Globalization from the People: Fratelli Tutti and the Latino Social Teaching of Pope Francis
David LantiguaUniversity of Notre Dame
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.
David Lantigua is Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame where he is also Co-Director of the Catholic Social Tradition Minor and faculty fellow of both the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Institute for Latino Studies. He previously taught at The Catholic University of America and was a former graduate fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He is author of Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (Cambridge, 2020). He is co-author of Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and co-editor of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights (University of Alabama Press, 2020). He has published articles in Modern Theology, Journal of Law and Religion, and Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics.
