Theological reflection is therefore called to a turning point, to a paradigm shift, to a “courageous cultural revolution” that commits it, first and foremost, to being a fundamentally contextual theology, capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women live daily, in different geographical, social, and cultural environments. —Pope Francis
The election of Pope Leo XIV has excited much attention for the fact of his being the first pope born in the United States, as it rightly should. But Leo’s background as a minister who has worked in many different parts of the world also deserves attention. In particular, I want to point to his training for the priesthood at Catholic Theological Union (CTU) in Chicago.
CTU is attached to no university, but it offers graduate degrees in theology and ministry. It was formed in 1968, after the Second Vatican Council, when men’s religious communities like Pope Leo’s Augustinians responded to the Council’s reforms by combining schools that trained men for the priesthood into CTU. Those schools wanted their candidates to be in a bustling city, near the University of Chicago, in conversation with people from other faiths, and attending classes with laypeople.
When Pope Leo attended CTU between 1978 and 1982, scholars on CTU’s faculty were leading the development of contextual theology. As Pope Francis described it in 2023, a contextual theology is one that begins from the lived experiences of people in many different places and cultures and searches for God within those experiences—where, indeed, God always can be found. In their important and defining 2004 book Constants in Context, Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder asserted what contextual theology asserts: the Gospel and Catholic faith are constant, but we discover those unchanging things in the different cultural contexts where people live.
The work that led to Constants in Context was underway long before 2004. Robert J. Schreiter, CPPS, wrote Constructing Local Theologies in 1985, in which he described how his new, contextual theological insights arose from his CTU classroom. Because CTU trains men from many religious communities, those communities send students from all around the globe—some sixty countries as of this writing. Once I taught a class of twenty-two students who, themselves, represented twelve nations. CTU is an unusual environment that way, and students often raise vital questions about theological constants: “What will this mean to the people in my home country?” “How can we help people understand this theology that was developed in the cultural environment of the West, in the Global North?” Those questions force professors to think in new ways about theology. Paying attention to constants in context for many decades now has been the result.
This is the CTU that Pope Leo would have known in the days when Schreiter was teaching. He would have heard those questions being asked, and he would have watched his professors working to answer them. Pope Leo met the global Church at CTU.
“Catholic” is a word that means “universal,” and so being global is a claim the Church has always made. But the Catholic Church really only began to recognize itself as a global Church in the twentieth century. The jet airplane made that possible in a way it had never been before. When 2,200 bishops from around the world gathered for Vatican II between 1962 and 1965, it changed the Church’s consciousness of itself forever. Slowly, that global reality has become more visible as the papacy has changed. Once, the pope never left the Vatican. Now, he boards airplanes to the farthest corners of the globe all the time. Francis advanced this development simply by being the first pope from the Global South. But Pope Leo is something else.
As is the case with so many CTU graduates, Pope Leo’s ministry took him far from home. He began his ministry in Peru, learning a new cultural context and finding God already at work there. He went on to be prior general, the global leader of his Augustinian community. The Augustinians minister in fifty nations of the world, and their members represent as many countries. The prior general’s job is to help those diverse cultural and historical experiences of Catholicism become one constant, global community. He returned later to Peru as a bishop, where he became a beloved spiritual leader. And from there to Rome—and the papacy.
At the heart of all Pope Leo’s journey is a theological vision rooted in contextuality. This is important. In recent decades, contextual theology has become a little controversial. The calls for doctrinal clarity coming from more traditional voices in the Church prefer to emphasize constancy—more of a one-size-fits-all theology than an accommodation for the diversity of human experience. This has been an important part of the academic debate within Catholicism. Does theology begin from the center or the margins? Pope Francis gave a definitive answer in 2023 when he said theology had reached a “turning point,” and he called for a “paradigm shift” to a contextual theology. Theology must begin from the lived experiences of people everywhere on the globe. The Church’s global reality is here to stay. Theology must meet that Church as it is, in all its wonderful and messy diversity, just as my colleagues and I meet it in our CTU classrooms.
