Kyriaki Karyogianes Fitzgerald, PhD, is a theologian, psychologist, author, and founder of St. Catherine’s Vision, an organization for women seminary graduates. Saint Catherine's Vision is an international fellowship of Pan-Orthodox Christians, one of whose purposes is to support the development of women’s ministries in the Church. Dr. FitzGerald has consistently been a warm and encouraging mentor to several generations of Orthodox women theologians.
She has worn many hats in Church circles. For one, Dr. FitzGerald is a writer and editor whose work has focused on ministries like the women’s diaconate and other callings (sometimes working with her husband, Fr. Thomas FitzGerald), and she has worked to make better known the lives of women saints through a St. Catherine’s Vision series. Her urgent sense of communing with God through ministry and spirituality shines in her conversation and writing. For example:
“We are on a journey on which the living God has invited us to ever greater depths of communion. The further we travel in this direction, the more the divinely established personal mystery within us begins to express itself and the more we ‘know’ God, ‘bear’ God, and become filled with God…. This deepening communion with God shines through their intentions, thoughts, words, and actions, indeed through their very presence.” (From “Sexism as Sin: Essential Spiritual Considerations” in Discerning the Signs of the Times (ed. Fitzgerald).)
Dr. FitzGerald is also an accomplished educator and has taught as faculty in Geneva at the Ecumenical Institute and World Council of Churches, in New York at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, and in Massachusetts at Holy Cross Orthodox School of Theology.
She is also an ecumenist, a long-time Faith and Order commissioner representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the World Council of Churches.
She has also had a secular career as a psychologist. Dr. FitzGerald served as an addictions psychotherapist and has created and implemented summer spirituality and addiction recovery psychotherapy groups, among other initiatives. Even here, she brings her theological training into use, and is a fellow of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.