Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?
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Do you want to pray before we start? By all means. Yeah, so loving God, we thank you for bringing us together. We ask you to help us to proclaim the gospel and open our lips that our mouth might declare your praise. Amen. From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. ♪

So interesting, in fact, that God in his wisdom has decided to call one Pope home and let the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church choose another.

The death of Pope Francis ends, or at least temporarily suspends, a tumultuous period in the life of the world's largest religious institution. A period that saw the Pope often pitted against his own bishops and cardinals in arguments about how much and in what direction Roman Catholicism should change.

My guest today and I were often on the opposite side of those debates. And so I'm hoping that our conversation can help illuminate the stakes in Roman Catholicism's conflicts, the prospects for the church's continued unity, and the implications of these debates for the future of religion in the modern world.

Father James Martin is one of the most famous Catholic priests in the United States, I think the only Jesuit to ever appear on Stephen Colbert's late-night TV program, and the author of many, many books, most recently, Come Forth, a meditation on the New Testament story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus from the dead. So, Father James Martin, welcome to Interesting Times. Good to be with you, Ross. Thank you.

So we're speaking, I think, 72 hours after the death of Pope Francis. And I feel like I've already heard at least 117 interviews that start with a big question about the Pope's legacy.

So I want to start smaller by talking about Francis as you personally experienced his pontificate and also as you experienced him. He was the first Jesuit pope. You are a Jesuit. You met on a number of occasions. You interacted. He wrote the introduction of your latest book. So I wondered if you could just talk about Pope Francis as a priest, which is something that he very self-consciously aspired to be, not just the pope of the Catholic Church, but

a priest of Catholicism. Yeah, and I think that's key to understanding who he was. He was a Jesuit for most of his life, a priest for just almost as long, and that's the first way that we Jesuits came to know him. Interestingly, he had something of a checkered relationship in the Jesuits because he was, by his own admission, he was rigid and authoritarian. He said,

So when he was elected, not every Jesuit was happy. In fact, in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005,

He was on the list. And interestingly, I was reading a piece in the Times that had a list of all the electors. And I said to a fellow Jesuit who was much older and who had worked in Rome, I said, who is this Jorge Mario Bergoglio? And this old Jesuit said, he'd be terrible. But, you know, he soon proved to be a real model Jesuit and was always very close to the Jesuits during his pontificate. And that's one of the ways I interacted with him and how I understood him. I think a lot of the stuff that he did was

could be mystifying to people, questions of discernment, freedom, and difference.

all Jesuit concepts. And so I think that's key to understanding who he was. He was always a good Jesuit. When did you meet him for the first time? I met him for the first time after a mass at Casa Santa Marta, very briefly, and just shook his hand and he said, pray for me, reza por mi. And then really in earnest, in 2017, he appointed me as a consulter for the Dicastery for Communication, which is a very low-level appointment for the communications office.

And I was at a... Because of your expertise in podcasting and other...

And when we were at the audience, I introduced myself and he said, ah, I'd like to have an audience with you. And I said, oh, yo tambien. And in September 2019, we had our first one-on-one meeting. And it was really, I'll just be honest with you, it was really life-changing just being with him, talking about these issues and just feeling completely relaxed. He was very warm and friendly. One of the things I want to share with listeners and viewers is he was just a nice guy. He was just a nice guy, friendly, fun guy.

And at the end of the meeting, I'd never spoken to a pope before. And at minute 25, it was a half hour meeting. I thought, oh my gosh, I've been talking the whole time about this one issue. Maybe he wants to talk about something else. So I said, Holy Father, what can I do for you? Meaning, you know, you want to talk about the American church or the Jesuits or something. He said, you can continue this ministry in peace, which I found extremely encouraging and moving. And, you know, he didn't have to do that. And he didn't have to meet with me a couple of times.

And we would exchange notes over email in his little kind of crabbed handwriting. And I saw him at the center. How would you get those? Would you get those notes scanned via email? Yeah. So I ended up getting the email address for his secretaries, which were different people at different times. And I would send him more formal notes, you know, like typed out and whatnot in Spanish or Italian, thanks to Google Translate.

And they would send me back scanned PDFs of his handwritten note, which they would have to transcribe or transliterate because it was like this tiny little handwriting. And then I would ask to have someone here to translate it. So that's how we communicate. That's how it works in the universal church. Yes. Yeah. Thanks to Google Translate. I was always struck and thinking about his legacy now, I'm struck by it even more by what you might call the visual element of his papacy.

After he died, a lot of people on social media were sharing the photograph of him in the empty St. Peter's Square holding the monstrance, which holds the Eucharist, the host that Catholics believe is the body of Christ. Again, in this sort of empty, darkened square in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years.

And I feel like at the beginning of his pontificate, there were a lot of those kind of moments. The one that I remember most is him embracing a man who had boils, I believe, or was disfigured in some way. And I feel like he had a certain kind of genius for, in effect, creating Christian iconography in his sort of public moments that I think will be one of the more

lasting elements of his papacy? Well, yeah. And I mean, as you know, like Jesus, who taught with words and deeds, right? I mean, Jesus taught with gestures as well, not just words and teaching. Francis was very good at that. I remember that, you know, Ross, as you were saying that, that to me is the image that I'll take with me to my grave, which is him embracing that man with the skin condition, you know, which called up Francis of Assisi embracing the man with leprosy, Jesus embracing people. You know, one of the great things was for me that

It was natural. He wasn't doing it for show, or I'm going to now do something that's going to impress people. This is who he was and he naturally reached out to people like that. But yeah, it made for good teaching moments, I would say. I agree. I think the visual is just as important as any encyclical that he did. Yeah. Let's talk about the doing though, as well as the showing. This was a dramatic pontificate in a lot of different ways.

But from my perspective, I'd say the great drama of the pontificate was the

You could call it a push to change church teaching or practice on a host of difficult and controversial post-1960s issues. I would say that that sort of went on as a thread throughout the, you know, was it 12 years? 12 years, right, where you had controversies that conservative Catholics regarded as having been sort of addressed and settled under prior popes.

over whether divorced and remarried Catholics should take communion without getting an annulment, over the possibility of female deacons, if not female priests, the possibility of allowing blessings for same-sex couples. All of these were suddenly sort of in the air. And that mattered a great deal to you because, as you just mentioned, right, one of the forms of work that you took up under Francis was writing and arguing about gay Catholics and their place in the church.

So from your perspective as a sympathizer, I would say, with that kind of push and that kind of opening of debate,

How far do you think it went? How far did Francis go on those issues? That's a great question. You know, interestingly, I would say that while those issues were in the forefront of a lot of our minds, I think for Francis, they were secondary, the kind of hot button issues. I mean, basically what he was trying to do, you know, in most of his homilies and his encyclicals and his apostolic pilgrimages to different places would just proclaim the gospel. So most of his time, he was just talking about Jesus, the resurrection, mercy, love,

But I think it's a fair question. How far did he go? I think he went as far as he could, basically. One of the things I learned when I was at the Synod, I was a delegate at the Synod, which is this worldwide gathering of Catholics, and we met in Rome in October 23 and 2024, was realizing how much he wanted church unity.

And so some issues, women deacons, LGBTQ people, you know, all sorts of things. You could see how much pushback there was from places like sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and, you know, even in the United States.

And he said a couple of times, unity is more important than these conflicts. Right. So I think he he tried to open the door to the discussion about some of these issues without breaking the church. I think, you know, one of the fundamental differences, I think, between Pope Francis and a lot of his critics, particularly in the church and sometimes even in the hierarchy. Sometimes even in the pages of The New York Times. Sometimes. Yeah.

was that he really spent time listening to people talk about their spiritual lives and had a real reverence for the activity of the Holy Spirit in the individual person's conscience. And so he really took that seriously. So when he talked about discernment and listening to people, and even in the Synod and LGBTQ issues and in Amoris Laetitia, his apostolic exhortation on the family,

A lot of his critics said, oh, well, anything goes. You know, it's just where we're going to listen to people. It's all about polls and opinions. But I think what they missed was that he really did trust the Holy Spirit active in the individual. So I think that for me encapsulates why people, I think, struggled with that. Because it is, you know, it's a challenge when you hear something like that. We need to meet people where they are. We need to listen to them. We need to see where the Holy Spirit is active.

But to your point, he didn't want to move the church so far that he would break it. I want to talk about that question of sort of breakage and conflict. But then what were the concrete changes? Because the point you make about sort of

or disappointing people runs both ways. So you had a certain kind of disturbance from conservative Catholics to the way the Pope talked about these issues, the debates he wanted to open up. But then, especially by the end of his pontificate, there was a certain kind of disappointment from more liberal Catholics, right? Saying, well, he sort of left us in a place of ambiguity where he talks about, you know, the individual soul and discernment and so on. And

and issues statements and teachings that can be, let's say, read in somewhat different ways depending on where you are. But there isn't like a concrete change to the Catechism in what it says about the immorality of same-sex relations. He opened the debate about possibly ordaining women to the diaconate, but it didn't really go anywhere.

First of all, what concretely changed, do you think, under Francis? And then I'll ask you about where the different sides would want to push things beyond him. Yeah. I mean, you could say more broadly that concretely, you know, we were brought to a greater understanding of the importance of the human dignity of migrants and refugees, for example. I mean, there's no church teaching change in that. But to your point more specifically—

For one thing, the Catechism changed on the death penalty. It's now inadmissible. That's a small thing. For another, early in his papacy, he said he wanted more, I remember this line, incisive roles for women in leadership positions. And now you have a woman who's the head of a Vatican dicastery or office. The governor of Vatican City is a woman, right? So I think there have been real changes, maybe not to the Catechism, but changes in church practice.

For LGBTQ people, I think there's been significant changes. The ones that are perhaps the most kind of juridical would be the allowance of blessing of same-sex couples under certain circumstances, right? I mean, before that document came out, you couldn't do it. After the document came out, you could do it. So that's a change. And then also something that's, I think, on...

overlooked is his call for the decriminalization of homosexuality, right? Which I think in the West people, you know, greeted with some shrugs like, "Ah, big deal." But that's a big deal over in Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

So, yeah, I don't think he set out to change the catechism, but I think he changed the conversation. And in a sense, in addition to these kind of specific things, I think that's a kind of change in teaching, right? I mean, to change the conversation and to change the approach and the tone is a kind of change in teaching. So I think, yeah, he disappointed conservatives, certainly in different aspects, and liberals, I think, who think he didn't go far enough there.

But again, I came away from the Senate understanding anew, or maybe for the first time, the importance of church unity and what a difficult job he had. So, you know... But is that the hard limit from your perspective, right? So let's say that we elect...

Pope Francis II or Pope John XXIV, someone who's seen a sort of a successor to Francis in terms of being open to liberalization. And you were named head of the Inquisition. I mean, sorry, you were named head of the head of the Office of Doctrine. Would you see the limits on changes to church teaching as being primarily about

Church politics, right? You need to keep conservative Africans and more liberal Germans together in the same church. Or is there just a limit? And here I'm speaking as someone who obviously thinks there is on just how much the church can change what it says about sex.

Period. No matter what changes in modern culture. I think the basis, as we would both agree, would be the creed, for example. I mean, you're not going to change any obvious dogma. You're not going to say suddenly that Jesus, guess what? Jesus didn't rise from the dead. You're not going to say that. Yeah. So we should start there because I think a lot of Catholics feel that, oh my gosh, Pope Francis was changing everything or anything goes, which is, you know, not accurate.

I do think that that's a limit. I do think that church unity is a value, right? I mean, Christ said that they all may be one. I think that's a value for us. So I think anything that goes against that needs to be looked at carefully. So it's a balance, Ross, I think, between what you might call prophecy and unity, right? I'll tell you a story. I would write to him fairly, not frequently, but a couple times a year. And I suggested that he do something. I forget what it was, to be honest, about LGBT stuff. And he said, yeah, that's a good idea. He said, I don't know.

But if I do that, I thought this was an interesting choice of words. I will provoke a chain reaction. And he's right. You know, so while I thought that he could have gone further, he would have, right? He would have provoked a chain reaction. And he saw that as a negative thing. And I came around to agree with him, you know, that it's not worth breaking the church over some of these things. So I think his approach was to open the discussion, which again, that's a change.

So for listeners who are not intimately familiar with endless, with sort of endless, the endless wrangling within the Catholic Church about some of these questions, which it's a wrangling that has been going on in every religious tradition. Certainly every Christian church, but also non-Christian churches as well, that there is just sort of this running tension between where

late modern life has ended up in terms of people's lived experiences, who people sleep with, who people get married to, when people get divorced, all of these kinds of things. And the pretty stringent line on sexual ethics that has been part of Christian teaching from the beginning. And one of the frustrations that, to be honest, conservatives, whatever, you know, however I define myself, some kind of conservative like me, sometimes have is

is that there's this sense that the liberal argument is always sort of open-ended. It's always saying, we're not saying exactly what church teaching would be. We just want to start a conversation. But then it seems clear to the conservatives that in the end, the conversation only ends when the liberal perspective carries the day, which is sort of what has happened in a certain number of more liberal Protestant churches.

denominations. So I want to push you to be a little bit concrete. I'm going to frame the question in a different way. From your perspective,

on issues related to sex, marriage, sex and marriage in particular. What is the thing that Christianity teaches, that Jesus Christ teaches, that has to be held onto, that is different from what a nice, well-meaning, secular liberal listener of this show might believe about sex? What is the Christian difference between

that needs to remain no matter what kind of conversations and evolutions we have? That's a great question. I'm not a theologian. I'm not a moral theologian. So I'll try my best to answer that. You are a Jesuit. You are a priest. You are, you know, a man. I think you're eminently qualified to answer the question. I would say reverence for the other person. I would say sex and sexuality is something that is sacred.

not using the other person and the value of monogamous relationships. Well, I mean, Jesus doesn't teach much on marriage. He teaches a lot on divorce, right? His first miracle is at a wedding feast. So there's a positive outlook. Positive. He's pro that marriage, at least. He's pro that marriage. He favored that one. He, of course, himself is celibate. He doesn't get married for a number of reasons. But

But I would say that's the distinctive Christian contribution today, which is reverencing the other person and not using the other person and seeing sexuality as sacred and deep and not something to be, you know, just kind of used in a relationship. And I think that is different than a lot of liberal, secular understanding of sexuality. I mean, when people come to me in the confessional about that, that's one of my first questions, you know, are you reverencing the other person, right? How are you treating the other person?

So I think that's different because I think in today's what Pope Francis would call throwaway culture, that's not accepted by every liberal secular person, even a good person. It's not. It's accepted by a lot of – I mean, I think the secular liberal narrative of sex that I certainly hear would say they might not use terms like reverence and sacred, but they would use terms like reverence.

And so on. And at least when I read the New Testament, right, and again, I quite agree, Jesus says much more about the sins of rich people than about sexual sins. That's absolutely true.

But the things he says about sex are quite stringent, right? He doesn't say anything in particular about homosexuality, but he speaks very strongly about marriage as lifelong, permanent, as divorce, as remarriage after divorce, as a form of adultery. And I would say, you know, I became a Catholic in my teens after some time in different Protestant churches.

And one of the things that always struck me about Catholicism in its sort of weirdnesses, including the things it says about sex, including like saying, you know, masturbation is a sin, right? These kind of things.

is that it seemed very biblical in that way, that like the Catholic Church is the only major Christian church in the West, at least, that still seems to say something about what's wrong with divorce. And there are a lot of divorces in my family tree. And I have a pretty good sense, I think, of what is wrong with divorce and why it's good for a church to say something about that. And so I think conservatives...

in these intra-Catholic debates are often framed as, you know, trying to hold on to some sort of rigid understanding of human beings. And I think that sometimes can be true. But again, just in this conversation, I feel like I can see why I am worried that the more liberalized church of an imagined successor to Pope Francis, that some of those things would slip away. To me, it's just not enough to

to say Christianity teaches some kind of generic reverence. I think it's important that Christianity teaches something like marriage is an indissoluble one flesh union that you, you know, can't easily get out of. Do you agree with that?

Which part? The part that there has to be something more than just a general statement, that there is sort of a specific concreteness to the way Jesus talks about sex as the way he talks about wealth and poverty. Absolutely. I think, yes, I mean, in terms of the sacrament of marriage. But I think what Pope Francis was trying to do, you know, was to remind ourselves that we're also dealing with individuals, right?

Right. And so we talk about when we've talked about divorce, masturbation. I brought it up just for the record. Sorry. You know, it comes up in the I don't know any man that comes to the confessional, at least in my experience, who does not confess that. So it's, you know, it's common. There's also a sense of and homosexuality. Right. In terms of all these topics. Right.

You know, one of the things that Pope Francis is trying to teach, and I think is Christian teaching, is encountering the person where they are and as they are, right? And, you know, he said, the name of God is mercy. So, yes, we have, obviously, we have all these rules, we have all these traditions, you know, but what is the pastoral application of these things in the confessional, in a person's life? And I do think there is something of a

over-focus on some of these topics. And I think Pope Francis was trying to remind us that there are other topics because I feel like there aren't many Catholics in the world who don't understand what the Catholic Church teaches on marriage and homosexuality and masturbation and things like that. There aren't a lot of Catholics that don't know what the Church teaches on poverty, the environment, those kinds of things. So I think this is what Pope Francis was trying to do. Interestingly, in an interview with Jesuit magazines, including America in 2013,

He said something like, I'm paraphrasing, I'm not changing anything. He said, but when it comes to questions, you know, of sexuality and abortion and things like that, I feel like people know it and it's time to, like a good teacher, move on to the next lesson. And I found that a really interesting insight because I think what people saw is his ignoring that was rather him saying, you know, we've understood this and now let's move on to other topics, which I think have been less interesting.

You know, poverty, you know, the stuff you pointed out and the environment, which was a surprise. Do you think that's a stable equilibrium, though? I guess that's my question. Like, say, 100 years goes by.

And that becomes the equilibrium of the Catholic Church. The church has a very pastoral case-by-case approach to issues around sex and sexuality. But nothing ever changes in the formal teaching of the church. The church never sort of recognizes same-sex unions the way it recognizes heterosexual unions. It just sort of remains in this place.

Are you personally content with that kind of? I think we should know because I think we should always be open to the signs of the times and what science teaches us and what we understand about the human condition. And I mean, you know, you can go back to Thomas Aquinas and he's talking about that. You know, we have to understand what in terms of homosexuality, for example, you know, like what are we learning?

And we certainly don't want to say that we're in the same place that we would be a thousand years ago about homosexuality, because we've learned things. And so I think, you know, when you look at, for example, you know, the Second Vatican Council, it's the church in the modern world, not the church against the modern world or the church frustrating the modern world. And so I think it's, this is where discernment comes in, honestly. And I know people might roll their eyes and say, oh, that's just like a buzzword. I think he really is, he really was the pope.

trying to help us reflect on the signs of the times, say, where is the Holy Spirit active? What am I calling people to do? What am I calling the church to do? But that's an inherently frustrating and messy and open process. Discernment is really open-ended, and that's okay, right? So,

I don't know where it's going to end up, but I think I would be- How do you think the modern world is going right now? Oh, not too well. Not too well. Okay. Yeah. So would you be comfortable if in 100 years, it seems like the church has to be more oppositional to the modern world than it did in the 1960s? I think the church is very oppositional to the modern world as it is now. I mean, you know, just talking about the poor and migrants and refugees and the sick. And I think that's very countercultural. I think the thing is that

You know, Pope Francis let all good church leaders preach the gospel, you know, as he understood it. And if it became political, so be it. But I don't see him, and in my conversations with him, one of the things he didn't like was ideologies. He was allergic to that. He wanted to meet people where they were. And if he got the sense that you were pushing an agenda or an ideology, he didn't want any part of that. And so this is this person who has a deeply pastoral heart. And I think that's a wonderful thing for the church.

All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, I'm going to offer a more conservative interpretation of Francis's record and legacy.

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Let's talk about the lived experience of more conservative Catholics during this pontificate. From your point of view, and from the point of view of a lot of Catholics...

the Francis pontificate was experienced as just a period of greater freedom. Like you're a priest, you have vows, you're part of an order, you're under certain kinds of obedience. And it was clear to me, certainly, that there were lots and lots of people inside the church who had opinions that they didn't feel comfortable expressing under John Paul II and Benedict, who felt comfortable expressing them under Francis, right? Is that a fair description? Yeah. I mean...

Tom Reese, our editor at America Media, was fired by Cardinal Ratzinger, which was his right to do. The future Pope Benedict. Correct. And he often said that I got fired for writing things and publishing things that Pope Francis is now saying, you know, from the pulpit. So I think that's a fair comment. People felt freer to...

express themselves. Yeah. Do you worry in a different pontificate that you will feel less freedom? Oh, sure. Are you sitting here in this podcast worrying that things you say could be held against you under a future pope? I'm just curious. No, you know, here's the thing. Look, I didn't always agree with St. John Paul II or Benedict XVI.

But I tried not to be critical. And also I was, you know, careful not to go out of bounds and, you know, try to color in the lines. I think, you know, as a Jesuit,

I mean, we've been dealing with popes for 450 years. And so you have to, in a good way, you have to come to peace with that. And also, like this is spiritual. They come and go, but the Jesuit order continues. No, what I meant was, you know, in a good way, we take vows of obedience and we have a special vow of obedience with regard to missions to the pope. So we see him as our leader. And even if we don't disagree with them.

We go along, we try to support his way of being Pope. So whoever the next Pope will be, I'll work with him and try to promote what he's saying. And sure, yeah, I'm actually very excited to see who it's going to be. I think you're going to see someone who's a little bit more moderate, a little bit more of a stabilizing influence. Well, no, that's a good place to take it, right? Because I'm curious what stabilization looks like, because the flip side of what I just described, the phenomenon where

Some maybe many Catholics felt more comfortable, more free to speak freely under Francis was the experience of a lot of conservatives and traditionalists I knew, which was kind of a mirror image of the liberal experience under John Paul II, right, which was that, you know, you mentioned at the outset that.

that there are a lot of Jesuits in Argentina who felt that Francis's leadership as a young man was authoritarian and rigid. The reality is that a lot of conservative Catholics felt that his pontificate was not sort of open and free-flowing, that it was authoritarian in his own way. It used to be that

The papacy would investigate more liberal religious orders, and suddenly it was conservative and traditional orders being investigated. And then especially you had a very explicit crackdown on the traditional Latin mass, which is something that is attended by a very small number of Catholics, but it's very meaningful to that number of Catholics. And Francis was not an admirer of traditionalists. I would say he was very... He spoke...

very harshly at times about conservatives and traditionalists, like a kind of paternal but scolding in certain ways. So I'm curious both what you think about that perspective, having been talking about the pope as a figure of openness and dialogue, but also whether you think, like, should it be possible for a pope to be pope without either liberals or conservatives feeling persecuted? Yeah.

Here's the answer you don't get from Jesuits a lot. I don't know. That's interesting, because I would say that each person who comes in is going to have his or her, his, obviously, predilection and sort of way of governing. My sense, you might disagree with this, my sense is that Francis was a lot more patient with his critics, who were much more vocal than critics under St. John Paul or Pope Benedict. And I think he gave them a lot of leeway.

But yeah, I mean, eventually he brought the hammer down on some people. But I think that was after a long time. So my sense was that he was pretty— The czar was very patient with his subjects. Well, my sense was that he was very patient with people who were above and beyond. I mean, I don't know any example under John Paul or Benedict, cardinals and archbishops, who were so vocal, you know, calling him a heretic and an apostate and a false pope. I just didn't see that under John Paul and under Benedict.

So, I think he was more patient. Now, in terms of the Latin Mass, here's how I see that. As I understand it, you know, the Second Vatican Council encouraged the church to turn towards the vernacular. That was in general what the council was trying to do.

the Latin mass continued in certain places. Pope Benedict published something that said that it needs to be more widely accepted and more easily celebrated by priests without special permission and stuff. This is how I understand, I know you might disagree, but that document was saying that this is a testing period to see how it works.

And one of the reasons I think Pope Francis, you know, limited it, limited the use, was because he saw that kind of testing period lead to division, where certain people say, you know, we're more Catholic than you are, you know, and the

Paul VI's mass doesn't count. And so I think he wanted to really sort of stop that. I know that upsets concertos. And let me just say that I can certainly understand that because it's such a value. I think it's less, I mean, from my perspective, right, it's less about sort of the general idea as sort of, to me, a kind of concrete lack of value.

pastoral care in the sense that my impression, again, observing Rome from far away, is that Francis has a lot of critics and he had a lot of American critics. Very vocal. Very vocal. Sometimes even in the hierarchy. Sometimes even in the hierarchy. I was such a critic. I think probably the most, you know, the most challenging emails we ever exchanged when I was writing some very pointed criticisms of the Holy Father. But most of the people who attend

Latin masses, in my experience, they're in the position of looking, as so many people are in this 21st century world of ours, for a tangible connection to the divine. And I don't think it's surprising that some people find that connection more fully in an ancient liturgy, right? And so it seemed to me that there was just a sense in which that there was a failure to

Again, to use the language that you've been using in this conversation, meet the conservative or really the traditionalist part of the church where those people are. And it made me worry, and this is a larger question, right, about the question of unity and how a church that has these divisions holds together.

Well, that's a really interesting question. We had an article in America Media by John Baldovin, who was a liturgical theologian that talked about the Latin Mass. And, you know, to go back to church unity and, you know, I don't know if I would have made the same decision as the Pope, you know, in terms of the limiting church.

But, you know, I think he saw it as a threat to unity. I think that's, you know, that was behind that document that he came out with. And so if we're going to say that we need unity in terms of sexual teaching, right, and not breaking the church on that, I think he didn't want to break the church on that as well, on the Latin mass. That was his judgment. Yeah. So, like I said, I don't know if I would have done it exactly the same way. Yeah. I mean, one interesting question connected to that, right, is...

this question of what draws people to Christianity and what draws people to church right now. Because I think one of the interesting questions hanging over the church right now is that in certain ways, the liberal conservative splits are

are generational, but not in the way that people usually expect, certainly among priests. If you look at surveys of priests in the United States, for instance, I think this is true, maybe not to the same degree elsewhere in the world. Younger priests, while not necessarily politically conservative, tend to be more theologically conservative than older priests. And so as

As someone who, you know, is seen as more on sort of the liberal side of the spectrum. First, what do you just what do you make of that trend? But also, what does it say to you about sources of zeal, sources of intensity? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I think I may have said this to you before. I'm more traditional than you might think. That's the first thing. So devotion to the saints, to the blessed sacrament, to lords, too. So some of these things are right up my alley.

You know, my general rule is whatever brings you closer to God. And if you like the Latin mass, wonderful. If you'd like to go to a Tese service, wonderful. If you like San Egidio, I know this is all inside baseball stuff to non-Catholics, but wonderful. And it's not surprising that people would turn to more traditional ways of being Catholic and traditional rights, you know, in kind of times of uncertainty. I think there's a certain comfort to that. In interesting times. Interesting times. There's a certain comfort to that. And I think it's great. Here's the dividing point for me.

as long as people who say that don't say that other Catholics are somehow not Catholic. So I think as long as there's openness, right?

to both sides as long as you're not what a friend of mine calls a rigidarian right then i think it's great look i grew up in the 1960s 1970s catholic church which a lot of people deride as beige catholicism right and you know felt banners but you know what it meant a lot to me and it still means a lot to me and i go back to my home parish which is this big 1960s a-frame parish outside of philadelphia and i love it and if that appeals to me that's great

If someone else goes to a high mass, a high solemn mass that's in Latin at some cathedral and that appeals to them, that's great. So I think the key is not cutting off the other side and really taking the other person's

spirituality and faith seriously. And I do see that in Catholicism. I do see a lot of, you're not really Catholic if you do this or that. And that's frustrating because the Catholic church really should be, here comes everyone, particularly in spirituality. I'm really strong about that. I really hate when people say, you're not a good Catholic because you don't pray the rosary, or you're not a good Catholic because you don't

Go to Tese services or San Egidio, right, or something that's a little more liberal. Or you're not a good Catholic because you're a convert. Oh, no, that's a big –

tendency and discourse that you get. You know, I hope not, given that we're speaking right after Easter, and we've just welcomed... One would think there wouldn't be. But I really do think, for me, the trouble is when people say, because you don't do this, you're a bad Catholic. And it's basically because you don't do what I like doing. And that's really frustrating to me. You know, and also, I'll just say, I mean, this is not to gather sympathy, but, you know, when I tell people that I love the rosary, I went to Lourdes, people...

kind of cocked their head at me and say, how can you believe in that stuff? And I say, well, I'm Catholic. And that, to be kind of diminished that way is a very strange feeling. All right, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll dig a bit more into some of the ideological divisions of the Francis era. ♪

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something that is real, right? The vast diversity of the Catholic Church. But you do have this set of issues that have led to outright schism in many of our fellow Christian churches, Anglicans, Methodists, and so on. And you do have a landscape where, as you said at the outset, the Pope pushed a certain distance on hot button issues and then said, okay, if we're keeping the Germans and the Africans in the same church, we can't push any further. And

But what does hold the church together in the end? That's actually a good question. That's an easy question, actually, which is, you know, the Holy Spirit. Yes. Truly. I mean, the Holy Spirit holds the church together. And we have to believe that. And the Holy Spirit's guiding the church. We really have to believe that. Jesus Christ, who is present to us through the Spirit, holds us together.

We believe that. So that's all true. But in terms of the person. We have had, we had a great schism where we lost the Orthodox or they lost us. We had the Protestant Reformation, an unfortunate period of trouble that we're still recovering from, right? So the Holy Spirit holds the church together in some form. But in this form, the church of you and I in the 21st century,

What makes people of these different perspectives want to stay together? Well, I would say the second part of that answer was the Pope and the primacy of St. Peter. And I think that's why he it was so focused on unity. Right. And all the different things we're talking about, sexual teaching, traditional Latin mass, you know, that that's the constant theme of unity.

And hopefully the hierarchy and hopefully our local priests and lay leaders. Those are all kind of unifying forces, we hope. But really, the unifying person is the pope, which is, you know, that's what he was trying to do. Now, a cynic, and I don't think...

I don't think this is entirely unfair, right? But a cynic might say, it is the Pope that holds the church together. It's the papacy that holds the church together. But it does because it offers this point of influence and shaping power that everybody wants a chance to...

to ultimately control, right? So no one in the end wants to leave the Roman Catholic Church and just become the German Catholic Church or the Sub-Saharan African Catholic Church. Because Rome itself offers this place of influence over the world that you would be foolish to give up. And I don't mean, I think the cynical perspective has some of the truth. Like, I'm very interested as someone who was

who was a Protestant, who watched how quickly Protestant churches could break up and split apart, how much people who really disagree with each other inside Catholicism tend to stay in Catholicism. Yeah, and I really do think that's less a political thing and more of a spiritual thing. I think people really want to stay in the church because they believe in the Catholic Church. They believe in the apostolic succession. They believe in the Pope. They believe this goes back to St. Peter. I just think that's so powerful. I mean, it's in...

Someone said to me recently or asked me recently, do you think there's going to be a schism because of homosexuality and the teaching of the church and same-sex unions and all that, the blessing stuff?

And I just said, you know, these people, you know, who are sort of opposed to what the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published, they want to be Catholic. You know, they don't want to leave the church. Who wants to leave the church? So I think it's much more a spiritual question. And even when Pope Francis was asked, do you think there'll be a schism? He said, no, because I think he understood that people don't want to leave. Why would they? They might want to see changes.

And the other thing is, you know, for priests and cardinals and members of religious order, we've also made promises and vows not to leave. Right. No, no. You guys are stuck. Let's be clear about that. I also wonder, though, in this landscape, right, like how much influence can a pope or the hierarchy have over religion?

Catholics, lay Catholics, not priests and religious, but lay Catholics who disagree with them, right? Because you said, you know, well, hopefully the hierarchy unites us. Hopefully the Pope unites us. I think the Pope is unifying. But since the sex abuse crisis, I think, you know, when I think about like how ordinary Catholics think about the hierarchy, just in my own lifetime, I think it's changed dramatically and people have just less respect.

for the bishops than they did. And just in terms of Catholic politics, right, that cashes out in this world where, you know, it just doesn't seem like the bishops have very much authority over Catholic politicians, for instance. So for a long time,

You had pro-choice Catholic politicians who, you know, favored abortion rights and the bishops would criticize them. And that didn't seem to go anywhere. And now you'll have sort of politicians on the right who take anti-immigration stances and the bishops will criticize them. And that doesn't go anywhere either. Right. So do you think that the hierarchy has real power?

Can it regain real influence of that kind? Or is it just sort of presiding in this way that doesn't matter that much to a lot of ordinary Catholics? That's a great question. I definitely think you're right that the bishops have less authority in the wake of the sex abuse crisis.

I think the Pope still has a great deal of influence. And I think it's, as you were saying earlier, it's not just his words, but it's his deeds. I think that they can help, those kinds of gestures can help people understand Catholicism and Christianity more. That's an influence, right? I think when he does speak out on the death penalty on migrants and refugees on the environment, I do think Catholics listen, maybe not to their local bishop. I've often had the experience of

saying to someone, you know, I mean, both of us are very attentive to these things. I'll say, by the way, what diocese are you in? And they won't know. I'll say, well, I remember saying to a very good Catholic whose name I won't remember, well, you must know what diocese you're in. When the priest says the Eucharistic prayer and puts the bishop's name in, what does he say? I don't know.

But they know the Pope, you know, and so I think he can have a great deal of influence. And I, you know, Ross, it's interesting. You're talking about that, where he embraced that man with the skin condition. And, you know, I looked at that and I was terribly moved. And I thought, you know, he's influencing me. And he didn't say anything to me. I just saw this picture. So-

That's a kind of influence and that's a kind of teaching and that's a kind of unifying effect. Right. You know what I mean? So beyond the kind of hot button issues we were talking about. So the answer is, yes, he can have an effect. And, you know, local bishops can do that from time to time. I don't want to dump on the bishops, but I think people see them less. No, I think they can. But I think certainly bishops, bureaucracies, the national councils of bishops and so on,

I feel like imagine themselves having a kind of authority that has completely evaporated. And personally, I would like to live in a world where Catholic politicians of both the left and right, not a world where they changed their position entirely because of something a bishop said, but a world where they felt like they had to address a bishop's critique. And I just don't know how we get there.

Right.

I feel like there is a renewed interest in religion in the Western world right now, definitely. But I think it's happening very much at a kind of ground level. And maybe that's where renewal always happens, right? But it's people reacting, as you said, to sort of what's going on in the world, things in their own lives. But it's not about suddenly having the debate about gay marriage settled or anything like that. But it's almost, if I'm being optimistic, I would say it's almost people moving past

some of the culture war arguments that you and I have been having for a long time and just sort of saying, well, you know, these are not fully resolved, but I'm going to go back to church anyway. But there's also a way in which it feels like it's happening and it has nothing to do with the hierarchy of the church. The hierarchy is just sort of not in the action at all. Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think it's that, you know, people probably are looking at their secular wives, their secular lifestyles that might not have got it and say, this feels empty.

And I really believe that in every person's heart, there's a natural desire for God. And I think if that's suppressed, you know, it eventually comes back. And I think that's what's happening kind of culture-wide. I think people are finding...

the secular world kind of empty, right? I mean, our hearts are restless until they rest in you, said St. Augustine. I think that's what's happening, finally. I'm surprised it took this long, actually. But yeah, I don't think it has a whole lot to do with, you know, the local bishop or even the local priest. It's a kind of desire for God. And in that desire, I think we have to meet people, right? And they might not, there are churches often people say,

And sometimes they're Jesuit churches. These are the churches for the people sort of on the way in and on the way out. And I think we have to meet them there. We have to meet them there. And I think that's one of the things that Pope Francis was trying to do. I would say that one of his most...

memorable images was the church as a field hospital, which he used in the interview with America Media in 2013, which I thought was, I'd never heard before. And it's just such a great image. It's open. I always think of MASH, you know, the old TV show. It's open. People are coming in. They're getting their wounds dressed. They're getting treated. And then later, one of the images in the synod was, the title of one of the working documents was, Enlarge the Space of Your Tent, which I thought was so beautiful. And so I think

One of the things that Pope Francis was trying to do is to reach out exactly to people like that who might be curious and not understand the church and say, you know, welcome. This is about mercy and love and you're welcome here. All right. So last two questions for you. Looking beyond some of the culture war issues and church debates we've been talking about.

What would you like to see the next pope do? Gosh, what a great question. Now, you're going to think I'm making this up, but I want him to be a holy man who proclaims the gospel. I don't think you're making that up, but I think it's... I would say on a particular issue, I think there was a lot of convergence at the Synod, big word that we used a lot at the Synod, on the question of women's ordination to the diaconate. I think there's actually a lot of

Yeah, convergence in different parts of the world. So I'd like to see him at least continue that conversation, which would be a big deal. This is still you're still staying, though, with with the culture. Give me some give me somewhere. Give me somewhere he should go. Oh, gosh. Somewhere he should go. Let me think about that. Where should he go? I think they've all I mean, they've got now I know they've gone they've gone everywhere. But you're his traveling secretary and you get to pick the first destination. A refugee camp. I think that would be the first place I would go.

Where? Gosh, well, I'm a little biased. I worked with refugees in East Africa. I go to refugee camp in northern Uganda to greet the Sudanese. Okay. That's a great question. That's a good answer. I'll accept it. But let me think. There's so many other places. Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. Pick it this way. How about a place, you mentioned Lourdes, a place associated with the supernatural in Catholicism? Which shrine, a site of a visitation? Well, let me tell you, if I were Pope, which will never happen in a trillion years, I would go to Lourdes first. Okay. Yeah, no question. And then I would go to the Sea of Galilee. I mean, this is all selfish. I would go there to pray. And then I would... It's never going to happen. And then...

I'd go to Knock. I love Knock. This is in Ireland. In Ireland, I love that. But of course, this is more... This is more tourism, Catholic tourism. This is all more like for the Pope's kind of personal spiritual life. But I think going to, gosh, a refugee camp in northern Uganda, Lourdes, the Sea of Galilee,

And then some big crazy city like New York. You know, probably go back to Argentina because I know the people in Argentina were upset that he didn't come back, which was very interesting. Yeah. Kind of mysterious. All right. Where would you have him go? I like the idea of lords and the Sea of Galilee. Some were associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe. Oh, Guadalupe, yeah. But I like the idea of...

I think, I suspect that we are headed into an era where sort of secular, I mean, the church has been consumed with issues about sexual behavior and its relationship to secular politics and so on. And one of my sort of prevailing views is that we're entering a much weirder time when it might be just really good for the Pope to be at the Sea of Galilee in places associated with

the moments when Christianity claims that God has actually reached down and touched the things of earth. So something in that zone is appealing to me. Last question, who is going to be the next pope?

They have that expression in Italian, entra papabile uscita cardinale, which means you enter a possible candidate, you leave a cardinal. You know, I really don't know. I think they're going to go for someone who's a little bit more moderate, less revolutionary. Some people have told me that the Italians feel like this is their last chance, right? Because the church is kind of moving toward the global south, and Francis certainly appointed a lot of bishops from there.

I don't know. I look at the same candidates that everybody looks at. Paroline, Pizzabala, Zuppi, Tagli. I really don't know. It's kind of exciting because I think it's pretty wide open. There's something interesting going on. I think people misunderstand this statistic that Pope Francis has appointed whatever, 75 percent, 80 percent of the cardinals as thinking they're all going to be in lockstep with him.

If you think about it, I'm sure you know this. Francis really tried to name cardinals from far flung places. Right. So small diocese. Exactly. I know the cardinal archbishop of Mongolia now, who's a lovely guy, Giorgio Marengo, Papua New Guinea. Right. So it was less about kind of people he liked and, you know, sort of historic sees and dioceses than sort of raising things up.

That doesn't mean that the bishop in these, the cardinal in these far-flung places is in lockstep with Francis, right? So I think it's more variegated than one would think. That's the first thing. Secondly, someone said to me, because they are kind of from far-flung places, they don't know each other very well. And so that argues for kind of a more Vatican diplomat, say, for example, like Cardinal Parolin, who they might know from visiting the Vatican. But the third interesting thing, there's a couple of interesting things. A lot of them were at the synod.

There were a lot of cardinals at the Synod in that room, and a lot of people said to me when I was there, look around you, the future pope could be in this room. So I think they took their measure of one another in the Synod. And then the final thing is, I think the political situation these days, people might look around and see kind of a rise in dictatorships and autocracies and might say, wow, we need someone who's going to be strong, sort of a strong voice against that. So I think all these things contribute to make it a really hard conclave to predict. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think people talk about a moderate choice and that could just sort of mean a boring choice, right? In the sense that you could pick someone who is a Vatican bureaucrat or a diplomat who doesn't have an incredibly strong public presence. That would be my impression of Cardinal Parolin, maybe unfairly, but who is sort of the insider candidate. But my assumption is it's either going to be that very quickly.

Right. It's either going to be a situation where you have all these cardinals, they don't know each other as well as as normally they might. And so there's a very quickly a couple of front runners and it consolidates very quickly. But then if that doesn't happen.

Then it seems like you get into territory where you should just scratch off all the leading contenders because almost anything can happen. But then if you scratch off the leading contenders, I don't know how well the other ones are known. That's the thing. And unlike that movie Conclave, they're not going to elect somebody who they met last week, you know? Unless the Holy Spirit should intervene, right? Unless through a wind and they open exploded windows of the Sistine Chapel, which I'm giving away too much of the movie. I would say...

Look, they need three things. They need someone who's holy. That's the first thing. They need someone who is a good evangelizer. That's the other thing. And then they need someone who's a good administrator. Those are three hard things to sort of find in one person. I think each of those names that I mentioned are all three of those things. We'll see. Who knows? Only the Holy Spirit.

All right. Well, on that note, and speaking in agreement in favor of openness to the Holy Spirit, Father James Martin, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. God bless you. Thank you. And thanks to all of you for listening again. We'll be back next week with another episode. Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also watch the show on YouTube. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please recommend us to your friends and leave a review.

Interesting Times is produced by Sofia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, Elisa Gutierrez, and Catherine Sullivan.

It's edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Amin Sahota, and Pat McCusker, with mixing by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our director of opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser. ♪