Global Catholicism

To strengthen the College's teaching and research on global Catholicism, the McFarland Center provides supplemental research funding through a competitive grant program open to all Holy Cross faculty.

The Fall 2026 Global Catholicism Grant recipients are:

The Liturgical Movement from a Global Perspective

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Audrey Seah

This project challenges the conventional Eurocentric history of the modern Catholic Liturgical Movement by demonstrating its global, bidirectional origins. While the movement is traditionally traced to nineteenth- and twentieth-century European monastic centers, this research argues that reforms later codified by the Second Vatican Council—including vernacular liturgy, indigenous clergy, and the integration of local cultural traditions—were anticipated in mission communities in East Asia and the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Drawing on archival research and previously understudied liturgical sources, the project repositions non-European Catholics as active contributors to modern liturgical reform and reframes the movement as the product of centuries of global exchange rather than the one-way diffusion of European ideas.

Northern (In)visibility: Retrieving Black Catholic Stories 

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Chanelle Robinson

This project investigates the overlooked history of Black Catholicism in Canada, challenging narratives that position Black Catholic experience primarily within the United States while obscuring Canada's own histories of slavery, migration, and racial segregation. Beginning with the life of the enslaved Black Catholic woman Marie-Joseph Angélique and extending to the development of Black Catholic communities in twentieth-century Ontario, the project draws on archival research to examine how Black Catholics shaped ecclesial life, negotiated belonging, and responded to changing cultural and religious landscapes. By centering Canadian experiences, this research expands the field of Global Catholicism and offers a more historically and geographically inclusive understanding of Black Catholic life in North America.