Since our founding by Jay Dolan in 1975, the Cushwa Center has initiated and expanded cross-disciplinary conversations about Catholic Christianity in academia and the wider public. By advancing research through this newsletter and signature events, supporting archival access, engaging salient critical topics in Church and society, and fostering academic collaboration within and outside the University, Cushwa has become the leading center for the study of American Catholicism and religion. During this 50-year anniversary celebration, Darren and I as co-directors have the momentous occasion to look at the past anew and toward the future as we remain grounded in present realities concerning politics, culture, and the environment.
Our 50th anniversary conference, Catholic Modernity in the Americas: Land, Culture, Politics, promises to deliver on such an occasion. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor raised the normative question of “a Catholic modernity” in his Marianist Award Lecture delivered at the University of Dayton in 1996. Using the historical example of early modern Jesuit missionaries involved in the Chinese rites controversy over Catholic accommodation of Confucian practices, Taylor explored the prospect of faith within modern secular society. His ambivalent philosophical stance toward modern liberal culture permeates his iconic lecture and his genealogical oeuvres, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. On the one hand, the break from medieval Christendom facilitated an expansion of the gospel’s incarnational ethic through universal solidarity and human dignity; on the other hand, the modern repudiation of God reduces human freedom and flourishing to goods of this world. Modern identity concerns self-actualization and self-expression rather than the self-transcendence and self-denial of religious traditions.
Whereas Taylor views modern disenchantment as a kind of “spiritual lobotomy,” theologian William Cavanaugh vividly describes the “misenchantment” of worshiping earthly things in modern societies. Religious devotion, Cavanaugh argues, has not disappeared but has instead migrated to economic, cultural, and political ambitions. Cultivating a religious sense of sacramentality has the power to reenchant our experience of the world without idolizing it or evacuating the divine from it. Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry, the featured book of our Dolan Seminar in American Religion, provides a model of cross-disciplinary inquiry that widens and reframes our conversation about secular modernity.
The discussion of Catholic modernity for the Dolan Seminar and our conference is less about how Catholicism should accommodate to the modern world and more about exploring the internal limits, uncomfortable entanglements, critical contestations, and overlooked possibilities of faith under and after modernity. From this vantage point, modernity is not conceived as a monolith but as multiform. Eminent scholar José Casanova, a returning speaker to the Cushwa Center, has charted this terrain of public religion and multiple modernities across hemispheres north and south, east and west. His keynote lecture at the conference is sure to illuminate our understanding of the complex history of globalization and Catholicism in the Americas.
With about half of the world’s one billion plus Catholics inhabiting this side of the Atlantic today, the demographic transition from Western Europe to the Americas as the center of the global Church invites reconsideration of a Catholic modernity. The Catholic Church in the Americas is not a mere projection of European culture, but a unique forging of faith constituted by the region’s specific histories, peoples, and geographies.
The emergence of Pope Francis, a Latin American Jesuit born of Italian immigrants who chose a radical medieval lover of poverty and creation as his namesake, reflects a Catholic modernity in the Americas. Pope Francis and other Latin American thinkers have described their diverse continent, despite its violent colonial history, in terms of a “baroque” or “enchanted” modernity open to the transcendent through architecture, creation, and everyday life (lo cotidiano), very different from a liberal and Enlightenment modernity centered on accumulation of wealth and material progress. The conference banquet address by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell will indeed capture and explore for us a key example from the modern Ignatian spirit of “finding God in all things” through the poetic imagination.
Another prominent example of Catholic modernity in the Americas since the Second Vatican Council has been the theology of liberation. A theology of encountering God in the poor and dispossessed of society became a vibrant global conversation during the last half century. Spanning across the global South and into North American Black theology, Latin American liberation theology initiated rich discourse about political agency and structural inequality across disciplines while inspiring U.S. Latine theology and eco-theology.
The Peruvian who famously articulated liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P., interpreted modern social realities through a living tradition of religious sources, beginning with the Bible and the faith of the poor. Liberation theology took a critical stance toward modernity, contrasting itself with both progressive liberal theology and the new political theology in 20th-century Western Europe. Catalyzed at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, liberation theology also continued the unfinished ecclesial task of Vatican II by focusing on the evangelical power of the poor in history rather than evangelization of secular nonbelievers. Padre Gustavo practiced what he preached by serving an impoverished parish community in Lima while teaching in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame for nearly two decades. Although his death this past October 22 marks the sorrowful end of a most prolific and generous life (and the beginning of a new one in the birth of my son Oscar!), it also represents a timely moment to return to the past in search of a Catholic modernity.
David Lantigua
William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Co-Director
This director’s note appears in the spring 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.