After a handful of years without an official leader, the Latin American/North American Church Concerns (LANACC) initiative has a new director: Kellogg Faculty Fellow and Department of Theology Teaching Professor Todd Walatka. From leading reading groups, to organizing annual Romero Days events, Walatka has been an active member of LANACC for more than ten years and is already reenergizing the program as part of the Kellogg Institute’s commitment to the University of Notre Dame’s Strategic Framework.
“LANACC is an important part of Notre Dame’s Global Catholic Research Initiative. It advances interdisciplinary scholarship on Catholic life and faith across the Americas,” says Walatka, whose academic work focuses on contemporary Catholic systematic theology, particularly the teachings of the late Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, OP and Archbishop Óscar Romero. Walatka also leads Kellogg’s Romero Studies Working Group, which collaborated on a book published in 2024 titled Óscar Romero and Catholic Social Teaching (University of Notre Dame Press). The book contains essays from 14 of the more than 50 scholars who regularly participate in LANACC programming.
“We need the Latin American church – in all of its richness, in all of its beauty – to come teach us,” says Walatka, echoing the philosophy of LANACC’s founder and longtime director, the late Rev. Robert S. Pelton, CSC.
Since Pelton founded LANACC in 1985, it has been promoting the bilateral exchange of ideas and practices among the Church and scholars of North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As a part of that work, LANACC championed both the scholarship and canonization (in 2018) of Romero through annual “Romero Days” – seminars and workshops held every spring that honor and explore the saint's legacy.
“LANACC has been a place of dialogue and collaboration for more than 40 years – we have historians, sociologists, and theologians all collaborating – and I want to build on that foundation,” says Walatka, who has been busy strengthening existing relationships and establishing new ones among church leaders and scholars of varying disciplines at universities across the US and Latin America.
“Ideally LANACC becomes a hub for deep, rich connections with other institutions and scholars. So that, for instance, our own doctoral students can have regular connection with faculty at these other institutions, and they can have regular connection with other graduate students at these institutions. That both enlivens and enriches everybody's work and formation,” says Walatka.
In the fall of 2025, LANACC hosted five remote teaching and discussion sessions on violence and nonviolence in Romero’s teachings. In March, LANACC will hold a two-day conference on the same topics for this year’s Romero Days.
“How do we think in terms of violence and nonviolence in relation to Christian faith, in relation to democracy?” asks Walatka. “We’d like these meetings and discussions to eventually bring forth a book, a way that LANACC can advance concrete scholarship.”
In May, LANACC is sending a research team to the Central American University in El Salvador to launch a project on the reception and interpretation of Romero in popular art: murals, poetry, music, and drama.
“The project centers on the vox populi, the ‘voice of the people’ in how they have drawn upon Romero both devotionally and in political resistance,” says Walatka.
Though LANACC will continue to study Romero’s teachings, Walatka intends to expand research to include Latin American liberation theology, beginning with the teachings of one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th century, the late Gutiérrez, former Kellogg faculty fellow and Notre Dame professor emeritus of theology. An archive of his audio recordings were just added to the Hesburgh Libraries in 2025.
“LANACC connects two central themes for Notre Dame: the study of global democracy and the study of global Catholicism,” says Kellogg Director and Faculty Fellow Aníbal Pérez-Liñán. “Our scholars have documented the Catholic Church’s contributions to justice, human rights, and democracy in Latin America for over 40 years, and we are glad to continue to build on that tradition.”