The Vatican announced Wednesday that Chicago priest Fr. Manuel Dorantes will play a leading role at the Laudato si’ Center for Higher Education at Castel Gandolfo.
Dorantes, currently pastor of Saint Mary of the Lake and Our Lady of Lourdes parish, will begin a four-year term as the center’s administrative management director Dec. 1.
But what exactly is the center, and why might Dorantes be familiar to longtime readers of Catholic news?
What’s the Laudato si’ Center?
Pope Francis released arguably the most influential encyclical of his pontificate in 2015. Laudato si’ was a call for “care of our common home,” decrying pollution, climate change, the loss of biodiversity — and air-conditioning.
The encyclical nudged politicians to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change and inspired Catholic environmental activists and conversations about conservation worldwide. New institutions named after the encyclical sprang up in places such as Campion Hall in Oxford, England, and Siena College in Loudonville, New York.
On Feb. 2, 2023, Pope Francis instituted the Laudato si’ Center for Higher Education, known by its Italian acronym CeAF-LS and based at the Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo, a complex southeast of Rome including a palace that has served as a papal summer residence and the Vatican Observatory.
The estate, which belongs to the Holy See though it is outside of the Vatican walls, has a farm that produces vegetables, milk, eggs, honey, and olive oil.
The pope appointed Fr. Fabio Baggio, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, as the center’s director general. Baggio is one of 21 new cardinals who will receive the red hat Dec. 7.
According to the center’s statutes, it is “a scientific, educational, and social activity body … which works for the integral formation of the person in the context of the sustainable economy and in compliance with the principles of the encyclical Laudato si’.”
On Feb. 22, 2023, the pope named Msgr. Paolo Nicolini, an Italian priest who has held various roles in Vatican City State, as the center’s management-administrative director, with a four-year mandate. Dorantes appears to be taking over Nicolini’s role. If so, it is unclear why Nicolini is stepping aside less than halfway through his mandate.
The center, which offers a variety of training courses, is overseen by a board of directors that includes Baggio and Sr. Alessandra Smerilli, secretary of the human development dicastery.
The center’s flagship initiative is the Borgo Laudato si’ project, which aims to use the gardens of the Pontifical Villas to promote education in integral ecology, environmental sustainability, and a “circular and generative economy.”
Since Jan. 15, the Borgo, as it is known, has been responsible for the 55 hectares (136 acres) of land belonging to the Vatican at Castel Gandolfo, which consists of 35 hectares of gardens, and 20 hectares of farmland, greenhouses, and service buildings.
The Borgo — which means “village” in Italian — is charged with preserving, maintaining, and developing the gardens, with the help of new technologies. Pilgrims visiting Rome in the 2025 Jubilee Year will be encouraged to take a trip to the gardens.
The Borgo is also reorganizing the site’s agricultural activities, and developing a new vineyard, called the Vigna del Borgo Laudato si’.
Those complex new ventures no doubt require an astute and experienced manager.
Who is Fr Dorantes?
Fr. Dorantes — known as Fr. Manny to his friends — was born in Mexico. He grew up in Ixtapan de la Sal, a town near Mexico City.
He emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 12. When he arrived in Waukegan, Illinois, he did not know English. But he quickly picked up the language, graduating from Waukegan High School at 16.
While studying at seminary, he interned at the Chicago affiliate of the Spanish-language television network Telemundo.
“That was a formative time for me,” he told Northwestern Magazine. “I was doing morning prayer and going to Mass, and thinking about philosophical questions. And then in the afternoon, I would jump in a helicopter to cover a shooting on the South Side.”
He was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago on May 22, 2010. He enrolled in the MBA program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2013.
Dorantes is perhaps best known in the Catholic world for his April 2014 to June 2016 stint as an assistant to the director of the Holy See press office, during which he liaised with Spanish-speaking media and spoke at Vatican press conferences.
Since 2017, Dorantes has been a strategic adviser to the Dicastery for Communication, which oversees Vatican News, the Holy See’s media behemoth.
On his return to Chicago, Dorantes served as pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in the city’s Brighton Park neighborhood. In 2019, he transferred to Saint Mary of the Lake.
He is one of the national Eucharistic preachers visiting dioceses across America as part of the national Eucharistic revival.
In a Nov. 6 statement, Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich praised Dorantes.
“A son of Mexico who came to the United States at the age of 11, Fr. Dorantes pursued his vocation as a teenager living in a new country, led two parishes to revitalization and completed an advanced business degree at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University,” he said.
“We are proud the Holy Father chose him for this important work. He has both the heart to understand the experience of migrants and the tools to help create solutions.”
Dorantes could not be reached by The Pillar for an interview.
