Just days before more than a dozen scholars convened in Rome for a symposium on the Catholic social tradition (CST), the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. The timing gave fresh urgency to the conversations about to unfold over three days.
The research symposium, titled “Modern Catholic Social Teaching in the American Anthropocene: Theological and Historical Perspectives on Labor and Land,” opened at Notre Dame Rome on June 3, 2026, with remarks from co-conveners David Lantigua (Notre Dame) and Susanna De Stradis (Mississippi State). Bringing together historians and theologians, the gathering invited participants to consider how CST has developed over time and how it has been received and interpreted in the Americas. Lantigua and De Stradis welcomed the interdisciplinary sessions ahead, including a scheduled visit to the Laudato Si’ Village in Castel Gandolfo, where Pope Francis’s own contributions to CST are vividly present.
The discussion began in earnest with a roundtable featuring David Cloutier (Notre Dame), Christine Firer Hinze (Fordham), Sarah Shortall (Notre Dame), and Paolo Valvo (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan). The relationship between theology and history was raised as a critical question for CST interpretation today—one the symposium was uniquely positioned to address. Firer Hinze reflected on the ways the two disciplines can benefit one another. Theological ethics inattentive to history is “like a skeleton without flesh,” she said. Shortall added that historians can offer a “long-term perspective” that can reveal the contingency and relative novelty of some current preoccupations in the Church, whether in relation to politics or certain assumptions about “the way things are.” Historians’ work shows that systems have beginnings and ends, helping theologians and the Church to take the long view even as they respond to particular crises and challenges. Cloutier, Firer Hinze, and Valvo each emphasized the importance of personal conversion in order for CST to be effective in response to today’s challenges. Forming everyday Catholics to understand the tradition and its implications for their own lives is, they argued, the work of scholars as well.
(Latin) American sources and reception
Throughout the symposium, panelists considered 20th-century Latin America as a “crucible” for Catholic social thought. The political, economic, and environmental crises brought on by neo-colonialism proved a critical testing ground for Catholic action and the theological developments tied to it. Lantigua explored the recent turn in CST to a positive view of “revolution,” a striking development for a tradition that took shape in large part through Catholic responses to the political and social upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries. Lantigua connected the revolutionary language of Pope Francis to the life of St. Francis of Assisi and the “mendicant revolution” he spurred. This evangelical revolution was simple, poor, and thus prophetic. Lantigua argued that Vatican II is likewise rightly read as a milestone for the Church’s teaching on the poor. While not prominent in the documents of the Council, the plight of the poor was a central theme for many bishops, as evidenced by Cardinal Giacomo Lercaro’s intervention and the Pact of the Catacombs—a 1965 commitment by some 40 bishops embracing simplicity, voluntary poverty, and justice for the poor. During and after the Council, Latin American bishops took seriously the commitment to a relectura (rereading) of the Gospel in light of contemporary realities, Lantigua said. The Argentinian teología del pueblo that developed after Vatican II emphasizes the agency of the poor rooted in the life and culture of the people. This grounds Francis’s support for the nonviolent, revolutionary struggle of the poor against the contemporary tyranny of money.
During a question-and-answer session, Austen Ivereigh (Campion Hall, Oxford) drew attention to how Pope Francis often described the contemporary moment as a “change of era.” Looking to the Latin American episcopal conference at Aparecida in 2007, Ivereigh suggested that “cambio de época” refers to moments in which technological changes are so powerful that existing cultures cannot absorb them. Those cultures are drastically changed, replaced, or lost as a result. For Ivereigh, this sheds light on Francis’s deep concern for culture throughout his encyclicals in response to the technocratic paradigm, as well as an apparent shift in recent encyclicals’ intended audience. In an age of global superpowers, Francis’s encyclicals, as well as Leo XIV’s, seem substantially intended for ordinary people. While global elites are certainly addressed in these documents, Francis’s hope for grassroots activism and popular movements is evidenced by his encyclicals’ noticeable turn to the people.
Ricardo Cubas Ramacciotti (Universidad de los Andes) presented Peru as a case study in the modern anthropologies that coincided with the social turmoil to which the Latin American bishops responded. The loss of legal protections for Indigenous collective personalities and communal lands during the move to liberal republican order paved the way for a “progressivist” paradigm at the turn of the 20th century. The effects on Indigenous and agrarian communities led to a search for solutions on the part of bishops and Catholic intellectuals. Bishops worked to organize social movements, and Catholic intellectuals such as Víctor Andrés Belaúnde saw the possibility of a “living synthesis” of Peru’s various histories in a common reality to which Christians could respond together.
Jaime Pensado (Notre Dame) showed how overlapping struggles across Latin American countries engendered a broader continental identity under the concept of the “Patria Grande” in the 1960s. This identity was marked by a movement away from European ideas to distinctly Latin American ones formed by grassroots political action and concerted ecclesial efforts to make sense of that action in light of the Gospel.
The process of identity formation was crystallized in the art of the period, as Stephen Andes (Bushnell) showed in his comparative analysis of St. Clair Bourne’s Let the Church Say Amen!, a documentary-style film about a Black church organizing in Atlanta during the Civil Rights Movement, and Aldo Francia’s Ya no basta con rezar, a feature film about a fictionalized priest’s conversion to the cause of liberation in the port city of Valparaíso, Chile. Each centers on a clerical protagonist struggling with the tension between his ecclesial position and his concrete historical circumstances. Both films evidence a “politics of contestation” entailed in maintaining or shifting ecclesial identities in times of social upheaval. However, the heart of the conflict is often largely intra-ecclesial. Who are we as a church? What matters to us and how will we respond? The ideological urgency of the Cold War fueled Church conflicts, but they nonetheless remained mostly in-house affairs, surrounding ethical/moral disagreements, generational differences, and the role of the religious institution in this-worldly affairs.
Ecology and land
Questions regarding the Anthropocene—a term for the planetary condition in which human activity has destabilized the relatively stable environment of the Holocene, posing serious ecological, political, economic, and ethical challenges—loomed large throughout the symposium. What has the Catholic Church’s social tradition taught about addressing climate change, and what does the still-worsening climate crisis teach about the possibilities and limitations of CST? Brad Gregory (Notre Dame) raised such questions through an analysis of the reception of Laudato Si’ and climate trends that have only progressed since its publication. Gregory reads Laudate Deum as a sobering point of reflection for CST enthusiasts, an intensified cry for change in a world that has yet to listen. Gregory concluded with further questions: What can CST accomplish? And what does the virtue of hope look like in the Anthropocene?
In his presentation, Matthew Whelan (Duke) offered a kind of response to Gregory’s through the life of Dorothy Stang. Her work in Brazil exemplified an alternative vision of land reform in response to the concentration of land ownership and extractive agricultural practices harming vulnerable communities. Stang modeled “integral agroecology,” a common use politics of land that extends beyond land access to promote human and environmental flourishing. Whelan argued that the mere redistribution of land fails to adequately respond to the sustainability crisis in Latin America and elsewhere. For Stang and others across Latin America, collective practices of sustainability such as cooperatives and communal organizations served as schools of solidarity ordered to sustainable forms of social life. Stang’s example highlights the need for more attention to the human relationship to land in the CST’s anthropological vision: “The death of the forest is the end of our lives” read one of Stang’s T-shirts.
Creation and creativity
CST must continue to take seriously the role of Creation in living a truly human life, as Liam de los Reyes (Mount Angel Seminary) also brought to the fore. De los Reyes explored CST’s vision of human ecological governance through a contrast between exploitative domination and dominion ordered to the good of all Creation. Does the biblical imperative to till and keep the earth inevitably lead to human domination? In Laudato Si’, Francis does not deny the unique role of human beings in governing the created order. Francis’s focus on human dominion, de los Reyes argued, is a response to God’s command that contradicts and counteracts the domination paradigm. This dominion entails the exercise of human capacities to understand the good and order the world. It necessarily involves the prudent development of the human world by the many. It calls forth our social and political capacities, requiring humble participation in the created order.
The theme of humility before Creation was also developed by Nichole Flores (Virginia), who highlighted the role of human creativity in CST’s anthropological vision. In response to the technocratic paradigm and the emergence of AI, recent popes have increasingly called for slow attention to the world around us and to what makes us human. Taking the time to develop and express human creativity is not just for the prodigy or the virtuoso. It is essential to our humanity, and serves as an embodied formation that allows us to respond to the extractive and efficiency-oriented forces of our time. Creativity helps us to realize the anthropological vision laid out in CST as it enables us to tap into the poetic dimensions of the human experience that set us apart from effective algorithms and fast production “AI slop.”
The human person
Elisabeth Kincaid (Baylor) similarly called for a new look at the way CST, and particularly Leo XIII, develops a vision of the human person that integrates work and leisure, as well as family, religion, and public life. She called out a tendency in business ethics to reference seemingly disconnected themes from CST when applicable, leaving learners with a flat understanding of rather abstract ideas that apply to distinct arenas of activity: Some pertain to business, others to personal life. She proposed a return to Leo XIII’s corpus beyond Rerum Novarum for insights into bridging this divide. As Leo XIII responds to the Enlightenment and its outworkings, he diagnoses its totalizing tendency. The Enlightenment and laïcité are not limited to public life while religion is safe in the private sphere. Rather, Leo XIII sees that modern ideologies aim to encompass every aspect of human life. In response, he argues that the Church does not take up space in a societal sense, but an anthropological one. Christianity must present itself as an ethic that extends across all arenas of life and work. A return to the origins of Catholicism’s modern social tradition might help to retrieve these essential connecting threads.
History and theology
To close the symposium, participants reflected on their takeaways from the presentations and discussions. Sarah Shortall commended the benefits of interdisciplinary discussion, while pointing out methodological differences in the disciplines’ respective approaches to CST that ought to be further interrogated. She noticed a tendency among the historians to emphasize a variety of sources from film to popular movements, while theologians were more conversant with magisterial papal teaching, even as they were willing to dialogue with other sources and experiences. She pointed out the need for more work to discern the precise relationship between magisterial documents and other sources engaging social questions, such as social movements or popular art. In other words, she asked, “How faithfully does papal teaching reflect these more local, grassroots forms of engagement, and how exactly do these two kinds of sources relate to one another?”
Participants also noted that the anthropology that runs throughout CST remained a central point of discussion. CST insists on the inseparably social and transcendent dimensions of the human person. It also provides tools for speaking clearly into historical circumstances: economic, technological, political, and environmental. As recent encyclicals have turned to address the people in the pews, the popes are reminding everyday Catholics what it means to be human when other forces are (implicitly or explicitly) communicating a different anthropology: that to be human is to dominate nature, to maximize efficiency and productivity, and to be an individual maximally independent from others. CST today responds to an era of technocracy. It reminds humans of our dependence on God, on one another, and on Creation. Matthew Whelan added that when CST engages with multiple disciplines and perspectives, those perspectives are “capable of disclosing dimensions of the human that might otherwise remain hidden from a single disciplinary vantage alone.”
The group discussed how, even with its turn to the grassroots and to Catholics in the pews, current CST certainly does not ignore political and corporate leaders. CST reminds them that our future depends upon their decision-making as well, and that those who hold power (increasingly, heads of companies as much as heads of state) hold much sway over our ability to exercise our distinctively human capacities. It reminds the powerful that the poor, whose faces they may never encounter and whose stories they may never hear, are most impacted by their decisions. In an era of multinational corporations, with each of the “Magnificent Seven” holding more capital than most national GDPs, participants agreed that the Church also stands in a unique position to speak to the issues of the day. They discussed a widespread eagerness for a moral authority that transcends national borders just as such corporations do.
Thus, as Brad Gregory provocatively asked on the opening day of presentations, “What can CST do?” Pontifical documents rarely make detailed policy recommendations, and they garner much criticism when they do. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV does not propose a concrete, multi-step plan. The symposium’s scholars identified this as a rather intentional choice given the principles and commitments central to CST itself. Subsidiarity and the agency of persons are emphasized in the tradition’s documents and in their grassroots reception. In an era of polarization and great uncertainty about the future, CST offers a social, ecological, and historically conscious anthropology necessary for measured discernment about contemporary challenges. This is a real and valuable intervention on the part of the popes, but requires that scholars across disciplines work together to communicate the tradition, both written and lived, more broadly to everyday Catholics and others so that it can have a sustained impact. As Matthew Whelan reflected on the benefits of the symposium’s discussion for this kind of work, he remarked that the conference’s interdisciplinary character was not simply methodological: “It pointed toward a richer vision of Catholic social teaching itself: a living tradition, attentive to history, open to new forms of knowledge, and increasingly capable of understanding the human within the wider community of life upon which we depend.”
Katherine Mascari is a doctoral student in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a graduate research assistant at the Cushwa Center.