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WILKES-BARRE — Bernard Prusak isn’t really sure how he got on the invitation list, but the King’s College associate professor thinks it’s “an exciting opportunity” to join a group of higher education officials across the country in a meeting with a Vatican prefect.
“I got an email invitation maybe six weeks or so ago, and I wondered just why I got it,” Prusak said.
Georgetown University is hosting a meeting of 41 academic leaders, many from institutions much larger than King’s — Notre Dame, Loyola and Fordham are among those on the list. The event is in cooperation with the newly-minted Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.
Prusak speculated King’ s College may have landed on the radar because of a conference it hosted about Catholic colleges, his work on a Catholic social teaching project in affiliation with the University of Notre Dame and Loyola University, or articles he has written for Commonweal Magazine, an independent journal edited by lay Catholics.
It almost certainly isn’t because of the size of the McGowan Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility at King’s, which Prusak heads.
“Most of the others are from much bigger institutions with much bigger projects,” he said. “We had to fill out an online questionnaire and one question had to do with the budget. It had a pull-down menu, and the lowest choice was ‘under $100,000’.
“The McGowan Center’s budget is well below $100,000” Prusak said with a laugh, joking that, when a second person is hired for the center as planned, “next year the staff will double in size.”
Prusak said Pope Francis formed the new dicastery — a type of papal department —by merging four offices already in existence, including the pontifical council on justice and peace, which had been headed by Cardinal Peter Turkson.
Turkson will be at the three-day meeting that begins May 30, in his new role as head of the new dicastery.
So far, the meeting has a pretty broad agenda. The top goal is to “bring together invited leaders of U.S. Academic Centers focused on Catholic Social Teaching to share their work, structures, best practices, future goals, etc.”
The other two goals are for those leaders to talk with Turkson, and to promote more communications among the participants and “explore possible areas of collaboration” between them and the Vatican.
Specific topics have yet to be fleshed out. The agenda calls for sessions on relationships and programs in the colleges and universities, priorities for the new dicastery, and “Pope Francis, Catholic Social Thought and U.S. Public Life.”
Prusak said he expects subjects Pope Francis has stressed are likely to come up. “He has really tried to reorient the Church’s priorities and public teachings toward emphasizing the rights and needs of immigrants and refugees, recognizing ecological disasters, and drawing attention to depredation, poverty and war.”
Pope Francis has frequently sought input as he shapes church policy, and Prusak suspects this may be an effort. “He wants to hear some dialogue on questions that matter to him,” Prusak said.