Dr. Clifford was installed as President of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) on June 14, 2026, at the close of the Society’s Eightieth Annual Convention in St. Louis. She succeeds outgoing President Susan Abraham of the Pacific School of Religion, who served the previous year as President-Elect.
On the Saturday before her installation, Clifford presided over the convention’s Third Plenary Session, which brought together Bishop Daniel E. Flores, Vice President of the USCCB and Bishop of Brownsville, Texas, and Bishop Alain Faubert, Bishop of Valleyfield, Quebec.
Sessions throughout the convention examined synodality from multiple angles, including historical theology, ecumenism, bioethics, public theology, and the experience of women and LGBTQ Catholics within the Church.
During the convention, the CTSA Board of Directors issued a statement on the report of Study Group 9, the body convened by the Synod of Bishops to examine “Theological Criteria and Synodal Methodologies for Shared Discernment of Emerging Doctrinal, Pastoral, and Ethical Issues.” The statement affirmed the report’s position that doctrinal, pastoral, and ethical considerations are interrelated rather than separate, and endorsed its call to move past polarized approaches toward Spirit-guided discernment grounded in the lived experience of communities.
The Board cited Acts 6 and Acts 15 as biblical precedents for this kind of discernment, and identified LGBTQ Catholics seeking pastoral accompaniment, along with communities practicing nonviolence amid war, migration, and discrimination, as examples raised by the report. The statement drew further support from Dei Verbum 8, Pope Francis’s Ad Theologiam Promovendam, and Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and closed by encouraging theologians to engage the report as a means of strengthening ties between the theological community and the bishops.
The CTSA’s 81st Annual Convention is scheduled for June 10-13, 2027, in Louisville, Kentucky, under the theme “Listening for God amidst the Landscape of Cries.”