Conference celebrates 50th anniversary

The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism presented their 50th anniversary conference, “Catholic Modernity and the Americas,” from April 10-12. Over 60 presentations addressed the historical and contemporary practice of Catholicism in the Western Hemisphere. 

Founded in 1975, the Cushwa Center “strives to deepen the understanding of Catholics’ historical role and contemporary expressions of their religious tradition in the United States” through academic discussion and publication, as stated by the Center’s website. 

David Lantigua, associate theology professor and the Cushwa Co-Director, told the Rover that the Center “wanted to think about this conference as an opportunity to both honor the important history of the Cushwa Center as well as begin to chart an exciting future.” Drawing inspiration from Charles Taylor’s 1996 lecture titled “A Catholic Modernity,” the conference focused on orienting Catholic practices within the contemporary, secular societies of North and South America. 

The conference began with an opening Mass, offered for the repose of the soul of Jay Dolan, Cushwa Center founder. Father Bill Miscamble, C.S.C. presided. “[The conference] was an opportunity to reflect in very thoughtful ways on the challenges and accomplishments of our Catholic faith across the Western hemisphere,” he told the Rover. “It was clear that all the participants derived much intellectual stimulation from their involvement.”

Panel sessions covered an extensive range of topics, including “Catholicism, Gender, and Family”; “Progressivism and Catholic Education”; and “Migration and Church Bureaucracy.” Consistent with the focus of the conference, presenters and scholars from Mexico City, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Canada, and across the United States were in attendance. Speakers from Dublin, Paris, and Rome were also present. 

Andrea Aguilar, a freshman studying accounting and Spanish, found the panel on “Eugenics, Birth Control, and Medical Authority in Modern Mexico” to be especially intriguing. The research presented the prevalence of hormonal birth control in Mexico’s rural women as a result of conflicting cultural practices and lack of information. 

“Topics like these are not typically covered in Notre Dame classrooms,” Aguilar explained. “These topics are important because they can prevent future conflicts between church and state over moral matters that the [Roman Catholic Church] has stances on. It is also helpful in examining why current attitudes in Latin America, mainly Mexico, are the way they are now.” 

The conference also attracted students from beyond Notre Dame. Eliza Davis, a history and political science major at Notre Dame of Maryland, was moved by the specificity and depth of the topics covered. 

“The sessions I attended were impactful because they discussed prominent social issues and connected these themes to religion and history,” Davis told the Rover. “I felt that these presentations uncovered a lot of history that still impacts marginalized communities today and is largely not recognized by larger groups of people, which helped spark interesting discussion and enlightenment regarding forgotten history,” she said.

Lantigua emphasized the importance of investigating the impact of Western culture on modern Catholic practices. “The Catholic Church in the Americas is not a mere projection of European culture, but a unique forging of the faith constituted by the region’s specific histories, peoples, and geographies,” he explained. “It is not just the ideas and debates about what it means to be Catholic in a historically Protestant (and anti-Catholic) country that matter, but also the faith and practices of the people in the pews, women and children, who are adjusting to a rapidly changing, and sometimes very unwelcoming world.”

Dennis J. Wieboldt III, Notre Dame JD and PhD history student, gave a presentation titled “No Wall Between God and Child: Catholic Litigators Confront American Constitutional Modernity.” The discussion centered around Everson v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court case that made the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment applicable against the states. 

Wiebolt described to the Rover how this case surfaced tensions surrounding the role of individual families in their children’s religious formation versus that of the government, saying, “[My presentation] revealed that the Church’s public spokesmen increasingly framed debates about parochial school aid after Everson as implicating the constitutional rights of American parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children in order to undercut claims that government aid to parochial schools would perniciously enrich the [Roman] Catholic hierarchy.”

Another presentation, delivered by Notre Dame JD candidate Mintae Cha, was titled “Trouble with Tocqueville: Protestants Debate the Relationship Between Democracy and Catholicism,” focused on the compatibility of Roman Catholicism with modern democracy. Striving to deliver a nuanced account of the contemporary relationship between Catholicism and politics, he told the Rover how many conversations on this topic become enmeshed in divisive language, saying, “This intra-debate about the compatibility between Catholicism and democracy became a site in which anti-Catholic tropes met with American partisan ideologies.”

“This conference’s topic on Catholic Modernity in the Americas was very capacious and covered an enormous range of topics on Catholicism in the Americas—both North and South,” Fr. Miscamble added. “It was an opportunity to reflect in very thoughtful ways on the challenges and accomplishments of our Catholic faith across the Western hemisphere.”

The Cushwa Center anticipates implementing another major conference focusing on Catholicism, authoritarianism, and democracy in America. “This theme is ripe for our political moment today, where Catholics are at odds about how to envision a society grappling with its modern liberal origins,” Lantigua told the Rover. 

The Center will host their triennial “Conference on the History of Women Religious: Lives and Archives” this summer, and is organizing a symposium on land and labor in modern Catholic Social Teaching for the upcoming academic year. 

Lantigua encourages undergraduate students to connect with the Cushwa Center, and hopes to integrate the Notre Dame undergraduate community into the Center’s events. 

Madeline Page is a freshman studying biology, and a Catholic living in modernity. She enjoys contemplating transubstantiation and theology of the body, but struggles to interpret contemporary slang. To tutor her in how to be more sigma, email mpage4@nd.edu. 

Photo Credit: Cushwa Center

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