of formal identification as “none”: While plenty of Americans two or three generations ago did not actually hold any specific religious beliefs, contemporary norms meant they still claimed some historic affiliation when responding to surveys. Americans today are much less hesitant to describe themselves as outside of specific religious categories or religion in general. Commenting on the endurance of certain religious subcultures, Bullivant noted the success long enjoyed by groups such as the Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals owing to their extensive efforts to create a parallel culture. As an example, some forms of secular entertainment, like professional “wrestling,” were forbidden or discouraged, but an acceptable version was created within those traditions.
In the question and answer period, Cushwa co-director Darren Dochuk asked which readers Bullivant hoped to reach with the book. Bullivant said he directed the work at “nonverts” themselves as well as those concerned with arresting the relative freefall in religious affiliation. He also saw value in the book for those trying to understand their own families and communities, especially older generations seeking explanations for younger generations’ disaffiliation.
Craig Lent (Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Notre Dame) mentioned that many of his students in recent years have struggled with the plausibility of the Christian account of reality and the world. Those students cite increasing scientific knowledge as one reason for that struggle but, Lent noted, the scientific revolution wasn’t recent—so scientific knowledge as a driver of disaffiliation is difficult to understand. Bullivant pointed to failed predictions in the 19th and early 20th centuries that greater awareness of scientific principles would lead to the disappearance of religious beliefs; science was then downplayed as a driver of secularization. He conceded, however, that these ideas indeed seem to be growing and that he, like most, didn’t have a ready explanation for the conflict. Campbell also noted that, at least in the United States, there are many scientists who are themselves deeply religious while also completely accepting scientific explanations for the origins and framework of the physical world.
Jana Riess (Religion News Service), who studies former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, asked about differences in the experience of disaffiliation in the short and long terms: Disaffiliation itself can be traumatic at first but often isn’t years later. Braunstein wondered whether the experience of nones will eventually resemble that of many religious believers, for whom the practice of their faith waxes and wanes over the course of life stages: receiving a tradition in childhood; often distancing themselves in young adulthood; re-engaging faith when forming their own families; distancing again once their own children have completed rites of passage; and, finally, engaging once more in older age. Do nones represent a long waning at a societal level, or a permanent shift? Campbell noted the difficulty of studying disaffiliation among specific individuals over a longer term, but commended the possibility of studying different groups who are themselves at different life stages to overcome this challenge.
Ingrid De Groot (Theology, Notre Dame) asked about the long-term viability of “nonism” and whether there may in fact be a trend back toward religiosity. Bullivant emphasized that many nones—especially in Britain—hold much more complex beliefs than simply nothing. He pointed to the use of “quasi-Christian categories” to make sense of and move through the world, and individuals’ use of a Christian “script,” adapted to their own beliefs, in the absence of a “script” of their own, around experiences like death and mourning.
Finally, sociologist Bridget Ritz asked about newer, or newly re-emergent traditions, such as neopaganism, which do not make strong appearances in the book. In response, Braunstein reflected on the role of religion as a category in individuals’ and communities’ lives. People seek transcendence in a variety of ways. Religion and its practice also address a significant social need, which itself does not disappear in the absence of religious adherence. She reminded the gathering that the process under discussion is disaffiliation from institutions, not disconnection from the needs that those institutions historically addressed.
The fall iteration of the Dolan Seminar is scheduled for October 5, 2024, and will discuss Emily Conroy-Krutz’s Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell, 2024). Heather Curtis (Religion and History, Tufts University) and Amy S. Greenberg (History, Penn State) will comment.
Mauricio López on the Amazon synod
The Cushwa Center welcomed Mauricio López to Geddes Hall on April 19 to deliver a lecture, “From the Amazon to Rome: Pope Francis and Synodality.” López used the 2019 Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region to explore renewed priorities for the global Church under the leadership of Pope Francis. López is vice president of the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon (CEAMA) and Director of Networking and Programs for Pastoral Action at the Episcopal Council for Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM). He has been a member of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development since 2019 and directed Cáritas Ecuador from 2013 to 2018. Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, Department of Theology, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and McGrath Institute for Church Life cosponsored the lecture.
López opened by noting his position within CEAMA—an ecclesial, not an episcopal, conference in the Church. He is one of four vice presidents of the conference; the leadership also includes a woman religious and a woman from the Indigenous communities of the Amazon. López stated at the outset that his knowledge and experience of the Amazon region, and the concerns of the people therein, come from extensive work with individuals and communities on the ground, rather than academic study of South America.
López defined the Amazon as a “theological place” both uniquely impacted by human activity and particularly suited to respond to pressing needs of the entire globe, a “portrait of the reality of the world.” Pope Francis wrote in 2023 in his post-synodal apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia that “everything the Church has to offer must become incarnate in distinctive way in each part of the world, so that the Bride of Christ can take on a variety of faces that better manifest the inexhaustible riches of God’s grace.”1 The region itself is vast, including territory from eight South American states (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela) and one overseas department of France (French Guiana). The Amazon area is nearly as large as the lower 48 United States and includes an enormous variety of biomes, ethnic and cultural groups, and spoken languages (including well over 200 of the latter). The region contains a significant amount of the planet’s fresh water and, because of the Amazon rainforest, produces a quarter of the planet’s oxygen.
Yet, as López reminded the audience, the West and the global North have long treated the Amazon region as a societal “backyard,” ripe for use, overuse, and exploitation. The arrival of European colonial societies divided the region’s Indigenous communities and occupied the territory for the extractive gain of imperial powers. Today, deforestation, pollution, and disregard for Indigenous communities—among other crises—threaten the integrity and future of the Amazon. Adding to his predecessor’s condemnation of the disastrous treatment of the Amazon basin, Pope Francis wrote that “the Amazon region has been presented as . . . a wild expanse to be domesticated. None of this recognizes the rights of the original peoples; it simply ignores them as if they did not exist, or acts as if the lands on which they live do not belong to them.”2 Taken together with the region’s size, human and ecological diversity, and vital role in the world’s ecology, the Church’s responsibility toward the region contributes to a charge that López attributed to the pope: “If we fail the Amazon, we fail the world.”
López concluded his lecture by discussing three elements of Pope Francis’s approach to the Amazon synod, which formally took place in October 2019 and was preceded by a two-year preparatory period. The pope had announced the synod in October 2017, saying that “The main purpose of this convocation is to identify new paths for the evangelization of this segment of the People of God, especially the indigenous peoples, often forgotten and without the prospect of a peaceful future, also due to the crisis of the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of paramount importance for our planet.”3 The first key element of the pope’s approach to the life of the Church as lived through the synod was a prioritization of economic and cultural “peripheries.” Through such synods, once-peripheral regions can move to the “center” historically occupied by the priorities and leadership of the Anglo-European Church. López noted that, given the high degree of politicization and intra-Catholic rupture that marks much of the Western church, viewing the world through the lens of a periphery like the Amazon provides both a fresh approach and a return to “true catholicity.”
Second, López noted the concern of Pope Francis and the Amazon synod’s leadership to remain focused on the key issues laid out at the beginning of the synod, rather than allowing the process to drift toward marginally related concerns. In a 2019 interview with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., Cardinal Claudio Hummes (d. 2022), whom Pope Francis named relator general of the Amazon synod, said, “The synod, according to the pope, does not have the aim of treating every topic, every challenge and every need of the global Church. We should not lose sight of our concrete goal. It is clear that its entire process has and will have universal repercussions, but the synod has an aim that needs to be focused so as not to remain generic.”4 Doing so prevents the long synodal process, which involves many individuals with differing and sometimes conflicting priorities, from becoming a battleground for disputes unrelated to the matter at hand.
Third, López noted Pope Francis’s desire to address the pressing needs of the Amazon through an “overflow” approach, rather than a patchwork of policies that emerge through conflict and compromise. In Querida Amazonia, Francis wrote that “solutions are found by ‘overflow,’ that is, by transcending the contraposition that limits our vision and recognizing a greater gift that God is offering.”5 This “overflow” approach benefits from steady concrete focus, avoiding the temptation to bring to a synodal discussion unrelated disputes that threaten the process of arriving, finally, at a solution to the problem at hand. López closed with an expression of belief that the Church has found itself in a moment of kairos, even in advance of the appearance of comprehensive solutions to the myriad problems facing the Amazon region.
Michael Skaggs (Notre Dame ’17 Ph.D.) is co-founder and director of programs of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.
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Notes
1 Francis, Querida Amazonia, post-synodal apostolic exhortation, sec. 6.
3 Francis, Angelus Address, October 15, 2017.
4 Antonio Spadaro, “Preparing for the Synod on Amazonia: An interview with Cardinal Claudio Hummes,” La Civiltá Cattolica, May 13, 2019.
5 Francis, Querida Amazonia, sec. 105.