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A chance encounter with an editor for a major publishing house led PhD Candidate Stephen Di Trolio, MDiv ’21, to two projects of a lifetime — translating a book by Pope Francis and, most recently, translating the biography of Pope Leo XIV.
“If you would have said 10 years ago, ‘Hey, you’re going to translate both Pope Francis and Pope Leo books — about or by them.’ I’d have said, ‘You’re crazy,’” Di Trolio said.
Di Trolio connected with Matthew Burdette, an editor for Penguin Random House Christian Publishing Group, while Burdette was visiting Princeton, New Jersey, in 2022. A mutual friend of theirs encouraged them to get coffee because of their similar backgrounds and academic interests. Just as they were departing after hours of companionable conversation, Di Trolio mentioned he recently finished translating a book written by his advisor, Raimundo Barreto, Jr., PhD ’06, from Portuguese to English, and asked Burdette to keep him in mind if a project came along.
That project came two months later, and Di Trolio couldn’t believe whose work he’d be translating. During a whirlwind month under a tight deadline, Di Trolio translated Pope Francis’ book, I Am Asking in the Name of God, from Spanish to English. The book featured a collection of 10 prayers addressing vital worldwide issues with a unifying call to humanity for a peaceful future.
In April, his third project with Penguin Random House was published, a translation of Pope Leo XIV: The Biography by Elise Ann Allen from Spanish to English. The book features the pontiff’s first-ever interview as pope after his election in 2025.
While a Protestant translating books about the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church may sound like the punchline to a joke, Di Trolio believes it speaks to his own ecumenical vision of Christianity, one that has been nurtured and flourished during his time at Princeton Seminary.
“While I am Protestant at a Protestant school, I’ve been radically marked by an ecumenical vision in my own life and my own ministry, my own teaching, and my own experiences,” he said. “Being in a room with Presbyterians, Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopals, sitting at the table and having class, or teaching, or reading texts, or even just living with these friends and colleagues has been deeply informative of my own vision of the church and my own vision of what it means to be a Christian.”
Fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, translation has consistently been a facet of Di Trolio’s life. He was born in Costa Rica to American Protestant missionary parents, who moved to Argentina when he was just 6 months old. Working between languages always presents an inherent challenge as “there’s no such thing as a one-to-one translation, but that there is a sense of keeping the voice as close as possible to the original,” Di Trolio said. For Pope Francis’ book, Di Trolio navigated translations of Argentinian slang among essayistic, spiritual sermons, while Pope Leo’s biography required him to maintain the narrative, intimate view of Pope Leo’s life Allen portrayed in her writing.
While I am Protestant at a Protestant school, I’ve been radically marked by an ecumenical vision in my own life and my own ministry, my own teaching, and my own experiences
In addition to these two standout works, Di Trolio has translated a number of books, essays, and chapters in edited volumes. He recognizes the consequential role translators play in the lives of the academy and the implications that arise when valuable research is only available in certain languages.
“As far as the production of knowledge and academics, there is a priority given to North America and Europe. And typically, that language is English,” he said. “Does that mean that all academic research and important things that are happening in English worldwide? No, that’s not true. I see [translation work] as a way of breaking these silos of knowledge. How do we create parity if languages are important? How do we think about the geopolitics of language and its importance?”
One of the ways Princeton Seminary has endeavored to bridge this gap is its annual World Christianity Conference, the largest and most diverse gathering of World Christianity scholars. For the first time this year, attendees presented papers in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, with simultaneous translation among the languages. Di Trolio presented two papers at the conference, “Faith and Nation: Catholic and Protestant Approaches to Argentine Nationalist Belonging, 1930-1940s,” and “Citizenry and Baptist Activism During the Peronist Government in Argentina (1940s-50s).”
“I hope it becomes a new norm where people are predisposed to think, I’m going somewhere else where I don’t speak the language. I need a translator, and I want to learn from other people who may not speak my language, or we’re going to find a common bridge language,” he said. “I think this is something that Christianity has always been doing from the beginning of time. Jesus spoke Aramaic, maybe he spoke a little Greek, but the disciples and surely the Apostle Paul were always going in between languages themselves. I think this is a really beautiful, sort of messy, but interesting turn to scholarship.”
Di Trolio is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Ecumenics, specializing in religion in the Americas. His research explores the relationship between religion, politics, and public life, with his dissertation examining the interplay among Protestantism, nationalism, and political history in 20th-century Argentina’s print culture.
