During the Summer of 2025 two Jacques Maritain Center graduate fellows, Caitlin Fitzgerald and Nicholas Ramirez, were able to advance their professional and spiritual development through the Maritain Fellows grants program.
Sociology graduate student Caitlin Fitzgerald participated in the Institute for Human Ecology's Rome Seminar on the Vision of God. During the seminar, Fitzgerald attended several lectures on the Beatific Vision, accompanied by opportunities for prayer, pilgrimage, and fellowship with other graduate students. Fitzgerald wrote that one of her favorite lectures was given by Professor Daria Spezzano on deification and the beatific vision.
Fitzgerald described the lecture's argument: "the goal of the Christian life is to become like God... through participation in the divine nature. This participation is only possible through grace... an added gift to the gift of nature. We cannot prepare ourselves for grace, as only God can deify us. Grace becomes an infused habitus within us.... In the beatific vision, the blessed participate in God’s clear knowledge of himself with... praise." Further, "in the beatific vision, the blessed dwell in God."
Fitzgerald carried these and similar insights through her journey in Rome, as she visited the Basilica of the True Cross, St. Peter's Basilica and St. John Lateran, climbed the steps of the Scala Sancta, and prayed in the Sistine Chapel. She also attended the officiaI installation of Pope Leo XIV as the bishop of the Basilica of St. Mary Major. Overall, she reported that participating in the seminar was an "academically and spiritually moving experience" and that "it was beautiful to reflect on the divine indwelling and how I can better manifest the reality of the Lord’s presence within me to others."
While Fitzgerald explored Rome, her fellow Maritain graduate student from the Theology department, Nicholas Ramirez, took a more domestic tack, presenting at the Saint Mary's Seminary and University Moral Theology and Seminary Teaching Conference using Center funds. Ramirez presented a paper titled, “The Primacy of Devotion and the Moral Life and Formation of Seminarians.”
Ramirez reports that his paper argued, "the act of the will known as devotion, the principal act of the virtue of religion for Saint Thomas Aquinas, is indispensable for better understanding how the seminarian’s entire formative experience can be weaved together and connected, especially the twin pillars of seminarian formation according to Saint Pope John Paul II: prayer and sacred study.... The greater the seminarian’s devotional life, the more he will desire to render homage to God through his study, and the more he studies Divine things, the more he will desire to render his whole life, including his study, into an act of worship."
Ramirez thanked the Maritain Center for funding that allowed him to present at the conference, recieve useful feedback on his paper, and connect with other moral theologians as he begins his doctoral studies in Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
The Maritain Center is proud of the steps taken by Fitzgerald, Ramirez, and its other student fellows to further their vocational and spiritual formation this summer.