Pope Francis and All the Saints
Catholic Studies lecture series
April 16, 2025
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Daley Library 1-470
Calendar
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About the talk: Pope Francis’ prolificacy in naming saints has rivaled even that of Pope John Paul II, who canonized 482 people during his twenty-seven years as pope, more than all of his predecessors combined. Pope Francis actually named almost double that number in just twelve years. This lecture uses Francis’ penchant for saint-making to explore his papal priorities. Through an analysis of several of the U.S. saints whose causes he advanced—among them Junípero Serra, Fulton Sheen, Dorothy Day, Augustine Tolton, and Emil Kapaun—it also considers the historic and ongoing relationship between sanctity and American society.
About the speaker: Kathleen Sprows Cummings is the John A. O’Brien Collegiate Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame, where she offers courses on the history of women, sanctity, global Catholicism, and American religion. From 2012 until 2023, she served as the William and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and the coordinator for the Conference on the History of Women Religious. Cummings is an affiliated faculty member in Gender Studies, Italian Studies, and Theology, and a fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Ansari Center for Global Religious Engagement. Cummings’ most recent monograph, A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. A short book based on her 2025 Madeleva Lecture, “Holy Women Making History,” a study of American Catholic sisters in the post Vatican II period, will be published with Paulist Press next year. She is also working on a book about the clergy sex abuse crisis in the United States, tentatively titled, Spotlight on American Catholicism: Historical Perspectives on Clerical Sex Abuse in Boston and Beyond.
Date posted
Mar 24, 2025
Date updated
Mar 24, 2025