Imagining Catholic Futures

This paper analyzes the pastoral practice and synodal ecclesiology of Catholic Small Christian Communities (SCCs) in Kenya. Initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, eastern African SCCs (known as “jumuiyas” in Kiswahili) exemplify Vatican II’s communion ecclesiology as well as the 1994 First African Synod’s vision of the “Church as the Family of God.” Building from recent ethnographic research in Nairobi, the paper considers how these communities connect the Catholic faith to daily life, empower women leaders within a patriarchal society and church, grapple with the challenge of expanding lay male and youth participation, interact with parish ecclesial structures, and struggle with clericalism especially when it comes to fundraising. I will synthesize lessons in local synodality that emerge from the lived practice of base communities in Africa that exemplify Vatican II’s People of God ecclesiology and Pope Francis’s calls for the church to become a “home to everyone in the neighborhood."

The Catholic church in the 19th century Protestant imagination was one in which women were held captive in convents and sexually abused by priests and children born from assault were baptized, killed, and cast into pits under the church. For almost a century, Catholic studies has turned to these narratives as evidence of Anglo-Americans’ anti-Catholic sentiments. However, recent revelations about the activities of the Catholic church, namely increased scholarship on and awareness of the horrors Native boarding schools, Magdalene laundries, and clerical sexual abuse, reveal the reality of many anti-Catholic narratives. This paper returns to anti-Catholic literature as a source of both the Protestant imagination of Catholicism and a revelation about the historical experience of Catholicism in North America, putting these fictional accounts in conversation with the experiences held captive and abused at Catholic-run Native boarding schools and Magdalene laundries in the 19th century.

This paper examines the early ministry of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, a congregation of nursing sisters founded in Paris in 1865. Unlike most women’s nursing congregations, the Little Sisters did not establish hospitals or care institutions. Instead, they cared for the sick poor in their own homes. In a time of working-class alienation from a Church increasingly perceived as aligned with industrial elites, the Sisters' intimate, domestic ministry functioned as a visible sign of the Church’s commitment to the urban poor.

I argue that the early ministry of the Little Sisters exposes a theological tension within emerging Catholic social thought: the effort to alleviate the material suffering of the poor while simultaneously believing suffering is redemptive. By tracing how the Sisters navigated this paradox, this paper also challenges cleric-centered narratives of social Catholicism and recovers women religious as significant contributors to its formation.

In this paper, I will argue that the virtue of attention is a liberative virtue that is necessary to think about the future constructively. Looking to the historical thread of the method of “See, Judge, Act” and to the theology of attention by Simone Weil, I investigate the virtue of attention in the midst of constant crisis. Attention is a necessary tool for the “See” in the See, Judge, Act Method, for the first step of charity is the attention to see the other; the poor are considered non-people, and attention heals in granting visibility. However, this vision is not an abstract gaze; rather, it is a communal act of prophetic hope. The good is never static but dynamic, requiring an attentiveness that allows beauty to become liberating justice. The liberative virtue of attention is transfigurative; it leads to a theology that attends to the world with patience.