The Pope Speaks to U.S. Hispanic Theologians
Plus: Francis Speaks to the G7 About AI, and the First Applications of the New Norms on Apparitions
Recent popes have not hesitated to offer their vision for the discipline of theology. For example, Pope John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, building on the Anselmian dictum that theology is “faith seeking understanding,” offers a moving account of theology and its relationship to philosophy. In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, his 1990 apostolic constitution on the mission of Catholic universities, he likewise discussed the place of theology among the other disciplines. Pope Benedict XVI, of course, was unique among modern popes in having lived out the vocation of a theologian prior to his election to the papacy, and he expressed his views on the discipline in works such as Introduction to Christianity and Principles of Catholic Theology. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger had an outsized influence on the field of theology, and, as pope, he continued to speak on the nature of the discipline in various documents and addresses.
Until recently, Pope Francis had, for the most part, made only occasional remarks on theology. Last November, however, he issued the apostolic letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam, revising the statutes of the Pontifical Academy of Theology (PATH), which outlined his vision of the method for doing theology. The letter drew on the overlooked 2018 apostolic constitution Veritatis Gaudium, which had revised the norms for ecclesiastical faculties and universities. I summarized and contextualized Francis’s vision for theology here. Ad Theologiam Promovendam, unlike the earlier document, received a great deal of attention, much of it positive, but critics also challenged the letter, particularly Francis’s call for “contextual” theology. I explained and addressed these criticisms here.
Francis continued this engagement with the field of theology in a more personal way early this June with a video message delivered to the participants of the 2024 Colloquium of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS), who were gathered at Boston College. As Francis mentions at the beginning of his remarks, he sent the message in response to an invitation from ACHTUS’s president, Ahida Pilarski, a biblical scholar at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The theme of the ACHTUS Colloquium was “Synodality En Conjunto: The People of God, the Bible, and Theology,” a theme which Pope Francis praised as “beautiful.” As an expression of synodality, the Colloquium participants offered responses to the five priorities proposed in the North American Continental Document produced during the synodal process in 2023: 1) the integration of synodal consultation in local Churches; 2) welcoming those who feel excluded from participation in the life of the Church; 3) co-responsibility; 4) addressing the unity and communion of the Church in the midst of polarization and division; and 5) a Church that goes out to the peripheries. In Ad Theologiam Promovendam, Francis had also called for a more synodal approach to theology, which he describes as one in which theologians dialogue and listen to one another, recognizing each other’s distinct contributions in a spirit of fraternity. In my commentary on that document, I mentioned the method of teología en conjunto practiced by ACHTUS, and many U.S. Hispanic/Latinx theologians more generally, as an example of what a more synodal theology could look like.
Francis’s remarks focused on what he considered the distinctive contributions of U.S. Hispanic theology. He proposed that it could embody synodality in a particular way by building bridges between North and South, that is, the cultures and ecclesial experiences of North America and Latin America. He also suggested that U.S. Hispanic/Latinx theologians should continue to give voice to the dignity of migrants making their way from the South to the North, and to reflect on the faith of migrants. This latter point, however, needs to be heard in the context that, as of 2021, 68 percent of U.S. Hispanics are native born rather than immigrants (as opposed to, say, Asian Americans, among whom only 43 percent are native born). In other words, for a growing number of U.S. Hispanics, immigration is not part of their direct experience, even if it is often an integral part of their shared community identity through the experiences of parents, grandparents, cousins, neighbors, and fellow churchgoers. In that light, theologians like Roberto Goizueta have proposed the “border” as an important part of U.S. Hispanic identity with theological significance, whether through the experience of migrating across borders or living at the border of multiple cultures.
Francis called on the theologians of ACHTUS to “do theology with your head, with your heart, and with your hands,” a pithy summary of his description of theology in Ad Theologiam Promovendam. Of course, doing theology with one’s head means exploring the faith with intellectual rigor and in dialogue with other disciplines. Doing theology with one’s heart is similar to what Francis refers to as the “sapiential” dimension of theology, that it should arise out of prayer and care for the world and its wounds. And doing theology with one’s hands means that it must be conducted in response to the concrete context, or, as Francis says in his remarks to the members of ACHTUS, theologians, like the Church, must go out to the margins.
The week after addressing the theologians gathered for the ACHTUS Colloquium, Pope Francis traveled to the seaside resort of Borgo Egnazia in the Apulia region of Italy for the G7 summit, where he addressed world leaders on the topic of artificial intelligence. It’s worthwhile to just savor the strangeness of that sentence for a moment, but it is truly a sign of the times that in recent years the Vatican has become a voice of moral authority on the ethical problems raised by artificial intelligence. As I’ve noted before, in 2020 the Pontifical Academy for Life held a gathering in the Vatican that led to the creation of the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a set of ethical guidelines for the development of artificial intelligence technologies. Tech giants Microsoft and IBM were among the initial supporters of the Rome Call.
Pope Francis’s address at the G7 did not break new ground; it repeats themes he had already raised in earlier addresses, like a 2023 speech given as part of the Minerva Dialogues sponsored by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, and his World Day of Peace message given earlier this year, which I discussed here. In his G7 address, Pope Francis discussed the uniqueness of the human capacity for decision-making, which requires virtues like prudence. We should not hand to machines, no matter how intelligent they may seem, the ability to make choices that impact human well-being; humans should always have the final decision.
What was truly distinctive about Francis’s address was the audience. Although popes have occasionally addressed the United Nations and met with world leaders on countless occasions, it was truly remarkable that Francis—who was invited to the event by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Miloni—was able to speak to some of the world’s most powerful political leaders about matters of technology and ethics in such a direct way. His address also comes at a time when the calls for government regulation of AI are getting stronger. It is encouraging that world leaders are inviting input from thoughtful, ethical voices like Pope Francis’s on such an important issue.
In May, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published a new set of norms for investigating alleged supernatural apparitions and visions. At the time, I discussed these new norms and some of the theological issues they raise here in the newsletter. Only a surprisingly short time later, on June 27, the Vatican announced the conclusion of the first investigation of an apparition to which the new norms had been applied. The DDF ruled that alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary which appeared to a woman named Gisella Cardia in the town of Trevignano Romano, near Rome, were “not supernatural.” This conclusion confirmed the finding of the local bishop, Marco Salvi of Civita Castellana. As I noted in my commentary, for the first time, the new norms require the DDF to assess the results of an initial investigation by the local bishop, and in this case (and hopefully what is usually the case), the bishop and the DDF were in accord.
The details of this case are remarkable. In 2014, Cardia and her husband Gianni brought home an image of Our Lady of Peace from Medjugorje, Bosnia, the site of a well-known apparition of Mary whose status in the eyes of the Vatican is itself ambiguous and unresolved. Cardia claims that in 2016, the image began shedding tears of blood, and that she receives monthly messages from the Virgin. As word spread, locals, including priests, began gathering to pray and hear the latest message at a nearby chapel built for that purpose, and the Cardias established a nonprofit organization and began accepting donations to fund these activities. This aroused the suspicion of local authorities, who opened a fraud investigation into the couple. Private investigators allegedly discovered that the blood present on the image was in fact pig’s blood and presented this evidence to the police, although it’s not clear if ecclesial authorities also had access to this evidence.
Then, just earlier this week, the DDF announced the results of a second investigation, into apparitions allegedly received by Pierina Gilli in the northern Italian province of Brescia in 1947 and 1966. In this case, the DDF concluded that the experiences recounted by Gilli did not include theological or moral elements contrary to the doctrine of the Church, and that the alleged apparition had encouraged positive spiritual and pastoral fruits among the faithful. Although not using this language, the DDF’s letter seemed to be offering a nihil obstat for the apparition, or in other words, it concludes that nothing stands in the way of the faithful offering devotion to the apparition. This confirmed the judgment of the bishop of Brescia, made in 2019. In her appearances to Gilli, Mary allegedly called for veneration of herself under the title of “Mystical Rose,” and encouraged the faithful to prayer and penance.
As I noted in my commentary, the new norms propose that apparitions and visions should be assessed based on their positive elements, which include the doctrinal orthodoxy of the experiences or messages, the lack of natural explanation, and spiritual fruits arising from the apparition, as well as on negative elements like evidence of fraud, natural explanations for the events, and doctrinal errors, among others, that would call into question the supernatural character of the apparition. One of the most notable aspects of the new norms is that they, for the most part, eschew the ability to definitively rule that a phenomenon is supernatural; they instead suggest that the most that can be said is that, in light of the positive elements associated with an alleged apparition, there are no negative elements that create obstacles for believing that the event is supernatural in character.
For the first time, the new norms also provided for six distinct conclusions to an investigation, reflecting the potential complexities and ambiguities involved in assessing supernatural phenomena. It’s interesting, then, that first two rulings given under these new norms involved the most definitive of these six possible conclusions, at each end of the spectrum: the first was a definitive rejection of the supernatural character of the apparitions, the second a judgment encouraging, without reservation, devotion to the apparition. We should watch for the first ruling from the DDF that involves one of the other four possible outcomes, which I outlined in my commentary.
Coming Soon…
Earlier this week, the Vatican published the Instrumentum Laboris, or working document, written in preparation for October’s second session of the Synodal Assembly. The document is a synthesis of responses the Synod Secretariat received from 108 of the 114 bishops’ conferences worldwide addressing the question, “How to be a synodal church in mission?” I hope to provide a commentary on the working document very soon.
This week I offered some brief reflections on some recent events that were related to themes I’ve covered extensively in Window Light: Pope Francis’s message to ACHTUS, his address on AI at the G7 summit, and the conclusion of the first two Vatican investigations of apparitions under new norms. There are a few more recent events I’d also like to get to, perhaps in an upcoming post for paid subscribers: the DDF’s excommunication of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for schism; the removal, and later return, of indigenous religious artwork from a church in New Mexico; and a decision by the Bishop of Lourdes to eventually remove mosaics by the Jesuit artist Marko Rupnik, who has been credibly accused of sexually abusing a number of women.
This summer, I want to make some improvements to Window Light, and the first will be transitioning to Substack’s podcast feature for the interviews that I occasionally publish in the newsletter. I think posting the interviews as podcast episodes will make them easier for people to access and listen to. This transition will begin by re-publishing past interviews as podcast episodes, perhaps one per week in the next few weeks. The podcast episodes will be available at the web site for Window Light, but I will also make sure they are published on Apple and Spotify for readers who access podcasts through those apps. I will offer more detailed instructions for accessing the interviews when the time comes, but that’s something to look forward to in the coming days. And all future interviews will be published as new episodes of the podcast.