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February 5, 2015 | 4:00-5:15 p.m.

St. Clare Room, Library and Learning Commons 

From the moment Pope Francis appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's after his election, he caught the attention of the world and soon became acknowledged as one of the great leaders of our times.  However, unlike his immediate predecessors he rarely speaks about Vatican II.  Why?  How, if at all, do his sometimes dramatic gestures relate to the council?  The lecture will address such questions.

Co-sponsored by Religious Studies Department and Jesuit School of Theology

John W. O’Malley, S.J., is University Professor in the Theology Department at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.  A native of Ohio, he is a specialist in the religious culture of early modern Europe, especially Italy.  He received his doctorate in history from Harvard University Among his eight monographs are Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (Duke UP, 1979), which received the Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association, and Trent and All That (Harvard UP, 2000), which received the Roland Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.  His best known book is The First Jesuits (Harvard UP, 1993), which received both the Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society and the Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society for Church History. The First Jesuits has been translated into ten languages. Rome in the Renaissance, Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century,  Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II and Saint or Devils Incarnate: Studies in Jesuit History are collections of some of his articles. His Four Cultures of the West (Harvard UP, 2004) has been translated into Italian and Chinese. He has also edited or co-edited a number of volumes, including three in the Collected Works of Erasmus series published by the University of Toronto Press.  With the same press he co-edited The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts (1999, Alpha Sigma Nu best-book prize) and The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts (2006).  His latest works on the Jesuits are The Jesuits and the Arts (St. Joseph’s UP, 2005), co-edited with Gauvin Alexander Bailey, and Constructing a Saint Through Images, an annotated facsimile of the 1609 illustrated life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (same press, 2008).  He recently assumed the editorship of a new series of monographs from St. Joseph’s UP entitled “Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts.”  What Happened at Vatican II, was published by Harvard in 2008 and has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish. A History of the Popes (Rowman and Littlefield) appeared in October, 2009 and has appeared in Polish, Spanish, and Italian.  In 2013 he published with Harvard Trent: What Happened at the Council. It has appeared in French and Italian. A full list of his publications (except book reviews) up to 2001 can be found in Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J. (Toronto UP, 2001), pp. xxvii-xxxiii.  He currently has two books in press.

John O’Malley has lectured widely in North America and abroad on both professional and more popular topics.  He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence), and the American Academy in Rome (Prix de Rome).  He is past president of the American Catholic Historical Association and of the Renaissance Society of America.  In 1995 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1997 to the American Philosophical Society, and in 2001 to the Accademia di san Carlo, Ambrosian Library, Milan.  He holds the Johannes Quasten Medal from The Catholic University of America for distinguished achievement in Religious Studies and the similar Monica Helwig award from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. He is a correspondent for the Vatican’s Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences and holds  a number of honorary degrees.  In 2002 he received the lifetime achievement award from the Society for Italian Historical Studies, in 2005 the corresponding award from the Renaissance Society of America, and in 2012 the same award from the American Catholic Historical Association.  He is a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Society of Jesus.