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Growth and Transition with Daniel Horan · Tomorrow's American Catholic Podcast

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[music]
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SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Tomorrow's American Catholic.
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SPEAKER_02: This is the official podcast of Tomorrow's American Catholic,
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SPEAKER_02: a journal and publishing platform animated by a central question.
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SPEAKER_02: Who is Tomorrow's American Catholic,
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SPEAKER_02: and how is their understanding of themselves,
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SPEAKER_02: their faith, and their church evolving in time?
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SPEAKER_02: In each episode,
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SPEAKER_02: we speak with a spiritual practitioner who helps us envision new forms
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SPEAKER_02: of Catholic culture and ways of being Church.
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SPEAKER_02: Our guests come from a range of backgrounds and traditions,
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SPEAKER_02: and we seek to proceed in a spirit of contemplative hospitality and synodal dialogue
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SPEAKER_02: where we can learn from one another.
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SPEAKER_02: You can find additional podcasts as well as our written work at our website,
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SPEAKER_02: tomorrowsamericancatholic.org.
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SPEAKER_02: And now on to today's conversation.
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SPEAKER_02: Daniel Horan is a professor of philosophy,
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SPEAKER_02: religious studies, and theology at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
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SPEAKER_02: A columnist for the National Catholic Reporter,
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SPEAKER_02: he's the author or editor of 16 books,
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SPEAKER_02: including Catholicity and Emerging Personhood,
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SPEAKER_02: A Contemporary Theological Anthropology,
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SPEAKER_02: A White Catholic's Guide to Racism and Privilege,
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SPEAKER_02: and The Way of the Franciscans, A Prayer Journey Through Lent.
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SPEAKER_02: Professor Horan's most recent books are titled Engaging Thomas Merton,
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SPEAKER_02: Spirituality,
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SPEAKER_02: Justice, and Racism, and Fear and Faith, Hope and Wholeness in a Fractured World.
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SPEAKER_02: Professor Horan regularly lectures throughout the United States and abroad
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SPEAKER_02: and serves on several university, academic, and publication editorial boards.
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SPEAKER_02: He is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing and service and is
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SPEAKER_02: the co-host of the Francis Effect podcast.
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SPEAKER_02: So Dan Horan, welcome to Tomorrow's American Catholic.
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SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, Michael.
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SPEAKER_01: It's great to be here with you all.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm going to introduce you on a little bit more of a personal level now,
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SPEAKER_01: just because I've known Dan for many, many years.
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SPEAKER_01: I think I started as the executive director of FAN in 2010,
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SPEAKER_01: and I think that's when I first met you.
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SPEAKER_01: If I'm not mistaken, you wrote Dating God right around that time.
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SPEAKER_01: That might have been your first book.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
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SPEAKER_01: It was.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01: Very good memory.
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03: A year or two after that, but I was right in the midst
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SPEAKER_01: of it.
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SPEAKER_01: And so I've gotten to know Dan and I've gotten to see the growth of Dan.
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SPEAKER_01: Also being a writer, I quote Dan all the time in almost everything I write.
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SPEAKER_01: I quote two people, Elia Delio and Dan Horan in pretty much every article I've written.
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SPEAKER_01: So, and I've kept up to that.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm finishing my book now.
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SPEAKER_01: It's time for Franciscan Renaissance.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm down to the last chapter and I have quoted you extensively in it.
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SPEAKER_01: So...
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SPEAKER_03: It's really very kind of you to do that.
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SPEAKER_03: And I should say that with reference to Ilya,
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SPEAKER_03: I'm, as John the Baptist to Jesus, unworthy to untie her sandals.
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SPEAKER_03: So it's nice to be in such good company.
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SPEAKER_01: Let me give you the next part of my introduction,
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SPEAKER_01: because I recently did an AI search and I asked a question,
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SPEAKER_01: who are the three most important Franciscan theologians today?
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SPEAKER_01: And the three answers were Ilya Delio, Richard Rohr, and Dan Horan.
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SPEAKER_01: Oh, wow.
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SPEAKER_01: So you're in really good company there.
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SPEAKER_01: I was sharing that.
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SPEAKER_01: And I mentioned that I was very excited that because I know all three of you very well.
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SPEAKER_01: And as I said to a friend,
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SPEAKER_01: not only do I know all three of them, but I've drank wine with all three of them.
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SPEAKER_01: That's the real test.
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SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I guess those checks to Anthropic and OpenAI have been paying off.
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SPEAKER_03: Right.
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SPEAKER_01: So, Dan,
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SPEAKER_01: we always like to start off with our guests to sort of give us a little bit of
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SPEAKER_01: a history of their spirituality.
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SPEAKER_01: And you've accomplished wonderful things and amazing things over the years in both
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SPEAKER_01: in your writing and your teaching.
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SPEAKER_01: But how did that all come about and how was your spirituality formed initially?
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SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's such a great question.
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SPEAKER_03: And I'm honored to be asked that.
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SPEAKER_03: Oftentimes people dive right into kind of contemporary or topical issues.
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SPEAKER_03: And to take a step back, I really appreciate it.
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SPEAKER_03: There's the very, very long version and then there's the podcast version.
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SPEAKER_03: I'm going to try my best to stick to the podcast version.
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SPEAKER_03: And that really begins with,
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SPEAKER_03: I was raised, I'm the oldest of four children, four boys in my family.
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SPEAKER_03: I come from a Catholic identified family.
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SPEAKER_03: So I'm one of those born and raised cradle Catholics,
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SPEAKER_03: went to Catholic elementary and high school,
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SPEAKER_03: ended up going to Catholic colleges and graduate school.
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SPEAKER_03: And education was really important to my parents, particularly Catholic education.
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SPEAKER_03: They're both products of primary and secondary Catholic education.
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SPEAKER_03: I bring that up because not everybody,
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SPEAKER_03: including many of our listeners who go to Catholic or parochial schools
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SPEAKER_03: or some other kind of religious schools necessarily experience a kind
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SPEAKER_03: of religious awakening or spiritual awakening in that process.
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SPEAKER_03: Some people are actually quite turned off by religious education.
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SPEAKER_03: We can see All the maybe physically and otherwise abusive nuns and priests
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SPEAKER_03: and brothers of the 50s and 60s education.
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SPEAKER_03: But that wasn't generally my experience.
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SPEAKER_03: I found myself from an early age really fascinated by the celebration of the liturgy.
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SPEAKER_03: And though I wouldn't have had the language as an elementary school student.
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SPEAKER_03: The fact that we would have school-wide celebrations of the Eucharist
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SPEAKER_03: and other prayer services,
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SPEAKER_03: whereas other students, you know, I was kind of a fidgety student.
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SPEAKER_03: I was a troublemaker at times.
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SPEAKER_03: My mom credits my third grade teacher with identifying
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SPEAKER_03: that I was probably more bored than anything else,
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SPEAKER_03: and then she kind of just dumped all this work on me,
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SPEAKER_03: and that sort of changed the course of my intellectual journey.
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SPEAKER_03: But I was somebody who,
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SPEAKER_03: in the church setting,
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SPEAKER_03: was always kind of fascinated and drawn to what was unfolding.
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SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03: So as I grew up as a kid,
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SPEAKER_03: I was an altar server and then actually in high school worked for my home parish as
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SPEAKER_03: a sacristan.
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SPEAKER_03: So I was very close to the clergy,
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SPEAKER_03: to the priests and deacons and religious sisters who served my home parish
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SPEAKER_03: in upstate New York, in Utica, New York, in the Diocese of Syracuse.
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SPEAKER_03: And so I at this point was already kind of Drawn to Catholicism,
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SPEAKER_03: drawn to the liturgical life of our faith tradition,
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SPEAKER_03: in particular, you know, that liturgia in Greek, meaning the work of the people.
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SPEAKER_03: It was a community experience.
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SPEAKER_03: I love the quiet in between liturgies on the weekends when I would prepare for mass,
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SPEAKER_03: but congregations would kind of come and go and there'd be a lull in the afternoon
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SPEAKER_03: or in the morning.
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SPEAKER_03: And so the quiet spaces were really meaningful to me,
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SPEAKER_03: as well as the work of the people when we'd gather for liturgy,
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SPEAKER_03: big liturgies, daily masses and so forth.
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SPEAKER_03: So I went to St.
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SPEAKER_03: Bonaventure University,
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SPEAKER_03: Great Franciscan University in Western New York State, where I met the Franciscans.
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SPEAKER_03: Up to that point, I had only really known diocesan priests and a range of women religious.
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SPEAKER_03: None of the kind of male charismatic religious communities like the Dominicans
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SPEAKER_03: or Franciscans or Jesuits and so forth.
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SPEAKER_03: And so that was a really eye-opening experience for me.
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SPEAKER_03: And what I like to say is that I always had a Franciscan heart but didn't understand.
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SPEAKER_03: I didn't have the language or the framework or the kind
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SPEAKER_03: of descriptive power necessary to make sense of that.
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SPEAKER_03: And it was in studying Franciscan theology,
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SPEAKER_03: spirituality,
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SPEAKER_03: history,
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SPEAKER_03: and philosophy as an undergrad that really set my imagination,
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SPEAKER_03: theological and spiritual imagination.
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SPEAKER_03: I kind of had one of those, you know, this is it moments.
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SPEAKER_03: Ironically,
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SPEAKER_03: that's something that one of the many early conversion stories of Francis
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SPEAKER_03: of Assisi conveys something similar where he hears in one of the tellings,
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SPEAKER_03: the local priest reading from the Gospel of Matthew,
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SPEAKER_03: you know,
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SPEAKER_03: go out into the world and take neither stick nor, you know, money sack and so forth.
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SPEAKER_03: And Francis is remembered to have said, that's what I want.
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SPEAKER_03: This is what I desire with all my heart.
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SPEAKER_03: And so I entered the Franciscan Order,
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SPEAKER_03: the OFMs,
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SPEAKER_03: the Friars Minor,
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SPEAKER_03: right after college,
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SPEAKER_03: entered formation and studied,
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SPEAKER_03: was solemnly professed, ordained a ministerial priest in the church and served.
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SPEAKER_03: The church as a Franciscan friar and priest for almost 20 years.
8:54
SPEAKER_03: This is, again, where I have to kind of abridge some of these things.
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SPEAKER_03: We can talk more about it, but I realize the time flies on the podcast.
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SPEAKER_03: I'll just say that after decades of being a member of what we call in
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SPEAKER_03: the Franciscan world,
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SPEAKER_03: the first order,
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SPEAKER_03: and as a ministerial priest in the church, I had,
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SPEAKER_03: like a lot of people around the time of the pandemic,
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SPEAKER_03: an experience of discernment,
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SPEAKER_03: a call of the spirit to kind of reevaluate where God was calling me.
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SPEAKER_03: The very long story short is,
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SPEAKER_03: and as many listeners may already know if they're familiar with me or have used
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SPEAKER_03: that Google device,
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SPEAKER_03: decided with the support of and really the great fraternal presence
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SPEAKER_03: and accompaniment of my brother friars, especially those in ministerial leadership.
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SPEAKER_03: And decided that actually being a part of the First Order was no longer where I felt
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SPEAKER_03: the Spirit was calling me.
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SPEAKER_03: And so I effectively retired from ordained ministry,
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SPEAKER_03: requested of the Order and of the Holy See to be released of my vow.
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SPEAKER_03: And what in canonical language is called the obligations of holy orders.
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SPEAKER_03: And very happy to say that the Holy Father supported that.
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SPEAKER_03: First Francis, but then actually my paperwork was on his desk as he died.
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SPEAKER_03: One of the first things Pope Leo did in early 2025 was approve, sign my dispensation.
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SPEAKER_03: So within two weeks, actually, of his election.
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SPEAKER_03: So it's kind of a wild historical arc to be a part of.
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SPEAKER_03: Since then,
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SPEAKER_03: I continue to do theology,
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SPEAKER_03: to teach theology and philosophy,
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SPEAKER_03: to write about spirituality,
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SPEAKER_03: to give lectures and retreats, to continue to write and research.
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SPEAKER_03: And I see that as still an essential part of my vocation.
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SPEAKER_03: I also still see myself as a Franciscan.
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SPEAKER_03: When I published on October 3rd, 2024,
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SPEAKER_03: the formal news that I had reached this point of discernment with the support
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SPEAKER_03: of my community,
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SPEAKER_03: and I was going to request to leave religious life and serve the church as
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SPEAKER_03: a lay theologian,
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SPEAKER_03: It was published on October 3rd,
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SPEAKER_03: which is the transitus of St.
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SPEAKER_03: Francis, the celebration of his transition from this life to the next.
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SPEAKER_03: Not an end and a beginning, but a transition.
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SPEAKER_03: And that's how I understood my own spiritual journey.
10:57
SPEAKER_03: Continue to be a person,
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SPEAKER_03: I believe,
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SPEAKER_03: of deep faith,
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SPEAKER_03: of commitment to the church,
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SPEAKER_03: of proponent of theology,
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SPEAKER_03: including making that accessible to people outside of the ivory tower or
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SPEAKER_03: the college classroom.
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SPEAKER_03: And so that's where I find myself now and continue to do this work.
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SPEAKER_03: And I'm so grateful for the opportunity to talk with you all about it.
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SPEAKER_03: So sorry for that filibustering, but that's as short as I can make it on the fly.
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SPEAKER_01: No, that was wonderful.
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SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
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SPEAKER_01: And I remember when you made that announcement,
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SPEAKER_01: I remember I believe probably many other people sent you emails saying you're still
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SPEAKER_01: a Franciscan.
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SPEAKER_03: I appreciated that, Patrick.
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SPEAKER_03: And I should say, too,
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SPEAKER_03: not to throw the copy editors of National Catholic Reporter under the bus,
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SPEAKER_03: but the headline that I had proposed for that column was always a Franciscan,
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SPEAKER_03: just no longer a friar.
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SPEAKER_03: And they added like a Franciscan at heart, which kind of waters it down a little bit.
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SPEAKER_03: But those of us in the Franciscan world know what we really mean here.
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SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
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SPEAKER_01: it's something that not being a Franciscan,
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SPEAKER_01: ordained Franciscan in any way,
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SPEAKER_01: people have always said to me, yes, you're a Franciscan.
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SPEAKER_01: Stop pretending that you're, you know, just a Franciscan-hearted.
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SPEAKER_01: Somebody,
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SPEAKER_01: in fact,
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SPEAKER_01: gave me a whole lecture on that one time about you're not Franciscan-hearted,
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SPEAKER_01: you're a Franciscan.
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SPEAKER_01: So it is, it's a way of life.
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SPEAKER_02: I might have kind of one follow-up on that, Dan.
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SPEAKER_02: Just how is your maybe sense of priestliness manifest now in lay life?
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SPEAKER_02: Because we think about this idea that we're all called to be priests and
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SPEAKER_02: to sacramentalize creation in some way.
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SPEAKER_02: How is that from moving from holy orders into the lay life,
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SPEAKER_02: but still having that priestliness, how is it manifesting?
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SPEAKER_03: That's such a great question.
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SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03: In a couple different ways, right?
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SPEAKER_03: So on the one hand,
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SPEAKER_03: the theological nerd in me always kind of has this alarm that rings,
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SPEAKER_03: and it's not triggered necessarily by anybody in this conversation,
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SPEAKER_03: but other people have said like, oh, you know, former priest, this kind of stuff.
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SPEAKER_03: And I'm always quick to point out,
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SPEAKER_03: you can't undo a valid sacrament according to Catholic theology.
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SPEAKER_03: And so I don't present myself,
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SPEAKER_03: I don't serve the faith community as an ordained minister anymore, but I'm still...
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SPEAKER_03: A ministerial priest.
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SPEAKER_03: And that's actually,
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SPEAKER_03: it's interesting in the dispensation from the Holy See
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SPEAKER_03: for those validly ordained like myself, where there's that acknowledgement.
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SPEAKER_03: That's why I like to use the language of retiring from ministry.
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SPEAKER_03: So in that one regard,
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SPEAKER_03: with that one identity in relationship to the rest of the body of Christ,
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SPEAKER_03: I'm no longer actively serving in that ministry.
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SPEAKER_03: Though there are these specified conditions in an emergency,
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SPEAKER_03: under certain circumstances,
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SPEAKER_03: Not only could I validly, but licitly celebrate some of the sacraments.
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SPEAKER_03: So somebody on their deathbed who wants to go to confession, for example, right?
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SPEAKER_03: That's kind of the classic example.
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SPEAKER_03: But your question is a really important one that also speaks to some
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SPEAKER_03: of my own discernment,
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SPEAKER_03: which is,
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SPEAKER_03: as I like to joke,
13:44
SPEAKER_03: and I had even in active ministry,
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SPEAKER_03: you know,
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SPEAKER_03: I'm probably,
13:48
SPEAKER_03: and those of you who know me well,
13:49
SPEAKER_03: this will not be a surprise, probably the most anti-clerical cleric there was.
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SPEAKER_03: Yes.
13:58
SPEAKER_03: But I had always felt uncomfortable with Even for those people who are aware
14:04
SPEAKER_03: of clericalism and were actively working in their ministerial capacity against
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SPEAKER_03: that sort of hierarchicalism in the church,
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SPEAKER_03: that neglects or mitigates what the church teaches in Lumen Gentium,
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SPEAKER_03: that we are all,
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SPEAKER_03: by virtue of our baptism,
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SPEAKER_03: called to holiness,
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SPEAKER_03: called to a shared vocation,
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SPEAKER_03: that we are a pilgrim people, that we are the people of God.
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SPEAKER_03: And it's interesting how that document,
14:26
SPEAKER_03: which is the most authoritative document we have in terms of church teaching
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SPEAKER_03: on clericalism, Church,
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SPEAKER_03: on ministry,
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SPEAKER_03: on baptism,
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SPEAKER_03: on holiness,
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SPEAKER_03: you know,
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SPEAKER_03: situates the kind of levels of orders,
14:36
SPEAKER_03: as it were, pretty late in the document, right?
14:38
SPEAKER_03: They kind of get around to bishops.
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SPEAKER_03: You know,
14:41
SPEAKER_03: the original plan was to make a document about the bishops,
14:43
SPEAKER_03: which wasn't finished in Vatican I.
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SPEAKER_03: And the Holy Spirit said, enough of this.
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SPEAKER_03: Let's focus on what we have in common,
14:49
SPEAKER_03: which I see Pope Francis talking about with Synodality at its best,
14:52
SPEAKER_03: and even Leo more recently as well with the consistory and so forth.
14:56
SPEAKER_03: So for me,
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SPEAKER_03: I've actually experienced myself over the last two,
15:00
SPEAKER_03: two and a half years,
15:02
SPEAKER_03: really recognizing that baptismal call to the threefold office of Christ of priest,
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SPEAKER_03: prophet, and king or minister.
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SPEAKER_03: And
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SPEAKER_03: I don't know exactly what that looks like but I feel comfortable in this positionality.
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SPEAKER_03: I feel like this is where I'm meant to be.
15:22
SPEAKER_03: I will say one of the things I do miss about Being an active ministerial priest,
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SPEAKER_03: serving the church in a sacramental capacity is liturgical preaching.
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SPEAKER_03: Celebrating the sacraments, presiding over the sacraments was always very meaningful.
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SPEAKER_03: But one thing I experience now as somebody who does not have those faculties as
15:43
SPEAKER_03: a deacon or a priest or a bishop is Is a missing of that.
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SPEAKER_03: And also recognizing that there are people who are not called to ordained ministry
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SPEAKER_03: who may very well be called to the ministry of preaching,
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SPEAKER_03: to a ministry of teaching in other capacities.
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SPEAKER_03: So I've worked over the years with great folks.
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SPEAKER_03: Folks like Casey Stanton at Discerning Deacons and was a big part of a group
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SPEAKER_03: of people who received a large grant to create a program for preaching formation
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SPEAKER_03: for lay women in the church.
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SPEAKER_03: And so that is called Proclaim.
16:16
SPEAKER_03: Just a shout out to them.
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SPEAKER_03: They're doing tremendous work with a great executive director, Lisa, who's fantastic.
16:23
SPEAKER_03: So I bring that up because I feel like my position in relationship to the rest of
16:26
SPEAKER_03: the church has changed,
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SPEAKER_03: which is what happens when you're ordained as well and serving in that ministry.
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SPEAKER_03: But this notion of priesthood,
16:34
SPEAKER_03: as you're talking about it,
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SPEAKER_03: particularly from baptismal priesthood,
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SPEAKER_03: for me, I'm still discerning what that means in my own life.
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SPEAKER_03: I think I understand that in short...
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SPEAKER_03: As an expression or is kind of a manifestation of my vocation as a theologian and teacher.
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SPEAKER_03: That's one way I think I would answer that.
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SPEAKER_03: That might also come under the sort of prophetic call of Christ in baptism.
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SPEAKER_03: But if we think about a priest as somebody who accompanies and mediates,
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SPEAKER_03: then I think there are ways in which that is a growing edge for me in this new state
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SPEAKER_03: of life in the church.
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SPEAKER_00: I have to say,
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SPEAKER_00: I'm really,
17:09
SPEAKER_00: I guess maybe the word is validated to hear What you just had to say about this idea
17:17
SPEAKER_00: of being able to deliver a homily,
17:21
SPEAKER_00: it's always been,
17:22
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:23
SPEAKER_00: as a woman in the church,
17:25
SPEAKER_00: frustrating not to hear feminine voices,
17:28
SPEAKER_00: because no matter what,
17:30
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:30
SPEAKER_00: in many ways,
17:32
SPEAKER_00: we see the world through a different lens, the lens of our experience as women.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: So I can totally understand how you feel about no longer having that pulpit in that way.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: And this relates to my next question, your writing.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm a writer as well and a teacher of writing.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I always would say to aspiring writers is,
17:57
SPEAKER_00: first thing you have to ask yourself is,
18:00
SPEAKER_00: who is my audience and what's my purpose in this piece of writing?
18:04
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, writing about theology and spirituality, that's a given.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: But would you say that in terms of your writing,
18:14
SPEAKER_00: given that you're writing from really a different kind of a role now,
18:18
SPEAKER_00: has that audience and purpose changed in any way?
18:22
SPEAKER_00: And do you feel a greater freedom to speak outside of the order as opposed to inside?
18:30
SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Barbara.
18:32
SPEAKER_03: Talk about a really great question.
18:35
SPEAKER_03: And one that I can give a partial answer to only because I'm continuing to think
18:40
SPEAKER_03: through some of that, actually.
18:42
SPEAKER_03: You're really insightful.
18:43
SPEAKER_03: I like the way you put that just with regard to the last comment about the freedom,
18:48
SPEAKER_03: because I don't know how to articulate this.
18:50
SPEAKER_03: I'm still thinking through and living through some of that.
18:55
SPEAKER_03: It's not that as a professed member of the Franciscan order that I felt unfree.
19:01
SPEAKER_03: In fact, I felt very supported in my 20 years.
19:04
SPEAKER_03: I would not be where I am.
19:06
SPEAKER_03: I would not have the kind of spiritual and theological worldview that I do
19:11
SPEAKER_03: if it wasn't for my formation as a Franciscan friar,
19:13
SPEAKER_03: if it wasn't for the support of religious worship.
19:17
SPEAKER_03: Franciscans, we don't like to talk about the language of superior or prior.
19:19
SPEAKER_03: We can talk about our ministers, provincial and local ministers, our guardians.
19:23
SPEAKER_03: But I felt very supported.
19:25
SPEAKER_03: So I never felt as though like, oh, I couldn't talk about X, right?
19:29
SPEAKER_03: I couldn't talk about Y.
19:31
SPEAKER_03: And yet now,
19:32
SPEAKER_03: but at the same time,
19:33
SPEAKER_03: I was always very aware of the fact that I am a member of a corporate body, right?
19:39
SPEAKER_03: Of a community.
19:40
SPEAKER_03: And when they saw Daniel Horan OFM, that OFM is not, Dan Horan by himself is some rogue.
19:47
SPEAKER_03: And I think sometimes men and women in religious life forget that.
19:52
SPEAKER_03: I think in our influencer age, as we might say, that temptation runs quite high.
19:57
SPEAKER_03: That has always made me nervous.
19:59
SPEAKER_03: But then again, as I like to joke, I'm an old millennial.
20:02
SPEAKER_03: You know, Xennials, they used to call it, like either a young Gen Xer or an old millennial.
20:07
SPEAKER_03: And so I've always been a little bit wary of some of the social media,
20:11
SPEAKER_03: yet I have struggled to be present to that as well.
20:13
SPEAKER_03: So I have said things sometimes that would ruffle feathers
20:17
SPEAKER_03: or sometimes would be read as controversial, but I always felt and was supported.
20:22
SPEAKER_03: In some ways, there's a greater freedom because I don't have that affiliation anymore.
20:27
SPEAKER_03: I'm not responsible then for being mistaken for representing
20:31
SPEAKER_03: a whole religious community or
20:32
SPEAKER_00: something like that.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to put out the message, you know, does not necessarily.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
20:38
SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
20:39
SPEAKER_03: That's right.
20:39
SPEAKER_03: Instead, I take the politician message.
20:41
SPEAKER_03: I put out a statement and I say, I'm Dan Horan, and I approve this message.
20:46
SPEAKER_03: That's the difference, perhaps.
20:48
SPEAKER_03: But the one thing I will say,
20:50
SPEAKER_03: if I may, in response to that really great question, is that there are other things.
20:54
SPEAKER_03: I think I always was somewhat reluctant,
20:57
SPEAKER_03: and part of this is personality,
20:58
SPEAKER_03: and part of this is having been religious for decades, is that I was...
21:03
SPEAKER_03: For as public a figure as I have been and remain, I'm a rather private person, right?
21:08
SPEAKER_03: I don't talk a lot about my personal life.
21:12
SPEAKER_03: That's why I love this question that Michael and Patrick and Barbara
21:15
SPEAKER_03: that you led off with, which is like, what is your spiritual journey?
21:18
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I don't often talk about that.
21:20
SPEAKER_03: I'm not often asked about that.
21:22
SPEAKER_03: And so I think there I'm exploring a new freedom where I can speak
21:25
SPEAKER_03: a little bit more freely from my own experience without feeling like I have
21:29
SPEAKER_03: to implicate all the other brothers or by extension sisters in the Franciscan world.
21:34
SPEAKER_03: And at the same time, I'm so still a part of that world.
21:38
SPEAKER_03: And so it's been an interesting experience and it continues to be.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me,
21:42
SPEAKER_00: at least my impression as a layperson,
21:45
SPEAKER_00: is that people or priests who are part of an order seem to have
21:52
SPEAKER_00: a little more freedom of expression and a little bit more freedom to kind of move
21:58
SPEAKER_00: about in their roles as might a diocesan priest.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking in particular of someone I know who left the diocesan priesthood
22:08
SPEAKER_00: and How so many doors were closed for him to use his many gifts in ministry.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: You know, it almost felt like a punishment for having left.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: And it was really a shame because it was really a loss for the church on many levels
22:27
SPEAKER_00: and tremendous personal loss for him.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: Do you see that it's different given that you're in an orphanage?
22:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well,
22:34
SPEAKER_03: I can speak from my own experience,
22:36
SPEAKER_03: but then I can also share just briefly some of what I've learned over
22:38
SPEAKER_03: the last two years,
22:39
SPEAKER_03: which I haven't talked about very much publicly,
22:41
SPEAKER_03: but I intend to write about at some point.
22:44
SPEAKER_03: I'm still reflecting on this and working through it.
22:48
SPEAKER_03: My own experience was one of great support.
22:50
SPEAKER_03: It was one of, to use the Latin kind of Franciscan term, fraternitas.
22:55
SPEAKER_03: It was one of brotherhood, of sisterhood, of support.
22:58
SPEAKER_03: I think part of that, again,
22:59
SPEAKER_03: it makes me a little bit uncomfortable because I'm centering myself
23:01
SPEAKER_03: in this narrative,
23:02
SPEAKER_03: but what some of my brothers,
23:05
SPEAKER_03: particularly those in leadership roles in the community,
23:08
SPEAKER_03: shared with me was their own gratitude for my transparency, right?
23:12
SPEAKER_03: People are on their own journeys.
23:13
SPEAKER_03: And I think for me,
23:15
SPEAKER_03: it was really important that I Do things the right way,
23:19
SPEAKER_03: to put it kind of clunky way.
23:21
SPEAKER_03: And one of those things was taking time to seriously discern,
23:26
SPEAKER_03: to pray,
23:26
SPEAKER_03: to reflect,
23:27
SPEAKER_03: to be in spiritual direction,
23:28
SPEAKER_03: to be in counseling, to really take seriously this possibility and to remain open.
23:32
SPEAKER_03: Even as I took a year, it was a year before I made that announcement at NCR in 2024.
23:36
SPEAKER_03: So in 2023...
23:39
SPEAKER_03: To step back for some vocational discernment.
23:41
SPEAKER_03: Now, I was fortunate in the sense that my primary job was not one of parish ministry.
23:47
SPEAKER_03: And so the break there wasn't as obvious.
23:50
SPEAKER_03: I could continue to teach.
23:51
SPEAKER_03: I could continue to lecture and write as an academic because I wasn't working in
23:55
SPEAKER_03: a traditionally ministerial capacity.
23:58
SPEAKER_03: And so for me, I did feel very supported.
24:00
SPEAKER_03: And I think the community has a lot to do with that.
24:02
SPEAKER_03: I also think the Franciscan charism has a lot to do with that.
24:05
SPEAKER_03: But I don't want to generalize because other people at different periods of time and
24:09
SPEAKER_03: because of their own process,
24:10
SPEAKER_03: their own journey,
24:12
SPEAKER_03: and because of the people that they're working with and being accompanied by
24:15
SPEAKER_03: or not can affect them.
24:18
SPEAKER_03: But one of the things that I did not anticipate from basically,
24:21
SPEAKER_03: you know,
24:21
SPEAKER_03: Patrick mentioned sending me a note and I'm so grateful for that and for so many
24:25
SPEAKER_03: who reached out to me,
24:26
SPEAKER_03: including bishops and priests and sisters and people from around the world
24:30
SPEAKER_03: that I have known.
24:31
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it was really 99.9% affirming.
24:36
SPEAKER_03: Mostly because I didn't look at Twitter.
24:37
SPEAKER_03: I was off Twitter at that time.
24:38
SPEAKER_03: So I have no idea.
24:39
SPEAKER_03: Somebody has subsequently told me in a podcast conversation that there was a lot
24:42
SPEAKER_03: of nasty stuff out there.
24:43
SPEAKER_03: I said, well, I'm happy to report.
24:45
SPEAKER_03: I have no idea about it.
24:47
SPEAKER_03: But I will say,
24:48
SPEAKER_03: Barbara,
24:48
SPEAKER_03: your question,
24:50
SPEAKER_03: you know,
24:50
SPEAKER_03: what that leads me to is the people who came out of the,
24:54
SPEAKER_03: to lack of a better phrase, woodwork.
24:55
SPEAKER_03: The people who I didn't necessarily know closely who either in person,
25:00
SPEAKER_03: and there were a number of people who came up to me at different events or even at
25:03
SPEAKER_03: the church where I worshiped.
25:05
SPEAKER_03: In the community here,
25:06
SPEAKER_03: greater community of South Bend with St.
25:08
SPEAKER_03: Mary's and Notre Dame and Holy Cross College,
25:11
SPEAKER_03: but also when I've traveled, people have reached out to share their stories.
25:17
SPEAKER_03: A lot of people,
25:18
SPEAKER_03: particularly diocesan guys,
25:21
SPEAKER_03: had experiences similar to who you were talking about,
25:23
SPEAKER_03: Barbara, where they felt unsupported.
25:25
SPEAKER_03: They felt cut off.
25:27
SPEAKER_03: They felt dismissed.
25:29
SPEAKER_03: Some people were treated really poorly.
25:31
SPEAKER_03: I'll be very frank.
25:32
SPEAKER_03: He's canonized now,
25:34
SPEAKER_03: but this is in addition to concerns that have been raised about now St.
25:38
SPEAKER_03: John Paul II and his pontificate and the issue of clergy sexual abuse
25:42
SPEAKER_03: and its cover up and his denial of that.
25:44
SPEAKER_03: That's all very important.
25:45
SPEAKER_03: But another thing that is really clear that has come to my attention over
25:49
SPEAKER_03: the last two years is the real vindictive attitude he perpetuated when it came
25:53
SPEAKER_03: to men and women religious who were leaving religious life,
25:56
SPEAKER_03: in particular diocesan priests leaving ministry.
25:59
SPEAKER_03: And I'm not talking about guys or gals who are accused of anything or
26:02
SPEAKER_03: who were removed from ministry.
26:03
SPEAKER_03: I'm talking about people who discerned and did their best to be transparent and
26:07
SPEAKER_03: with integrity and And the refusal to grant the kind of permissions,
26:12
SPEAKER_03: the rescript,
26:13
SPEAKER_03: the dispensation to allow them to marry in the church or to serve in ministries in
26:18
SPEAKER_03: the church outside of ordained ministry, which is their baptismal right.
26:23
SPEAKER_03: It has been so painful to hear these stories and how people persist
26:26
SPEAKER_03: and how they struggle to relate to the church when the church as institution,
26:31
SPEAKER_03: as church as minister has treated them so poorly.
26:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
26:35
SPEAKER_03: I'm happy to say that that was not my experience.
26:37
SPEAKER_03: Pope Francis worked really hard In a more pastoral way,
26:41
SPEAKER_03: I think Leo is continuing that tradition for people who are going through this kind
26:45
SPEAKER_03: of discernment about religious life.
26:47
SPEAKER_03: But the one thing that I need to spend more time thinking about and that I intend
26:51
SPEAKER_03: to talk and write more about is the role of shame in all this.
26:54
SPEAKER_03: I did not feel shamed.
26:56
SPEAKER_03: I have no shame about where the Spirit has led me,
27:00
SPEAKER_03: about the good work that I know God has done through me in the 20 years
27:04
SPEAKER_03: of Franciscan ministry and priestly ministry.
27:07
SPEAKER_03: But that doesn't stop now.
27:09
SPEAKER_03: And that's why it is a transitus.
27:10
SPEAKER_03: The Franciscan tradition has given me language to understand that and the community
27:14
SPEAKER_03: to support me in that.
27:15
SPEAKER_03: But shame plays a big role.
27:17
SPEAKER_03: And there's a lot of real painful stories out there.
27:20
SPEAKER_03: So sorry to go on about that, but their stories need to be heard.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: I think it's really important.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: And I also think it's interesting that both Francis and Leo...
27:30
SPEAKER_00: You know,
27:31
SPEAKER_00: one is an Augustinian,
27:32
SPEAKER_00: the other Franciscan,
27:34
SPEAKER_00: that we do see a different kind of a tone out there in regard to so many things that
27:42
SPEAKER_00: the church just feels more open,
27:45
SPEAKER_00: you know, synodality, accompaniment, all of those kinds of things.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me maybe an outgrowth from really coming up through the ranks in the
27:57
SPEAKER_00: With the Franciscans or the Augustinians,
28:00
SPEAKER_00: I just think it's a different tone, and I think it's a welcome tone.
28:04
SPEAKER_02: I'd be curious, Dan,
28:04
SPEAKER_02: if you felt that tone,
28:05
SPEAKER_02: because I think we're of,
28:06
SPEAKER_02: came of age around a similar time in what you were just saying about John Paul II.
28:10
SPEAKER_02: I actually just read the George Weigel's biography,
28:12
SPEAKER_02: and it was really illuminating in a lot of ways,
28:14
SPEAKER_02: but I do feel,
28:15
SPEAKER_02: I wasn't aware of what you just shared,
28:17
SPEAKER_02: but that he had gone through so much personally that he almost was like,
28:22
SPEAKER_02: If anyone can't hack it, that's kind of on them.
28:24
SPEAKER_02: He was not a very, not as pastoral in some instances.
28:27
SPEAKER_02: So do you,
28:28
SPEAKER_02: I'm sidetracking a bit,
28:29
SPEAKER_02: but as Barb was just mentioning,
28:30
SPEAKER_02: do you feel that sense of openness in kind of the trajectory of your experience of
28:34
SPEAKER_02: the church?
28:34
SPEAKER_02: Because I definitely feel it post-Francis that things are on the table that weren't
28:37
SPEAKER_02: when we were coming of age.
28:39
SPEAKER_03: Oh, 100%.
28:40
SPEAKER_03: I 100% do.
28:42
SPEAKER_03: I think I can see that from a couple different vantage points from my own experience.
28:46
SPEAKER_03: One is as a religious and as an ordained priest,
28:49
SPEAKER_03: I think in that process of discernment of transitioning into lay life
28:52
SPEAKER_03: or leaving religious life,
28:55
SPEAKER_03: even people like the Franciscan canon lawyer who was assigned to me to work with me
28:59
SPEAKER_03: through the process of the paperwork with Rome.
29:03
SPEAKER_03: Even he observed, like, look, Francis has been – he has seen this as a pastoral need, right?
29:09
SPEAKER_03: It's not the flashy thing that gets on the front page like,
29:12
SPEAKER_03: you know, the different research groups or the synodal sessions and so forth.
29:16
SPEAKER_03: But it's a behind-the-scenes.
29:21
SPEAKER_03: I think with Leo, you see something similar.
29:23
SPEAKER_03: I think Barbara's right.
29:25
SPEAKER_03: These are two folks who come from religious traditions,
29:28
SPEAKER_03: the Ignatian tradition with the Franciscan heart.
29:30
SPEAKER_03: Here we are at the Franciscan heart with Francis.
29:32
SPEAKER_03: And then with Leo as an Augustinian as well.
29:35
SPEAKER_03: I also think their geographic perspective is important coming from the Americas.
29:41
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
29:53
SPEAKER_03: There's a very insular,
29:54
SPEAKER_03: very isolated,
29:55
SPEAKER_03: very kind of bubble way of thinking over there that, yeah,
30:00
SPEAKER_03: you add John Paul II's upbringing and what it's like for him to be a young man and
30:05
SPEAKER_03: the kind of pressures on the church in the age of communism.
30:08
SPEAKER_03: You look at Benedict,
30:09
SPEAKER_03: the same sort of thing with World War II and National Socialism and
30:12
SPEAKER_03: the Nazi imposition.
30:13
SPEAKER_03: And these are really horrific experiences.
30:17
SPEAKER_03: And I don't want to take away from that.
30:19
SPEAKER_03: But we see that also with John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger as his right-hand man in
30:23
SPEAKER_03: the doctrine office for all those decades.
30:25
SPEAKER_03: The treatment of liberation theology,
30:27
SPEAKER_03: the skepticism, I mean, the treatment of somebody like Oscar Romero in the 1980s.
30:31
SPEAKER_03: It's just abhorrent, really, in retrospect.
30:34
SPEAKER_03: We see the denial in the early 2000s,
30:36
SPEAKER_03: even from a very ill John Paul II with regard to the clergy sexual abuse revelations
30:41
SPEAKER_03: in the Boston Globe.
30:43
SPEAKER_03: We see the anti-LGBTQ crackdown, you know, with the documents of the 1980s.
30:49
SPEAKER_03: We see, you know,
30:50
SPEAKER_03: the doctrinal impositions that come down at the same time,
30:55
SPEAKER_03: the hammer on people like Jacques Dupuis or...
30:58
SPEAKER_03: Leonardo Boff, speaking of fellow former Franciscans.
31:02
SPEAKER_03: And we can just go on and on and on.
31:04
SPEAKER_03: And I think we have not seen that over the last decade plus under Francis and Leo.
31:10
SPEAKER_03: And I hope that continues.
31:12
SPEAKER_03: I have a lot to say.
31:13
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I have a lot of interest as a theologian as well in not creating cultures of fear.
31:20
SPEAKER_03: Can I just do one quick anecdote?
31:23
SPEAKER_03: I know we're talking about Tomorrow's American Catholic,
31:25
SPEAKER_03: but we went back to 13th century British and French Catholics in the Diocese
31:32
SPEAKER_03: of Paris, where you had one of the earliest scholars.
31:35
SPEAKER_03: Sort of Western European universities in the 13th century come to existence.
31:39
SPEAKER_03: The Archbishop of Paris had a lot of hands-on involvement in what was going on in
31:43
SPEAKER_03: the schools there and then what became the university.
31:46
SPEAKER_03: And you have things like three years after Thomas Aquinas' death,
31:49
SPEAKER_03: the condemnation of his writings because he was too loosey-goosey.
31:53
SPEAKER_03: He was too sort of engaging with the world and with pagans like Aristotle, God forbid, right?
31:59
SPEAKER_03: But across the channel,
32:00
SPEAKER_03: you have the University of Oxford,
32:02
SPEAKER_03: which was founded around the same time, a different vibe of theological exploration.
32:08
SPEAKER_03: In part,
32:08
SPEAKER_03: my theory is,
32:09
SPEAKER_03: and I'm not the only one to advance this,
32:11
SPEAKER_03: because there wasn't as much ecclesiastical pressure
32:15
SPEAKER_03: where people like John Donne Scotus and William of Ockham
32:18
SPEAKER_03: and Robert Gross Attest could do theology in really creative and innovative ways.
32:24
SPEAKER_03: And you see that in somebody like Scotus.
32:26
SPEAKER_03: I'm a Scotus nerd, so he...
32:28
SPEAKER_03: He studies and teaches in England as well as in Paris,
32:31
SPEAKER_03: and what he writes in Paris is much more constrained.
32:33
SPEAKER_03: And so anyway, a little nerding out there, but I think that it does kind of start at the top.
32:40
SPEAKER_03: And I think in both Francis and Leo,
32:42
SPEAKER_03: we see people opening up,
32:44
SPEAKER_03: like John XXIII, the opportunity for the spirit to move as she will.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: So let's move us a little bit forward from John Dunscotis, who...
32:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, I have to admit,
32:56
SPEAKER_01: I've read most of what he has written,
32:58
SPEAKER_01: and I still don't understand a single word of it.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: That makes two of us.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: I keep asking.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: And you're a scholar on it, so I feel much better now.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I learned and understood when I took the job as
33:11
SPEAKER_01: the executive director of the Franciscan Action Network,
33:14
SPEAKER_01: and to this day,
33:15
SPEAKER_01: I have no idea why they hired me,
33:17
SPEAKER_01: because I had no background in Franciscan Spirituality, theology.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: I discovered later that I had an uncle who was a Franciscan in Belfast,
33:25
SPEAKER_01: but he died before I was born.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: But my mother told me that after I took the job.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: And yet I was so welcome there in the Franciscan world,
33:33
SPEAKER_01: not just at Fan, but in the Franciscan world.
33:36
SPEAKER_01: And the understanding of the importance of Franciscan spirituality,
33:41
SPEAKER_01: not just from a faith perspective,
33:44
SPEAKER_01: but from a global world perspective, from the understanding of who we are.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Ilya writes about this.
33:49
SPEAKER_01: You write about this.
33:50
SPEAKER_01: I've written about it.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: Others have, you know, Richard Roy created a whole center around it, who we are in the world.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: As part of the Franciscan family,
34:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:01
SPEAKER_01: with the kind of current mess,
34:03
SPEAKER_01: we try to stay away from politics in this podcast,
34:05
SPEAKER_01: but with the current mess that we're living in,
34:08
SPEAKER_01: what role do you see for the Franciscans and how do we get people
34:13
SPEAKER_01: to better understand?
34:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's almost like we have to reimagine who St. Francis was.
34:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, this is going to be well-received.
34:22
SPEAKER_03: And you have about 30 seconds to answer that question.
34:26
SPEAKER_03: Well, I was just going to say that I think I'm speaking and preaching to the choir,
34:30
SPEAKER_03: as it were,
34:31
SPEAKER_03: in this case,
34:31
SPEAKER_03: which is I think the Franciscan tradition has a lot to say, unsurprisingly here.
34:39
SPEAKER_03: I mean, one thing is.
34:41
SPEAKER_03: I really do believe that,
34:43
SPEAKER_03: on the one hand,
34:44
SPEAKER_03: would Frances,
34:45
SPEAKER_03: and by extension Claire,
34:46
SPEAKER_03: right, as the legitimate co-founder of this movement, would they...
34:49
SPEAKER_03: I think for saying that.
34:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well,
34:51
SPEAKER_03: and it's true,
34:52
SPEAKER_03: and people forget,
34:53
SPEAKER_03: you know, Frances dies in 1226, but Claire lives until 1253, and she...
34:58
SPEAKER_03: Influences people like St.
34:59
SPEAKER_03: Bonaventure,
35:00
SPEAKER_03: people like Gregory IX,
35:04
SPEAKER_03: who ultimately on her near deathbed grants her permission to be the first woman
35:09
SPEAKER_03: who authors a rule for a religious way of life.
35:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so it's easy to kind of like put Claire aside,
35:14
SPEAKER_03: but she deserves to be there front and center because she actually influences
35:17
SPEAKER_03: the movement.
35:19
SPEAKER_03: Longer than Francis himself did.
35:20
SPEAKER_03: He started something and then it gets moved on.
35:23
SPEAKER_03: But anyway, what they both recognized was the intrinsic importance of relationship.
35:29
SPEAKER_03: And they come to that awareness not by their own sort of cleverness or creativity,
35:35
SPEAKER_03: but because they return to the gospel.
35:36
SPEAKER_03: And one of the things I'm fond of saying is that
35:39
SPEAKER_03: the Franciscan spiritual tradition is deeply unoriginal.
35:42
SPEAKER_03: It's just a footnote of the gospel.
35:45
SPEAKER_03: And you see that in the rules, all three branches of the order.
35:48
SPEAKER_03: The first order of the Franciscan friars,
35:50
SPEAKER_03: those three branches,
35:51
SPEAKER_03: the second order of the poor clairs,
35:53
SPEAKER_03: and then the third order secular and third order regular,
35:55
SPEAKER_03: all the rules begin the same way,
35:57
SPEAKER_03: which is the way in life of the Franciscans is this,
35:59
SPEAKER_03: to live the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, period.
36:02
SPEAKER_03: That's the first thing.
36:03
SPEAKER_03: That's the whole thing.
36:04
SPEAKER_03: Everything that follows is an interpretation of our particular way of living this out.
36:10
SPEAKER_03: So the third order secular is not going to live those evangelical councils
36:14
SPEAKER_03: of poverty,
36:15
SPEAKER_03: chastity,
36:15
SPEAKER_03: and obedience, but the first and second and third order regular will, right?
36:18
SPEAKER_03: So you have the tweaks there.
36:20
SPEAKER_03: But what comes first, including, as I'm fond of pointing out, is that Francis of Assisi...
36:26
SPEAKER_03: Says that our first loyalty is to Christ in the gospel,
36:29
SPEAKER_03: regardless of what your state of life is,
36:31
SPEAKER_03: regardless of which branch you're in,
36:33
SPEAKER_03: regardless of who you are, by virtue of baptism, that's your call.
36:36
SPEAKER_03: Secondarily,
36:37
SPEAKER_03: he says, I,
36:37
SPEAKER_03: Brother Francis,
36:38
SPEAKER_03: vow obedience to Pope Honorius III and his successors and to the minister general
36:43
SPEAKER_03: of this order.
36:44
SPEAKER_03: And I wrote a piece a little while ago about this,
36:46
SPEAKER_03: that one way to look at this and how Francis actually lived his life is Was
36:51
SPEAKER_03: to prioritize relationship when there was tensions,
36:53
SPEAKER_03: including ecclesiastical tensions, like the call of the Fifth Crusade.
36:57
SPEAKER_03: And Francis goes and does not support that initiative,
37:00
SPEAKER_03: but instead crosses against the advice of the cardinal legate to go over
37:04
SPEAKER_03: the so-called,
37:05
SPEAKER_03: you know, Saracen battle line, to go over to visit the Muslims in the...
37:10
SPEAKER_03: And to the Sultan,
37:11
SPEAKER_03: Sultan Malach al-Khamil,
37:13
SPEAKER_03: in April of 1219,
37:14
SPEAKER_03: he does so because he sees the inherent brotherhood of this Muslim man
37:19
SPEAKER_03: who he recognizes as his brother in God,
37:22
SPEAKER_03: in Christ, changes his whole perspective, changes his life.
37:24
SPEAKER_03: He changes ultimately the earlier rule of 1221.
37:28
SPEAKER_03: We see the same thing with his early relationship to lepers.
37:30
SPEAKER_03: We see it in his relationship even to really wealthy people.
37:34
SPEAKER_03: I'm fond of saying,
37:36
SPEAKER_03: giving credit to Father Kent Himes,
37:38
SPEAKER_03: a Franciscan moral theologian,
37:40
SPEAKER_03: retired from Boston College,
37:41
SPEAKER_03: who In a talk he once gave many,
37:43
SPEAKER_03: many years ago said,
37:44
SPEAKER_03: how is it that Francis of Assisi could treat,
37:47
SPEAKER_03: could see people like the leper and the poorest of the poor and yet the Pope,
37:51
SPEAKER_03: Innocent III and the wealthy counts and dukes and kings and princes
37:56
SPEAKER_03: and treat them all the same?
37:57
SPEAKER_03: Why is it that he could relate so easily to them?
37:59
SPEAKER_03: And Ken says,
38:01
SPEAKER_03: because nobody ever looked into Francis's eyes and saw greed or lust for power or
38:05
SPEAKER_03: the desire to control another person.
38:08
SPEAKER_03: And I think that is putting relationship first and foremost,
38:11
SPEAKER_03: and that's what Jesus Christ did as well.
38:13
SPEAKER_03: So that opens up all kinds of avenues for today.
38:18
SPEAKER_03: If only we could put, I mean, it's so simple as to be nearly impossible.
38:22
SPEAKER_03: If only we could just see each other as the siblings that we are in God,
38:26
SPEAKER_03: in one another,
38:27
SPEAKER_03: and to recognize,
38:28
SPEAKER_03: as Francis did too,
38:29
SPEAKER_03: that that sibling connection extends beyond the human family to the more
38:33
SPEAKER_03: than human world.
38:34
SPEAKER_03: And so in this age of ecological crisis,
38:37
SPEAKER_03: Can we say that this tree and this squirrel and this river
38:42
SPEAKER_03: and this great lake are our siblings that care for us and support us like brother,
38:48
SPEAKER_03: son and sister moon and mother earth?
38:50
SPEAKER_03: Or do we reduce Francis's powerful theological and spiritual vision to
38:55
SPEAKER_03: a bumper sticker and a garden trinket?
38:58
SPEAKER_03: And I think if we can move beyond that, then that's incredibly powerful.
39:03
SPEAKER_03: It really is.
39:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: And I guess the other part of it is,
39:07
SPEAKER_01: and again,
39:08
SPEAKER_01: to give Claire all the credit for this,
39:09
SPEAKER_01: although Francis gets credit for it,
39:11
SPEAKER_01: is when she wrote about being a mirror of Christ.
39:14
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
39:15
SPEAKER_01: what Francis is credited with saying,
39:18
SPEAKER_01: I can never find anywhere,
39:19
SPEAKER_01: or he actually said it, but when I look at you, I should see Christ.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: And when you look at me, you should see Christ.
39:25
SPEAKER_01: And if I'm not seeing the Christ in you and you're not seeing the Christ in me,
39:28
SPEAKER_01: then we really need to start to reimagine who we are and what we are.
39:32
SPEAKER_01: And it's not just you and me as individuals,
39:35
SPEAKER_01: it's all of creation, as you just said, and seeing the Christ in all of creation.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: And Francis did see the Christ.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: He saw this crucified Christ in the suffering and in the poor.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: So maybe if we started looking around and started seeing the Christ in everyone
39:50
SPEAKER_01: and everything,
39:51
SPEAKER_01: The other question I have centers around the whole issue of interspirituality.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: First of all,
39:57
SPEAKER_01: just even within the Franciscan movement,
39:59
SPEAKER_01: there are whole orders,
40:00
SPEAKER_01: as you well know,
40:01
SPEAKER_01: of Episcopalian Franciscans and Ecumenical Franciscans and Lutheran Franciscans.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: There's even Sufi Franciscans.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: People like folks like that.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: So it's pretty much a universal order.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: It's not a Catholic order anymore,
40:16
SPEAKER_01: which sort of tells us something of which direction we need to go in,
40:20
SPEAKER_01: both as people who are Franciscan and also as the rest of our society.
40:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
40:28
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it goes back, I believe, to that opening line in all the rules, right?
40:32
SPEAKER_03: Which is if what our call is,
40:35
SPEAKER_03: is to walk in the footprints of our Lord Jesus Christ, well,
40:37
SPEAKER_03: then if you recognize through baptism that to be the case,
40:41
SPEAKER_03: that Christ is God incarnate.
40:43
SPEAKER_03: Then you're welcome on board.
40:45
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Franciscan train.
40:48
SPEAKER_03: And I do think there are all these other influences.
40:52
SPEAKER_03: Famously,
40:53
SPEAKER_03: you have the Benedictine connection to the early Franciscans,
40:57
SPEAKER_03: the Porziuncola,
40:57
SPEAKER_03: the Church of Our Lady of the Angels in the Valley of Assisi,
41:01
SPEAKER_03: which was the real heart of the Franciscan order.
41:04
SPEAKER_03: It's where Francis went to die.
41:05
SPEAKER_03: It's where he received Claire.
41:08
SPEAKER_03: There are all these ways in which this is the kind of mother church, this tiny little...
41:13
SPEAKER_03: Byzantine Chapel inside a huge Roman Bismarck today.
41:17
SPEAKER_03: But the tradition continues some 800 years that that church,
41:22
SPEAKER_03: that little country church, was actually owned by a Benedictine monastery.
41:26
SPEAKER_03: And every August 2nd, the order gives...
41:29
SPEAKER_03: The lease funding for that church, which is a basket of fish.
41:34
SPEAKER_03: I bring this little tidbit up,
41:35
SPEAKER_03: which is a tradition that continues to this day,
41:37
SPEAKER_03: that the local abbot receives this basket of fish from the friars as payment for
41:41
SPEAKER_03: the loan of this church.
41:43
SPEAKER_03: I bring that up because you talked about welcoming others.
41:46
SPEAKER_03: You talked about treating, seeing Christ in one another.
41:48
SPEAKER_03: And I'm thinking of the Benedictine rule, which says you're to welcome all as Christ.
41:52
SPEAKER_03: And I think that is exactly...
41:55
SPEAKER_03: The kind of spirit that we see play out in Francis and Claire.
41:58
SPEAKER_03: They don't turn anybody away.
42:00
SPEAKER_03: And it's interesting,
42:00
SPEAKER_03: Patrick,
42:01
SPEAKER_03: you mentioned earlier that,
42:03
SPEAKER_03: you know,
42:03
SPEAKER_03: a lot of the earlier writings,
42:04
SPEAKER_03: the hagiography, you know, they had a political aim, right?
42:07
SPEAKER_03: The idea was to show how holy and how significantly holy Francis was
42:11
SPEAKER_03: from his early life in order to demonstrate his saintliness to be canonized.
42:15
SPEAKER_03: But then within a generation,
42:17
SPEAKER_03: we have these other stories that are collected by later ministers general,
42:20
SPEAKER_03: like the Assisi compilation,
42:22
SPEAKER_03: Anonymous of Perugia, The Legend of the Three Companions.
42:25
SPEAKER_03: And these are recollections from people who knew him, who lived with him.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: And some of those stories are striking because they show a side
42:32
SPEAKER_03: of Francis that's deeply human and flawed,
42:34
SPEAKER_03: where he made mistakes, where he did not treat other people well.
42:38
SPEAKER_03: But there's one consistent theme that those people remember, which is...
42:42
SPEAKER_03: He didn't make a mistake and then just ignore it.
42:44
SPEAKER_03: He always went back and sought reconciliation, right,
42:46
SPEAKER_03: which we see, again,
42:47
SPEAKER_03: at the end of the Canticle of the Creatures,
42:49
SPEAKER_03: that blessed are those who are peacemakers and reconcilers and lovers.
42:53
SPEAKER_03: So I think,
42:54
SPEAKER_03: you know,
42:55
SPEAKER_03: we need that,
42:55
SPEAKER_03: not because Francis is a perfect ideal that none of us could ever attain or match.
43:02
SPEAKER_03: But because actually the fuller Francis,
43:04
SPEAKER_03: the fuller story shows somebody who says,
43:06
SPEAKER_03: you know what,
43:07
SPEAKER_03: I'm committed to this baptismal call to walk in the footprints of Christ and to do,
43:12
SPEAKER_03: as we know from that 19th century slogan, what would Jesus do?
43:15
SPEAKER_03: And then even when I fall short of that, how do I then seek to repair a relationship?
43:19
SPEAKER_03: I mean, boy, do we need that today.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: Dan, just to go in a slightly different direction,
43:25
SPEAKER_00: you talk a lot about discernment as an ongoing process.
43:30
SPEAKER_00: Kind of thing that's necessary,
43:31
SPEAKER_00: I think, if in fact we're going to follow in the footsteps of Christ, right?
43:37
SPEAKER_00: And I just am interested to know how much you're writing,
43:43
SPEAKER_00: because the very process of writing is a synthesis of all kinds of things that
43:49
SPEAKER_00: then we organize, we create.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: I've always felt that I write to understand how I think.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, I write and I'm like, oh, that's it.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: How much is your writing a part of your discernment that other people get to share,
44:06
SPEAKER_00: you know, in some ways?
44:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:09
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I really love that.
44:10
SPEAKER_03: That's actually one of the things that I've often thought of too.
44:13
SPEAKER_03: I'm sometimes surprised more often than not when I'm writing for a general audience.
44:18
SPEAKER_03: So like my column at NCR or occasional pieces like that,
44:21
SPEAKER_03: as opposed to something maybe a little more academic where,
44:26
SPEAKER_03: There's discernment involved, but it tends to be kind of a deeper dive, right?
44:30
SPEAKER_03: So you're kind of mining,
44:31
SPEAKER_03: as it were,
44:32
SPEAKER_03: to mix a bunch of metaphors,
44:33
SPEAKER_03: like into the caves, into the recesses of the tradition or to texts or ideas.
44:39
SPEAKER_03: Not that I'm not doing that or bringing some of that to the fore
44:42
SPEAKER_03: with something like my NCR column,
44:44
SPEAKER_03: but I do sometimes wonder how do I sit down every other week and come up with
44:49
SPEAKER_03: about 1,200 words of something that at the end of the day I hope is only cogent.
44:53
SPEAKER_03: Like, does this even make sense?
44:58
SPEAKER_03: Oftentimes it's a kernel of an idea or it's a different angle or perspective
45:04
SPEAKER_03: on something,
45:04
SPEAKER_03: whether it's Spiritually or historically or something more contemporary.
45:09
SPEAKER_03: And I have to give credit to a dear friend who may be familiar
45:13
SPEAKER_03: to some listeners here,
45:14
SPEAKER_03: a theologian who passed away about five years ago,
45:16
SPEAKER_03: named Robert Schreiter, Father Bob Schreiter.
45:19
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, he was probably best known for his academic work on reconciliation.
45:24
SPEAKER_03: But Bob, I remember once gave me the advice.
45:26
SPEAKER_03: He's like,
45:26
SPEAKER_03: I had previously been a columnist at America Magazine for about four years
45:29
SPEAKER_03: before joining NCR.
45:31
SPEAKER_03: And he was always like, you know what makes for the best columns?
45:35
SPEAKER_03: Whether it's the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or NCR or what have you,
45:38
SPEAKER_03: is it's about one thing.
45:40
SPEAKER_03: So just make it about one thing,
45:42
SPEAKER_03: which as an academic is really hard to do because that requires
45:45
SPEAKER_03: a different discernment too,
45:46
SPEAKER_03: to your point,
45:46
SPEAKER_03: Barbara,
45:46
SPEAKER_03: which is like,
45:47
SPEAKER_03: I want to talk about all the things and I want to talk about the thing,
45:50
SPEAKER_03: subset thing, subset thing.
45:51
SPEAKER_03: And So I think the language you use is language I've used before
45:57
SPEAKER_03: that I've attributed to Thomas Merton,
45:59
SPEAKER_03: another deeply influential figure in my own life,
46:02
SPEAKER_03: and that is to write in order to understand.
46:04
SPEAKER_03: I mean,
46:04
SPEAKER_03: there probably is nobody in the American Catholic context of the 20th century
46:09
SPEAKER_03: who was more prolific than Thomas Merton.
46:11
SPEAKER_03: I can guarantee that.
46:13
SPEAKER_03: I mean...
46:15
SPEAKER_03: Henry Nouwen, not even close.
46:17
SPEAKER_03: I don't know who we would even kind of hold up against him.
46:20
SPEAKER_03: But he was the same way.
46:21
SPEAKER_03: I think he wrote with such volume,
46:23
SPEAKER_03: with such kind of voraciousness, really, that he was seeking something, right?
46:30
SPEAKER_03: That's the sermon, like seeking to understand better.
46:33
SPEAKER_03: It's the Anselmian notion of theology as faith seeking understanding.
46:40
SPEAKER_03: And I think maybe that's another piece of the Franciscan charism that we can go back
46:44
SPEAKER_03: to for thinking about the American church today where we really lack it.
46:47
SPEAKER_03: There are people who are drawn and you see these reports of some young men,
46:52
SPEAKER_03: which the numbers are kind of debatable at this point,
46:55
SPEAKER_03: but there are definitely some people
46:57
SPEAKER_03: who are seeking religious institutional belonging.
47:00
SPEAKER_03: Not because they want ongoing seeking and the journey of deeper understanding
47:05
SPEAKER_03: or discernment or unpacking a tradition.
47:08
SPEAKER_03: They want what Pope Francis rallied against.
47:10
SPEAKER_03: They want a museum of collected pieces that are static and that they can be sure of
47:15
SPEAKER_03: and that nothing's going to change.
47:17
SPEAKER_03: So I think the very process of writing,
47:19
SPEAKER_03: and I'd be interested in all three of you are great writers,
47:22
SPEAKER_03: like I think the dynamic process of writing is actually something we write
47:27
SPEAKER_03: to better understand what we think, but we also do this in conversation.
47:31
SPEAKER_03: So this is something I often tell my grad students over the years,
47:34
SPEAKER_03: which is when you're writing,
47:36
SPEAKER_03: whether it's a dissertation or a master's thesis or a seminar paper,
47:39
SPEAKER_03: you're really writing for a very limited audience,
47:41
SPEAKER_03: an audience of your professor, et cetera.
47:43
SPEAKER_03: But if you're going to write an article or if you're going to write a book chapter,
47:48
SPEAKER_03: You got to remember that you're entering into a conversation that's public.
47:51
SPEAKER_03: You're entering into something that has already happened,
47:53
SPEAKER_03: that's ongoing,
47:54
SPEAKER_03: that you are contributing to,
47:56
SPEAKER_03: but you don't have the whole be all end all,
48:00
SPEAKER_03: nor are you there just to refute something that came before you.
48:03
SPEAKER_03: You're there to contribute.
48:05
SPEAKER_03: And so that's kind of how I think about discernment in writing is that how do I participate?
48:09
SPEAKER_03: What's my angle,
48:10
SPEAKER_03: my entry point,
48:11
SPEAKER_03: my very little contribution, but there must be a contribution nonetheless.
48:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
48:16
SPEAKER_00: I wonder also with your students, the conversations that have to take place around AI, right?
48:23
SPEAKER_00: That's such a huge concern in terms of that whole process of synthesis
48:28
SPEAKER_00: and organization and the whole of it.
48:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean...
48:35
SPEAKER_03: I haven't figured out the whole AI thing yet.
48:37
SPEAKER_03: If I did, probably I'd be too busy to be on this podcast trying to solve all the problems.
48:43
SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'll just say this for me personally.
48:46
SPEAKER_03: I began when OpenAI released its ChatGBT.
48:50
SPEAKER_03: And that was really what kind of was the first explosion in 2012.
48:55
SPEAKER_03: You know, I was here at St. Mary's teaching, primarily undergrads.
48:58
SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I was really resistant.
49:01
SPEAKER_03: I was really reluctant.
49:02
SPEAKER_03: I thought, this is terrible.
49:03
SPEAKER_03: This is going to just be the worst.
49:05
SPEAKER_03: And it has been a challenge for sure.
49:08
SPEAKER_03: And what I've heard from students and what I've heard from colleagues anecdotally
49:12
SPEAKER_03: about conversations with their students is that a lot of our students,
49:15
SPEAKER_03: a lot of,
49:16
SPEAKER_03: and this is about Gen Z right now, your traditional sort of college age student.
49:20
SPEAKER_03: They grew up completely saturated with the internet and with social media and
49:24
SPEAKER_03: with smartphones in a way that the four of us cannot relate to at all.
49:28
SPEAKER_03: And they want desperately to be disconnected from this, at least at times.
49:33
SPEAKER_03: But it's hard for two reasons.
49:35
SPEAKER_03: One is they don't know how to do it themselves.
49:37
SPEAKER_03: They don't have good models of this.
49:39
SPEAKER_03: And then the other thing too is it's incredibly scary.
49:42
SPEAKER_03: And so if this is all you've ever known.
49:44
SPEAKER_03: So things like...
49:46
SPEAKER_03: Thinking on paper, thinking in an analog way, that's new to a lot of them or frightening.
49:54
SPEAKER_03: But I find that helpful.
49:55
SPEAKER_03: I know some colleagues, fellow professors who've gone all blue books in the classroom for exams.
50:00
SPEAKER_03: And I resist that because of the fields that I teach in, in theology and philosophy.
50:04
SPEAKER_03: I don't think regurgitation necessarily is a good pedagogical approach.
50:09
SPEAKER_03: But I think actually...
50:11
SPEAKER_03: Young people, again, I'm going to make a generalization.
50:14
SPEAKER_03: I think they would like for there to be spaces in which they have to kind of grapple
50:20
SPEAKER_03: with some of these things.
50:20
SPEAKER_03: But unless it's imposed in a superego sort of way,
50:23
SPEAKER_03: to use a psychological term, it's really hard for them to.
50:26
SPEAKER_03: Kind of self-generate that.
50:28
SPEAKER_03: And I think it's affecting us too.
50:29
SPEAKER_03: I have friends who are in their 40s, 50s,
50:32
SPEAKER_03: and 60s who are addicted to ChatGBT or to Gemini or to Claude or these sorts
50:38
SPEAKER_03: of things.
50:39
SPEAKER_03: That said, I've mitigated my personal sort of resistance.
50:44
SPEAKER_03: I was convinced by a presentation I heard from a provost at a university
50:48
SPEAKER_03: where I served on the board of trustees for a number of years at about 2023, 2024.
50:54
SPEAKER_03: And I was convinced that like this is not going to go away any more than Google
50:58
SPEAKER_03: when it arrived 25 years ago or the printing press or the telephone
51:02
SPEAKER_03: or what have you.
51:03
SPEAKER_03: So then the question is, what do we do about that?
51:06
SPEAKER_03: And I don't have an answer.
51:07
SPEAKER_03: I'm still trying to figure that out myself.
51:09
SPEAKER_03: I don't use it very much other than when it forces itself upon me.
51:13
SPEAKER_03: Like I know sometimes Google will insert its own Gemini responses
51:17
SPEAKER_03: and you see these AI summaries and I'm like, I didn't ask for this.
51:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that happens all the time.
51:23
SPEAKER_01: I think Elia wrote a book called The Why AI Needs Spirituality.
51:28
SPEAKER_02: I think Leo's trying to get at that with the encyclical.
51:33
SPEAKER_02: As Dan was saying, it might be here to stay.
51:35
SPEAKER_02: So now the question is, how do we define progress?
51:37
SPEAKER_02: How do we define the use of this tool?
51:40
SPEAKER_02: What progress means?
51:41
SPEAKER_02: All that stuff.
51:42
SPEAKER_01: And I was, you know, like you, Dan, and very reluctant to even, you know, open ChatGBT.
51:48
SPEAKER_01: Although I did mention I opened it to see who the three top Franciscan scholars were.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: Given the results, I'm a little skeptical.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: But I had a friend I was talking to who does is very into AI.
52:03
SPEAKER_01: And he said to me, well, think of it this way.
52:05
SPEAKER_01: When you write an article and you're writing it on Word, doesn't Word spell check it for you?
52:12
SPEAKER_01: And I said, yes.
52:12
SPEAKER_01: And he said, well, that's AI.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: This is just a much more advanced version,
52:17
SPEAKER_01: but technically you're using AI if you use Word to spell check your,
52:22
SPEAKER_01: or grammar check your articles.
52:24
SPEAKER_01: And it's sort of, you know, so I think you're right.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: It's there.
52:27
SPEAKER_01: We need to figure out How to do it, what to do, how to use it.
52:32
SPEAKER_01: But again,
52:32
SPEAKER_01: as Ilya said,
52:33
SPEAKER_01: maybe we need some form of spirituality or maybe instead of AI needing spirituality,
52:38
SPEAKER_01: maybe we need different spirituality and we need to reimagine our spirituality.
52:43
SPEAKER_01: Another question I have for you is...
52:46
SPEAKER_03: Can I just before you... Oh yeah, go ahead.
52:47
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, go ahead.
52:47
SPEAKER_03: Because I think, I mean,
52:49
SPEAKER_03: Ilya is a dear friend and mentor and we agree on a lot of things and we,
52:53
SPEAKER_03: as you would predict, disagree on some things.
52:55
SPEAKER_03: I think she's a little bit more AI positive.
52:58
SPEAKER_03: Yes, she is.
52:58
SPEAKER_03: Very much so.
53:21
SPEAKER_03: And I think that this is something that needs,
53:24
SPEAKER_03: pun intended,
53:24
SPEAKER_03: more attention,
53:26
SPEAKER_03: which is that the outsourcing,
53:28
SPEAKER_03: the rapidity with which people can do tasks because of things like you used to have
53:34
SPEAKER_03: to print out your,
53:35
SPEAKER_03: even if you're using Microsoft Word without AI spellcheck,
53:39
SPEAKER_03: you'd have to like, okay, I need to look it over, have somebody else look it over.
53:42
SPEAKER_03: It takes time.
53:44
SPEAKER_03: It can be done.
53:45
SPEAKER_03: But now it happens instantaneously.
53:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
53:48
SPEAKER_03: And that's great when you're looking to correct an inverted I and E or something in a sentence.
53:54
SPEAKER_03: But my concern is we are distracting ourselves under the guise of multitasking
54:03
SPEAKER_03: and productivity in a way that I don't know how spirituality can be incorporated.
54:09
SPEAKER_03: I used to be,
54:10
SPEAKER_03: I think,
54:10
SPEAKER_03: a little bit closer,
54:11
SPEAKER_03: and I don't want to speak for Ilya,
54:12
SPEAKER_03: I presume here,
54:12
SPEAKER_03: but I think I used to be a little bit more interested in how For instance,
54:18
SPEAKER_03: Benedict XVI in 2009 referred to the internet as the digital continent.
54:22
SPEAKER_03: And as a Franciscan,
54:23
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, yes,
54:24
SPEAKER_03: let's be gospel presences in this space where people are,
54:28
SPEAKER_03: even if it's not a material space, people are spending time online.
54:31
SPEAKER_03: So things like social media, things like blogs, Substack, here we are, right?
54:38
SPEAKER_03: I think that's still valuable.
54:40
SPEAKER_03: But I think something has changed in the last 16,
54:43
SPEAKER_03: 17 years, and AI has accelerated that, that troubles me.
54:47
SPEAKER_03: And I think that it's no longer us evangelizing,
54:51
SPEAKER_03: and I don't mean that in a proselytizing way,
54:53
SPEAKER_03: but just being upstanding,
54:56
SPEAKER_03: gospel-believing, good Christian people to one another in this digital medium.
55:03
SPEAKER_03: I think we've gone from that call to one in which this is actually a siren,
55:08
SPEAKER_03: to use Chris Hayes' reference back to the Greek mythology.
55:11
SPEAKER_03: It's distracting us.
55:13
SPEAKER_03: And the piece that I wrote was just like a little tidbit of some
55:17
SPEAKER_03: of this bigger picture that I'm grappling with that I know a lot of others are too,
55:20
SPEAKER_03: which is – I think the language I used was going back to the – First Book of Kings,
55:25
SPEAKER_03: which is when Elijah is called, God whispers.
55:28
SPEAKER_03: And yet we live in a world that is screaming and shouting at us nonstop.
55:33
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what spirituality looks like in the maelstrom of the AI super hyper world.
55:41
SPEAKER_03: And so maybe it is, again, going back to the Benedictine tradition, it's an aura et labora.
55:47
SPEAKER_03: There's some sort of balance that needs to be struck.
55:49
SPEAKER_03: Even Francis did this, right?
55:51
SPEAKER_03: You go out in the rule for hermitages,
55:52
SPEAKER_03: and you have your time as Mary,
55:55
SPEAKER_03: but then you go in pair so that you split the time,
55:58
SPEAKER_03: and then you're the worker,
55:58
SPEAKER_03: you're the Martha,
55:59
SPEAKER_03: but you have to disconnect from this in order to be present to God.
56:03
SPEAKER_03: So that's my little caveat.
56:04
SPEAKER_03: It's not fully thought out,
56:06
SPEAKER_03: but I think the Franciscan tradition, again,
56:07
SPEAKER_03: offers insight to Can we recognize the goodness of these tools and technologies
56:12
SPEAKER_03: without it Really overwhelming us.
56:14
SPEAKER_03: And the last thing I'll say about it is the analogs are plain as day every century.
56:18
SPEAKER_03: And Michael, you mentioned, you know, Pope Leo's encyclical on AI inspired by his own namesake.
56:25
SPEAKER_03: And a century plus ago,
56:27
SPEAKER_03: the problem was the instrumentalization of labor,
56:30
SPEAKER_03: that human labor was taken over in the same way.
56:32
SPEAKER_03: And you couldn't.
56:33
SPEAKER_03: What does a spirituality look like?
56:35
SPEAKER_03: How do you incorporate spirituality with child labor in 19th century Britain?
56:40
SPEAKER_03: What does that look like in Massachusetts in 1910 or during the Great Depression?
56:46
SPEAKER_03: Or the expansion of the Erie Canal or the railroad system?
56:52
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what that looks like,
56:53
SPEAKER_03: and I think it's a similar problem in this attention economy that's only exacerbated
56:59
SPEAKER_03: by this technology.
57:00
SPEAKER_03: So I don't think we're ever going to get rid of it,
57:02
SPEAKER_03: but I think we have to learn to relate to it differently.
57:05
SPEAKER_01: And I think one thing I thought kind of came up with a solution,
57:08
SPEAKER_01: a partial solution at one point when you talked about talking out our stories,
57:13
SPEAKER_01: not just writing them.
57:14
SPEAKER_01: And that's actually something that I do.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: I can't sit down and type and write.
57:19
SPEAKER_01: I have to pace.
57:19
SPEAKER_01: I walk back and forth.
57:21
SPEAKER_01: I drive my wife crazy because I'm walking back and forth and I talk it through my head.
57:26
SPEAKER_01: And then I sit down and I write it after I've gone through it 18 times in my,
57:29
SPEAKER_01: you know, and planning it out and everything.
57:32
SPEAKER_00: That's the difference between an introvert and an extrovert.
57:35
SPEAKER_00: The introvert writes first to figure out what I'm going to say.
57:40
SPEAKER_00: And the extrovert says it and says it and says it.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: And then writes it.
57:45
SPEAKER_00: Yes, that's a little different.
57:47
SPEAKER_01: Good point.
57:47
SPEAKER_01: But I think we need to understand,
57:51
SPEAKER_01: I think, how to use AI appropriately because it can have a great advantage.
57:56
SPEAKER_01: Certainly in the medical field,
57:57
SPEAKER_01: it's had a great advantage and other fields without it taking over us.
58:02
SPEAKER_01: Without us losing our spirituality and our humanity.
58:05
SPEAKER_01: And we haven't come to that point yet.
58:07
SPEAKER_01: So I'll trust you to figure that part of it out.
58:11
SPEAKER_03: When I do, I'll let you know.
58:12
SPEAKER_03: I'll be back on your show.
58:15
SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
58:16
SPEAKER_02: We can kind of pivot now maybe towards the idea
58:18
SPEAKER_02: of Tomorrow's American Catholic is generally how we like to tie the threads
58:21
SPEAKER_02: of these conversations together.
58:22
SPEAKER_02: And one thing I just want to make sure I asked you as part of this question,
58:26
SPEAKER_02: and I put this in our working outline,
58:28
SPEAKER_02: but this idea of Catholicity, this word has come up a couple times.
58:31
SPEAKER_02: And I don't know if my co-facilitators feel the same way,
58:34
SPEAKER_02: but it struck me as this framework,
58:35
SPEAKER_02: this term,
58:36
SPEAKER_02: and I know it's a title of one of your books that I actually really love,
58:39
SPEAKER_02: Catholicity and Emerging Personhood.
58:40
SPEAKER_02: I just like the idea and In that book that we reach the universal through
58:44
SPEAKER_02: the specific, if I'm understanding correctly, that's something that recurs a lot.
58:47
SPEAKER_02: And I just I love that idea.
58:49
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a generative idea and one that we need to incorporate
58:52
SPEAKER_02: into our theological imagination more and more.
58:54
SPEAKER_02: But as part of thinking about Tomorrow's American Catholic,
58:59
SPEAKER_02: speculatively, what is Catholicity to you?
59:01
SPEAKER_02: What does it mean for our listeners?
59:03
SPEAKER_02: How is it different from Catholicism?
59:06
SPEAKER_01: Before you answer that, for me, it's universal, which is sort of the same thing.
59:11
SPEAKER_01: But when I talk about being Catholic,
59:13
SPEAKER_01: I talk about being universal Catholic, not necessarily Roman Catholic.
59:17
SPEAKER_01: I'll leave it up to you, not at all.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: All that in answer quickly.
59:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
59:22
SPEAKER_03: Well, what I'll say is I think there is something to the kind of the potential
59:28
SPEAKER_03: of Catholicity as a framework.
59:30
SPEAKER_03: And it is obviously the root word of Catholicism.
59:35
SPEAKER_03: Lowercase c Catholicism is traditionally certainly in English,
59:38
SPEAKER_03: as Patrick said, you know, a kind of synonym for universal.
59:42
SPEAKER_03: But one of the things and I credit Walter,
59:45
SPEAKER_03: the late Jesuit Walter Ong for some pioneering work in this regard is As well as
59:50
SPEAKER_03: the Jesuit John Hoy,
59:51
SPEAKER_03: who is a close colleague of Sister Ilya Delia, who we keep talking about.
59:55
SPEAKER_03: And Ilya was the general editor of this series on Catholicity as a framework
1:00:00
SPEAKER_03: for thinking about theology.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_03: So that's where my book on anthropology came in,
1:00:04
SPEAKER_03: was under this kind of umbrella of different scholars thinking about Catholicity
1:00:09
SPEAKER_03: in their own area,
1:00:09
SPEAKER_03: the Old Testament, ecclesiology, in my case, theological anthropology, and so forth.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_03: And where I think Ong offers us a really important clue is actually
1:00:18
SPEAKER_03: the Greek foundations for that word,
1:00:21
SPEAKER_03: that once it enters into the Latin kind of lexicon,
1:00:24
SPEAKER_03: it takes on this universality that Patrick's talking about.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_03: But in its origins in the Greek,
1:00:29
SPEAKER_03: it's a compound word,
1:00:31
SPEAKER_03: kata anholos,
1:00:32
SPEAKER_03: which means throughout the whole,
1:00:35
SPEAKER_03: which is different from the Latin root of universal or universus,
1:00:39
SPEAKER_03: which is around a singular point.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_03: So the way I've I've often thought about this,
1:00:44
SPEAKER_03: and Ong talks about this,
1:00:45
SPEAKER_03: is if you think about a compass,
1:00:46
SPEAKER_03: like the old fourth grade thing with the sharp metal point that you put
1:00:50
SPEAKER_03: a little baby pencil in,
1:00:51
SPEAKER_03: and you put that point down on a piece of paper,
1:00:53
SPEAKER_03: and you do a universo, you do a around the one, right, around this uni, one point.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_03: And one of the things that Ong says is the Greeks in the early church, right?
1:01:05
SPEAKER_03: This was a Greek-speaking context in which early doctrine was developed in
1:01:09
SPEAKER_03: the early councils of the church, Nicaea and Constantinople and so forth, Chalcedon.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_03: They had that language,
1:01:15
SPEAKER_03: but they chose Catholicity,
1:01:17
SPEAKER_03: kataholos, instead of universalis, instead of around the one.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_03: And the reason is potentially,
1:01:24
SPEAKER_03: from kind of a semantic or semiotic perspective,
1:01:27
SPEAKER_03: and theologically it has some weight,
1:01:30
SPEAKER_03: Is that when you have that compass universalis,
1:01:33
SPEAKER_03: you have an inside the circle and an outside the circle.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_03: And so a universal Catholic sounds inclusive.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_03: And in some ways it is, depending on how wide you draw that circle.
1:01:44
SPEAKER_03: But there's always an outside the line, right?
1:01:46
SPEAKER_03: Richard Rohr talks about this too.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_03: He likes to talk about being an Orthodox Catholic within like just inside the line,
1:01:53
SPEAKER_03: kind of pushing up on the edge, right?
1:01:56
SPEAKER_03: Where kataholos in Greek, Catholicity, And Walter Ong uses the parable of the sower.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_03: It's like yeast in the dough.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_03: It's not just in one spot.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_03: It has to be throughout the hole in order for the dough to rise.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_03: It needs to permeate this.
1:02:13
SPEAKER_03: So there's no space outside of it.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_03: And to me,
1:02:16
SPEAKER_03: that has a much more pneumatological or Holy Spirit kind of sensibility
1:02:21
SPEAKER_03: that no one is outside of this purview,
1:02:25
SPEAKER_03: that God is present throughout the whole,
1:02:27
SPEAKER_03: and that what we are called to is a recognition, right?
1:02:30
SPEAKER_03: It's what Karl Rahner,
1:02:32
SPEAKER_03: another great late Jesuit,
1:02:33
SPEAKER_03: talked about in terms of ordinary mysticism,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_03: everyday mysticism, seeing grace, seeing God's presence everywhere, right?
1:02:40
SPEAKER_03: I think if we think of whole making in this way,
1:02:43
SPEAKER_03: an effort toward bringing everybody together, it is like what Patrick said.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_03: It's not about sectarianism.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_03: It's not about Roman Catholicism or Anglo-Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Catholicism.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_03: It is about what universalis in Latin should mean in practice,
1:03:00
SPEAKER_03: which goes back to its Greek origins and cataholos throughout the whole.
1:03:05
SPEAKER_03: I think that's a tough pill.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_03: It sounds very simple, but it's actually quite radical in both senses.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_03: It's radical as in it goes back to the roots, to the origin of what Christianity is, right?
1:03:16
SPEAKER_03: You know,
1:03:16
SPEAKER_03: Jesus came and ministered and broke boundaries and crossed over those thresholds
1:03:23
SPEAKER_03: that would have been exclusionary time and time again.
1:03:25
SPEAKER_03: It's part of what was so scandalous about him.
1:03:27
SPEAKER_03: But it's also radical in the sense that it's unsettling, right?
1:03:30
SPEAKER_03: It should be inspiring that no one is excluded.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_03: And we see that in Pope Francis's ministry,
1:03:36
SPEAKER_03: his famous Spanish expression, todos, todos, todos, right?
1:03:39
SPEAKER_03: Everyone, everyone, everyone.
1:03:41
SPEAKER_03: That offends a lot of people.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_03: And going back to late Pope Francis,
1:03:47
SPEAKER_03: some people always lamented,
1:03:48
SPEAKER_03: like, this is the most pastoral, generous, kind, loving, insightful person.
1:03:53
SPEAKER_03: Why are some people,
1:03:54
SPEAKER_03: particularly some American Catholics and American clerics,
1:03:58
SPEAKER_03: so hostile, so resistant to this?
1:04:01
SPEAKER_03: And my sort of serious and at the same time tongue-in-cheek response was,
1:04:05
SPEAKER_03: well, look what happened to Jesus.
1:04:06
SPEAKER_03: When God in God's self enters this world and crosses boundaries and says,
1:04:10
SPEAKER_03: todos, todos, todos, they crucify him, right?
1:04:13
SPEAKER_03: We don't like that.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_03: It's the same reason why...
1:04:16
SPEAKER_03: Matthew chapter 20,
1:04:17
SPEAKER_03: the story of the vineyard owner who goes out and hires people throughout the day is
1:04:21
SPEAKER_03: so unnerving even to modern listeners.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_03: I mean, the dude who worked 20 minutes gets the same pay as me who worked for eight hours.
1:04:27
SPEAKER_03: Are you kidding me?
1:04:28
SPEAKER_03: You know, this is unfair.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_03: Well, and Jesus's response is, are you jealous because I'm generous?
1:04:35
SPEAKER_03: Where's the boundary here throughout the whole?
1:04:37
SPEAKER_03: And so, yeah,
1:04:38
SPEAKER_03: I could go on and on and on about the gatekeeping and stuff,
1:04:41
SPEAKER_03: but I think that notion of Catholicity is incredibly powerful and And if we think
1:04:45
SPEAKER_03: about Tomorrow's American Catholic,
1:04:47
SPEAKER_03: what does it mean to be in this context,
1:04:50
SPEAKER_03: in this country at this time,
1:04:52
SPEAKER_03: today and tomorrow into the future,
1:04:53
SPEAKER_03: but also embrace a spirit of Catholicity that is not actually about gatekeeping.
1:04:58
SPEAKER_03: It's not about guarding the peripheries or the walls or who is in and
1:05:03
SPEAKER_03: who is out around one idea or one identity.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_03: But how can we be in such a way?
1:05:09
SPEAKER_03: And I think Francis Sinclair Vassisi lived this, right?
1:05:13
SPEAKER_03: Again, going back to what I mentioned earlier,
1:05:15
SPEAKER_03: where nothing was going to hold them back from relationship to another.
1:05:19
SPEAKER_03: Whether that person was a Muslim leader in the middle of the Fifth Crusade,
1:05:22
SPEAKER_03: whether that person was the poorest of the poor or a shunned leper,
1:05:26
SPEAKER_03: or whether this was a brother or sister or robber,
1:05:29
SPEAKER_03: as some of those early Franciscan stories talk about,
1:05:31
SPEAKER_03: a violent person, what have you.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_03: They open themselves up to relationship regardless.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_03: And that, to me, is what Catholicity looks like in practice.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:05:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the linguistic orientation is very,
1:05:46
SPEAKER_02: very helpful to think about this as leaven and disperse through that permeation.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_02: I love the pneumatological image you gave us there of the rising leaven.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, that's very helpful to think of that term.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_03: That's all Walter Ong.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_03: I got to give Jesuit credit where Jesuits,
1:06:02
SPEAKER_03: it's rare for a Franciscan person to be so deferential to all these Jesuits,
1:06:06
SPEAKER_03: but they have some really great points.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_03: Thank you for carrying his wisdom into archdiocese.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_02: Well, Dan, this has been great.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_02: Any final thoughts on just the phrase Tomorrow's American Catholic, what am I conjure for you?
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: This is kind of our research portion.
1:06:21
SPEAKER_02: We just,
1:06:21
SPEAKER_02: you know,
1:06:22
SPEAKER_02: it's the name of our publication platform,
1:06:24
SPEAKER_02: and we just love to hear what it's inspiring in people and how they might see
1:06:28
SPEAKER_02: the idea of Tomorrow's American Catholic.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think it's a very provocative title in a good way.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_03: You know, people hear provocation and they think something bad.
1:06:37
SPEAKER_03: Again, I point back to a certain Jesus of Nazareth who was very provocative in that,
1:06:42
SPEAKER_03: you know,
1:06:43
SPEAKER_03: there's this ongoing question in ecclesiastical circles,
1:06:46
SPEAKER_03: particularly in the synod, right?
1:06:47
SPEAKER_03: A lot of church leaders are skeptical of any quote unquote qualification of the term Catholic.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_03: They want that universalis.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_03: They want the one identity around which everybody else orients themselves.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_03: And so to talk about an American Catholic or to talk about the American Catholic of
1:07:03
SPEAKER_03: the future, Tomorrow's American Catholic, invites a lot of reflection.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_03: And I welcome that.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_03: I think it's good to think about because as my friend and former colleague,
1:07:14
SPEAKER_03: Father Steve Bevins,
1:07:15
SPEAKER_03: a great missiologist and theologian,
1:07:19
SPEAKER_03: talked a lot about in the 80s and 90s with some pioneering work,
1:07:22
SPEAKER_03: all theology is contextual.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_03: I tell my students this too.
1:07:26
SPEAKER_03: I'm like,
1:07:26
SPEAKER_03: it's not an accident that we have the language we do in the creed
1:07:30
SPEAKER_03: because it was Greek speaking,
1:07:32
SPEAKER_03: Greek philosophical thinking people trying to find language and frameworks
1:07:36
SPEAKER_03: to make sense of this insane encounter with God as a human being in our world.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_03: And what does that mean?
1:07:44
SPEAKER_03: And so if the incarnation had taken place in...
1:07:47
SPEAKER_03: So Indianapolis,
1:07:48
SPEAKER_03: Indiana in the year 1950,
1:07:50
SPEAKER_03: then it would have been an English sort
1:07:52
SPEAKER_03: of maybe American pragmatist philosophical framework or what have you.
1:07:56
SPEAKER_03: And we would have come up with credo language in the context in
1:07:59
SPEAKER_03: which we find ourselves to make sense of this,
1:08:01
SPEAKER_03: it would be imperfect, like the Greek is imperfect.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_03: But I think it's important to think about our context.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_03: What does it mean,
1:08:07
SPEAKER_03: especially in an age where we have the first bishop of Rome who was born
1:08:12
SPEAKER_03: on this continent of North America in this country known as the United States,
1:08:17
SPEAKER_03: who has ministered for a period of time in South America,
1:08:20
SPEAKER_03: who is somebody whose context shapes the way he sees the world and speaks about it.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, I don't know.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_03: I'm very hesitant and nervous about some of the trends I see gaining a lot of media
1:08:35
SPEAKER_03: and attention today when it comes to kinds of American Catholics.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_03: I think, by and large, what I see is not sustainable.
1:08:43
SPEAKER_03: And I think that's because at the end of the day,
1:08:45
SPEAKER_03: what Pope Francis talked about in terms of those who seek doctrines in
1:08:49
SPEAKER_03: a church that's just a museum of old artifacts that get dusted off from now and now
1:08:54
SPEAKER_03: and then is not actually what the spirit calls us to.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_03: You know, I wrote years ago about what I call Holy Spirit atheism.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_03: And that's I think most American Catholics are Holy Spirit atheists.
1:09:05
SPEAKER_03: And I think the vast majority of Catholic church leaders are too.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_03: That's going to be talking about provocative.
1:09:12
SPEAKER_03: But what I mean by that is in the Creed,
1:09:14
SPEAKER_03: they'll profess they believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_03: But in their actions,
1:09:18
SPEAKER_03: they act like the Holy Spirit doesn't exist, which means it's all up to me.
1:09:22
SPEAKER_03: I have to decide.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_03: I'm in control.
1:09:24
SPEAKER_03: I'm in charge.
1:09:25
SPEAKER_03: I need to be the protector of that universalis.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_03: And God needs no protection.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_03: The Holy Spirit needs no confines.
1:09:33
SPEAKER_03: Christ is present throughout the whole.
1:09:36
SPEAKER_03: And if we're unwilling to recognize that,
1:09:38
SPEAKER_03: then I think we're unwilling to live the Catholic faith as Christ lays it out for us
1:09:43
SPEAKER_03: in the Gospels and as the tradition unfolds and as great interpreters
1:09:47
SPEAKER_03: and embodiments of that tradition like Francis and Claire of Assisi model for us.
1:09:51
SPEAKER_03: So I think it's an important, it's a provocative, it's a...
1:09:55
SPEAKER_03: It's a great kind of launching point for reflection about what does it look like
1:09:59
SPEAKER_03: to live this Catholicity in this context in the future.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_03: And that's what I see Tomorrow's American Catholic all about.
1:10:05
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Dan.
1:10:06
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
1:10:07
SPEAKER_02: God needs no protection.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for that.
1:10:10
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for your time and sharing your insight with us.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_02: You can find additional podcasts as well as our written work at our website,
1:10:35
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1:10:59
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