Dear Faculty and Staff,

I join with our campus community in mourning Pope Francis, who passed away the day after Easter.

As I reflect on Pope Francis’s legacy and think about what his papacy meant for our little corner of the world, I wonder how we might characterize his influence on academics, especially in the AJCU. For an answer, I turn to two of our own faculty in Religious Studies. 

Here is what Assistant Professor Elyse Raby, a distinguished ecclesiologist, notes about Pope Francis’s papacy: 

In November 2023, Pope Francis wrote a letter “On Promoting Theology” in which he urged theologians to not be confined to their ivory towers or settle for “a desk theology,” but, like good pastors, to “smell of the people and of the street” and ground their work in the “wounds of humanity.” (§3–4) Francis also insisted that theology be fundamentally contextual—in dialogue with diverse geographical, social, cultural, and religious environments and with other non-theological disciplines. Our own Religious Studies department has long been committed to just this kind of contextual and interdisciplinary study of religion and theology.

That 2023 document echoed a key phrase that Pope Francis used throughout his papacy—“realities are more important than ideas.” All scholarly work—in the humanities, the arts, the sciences, and beyond—must be grounded in concrete realities and be “at the service of communication, understanding, and praxis” (Evangelii Gaudium 232). Pope Francis’s vision affirms SCU’s mission and vision of putting knowledge, education, and scholarship at the service of building a more humane, just, and sustainable world.

Professor Raby’s department colleague, Assistant Professor Nicholas Hayes-Mota, offered these reflections:

One of the central themes of Pope Francis’s papacy, which he drew from the Second Vatican Council, was dialogue. In Evangelii Gaudium, the 2013 document he used to frame the agenda of his papacy, Francis explained why he saw it as so important. On the one hand, each of us only grasps the truth from a particular “place” or location; though we do encounter reality, we never encounter it in the abstract. On the other hand, for this very reason, our understanding of reality is always limited and partial. It is a grave mistake to respond to this limitation by trying to “uproot” ourselves from our particularity: this is not only impossible, but misguided, since it is our particularity that enables depth and specificity of insight into truth. Instead, our task is to continually expand and integrate our perspectives through ever widening dialogue with others–especially those society tends to marginalize or overlook. Our model here, Francis was fond of saying, should be a polyhedron: a shape which “reflects the convergence of all its parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness” (Evangelii Gaudium 236).

For Francis, this image of a polyhedron, constructed through dialogue, was a metaphor for the pursuit of the common good, a cardinal principle of Catholic Social Teaching and a core value of our University. Francis saw dialogue as essential to the life of the church, and sought to institutionalize it at every level through the “synodality” he made a pillar of his papacy. In the world, he championed dialogue across every kind of difference as the foundation of social peace and the “better kind of politics” he called for (Fratelli Tutti, Chapter 5). Yet Francis also sought to foster dialogue between faith and reason, and among the diverse ways of human knowing and acting, on the grounds that only through dialogue of this kind would humanity have any hope of addressing the many serious global challenges we face today (Laudato Si, Chapter 5).

I am not a member of the religious studies faculty, but my academic work has also been influenced by Pope Francis, who had an enormous effect on my feelings and hopes as a professor of environmental studies. In 2015, I was in Paris for the climate talks, also commonly referred to as COP 21. There had been many climate meetings before 2015 and there have been many since, but there was a special feeling in Paris that year. An unprecedented number of world leaders, including President Obama, came to the talks and it seemed that real progress was possible. And then comes Laudato Sí, Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, with a special focus on climate change.

I was part of a group of University of California faculty attending COP 21 as a delegation. We were also writing on how California could “bend the curve” of climate emissions. One member of the UC delegation, my colleague from UC San Diego, Veerabhadran Ramanathan—as ardent and articulate a climate scientist as you could find—spoke movingly of his interactions with Pope Francis and his thoughts about climate and justice.

Through Dr. Ramanathan’s connections, I was invited by Fr. Marcelo Sanchéz Sorondo, then Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, to meet and hear how Laudato Sí and scientific research could be combined in influential, inspiring ways. 

Those of us in the environmental science and policy community who had been sounding the alarm for decades suddenly had an inspiring, influential leader and ally in Pope Francis. His insistence on the integration of social justice and sustainability, inseparably together, gave inspiration, vigor and political influence to activists and scientists alike. I will always be grateful to Pope Francis for his leadership.

Focusing on people’s material reality, promoting dialogue, and embracing a deeply humane vision of sustainability—these are just some of the ways in which we, as academics, learned from Pope Francis. I’m quite sure if I asked others in the College, I would learn of additional ways Pope Francis spoke to our work as intellectuals and teachers.

I leave you with this phrase, from Cicero’s On Duties (De Offici, 1:22):

Non nobis solum nati sumus ortusque nostri partem patria vindicat, partem amici (Not for us alone are we born; our country, our friends, have a share in us).

Daniel

 

Citations: Ad Theologiam Promovendam, §3 and §4; Evangelii Gaudium §232.