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Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens is an Associate Professor in the History Department at California State University, Northridge.
Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens received her doctorate in History from the University of California, San Diego in 2001. Her research offered a comparative analysis of a transnational Catholic religious movement initiated by Maryknoll missionaries from the United States in highland communities in Peru and Guatemala. It presents a distinct perspective on the development and influence of Liberation Theology and Progressive Catholicism by focusing on the encounter between indigenous peoples and missionaries.
The research illustrates that Mayas and Andeans in Guatemala and Peru engaged missionaries’ religious practices and resources to redefine their communities and to access national political movements. This encounter also transformed the missionaries who began their proselytization in the 1940s as conservative, nationalist, anti-communists, but by the 1970s became identified as radical and even “communist” clergy. Fitzpatrick Behrens has published articles in The Americas, The US Catholic Historian and The Helen Kellogg Institute Working Paper Series. Her monograph, Transnational Faith and Transformation: The Maryknoll Catholic Missionaries in Peru, 1943 – 1986, is under contract with the Kellogg Institute Series of the University of Notre Dame Press.