This Monday, June 23, the Pontifical Mother and Teacher University in Santo Domingo will host a highly significant academic and ecclesial event: the inauguration of the Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez Chair of Social Doctrine of the Church. The event will feature Mario J. Paredes, president of the International Academy of Catholic Leaders and CEO of SOMOS Community Care, who will deliver the inaugural address.

The new chair was created with the purpose of promoting the rigorous and committed study of the Social Doctrine of the Church, with special emphasis on the thought of Pope Francis, whose social vision has profoundly influenced the Church and the contemporary world. According to Paredes, a disciple and personal friend of the then young Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine pontiff represents “a radical of the Gospel who gives absolute priority to the poor.”

During his presentation, Mario J. Paredes will present the roots and fundamental axes of Francis’s social thought, among which the following stand out:

• Mercy , understood as the core of Christian love that transforms relationships and structures.
• The periphery , not only geographically, but existentially and socially, as a place where the Church must be present.
• Universal brotherhood , developed in  Fratelli Tutti , as a model of coexistence and political commitment.
• Human dignity , in the face of a “throwaway culture” that marginalizes and excludes.
• Caring for our common home is key to  Laudato Si’ , which unites ecology and social justice.

The chair pays tribute to Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, an emblematic figure of the Church in the Dominican Republic, whose pastoral and educational legacy has left its mark on numerous institutions, including the Catholic University of Santo Domingo and Televida.

With this initiative, the Pontifical Mother and Teacher University reaffirms its commitment to integral education and Christian humanism, serving a more just, fraternal, and supportive society. The inauguration of this chair is intended as a permanent space for reflection, study, and action inspired by the Social Doctrine of the Church and the innovative spirit of Pope Francis.

Full text:

THOUGHT AND SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF POPE FRANCIS

Inaugural Speech of the Chair of

SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez

at the Pontifical University “Mother and Teacher”

by Mario J. Paredes, KGCHS

President of the International Academy of Catholic Leaders

and CEO of SOMOS Community Care

Very honorable

Authorities,

Faculty and staff

Students of this distinguished University Council.

Special guests.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

I greet everyone present, grateful for the honor conferred upon me to share some reflections on the event that brings us together:  the inauguration of a Chair dedicated to the study of the Social Doctrine of the Church , at this prestigious house of study: the “PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD MADRE Y MAESTRA.” This Chair bears the name of His Eminence Cardinal  “NICOLÁS DE JESÚS LÓPEZ RODRÍGUEZ.”

I preside over the  International Academy of Catholic Leaders , whose vision and mission are aligned with the purpose of the Chair we are launching today: academic training in the Social Doctrine of the Church. I am also CEO of  SOMOS Community Care , a health organization in New York City that coordinates more than 2,500 physicians, with their private clinics, for primary and family care for vulnerable individuals and communities, especially immigrants. This organization was founded by a prominent Dominican physician, Dr. Ramón Tallaj.

But I have also had the privilege of sharing a friendship, in important times and undertakings, with Cardinal López Rodríguez. A man, a Dominican, and a pastor of the Church, outstanding in the national and ecclesiastical history of this nation.

My close relationship with Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús dates back to my time as president of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center, created by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. This organization coordinated pastoral ministry for Hispanics residing in some 32 northeastern dioceses.

From that position, I witnessed firsthand the pastoral drive of Cardinal López Rodríguez, as founder and executive of many works for the good of society and the Church.

I would especially like to mention here the support I was able to give the Cardinal in founding the television channel “Televida” and in creating the “Santo Domingo Catholic University.”

But there are many parishes, educational institutions, and other institutions that bear the creative and founding imprint of the Cardinal, who today, with his name, honors and adorns the Chair we inaugurate.

BRIEF PROFILE OF CARDINAL NICOLAS DE JESUS ​​LOPEZ RODRÍGUEZ.

We know Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús for his constant elegance, his impeccable presence, his overwhelming personality, his impatient, combative, and controversial temperament, and his democratic and decidedly anti-Trujillo attitude.

These and other traits of his personality and ministry, especially from the seat of the Primate Church of America, made the Cardinal an essential voice in the life of the Latin American Church and in the life and history of Dominican society.

To accurately describe the greatness of Cardinal López Rodríguez’s life and the breadth of his work would take many hours. Allow me, however, to delve a little deeper, out of respect for the homage that this university, this meeting, this chair, the Church, and this nation owe and pay today to such an illustrious prelate, with other salient details:

Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, currently Archbishop Emeritus of Santo Domingo, was born in Barranca – La Vega, Dominican Republic, on October 31, 1936. He initially carried out his pastoral work in the diocese of La Vega, and his studies included a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences obtained in Rome.

In 1978, he was appointed Bishop of San Francisco de Macorís; in 1981, Archbishop of Santo Domingo until 2016; and in 1991, he was created a cardinal by Pope Saint John Paul II, and participated as an elector in the conclaves of 2005 and 2013.

During his extensive episcopal ministry in Santo Domingo for fifteen years, he promoted the founding and construction of educational and religious institutions and became President of the Latin American Episcopal Council between 1991 and 1994. In this position, his leadership as a pastor stood out as host and organizer of the celebrations commemorating the  500th anniversary of the meeting of the two worlds and the evangelization of Latin America and the Caribbean, and, very specifically, for the celebration on that occasion of the IV General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate (CELAM ), with the presence of the then Pope John Paul II. For this reason, this meeting is known as the Conference or Document of SANTO DOMINGO.

For reasons of time in the programming of this event and out of consideration for all of you, I omit here three topics on which I reflected for this occasion, namely:

• The controversy over October 12, 1492
• An analysis of Latin American reality
• The foundations of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

I do inform you, however, that the full text of this dissertation will be published.

I continue with the central theme of this Conference.

Thus, this act that brings us together and  this Chair that we inaugurate today in this Pontifical University, that is, of Catholic profession and with an institutional philosophy  (18)  in which the commitment to educate integrally and to form according to the values ​​of Christian humanism is stated, fulfills the commitment of CELAM in Santo Domingo  for an education that is  “the methodological mediation for the evangelization of culture…

A Christian education from and for life at the individual, family, community and ecosystem levels; which fosters the dignity of the human person and true solidarity; an education that integrates a process of civic-social formation inspired by the Gospel and the Social Doctrine of the Church…” (19)

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION IN THE THOUGHT AND DOCTRINE OF POPE FRANCIS

As an inspirational and aspirational topic, for what will be the ongoing academic work of this Chair we are inaugurating today, I have been asked to speak about what we might call the social thought of Pope Francis.

In this regard, I reflect among you, with the pride that comes from the privilege of having been a disciple of the then young Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio at the University of El Salvador in Buenos Aires, and the friendship that continued until the last days, in periodic meetings with Pope Francis in Rome, together with the admiration I profess for the authenticity of his life as a human being, as a Christian, and for the greatness of the legacy of his intense pontificate.

If we want to approach the  sources and historical contexts  from which Francis drank for his very personal synthesis, awareness, vision and social mission, we can say that – especially but not exclusively – he was influenced by his own pastoral experience in the slums of Buenos Aires, Peronism in Argentina, the boiling of social demands that shook Latin America in the sixties and seventies, Liberation Theology (20), the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Ignatian spirituality, the theology of Methol Ferré, the life of Father Fiorito, etc. (21).

All of which, seen from the prism and logic of the Gospel, was developing in Francis some humanistic-theological convictions, among which stands out: the certainty that the will of God, lived and taught by Jesus, as the good news of his Gospel and of Christianity, consists in loving God by loving one’s brother. Because,  “whoever says he loves God whom he does not see and does not love his brother whom he does see is a fraud ” (22).

Furthermore, the face of God is revealed and we find it, especially and preferentially, in the face of our brother or sister in need. For  “whatever you did or failed to do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did or failed to do for me ” (23).

These influences of thought, of historical, social, and ecclesial contexts, these humanistic, theological, and evangelical convictions, which – in communion and concordance with the Tradition and Magisterium of the Church – are embodied, in the pontificate of Francis, in a vision of the Church and in some emphases with which he attempted to respond to the challenges of today’s world.

THE ECCLESIOLOGY OF FRANCIS.  Francis conceives of the Church in terms of its evangelizing task in the world. For this reason, he so often invites us to build a “Church that goes out,” toward the world’s peripheries, like a “field hospital.”

A Church that knows it is sent, a missionary Church. To this vision, Francis contrasts the worldly Church, the settled and comfortable Church, which withdraws and lives self-absorbed within itself, by itself, and for itself.

This “going out,” this mission, even “smelling like sheep,” must be carried out – according to Francis – in “synodality” (24), that is, making the journey together, walking together; in listening, dialogue, discernment, and the participation of all.

This vision of the Church becomes doctrine and evangelizing social action through the  MAIN THEMATIC EMPHASIS :

MERCY  (25), which is God’s own way of loving, ” with a trembling of the bowels”  (26) in the original Hebrew and Greek and, of the heart, in Latin; a trembling of the whole being with which God wants us to love one another, as He Himself loves us.

Mercy is the concretization of Jesus of Nazareth’s new commandment to his disciples, through which we are moved, with our whole being, by the presence of our neighbors in need, and which compels us to commit ourselves to the solution of these difficulties or shortcomings.

Mercy, which in Pope Francis is a force capable of making us go out to meet others, especially those who live in the peripheries of every kind, and of transforming human relationships and social structures,  “when the heart joins with the misery of the other, that is, when the misery of the other enters my heart ” (27).

The concept of  “PERIPHERY ” is essential in the social thought of Francis, who said that: “ The Church is called to go out of herself and go to the peripheries, not only the geographical ones but also the existential ones: those of sin, those of pain, those of injustice, those of ignorance and religious disregard, those of thought, those of all misery.”

“To these two peripheries, Francis adds a third: the social one, that of the place occupied by the disinherited of the earth, those “discarded” by society”  (28).

UNIVERSAL FRATERNITY AND SOCIAL FRIENDSHIP , social concepts especially worked on and exposed in the Encyclical  Fratelli Tutti  (29), in which it exhorts to live a fraternity, by the commandment of love, open, without indifference or discarding, without borders in the heart, neither geographical, nor of any kind, and exposes the urgency of a “better politics” that seeks the common good, not the corrupt, selfish, hedonistic and sinful well-being of a few.

The challenge, says Francis, will be an economy at the service of the person and not the other way around;  “civilizing the market” by asking it to put itself at the service of integral human development, rather than limiting itself only to being efficient in the production of wealth ” (30).

HUMAN DIGNITY VERSUS THE “CULTURE OF DISPOSE.”  Francis consistently denounced what he called “the culture of waste,” which forgets, excludes, and marginalizes individuals and peoples; while always proclaiming the dignity of every human being as a child of God and brother to all.

Because of this conviction, Francis invites us—once again—to preferentially choose the poor and most vulnerable in society, whose attention or neglect, according to the Pope, is the indicator that measures the value of a society.

Therefore, ” if the Church ignores the poor, it ceases to be the Church of Jesus and revives the old temptations of becoming an intellectual or moral elite”  (31).

CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME , especially articulated in the Encyclical  Laudato Si  (32), in which he expresses his concern for the environment and for social justice until achieving an “integral ecology.”

Was Pope Francis right-wing or left-wing? Conservative or liberal? Traditionalist or revolutionary? This harmful desire to ideologically label people is resolved in Francis when he says that, like all human beings, Bergoglio is all the Bergoglios rolled into one (33), and that  “if it were necessary to define him in one fell swoop, the fairest thing would be to say that Francis is a radical of the Gospel who gives absolute priority to the poor…”  (34).

In this social dimension of the Gospel lies, without a doubt, the greatest novelty and contribution of Christianity to humanity (35), the “plus” of Christianity and the greatest emphasis and the best legacy of Francis to the Church and the world: in putting Christ again – in the face of the poor brother near – at the center of the life of the Church and the world.

I invite all  those present here to commit themselves, through this University Chair, to this exhortation and wishes that the Latin American bishops expressed for our entire continent, from this beautiful Quisqueya, in October 1992.

I invite all students, their parents and guardians, all Dominican clergy, all Dominican citizens, and especially their political leaders, businessmen and women, to contribute to the nobility and greatness of this nation, of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the world by educating themselves in the principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church that this Chair contains and promulgates.

Because, all of us present here, together with the beloved Pope Francis, of happy memory, could repeat today the poem of my countryman, the Chilean Nicanor Parra (36):

“Who are my friends:
the sick
……………… the weak
……………………………… the poor in spirit

those who have nowhere to fall dead
the elderly
………………. the children
……………………………. the single mothers
-the students, not because they are troublemakers-
the peasants because they are humble
the fishermen
………………….. because they remind me
of the holy apostles of Christ
those who did not know their father
those who lost their mother like me
those condemned to life imprisonment
in the so-called public offices
those humiliated by their own children
those offended by their own wives
the Araucanians
those put aside time and again
those who do not even know how to sign
the bakers
………………… the gravediggers
my friends are
the dreamers – the idealists
who gave their lives like Him,
in holocaust for a better world.

Until we can sing with emotion, as in times past and with patriotic muse, as a poet of these lands did:  “How beautiful you are at the top / Dominican flag! / Who would see you, who would see you / higher, much higher!”  (37).

Thank you, dear and remembered Pope Francis

For showing us the face of Christ among us.

Thanks to this prestigious institution. And especially to the School of Theology, my appreciation and gratitude.

Thanks to the founders of the Chair of Social Doctrine of the Church

Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez

Thanks to Rev. Fr. Dr. Cecilio Espinal and his

Your Board of Directors of this Pontifical University.

Our admiration to His Eminence Cardinal Nicolas de Jesús López Rodríguez

For his extraordinary legacy to the Dominican Church and the Continent and for being such a distinguished son of Quisqueya.

Thank you very much for the invitation and for your interest in listening to me.

May God bless us all.