The Cushwa Center has been celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, which brought the great successes of the 13th triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious and the Catholic Modernity in the Americas conference. With early and senior scholars and practitioners coming to South Bend from across the Global North and Global South, the Cushwa Center continues to expand its local, regional, and international network. Its co-directors and staff were humbled and inspired by the overwhelming response of gratitude and support for the conferences from veteran and new members.
The interdisciplinary, transatlantic, and hemispheric dimensions of both conferences were a tribute to the legacy of the study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame. Building on that legacy, we are advancing the historical and theological study of American Catholicism through a new Gustavo Gutiérrez Research Award and a new Undergraduate Research and Writing Prize.
The loss of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV, a Chicagoan with Peruvian citizenship, signal that American Catholicism in the 21st century has become a historical and pastoral source for the global Catholic Church. American Catholicism, with one large foot in the global South and the other in the North, stands out in sheer numbers with about 660 million baptized members. That means nearly half of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics live in América today. Of the top five countries in the world having the largest Catholic population, three are on the American continent (Brazil, Mexico, and the United States).
It may seem a misnomer to refer to a single America that includes North and South, but that is precisely how the global Catholic Church and the Roman papacy have long understood the “New World.” When Pope John Paul II wrote a letter to each continent at the end of the second millennium, he intentionally referred to the Church in America. “The decision to speak of ‘America’ in the singular,” he explained, “was an attempt to express not only the unity which in some way already exists, but also to point to that closer bond which the peoples of the continent seek and which the Church wishes to foster as part of her own mission, as she works to promote the communion of all in the Lord” (Ecclesia in America, no. 5).
That bond and unity have become quite evident in Francis and now Leo. The American popes were born and raised in the suburbs of two major cities, comparable in size, which saw large immigrant Catholic populations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both witnessed the power of immigrant faith and the allure of practical atheism in a modern worldly metropolis. Those immigrant communities, sustained by a concrete faith of daily devotions and working-class perseverance, often experienced the brunt of wealth inequality on the economic underside of majestic skyscrapers and Parisian-style affluence.
Recognizing the invisible and excluded members of society has emerged as a pattern between these American missionary popes intimately familiar with the faith of migrant peoples on the move who do not conform to the “true” people or “pure” nation. While Francis spoke of the value of cultural mestizaje—the bringing together, sometimes forcibly, sometimes organically, of different races, languages, and ethnicities to forge a new people—Leo XIV is the direct result of that phenomenon, or creolization, on the American continent. Historically, Our Lady of Guadalupe remains the enduring mestizo icon and symbol of “reconciled diversity” in América. The Argentine tango and New Orleans jazz, familiar to both popes, capture an original spirit born of mixing dance and musical styles. Leo’s diverse background, as attested by Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s interest in the new pope’s family tree, includes French, Canadian, Cuban, Spanish, Italian, Haitian, and African roots.
This issue’s feature articles—each originating from our 50th anniversary conference this past April—address in distinctive ways the delicate theme of cultural mixing on the “modern” American continent, from the 16th to the 21st centuries. Maria Cecilia Ulrickson takes up and complicates José Casanova’s brilliant keynote address on phases of globalization in the Americas by looking beyond the Jesuit ecclesial network of global exchange to consider the complicated contribution of African Catholics, enslaved and free. Nayeli Riano examines two Latin American intellectuals and their respective categories of “myth” and “spirit” to delineate not a counter-modern project but a critical modernity focused on reenchanting life and society within and without Catholic culture. Pablo Forni introduces us to the Argentine theological context that shaped Pope Francis’s distinctive pastoral style of engaging the popular wisdom of peoples—often poor migrants at the margins of society—as a resource for renewing the cultural life of Catholicism after modernity. Our 50th anniversary conference demonstrated, in various ways, just how complex, constrained, contested, and liberating modern Catholic cultures have been throughout the more than 500 years of América.
David Lantigua
William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Co-Director
This director’s note appears in the fall 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.