How might Catholic theology inform or transform ostensibly secular professions? This session explores this and related questions with an eye on three distinct arenas of work: higher education, industrial farming, and journalism.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, when he established Jesuit schools and colleges in the sixteenth century, insisted that no tuition fees be charged to the students in order that the poor might participate with the rich. Today, student fees in some of our Catholic colleges are exceeding $60,000 a year.
Should Catholic education include, as part of its mission, the goal of reducing the gap between the rich and poor?
My thesis deals with the question: Is it time to insist again, as St. Ignatius did, that no tuition fees be charged to the students, or is Catholic education now so expensive that the Church should give up teaching general education (in those countries where the state provides for it) so that the resources could be used for Christian formation? And thus be able to provide “a preferential option for the poor”.
This paper explores the relationship between religious institutions and secular professions by examining how the Catholic Church has articulated its social, ecological, and economic principles within the Canadian agricultural industry. It first provides an overview of Canadian Catholic leadership’s approach to industry and the rights of workers, particularly as features of a global economy. In doing so, it highlights tensions surrounding the local and the global, themes which remain present in recent Catholic documents like Querida Amazonia and Fratelli Tutti. The paper then draws from ethnographic research carried out at three agricultural sites to illustrate the development of secular partnerships and perennial responses to migration, including one monk’s campaign to resettle climate refugees in central Saskatchewan. Such examples call attention to the ways religious institutions respond to rapid economic changes and the heightened public discourse around food security, globalization, and the rights of workers brought about by the global pandemic.
The ‘culture of encounter’ has been one of the recurrent concepts in Pope Francis’ annual addresses for World Communications Day. For the Pope, journalists and the media have a paramount role in making space for dialogue and bringing realities that otherwise would be invisible in contemporary societies; in other words, to encounter ‘the other.’ Nevertheless, journalism is barely seen as a field aiming to promote a culture of encounter.
This paper explores the discourses through which journalists working for mainstream media in Mexico and Russia make visible ‘the other’ by using visibility as a category for social research. Specifically, it focuses on Catholic Faith-Based Organizations operating in Mexico City and Moscow whose primary mission is to assist people in need. The paper draws from online interviews I conducted in 2022 with journalists in Mexico and Russia to compare notions of social responsibility when religion is involved in seeing ‘the other.’