Free and open to the public. This event will be held online through Zoom (registration required) and live-streamed to YouTube. This event is part of a webinar series on Hispanic Theology. This event and series is made possible by a generous grant from the Our Sunday Visitor Institute.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a flash point for globalization as a sign of the times, revealing the best and worst of our interconnected human family. Released during the pandemic, Pope Francis’s Fratelli tutti speaks directly to the political crisis of globalization, following the worldwide financial and ecological crises addressed in the previous two social encyclicals of the twenty-first century. Despite the public conversation about Fratelli tutti, very little attention concerns the Latino theological and political imagination of Pope Francis’s social teaching. This talk examines the new encyclical of the first Hispanic Pope from the global South as someone formed in a teología del pueblo. Among the relevant topics raised in Fratelli tutti, we will explore the peculiar relationship between neoliberalism and universal human rights, and the providential role of popular movements for promoting global solidarity in sharp contrast to populism.