Michele Sagarino is well-qualified to answer these questions. As President of Cross Catholic Outreach, one of the largest Catholic relief organizations in the United States, she has traveled extensively through some of the world’s poorest communities, working alongside missionaries, bishops, religious sisters, and local Church leaders to address both material and spiritual poverty.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The experience in Jamaica that transformed Michele Sagarino’s understanding of aid

• The role of subsidiarity and solidarity in addressing poverty

• How faith-based organizations differ from secular approaches to development

• The relationship between charity, human dignity, and spiritual flourishing

This is a conversation about charitable giving, Catholic social teaching, institutional trust and the practical meaning of loving one’s neighbor in the modern world.

Father Francis Tiso has spent decades exploring these questions. A Catholic priest, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, and former advisor on interreligious dialogue for both the Vatican and the U.S. bishops, Tiso has studied in monasteries and retreat centers throughout Asia and met privately with the Dalai Lama.

In this conversation, he reflects on the growing attraction of Buddhism in the modern West, the decline of religious consciousness in secular culture, and the surprising similarities between Buddhist meditation and Christian contemplative prayer.

The discussion also explores one of the most controversial subjects in Tibetan spirituality: the phenomenon known as the “rainbow body,” reports of advanced practitioners whose physical remains appear to transform at death. Tiso explains why he believes the phenomenon deserves serious study and how it relates to broader questions surrounding mysticism, resurrection, and human consciousness.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why Buddhism has become so attractive to many Western seekers

• What the Dalai Lama told Father Tiso about Christian meditation

• The similarities and differences between Buddhist and Christian spiritual practice

• The phenomenon of the rainbow body and why it remains controversial

• Whether mystical experiences point toward deeper dimensions of human consciousness

• How interreligious dialogue can deepen rather than weaken Christian faith

This is a conversation about Buddhism, Christianity, contemplation, consciousness, mysticism, mindfulness, secularism, the Dalai Lama, religious experience, and the enduring search for transcendence.

But according to four Catholic scholars who have spent years studying technology, media, and human formation, the Pope’s concern is not primarily about machines. It is about what happens to human beings when technological systems begin to reshape how we think, relate, work, pray and understand ourselves.

Bo Bonner, Brett Robinson, Luigi Russi, and Michael Murphy argue that Pope Leo’s message is ultimately about defending the human person in an age increasingly defined by algorithms, automation, and artificial intelligence.

Far from being anti-technology, they contend that the Church is calling for a deeper examination of how AI influences human freedom, attention, relationships, labor, and spiritual life—and whether society is allowing technological progress to eclipse the deeper questions of meaning, vocation, and human flourishing.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why Pope Leo believes AI is fundamentally an anthropological and spiritual challenge rather than merely a technological one

• How artificial intelligence and social media can fragment attention, identity, and community

• The rise of transhumanist ideas and competing visions of human destiny

• Why many young people are becoming skeptical of technological utopianism

• How Catholic social teaching can help address concerns about labor, automation, surveillance, and human dignity

• The role of liturgy, sacramental imagination, and Catholic tradition in responding to the challenges of the AI age

• Their new book, Catholic Cosmotechnics for the AI Age, and why they believe the Church has unique resources for understanding the technological moment

This is a conversation about artificial intelligence, Catholicism, technology, social media, work, education, transhumanism, media ecology, human dignity, and what it means to remain fully human in an increasingly digital world.

Speaking in Rome during one of the Catholic Church’s largest annual gatherings focused on exorcism and spiritual warfare, Tobin reflected on the growing overlap between mental illness, loneliness, compulsive technology use, and what many believers increasingly interpret as spiritual oppression.

A practicing psychologist who works closely with exorcists and individuals reporting demonic phenomena, Tobin argues that modern society’s obsession with self, stimulation, and digital affirmation mirrors ancient spiritual patterns described in Christian theology for centuries.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why Tobin believes modern technology can condition people in ways that resemble “a form of possession”

• The Vatican-linked conference on exorcism and why AI became a major topic this year

• How social media, algorithms, and smartphones may contribute to anxiety, isolation, and spiritual fragmentation

• Why Tobin thinks modern culture increasingly searches for supernatural meaning through demons, exorcism, and the occult

• The relationship between psychology, trauma, mental illness, and alleged demonic activity

This is a conversation about AI, demons, exorcism, mental illness, spiritual trauma, loneliness, modern technology, and the search for meaning in an increasingly fragmented world.

Transcript

CNS Note: This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI tools. For precise quotations, CNS recommends referring to the video above.

Intro: Sean Tobin is a practicing psychologist working at the intersection of mental illness, spiritual trauma, and demonic possession. He was recently in Rome for one of the Catholic Church’s largest annual gatherings exorcists-in-training, where this year, speakers explored a disturbing question: what happens when ancient spiritual fears collide with modern technology? In this conversation with Catholic News Service, I ask Dr. Tobin about the rise in public fascination with demons and exorcism, the psychological patterns he sees in his patients, and why some religious thinkers now believe the modern crisis of anxiety, loneliness, and compulsive technology use may also be a spiritual crisis.

Robert Duncan: Dr. Sean Tobin, thank you so much for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Sean Tobin: It’s my pleasure to be here.

Robert Duncan: How do you see the devil as being active in the world today?

Sean Tobin: What I see happening overall in society is, especially with the rise of technology, is we’ve become so self-focused. And what’s interesting is even in the garden, right, Satan doesn’t originally turn us from God to evil. He turns us from God to self. And when he can turn us to self, it can cut us off from God when self-will reigns, right? And then we actually can, it allows space for every other evil, right? But I do think we’ve become more self-focused than ever before. And I think the rise of social media and internet and other things have unfortunately contributed to that. Not that they’re evil in themselves, but there’s a great book by Romano Guardini called The End of the Modern World, where he talks about how man does not have the power to properly integrate these technologies. We can’t keep up morally with the changes, and we don’t have that formation. So we have to be very intentional about how we use technology because it can create a state where we’re so self-focused that all we’re doing is seeking either the confirmation of what we already believe, or it’s to the point where we’re expecting so many answers immediately and expecting that there is an answer, that we can’t tolerate that discomfort or that mystery that ultimately creates the space where we can come to believe and experience God. So it’s becoming harder and harder for people to even be still enough to pray.

Robert Duncan: You mentioned technology, and I think that might be a good opportunity for you to tell people why you’re here and that technology is actually part of the thematic substance of this conference. So tell me about the conference and how AI and other forms of technology can be vehicles of—

Sean Tobin: Of the enemy and stuff, whatever, yeah. Well, I think, again, even the apple in the garden, whether it’s an apple or whatever fruit, it’s not good or evil. It’s how we’re oriented towards it, right? So I think that technology is the same thing. It’s amoral. It’s not good or evil. It’s how we use it. But I think that the way we are using a lot of technology has been to our detriment. I mean, we’re the most isolated, lonely, anxious society ever. There’s a great book called The Dopamine Nation by Dr. Anne Lemke that goes in depth into that, how the smartphone is the new hypodermic needle of our generation. So at the conference, I mean, it is a course for exorcists. There’s like 300, mostly priests and some mental health workers that are there, bishops as well. So it’s sometimes reported in the news as a Vatican conference.

Robert Duncan: Yeah, it seems to be centralized or promoted by the Vatican. So who hosts it?

Sean Tobin: Right now, yeah, it’s at a Legionaries of Christ college just outside of Rome. And they’ve had it for about 20 years now. But it seems to be the official Vatican gathering of priests.

Robert Duncan: Are there Vatican representatives there?

Sean Tobin: Yeah, Father Bamonte is the exorcist for Rome. He gave a talk actually just before I got here today, which was excellent. He gave a Q&A, and I mean, he’s got so much experience.

Robert Duncan: Did you get a sense that he had a particular Vatican line on what the tone of the conference should be?

Sean Tobin: I got a sense that he knew what he was talking about. And when people were asking questions, there was just this different kind of authority in the way that he spoke. And yeah, I do think there’s an air, for me, of it’s kind of more an official statement. He’s also very careful about certain things. Like there’s some topics that are not fully understood yet. Like something like generational curses or generational healing is kind of a hot topic. And he was pretty good about giving space for the controversy and the clarification. And so I think it does a good job trying to go after what is true and speak authoritatively about what is and isn’t. But yeah, at the conference itself, I think this is probably one of the first times that there’s been presentations on AI itself. Not just because people can use it maliciously, even people in the occult, right? But in a sense, there’s a—I guess for me, what I find fascinating is anything we create, it kind of mirrors God’s own creation. And we’re almost making like digital angels, especially as superintelligence eventually kind of emerges in some form. It’s not the first time that man has had such a close relationship with a superintelligent creation or whatever. In the garden, we dialogue with a language model that was superintelligent, that turned us back towards ourselves and away from God—the enemy, right? The angel of light that was the interpreter and counselor, you might say. And so I think that there’s a tendency, as we’re oriented toward these things, again, it helps us find more of what we’re looking for. If we’re wanting just reassurance and self-praise, it’ll give it to us. But if we want to think critically and seek God, it can help create space for that. But I think largely nowadays, as people are ambitious, people are seeking their own happiness, their own progress and wealth and enticed by everything else in the world, a lot of these systems, algorithms, social media—they’re not really designed to integrate us. They’re designed to engage us, to keep us engaged. And so being mindful of that, we have to be very careful about the way that we begin to internalize and integrate this technology. Because in some sense, the way the algorithms can know us and tailor everything, the phone can answer your question before you even ask, right? It’s going to get to a point where we’re so conditioned. Some people will be so conditioned by it. It’s almost like a form of possession, where they’re not going to realize how much freedom they’ve given away.

Robert Duncan: You said that through a sort of form of osmosis, we could be influenced in such a way by the algorithm and its logic that it could be as if we were possessed. But I wonder, given some of the stories that have been reported of people who are depressed and dialoguing with an AI, have been encouraged to follow through with a suicide or something like this. Is it a reasonable concern to think that the technologies themselves could be channels of these kinds of powers?

Sean Tobin: Stories like that, like even minors who have committed suicide after being influenced by a chatbot, right? That’s kind of old technology though. The technology really is changing so much. And it is kind of an amalgamation of what seems to be universally true. Not that it actually gives us truth, but they are getting smarter and smarter. There’s more safeguards and we’re learning from mistakes, right So I think it’s going to change, where there’s going to be less of a risk of that kind of thing. Even there was a danger at one point where there was a psychotic disorder emerging, where part of the chatbots—it’s like sycophantic, where we want to hear that we’re good, that we’re special. And it was telling us that: “That’s a good answer. That’s a good question.” And it inflates people’s ego. They’re actually even changing that to be a little bit more, you know, like a normal conversation, less appealing in that way. So the technology is changing and growing, and in some sense becoming more intelligent artificially. To me, again, the greatest danger, it’s what’s going to atrophy in us, where we’re not going to recognize, just like with the rise of social media, the damage that is being caused, that we’ll have to figure out a way to reverse.

Robert Duncan: Tell me more about the conference. You said that you go if you are training to be an exorcist. And you are not training to be an exorcist because you’re not a priest. But two questions: What does training to be an exorcist entail? And why are you there?

Sean Tobin: Well, training to be an exorcist—first of all, an exorcist is someone who’s an exorcist in the Catholic world. It’s usually someone who is designated by the bishop to be the representative to serve the community or anyone seeking that kind of spiritual support. Traditionally, it’s been a priest. But in the early church, it wasn’t always a priest. In the course of history, there’s actually been even some women saints who are known for a charism, like Catherine of Siena and others. But an exorcist traditionally is someone who, again, is designated by a bishop, usually a priest. And they, in some sense—it’s kind of an emerging field. They’re still developing the whole formation. There’s different institutes that have recently been formed to do that.

Robert Duncan: And I’m guessing different bishops have very different visions of what that ministry looks like.

Sean Tobin: Absolutely, absolutely. But more and more, they’re looking to Rome. They’re looking for really this conference to be one of the main training tools. And so this conference is a whole week long. And from morning to evening, it’s session after session where they systematically go through everything from canon law to the role of—the talk I’m going to give is the role of a psychologist as part of the team serving the exorcist. And so they have a full range of topics to kind of cover everything, even the proper administration of the rite, to have certain boundaries in place, or different kinds of protocol, and to understand even how lay deliverance ministry and the formal exorcism kind of complement one another and the space for all of it. So it’s a very thorough program. And this one primarily is for newly recruited or assigned exorcists or those that are just seeking more training, community. But it is kind of a gold standard, it seems, for preparation for anyone who is asked to become the exorcist.

Robert Duncan: And you were invited?

Sean Tobin: Yep.

Robert Duncan: Can you say who invited you or what was it?

Sean Tobin: Yeah, the institute itself reached out to me. I was recommended by a dear friend of mine, Dr. Mary Healy. She’s an incredible woman, theologian. She sits on the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Very brilliant lady. She’s even, I think, the first female who works on the dicastery for worship. So amazing lady. But yeah, I was very humbled that she recommended me. I think largely because she was instrumental in kind of guiding my own thought theologically. I wrote a book this past year, Big God, Little Devil. And she was a great advisor for kind of putting it together and reviewing it. And so I think in light of that, she felt like I had something to contribute. Because I really do, I think, look at the whole experience of exorcism in a different way. Where I think because of my training in psychology—which again, in the past, psychology and faith have not really been good friends—but I think now it reveals more about what’s happening, even in the rite. Where the rite is not some magical formula that happens over someone and they’re freed. It really is an encounter. It’s a preaching of the gospel. They’re experiencing the presence of Christ in the priest. And all the sacramentals are touching the body and speaking to the soul to revive their spirit. There’s so much more happening in the room. And that’s really part of what my talk is about. It’s that I believe a psychologist really helps prepare the soil in the person to receive the ministry so that they can even be present in the room, present in the process. So I think too often in our society, we expect you to go to a psychiatrist when you’re suffering because you want a pill to just take away the pain. People can approach the exorcist in the same way, where it’s like, “Just do it to me and it’s done.”

Robert Duncan: Well, that’s how it’s portrayed in the films, right? I mean, I think maybe if anybody’s watching this that doesn’t come from sort of a Catholic context, they may think, well, if the possession experience is anything like I’ve seen it portrayed as, how do you even have the space to do that preparation work? Because, you know, the person’s in all these kind of states.

Sean Tobin: They’re not manifesting all the time, you know. But even while they’re manifesting, and there’s some times where maybe they’re not as conscious or they black out, but there’s still a part of them, almost a distant part of them, watching it happen, watching the demons do things through them. And when you can dialogue with that part of them to understand what’s happening inside of you when the demons were just speaking, you know, there’s still a part of the person that’s very active in the process. And typically when a demon is speaking through someone, internally they’re trying to get it to stop, right? Which actually can be counterintuitive but causes more of the inner conflict. So yeah, there’s always a part of the person still present. Again, whenever Jesus healed someone in the gospels, it was very relational. It wasn’t mechanical. I mean, there was a woman Satan bound for 18 years who was hunched over. And when he saw her, he called her a daughter of Abraham and just said, “You are free.” He was welcoming her again to community. That was part of her healing, right? The demoniac—he asked, “What’s your name?” He’s connecting with that person underneath. So it’s so much more than this formula. I mean, the rite, just like the liturgy, you know, it seems very formal and structured, but there’s so much space within it for the mystery and the encounter. It’s liturgical. And the sacramentals themselves speak so much more than—I mean, an image speaks a thousand words, right? The sacramentals themselves have a power to impart a real truth to a person in a way that simple catechesis can’t.

Robert Duncan: Do you think that the devil is more active now given the scale of global conflict than in the past?

Sean Tobin: Well, I think that the devil has always been at work, partly because I think as some of the saints describe, he’s almost like God’s quality control agent. He’s always had a position. I think about Pope Leo XIII who had that vision of Satan and that contest that he proposed to God to give him a century to try to destroy the Church. That gives me some reasons to think that maybe this is a special kind of time, a special season we’re in. But I think that he’s always been active. But ultimately I think God is even more active and we are heading towards a day that has been planned. It’s interesting. I was atheist for a big portion of my life. Watched the movie The Exorcist—

Robert Duncan: How big are we talking?

Sean Tobin: From childhood till 21.

Robert Duncan: Were you raised in a Christian home?

Sean Tobin: My family was Catholic, Irish Catholic, but I was a big skeptic and had a lot of more personal issues that made the capacity to believe and experience a God who’s so close and loving kind of difficult to grasp. But yeah, I was interested in horror movies back then and I didn’t believe in God, but I actually believed in the devil, which is kind of ironic. And I think that the world is more open to the idea of an evil force, even something personal, which doesn’t necessarily make them Catholic or Christian. I think a lot of different spiritual worldviews have that in their context, right? But I think especially nowadays, when science seems to be able to explain everything, it struggles with certain mysteries, right? And when you hear about someone who’s coughing up nails or levitating or a little woman that is crushing a metal-framed chair or bed supernaturally, these things raise a lot of questions. And I think as they should. I think signs and wonders are meant to kind of challenge what we think we know to create that space for wonder and the possibility of coming to faith.

Robert Duncan: I want to obviously ask you about the things that you mentioned and whether or not you have witnessed such things. But before we get there, people ask God all the time for proof that he exists. I would wager that most people don’t get the kind of proof that that question generally suggests. But the things you’ve mentioned and that other exorcists mention, it seems like the devil has no problem proving that he exists. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Sean Tobin: Yeah. Well, I think that sometimes the secular world can argue against the existence of a good God because of the existence of evil, while simultaneously I think the very existence of evil proves that there’s goodness, right? Following that to the end of absolute being. But so it’s confusing, right? And even the demons believe there’s God. That’s not really the point. I think what it comes down to is when you’re asking for that kind of proof, people want to have an experience with, or even deeper, an encounter with a living God. And it’s not so much that we just want a reason to believe some kind of philosophy is true. I mean, for anyone to be a Christian, I think fundamentally it’s because we’ve met Christ. We’ve experienced him as alive in some way. And our hearts are restless until they rest in God. I think it’s normal to search and to ask, even for signs. I mean, Gideon in the Old Testament asked for signs again and again and again, and that wasn’t wrong. But the way the Pharisees asked for signs was more testing God. So that’s a little bit more complicated, even asking for proof, you know? Because I think faith needs some evidence in some sense to have something to hold on to.

Robert Duncan: The people that seek out—first of all, maybe you could tell people a little bit about the professional work you do and how—well, why are you talking about this at all? You’re not in a Roman collar, you’re a psychologist. So tell me a bit about your work.

Sean Tobin: Yeah, well, I was in religious life for a brief period of time. After my conversion, I went pretty deep into studying philosophy and theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville. And while I was actually in religious life, I witnessed some demonic manifestations in people at conferences or retreats, someone shrieking out—

Robert Duncan: What kind of conferences were you going to?

Sean Tobin: Yeah, actually just very normal Catholic conferences that were speaking about the life of prayer and contemplative—

Robert Duncan: Steubenville is famous for the—

Sean Tobin: Steubenville was more charismatic, for sure. It wasn’t so much there, actually. It was in religious life. We specialized in leading retreats, individual retreats. And sometimes people would be there who were very broken and troubled. And I remember one time at a mass, the priest was reading the line, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.” And there was this woman in the congregation who immediately started shrieking like, “No, no, make it stop.” And I was sitting there as a brother thinking, what is happening, right? I’d never experienced that before. But yeah, so it put kind of a question in my mind. So when I eventually discerned to leave and go back to school studying psychology, as a believer who, as a Catholic who actually reads the Bible, it always got me thinking, what was Jesus doing when he’s meeting with an epileptic boy or a man whose mind was not well, like the demoniac? He healed things that seemed like psychiatric conditions, but he was driving a demon out to heal them. And that always confused me and intrigued me. And so I started asking lots of questions in grad school. I went to a Catholic university and then to a Protestant university to finish the doctorate. And I didn’t get a lot of answers, just more questions. So I ended up doing my dissertation on exorcism, deliverance, and psychotherapy, and basically studying everything in the scientific databases. But then when I started to work professionally, I had gone through a bunch of training at different sites, including I worked at a psychiatric hospital for a time where I saw a lot of different crazy stuff. But after having a really good relationship with my local auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles, I started being referred people who either needed a psychological evaluation before they received an exorcism or just needed support alongside the process. But I also found that I started getting sent a lot of people by word of mouth who seemed to be suffering from some kind of demonic phenomenon, whether it’s just something in their house, a more harassing kind of experience, or something interior. And it became kind of a specialization for me. And I found a way to sit with people with what was presenting and sometimes have seen some incredible, incredible transformation.

Robert Duncan: People listening may have noted that you said that you had a particular interest in horror films growing up and wonder whether or not you have charted a course through to be in The Exorcist film, but in real life.

Sean Tobin: Yeah, well, no, I wouldn’t say I had a huge passion for it. I think I had a curiosity. I think any young man wants to face what he is afraid of and show that he can overcome it. I think a lot of horror movies are actually about that. It’s about facing a fear and coming out as that one survivor, you know, on the other side of it, almost like a narrative, projective thing or whatever. Not a huge advocate for horror films, but I get what it’s about in some ways. So I’m not like a huge horror fan, but to me, it was still just more the honest question of where does the demonic and mental illness fit, right? Because I think the tendency is we make things either spiritual or psychological. But I think that’s kind of a false dichotomy because within the human person, I mean, the spirit, the soul, the body make one nature and it can be these categorical errors, right? Jesus touched the body and healed the soul. And so for me, I was trying to understand not so much, you know, what’s what, but what’s happening in the human person while something spiritual can also be happening.

Robert Duncan: Maybe you could give people listening just a little bit of the history of the development of the Church’s attitude towards exorcism. Because, you know, what you just said—that people want to separate the spiritual and the mental illness—is in a sense, if I’m hearing you properly, maybe reading between the lines a bit, a response to an attitude that I think the Church had in the second half of the 20th century, which was to say many of the cases that in the past we thought were maybe of demonic or supernatural origin actually can be explained by, you know, mental illness.

Sean Tobin: Yeah. But then again, in the gospels, the man with multiple personalities, Legion or whatever, it was a demon still, right? So it’s both ends. But it’s true that maybe in the past there was an over-pathologizing, you know, of—or describing something as spiritual—which we’ve learned now has a strong mental health component, right? I do think that a lot of current exorcists are trying to do some damage control from what the Enlightenment has done, the age of scientism, where there’s a lot of skepticism about anything supernatural. And so there is sometimes some advocacy for the possibilities of these things being real. I think among believers though, ever since the first century, there’s always been kind of a challenge of dualism that we have, right? Between the body and the soul. And so I think sometimes it’s difficult to grasp how integrated those are. And often the people that I see that come in, people would almost feel more relieved to know it’s a demon and that they’re not mentally ill.

Robert Duncan: Well, I can understand that.

Sean Tobin: Yeah, because it can seem like almost a shame or—

Robert Duncan: But that impulse though is what some people would say would explain a kind of credulity in demonic forces in the world because it relieves us of responsibility.

Sean Tobin: Right. The challenge for believers is, I mean, in scripture as a believer, all we have to do is submit ourselves to God, resist the devil and he’ll flee. So there is an act of participation in grace, a responsibility we have, a conversion, an interior work that we have to go through to seek that kind of freedom. The kind of people that I tend to see are believers. It’s not like someone on the fringe being evangelized for the first time, or like in the gospels when Philip is preaching in Samaria and driving out demons just in the gospel, right? That’s a different context for what we often see and who the exorcist tends to see. I think it’s sensitive, but I think we have a lot of catechized believers who aren’t always evangelized. Now we received in baptism the grace that sets us apart from the enemy, as much as the waters of the Red Sea set us apart from Pharaoh, right? But that baptismal identity needs to be actualized and lived to the full. And I think in a lot of ways we have a very confusing worldview. We’re not very well-formed spiritually as well as theologically. And I think people just carry into their faith—we take for granted how much of our family of origin, our culture, our belief systems, our wounds, our fears actually do play themselves out in our spiritual life and can even create vulnerabilities for the enemy.

Robert Duncan: So what patterns have you noticed in these clients that come to you? You mentioned that many of them are religious believers, but what does your typical client look like?

Sean Tobin: Yeah, typical client. Well, the ones that suffer from demonic stuff—

Robert Duncan: What percentage would they be of your total?

Sean Tobin: I would say actually probably about 60% of my clients are primarily there because they’re religious. They’re primarily there because they’re trying to understand what’s going on spiritually.

Robert Duncan: And how many people do you see, like a month or a week?

Sean Tobin: Right, I usually see about five or six people a day. So an hour a client, and you do notes and everything else too. I can tell you about how last week was and some of the people that I saw.

Robert Duncan: Tell me.

Sean Tobin: Yeah, well, one of the clients I saw regularly—one of the first times I ever met her, in the course of our conversation, all of a sudden she starts looking at me. Her face starts contorting, and then she starts growling, and then speaking in some language that she doesn’t know.

Robert Duncan: Do you know it?

Sean Tobin: No, it sounded Italian, to be honest, but she doesn’t know Italian clearly. And I should probably record it one of these days and see what it is. But bodies contort. I’ve seen her stand on one toe in a very weird posture.

Robert Duncan: And you’re alone in a room with this person?

Sean Tobin: Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I trust in the Lord. And he didn’t seem very intimidated when the man they were trying to chain and keep in the tombs was coming at him, you know, the demoniac there. So I think that’s part of—yeah, that’s part of the gift, I think, I want to help bring people to, is the confidence in God and how much he really has set us apart. And ultimately that the enemy serves his purposes in a mysterious way. But so someone like this, right? I see people who have experienced trauma—

Robert Duncan: Sorry, if we could go back to this part. You gave a few examples, colorful examples of the things that she could do or were done to her, however you like. Is there enough normal space in order for conversation and therapy.

Sean Tobin: Yeah, so how much is it that kind of presentation or how much is—I’ve learned a couple of tricks over time where sometimes if you change the subject, be like, “So tell me about, again, where you came from, where you were born.” You can see the presentations change where it’s as if parts of the self still have agency while other parts that are a little bit more provoked, you know, become the territory that the enemy can operate from.

There’s degrees of possession, ultimately. I also sometimes provoke people on purpose. I tell them, “You’re God’s favorite. He loves you. He’s got a special plan for your life. He died for you. If it was only you, he’d do it again.” You know, all these things that provoke something because, I mean, when you see in Mark chapter one, the first time before Jesus is well-known that someone manifested with a demon, I mean, it was a guy in church, in the temple, right? But it was after this witness of, “Who is this man that speaks with authority?” That authority though, it provoked something in this man where a part of him felt like it was a threat, like it’s here to destroy me. And the demon spoke out, right? And Jesus silenced it and it came out of the man.

I see that all the time where oftentimes there’s a part of us too that gets provoked by God. Maybe it’s called to surrender or to trust or to let go. And we have a hard time sometimes accepting that, right? Our journey with God is very complicated and nuanced, and that’s okay. It’s not always demonic, but I think sometimes it can be because ultimately he wants to set those parts against one another to ultimately keep us from being open and trusting to receive the Lord as he is.

And so I—just his love, I think, provokes people. His presence provokes people. And if I can bring that to them in some way, even sometimes, you know, speaking about certain elements of the gospel, it often will get a reaction from someone who is heavily demonized. But then that gives me territory to work with because I have this idea that in scripture, we say that the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour, right? “To resist him, steadfast in your faith.” Well, a roaring lion is a terrible prowler. He reveals where he’s hiding. You know, he is an attention grabber. He wants us to react to the manifestation. But God is using that to expose something hidden, an area of influence, an area of weakness, fear, or brokenness.

And so when the manifestations happen, that’s actually when the enemy’s weakest. And so I’ve learned, I guess, to sit with that, to attend to the part of the person that’s broken underneath, you know? Like when the man’s manifesting, “I’m Legion, for we are many,” it’s because Jesus was asking him what his name was. He’s trying to attune to something deeper, to call a man into his self. And so I think when you look past the manifestations, there’s an opportunity there that God’s creating.

Robert Duncan: You told me a few things earlier. You told me that maybe 60% of the people you see, you think could have some demonic influence.

Sean Tobin: Sometimes it’s just things moving around their house. They hear chains and screams or whatever at night.

Robert Duncan: Okay, so to be clear, you’re saying 60% of the people are coming to you because they believe—not necessarily that you ascribe demonic.

Sean Tobin: Okay, that’s important clarification. That’s true.

Robert Duncan: Is there a key that you know as a psychologist when it’s actually merely psychological?

Sean Tobin: Yeah, again, I think it can be both-and. So it’s less important to me to prove whether or not it’s real. And it’s more important to understand what it means to that person. Because whether the demon’s there or not, why does this person not have peace in Christ, right? I mean, Jesus had no problem with the devil hanging out in the desert until he was annoyed after the third time and sent him away, you know? He wasn’t so quick the first time to send the devil away. So the presence of the devil is not that important. It’s looking for the presence of Christ. So he should be afraid. The devil should be afraid of us more than we should be afraid of him. So that’s really fundamentally what I’m looking for in a person. Whatever they’re suffering from, how do I move them to a place of greater peace and integration and wholeness in their life and confidence, right? Especially in the love of God, in the presence of God. But obviously there are certain conditions, whether it’s like schizophrenia or like you said, maybe some personality disorders that can seem to resemble the character of evil, right? Or something explicit that is like schizophrenia where you could have visions that maybe aren’t really there, right? Well, even in the case of schizophrenia, I’ve worked with people who say they hear the devil. And while it’s saying gibberish or strange things, it can seem like a delusion. It’s not really in the scope of science to prove empirically whether or not a demon isn’t there or not. It still could be. I mean, a demon could present itself as mental illness to someone, right? It is the devil’s mental illness that we’re suffering from in some sense from the beginning. But again, for me, it’s how is this person suffering? What does it mean to them? And how do I help them move towards wholeness in some degree? And whether it’s explicitly confronting this experience and the presence of the devil in their life or not. I think in the course of someone who is mentally ill, the change is different. I think it’s a little bit less realistic to see some of the phenomenon go away. When you have a lot of hallucinations, auditory or otherwise, they tend to last a lot longer. And that you do need to treat it with medication because it is primarily a neurological, a brain disorder. So you do have to treat the body directly to improve the symptoms, which again doesn’t negate that there couldn’t still be a demon. But again, who cares if there’s a demon or not? That doesn’t keep you from coming to a place of peace and wholeness.

Robert Duncan: Do you believe that the devil attacks believers and unbelievers in equal measure? I think he hates all God’s children.

Sean Tobin: But I also think that in some sense, Raniero Cantalamessa said that the strongest proof of the devil’s existence isn’t found in the sinners or the possessed, but in the saints. Because by way of their life, his works are exposed. And in some way, God has always used the enemy. John Chrysostom said he uses the enemy like a surgeon uses a scalpel, or a vine dresser uses pruning shears, or like a shepherd using a sheepdog to drive the flock back to him. I think that he’s always been used as part of sometimes the redemptive purposes of God. And so it’s not so much maybe that he’s less active in a believer’s life, but we can be more aware of his activity in our lives. Some people say, if you have a great calling, then the devil is going to target you more. But I think we’re all the target of God’s jealous love. But I do think that in any of our callings, there’s a training as well. And again, I think he’s our sparring partner so often, our training partner that God permits in order to prepare us, just like with Peter or Job or anyone else. So I wouldn’t say that it’s more so, but then again, the devil, of course, he’s going to want to, at least in his mind—which never operates outside God’s will—he obviously wants to try to prevent the saints or any believer from preaching the gospel or living the gospel. But his activity is always under the restraint of divine providence.

Robert Duncan: You told me earlier that most of your clients, maybe you said all, are believers or Christians.

Sean Tobin: No, yeah, I actually stopped working with more secular people, yeah.

Robert Duncan: And why is that?

Sean Tobin: It felt like doing surgery with one arm behind my back. I think that the relationship with God is one of the most important relationships we have. And when we talk about mental health and mood disorders, I think how you think God sees you and feels about you has one of the greatest impacts on our health. And I don’t understand sometimes why you can talk about your parents and do an empty chair technique and pretend they’re there to look at that structural relationship that you’ve internalized, you know? But we can’t do that with God because it’s still a very real relationship. And so actually one of the first questions I ask believers when they come in is, between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who do you feel the closest to and who do you feel the furthest from? And I find in that answer it tells a lot about the inner workings of a person and their framework for experience.

Robert Duncan: Can you give me an example?

Sean Tobin: Sure.

Robert Duncan: Like if I were to say the Father or the Holy Spirit, I mean, what would that be?

Sean Tobin: You won’t get personal. You don’t want—yeah. So, I mean, a lot of people, they feel close to Jesus because maybe they’ve suffered and they’re naturally an empathic person and they can identify the mercy of God, the closeness of God in Jesus. The Father can seem distant oftentimes because they have a father who maybe was busy or less engaged or not really seeking out that child. Or the Holy Spirit can be distant where this person can be more self-reliant, is more skeptical of comforts, and in general is kind of taking care of themselves, right? And so in some way, we have a gift in having three unique persons within the Trinity because we relate to each one differently. But I think in a meaningful way—I would say even the kind of church we’re attracted to has a lot to do with our psychology as well.

Robert Duncan: Say more.

Sean Tobin: Whether it’s something very structured or a little bit more, you know, free-flowing. I mean, just personalities alone—someone who’s choleric versus sanguine—will feel more comfortable in those spaces. But I think naturally we try to find something that’s familiar, that speaks to us. But that’s, I think, one of the beautiful things about the Church, is not only is there room for everything, but we have an opportunity to go beyond just what’s my preference and comfortable, to try to find all of God, to seek all of God. I think even within different movements, like say the Protestant world, right? The born-again movement. I see a lot of people who are really trying to find a way to leave their past behind, to somehow change their narrative, to try to heal from it. And that can be a very convenient belief, you know? “I’m once saved, always saved,” instead of having to do this deep interior work still of conversion. So again, a lot of these ideologies and even church identity or styles of worship have a lot more to do with how God’s meeting us where we’re at, but always inviting us into the fullness.

Robert Duncan: Do you ever wonder, or have you ever asked yourself, whether, to the extent that you were doing psychological work, your religious faith has clouded your judgment? Does it shape too much your worldview to see maybe a spiritual problem when maybe the person needs medication?

Sean Tobin: Well, I don’t see so much a conflict with medication. There’s a great passage in the Book of Sirach, chapter 38, where it talks about how the pharmacist makes medicines from the earth that are from God, and that we really need to give the doctor his place with these medicines, right? I think what it comes down to is we want to do all that we can for the body, for the soul, and for the spirit—the whole person. And I think that’s the model of scripture. And what’s informed by my faith is when Peter and John met the man at the Beautiful Gate, and they said, “Silver and gold we don’t have, but what we have we give you. In Jesus’ name, rise and walk.” It says that he goes into the temple walking, leaping, and praising God. So we see physical, emotional, and spiritual. The whole person was healed. Jesus touched someone, healed their soul. He said, “Your sins are forgiven, now rise and walk.” It’s the whole person he’s healing. And in my work, I mean, a psychologist is really psyche—soul. I study the soul in some sense. But as we know it, so much of trauma is stored in the body, in our nervous system. The Body Keeps the Score. And so I think we’ve come from a time where everyone is an expert in their own lane. But more and more, we have to understand the fullness of the person and to really help integrate them. And so I don’t have so much a preference for just like the spirit or the soul. I just want to understand what the person looks like in their wholeness. Actually, Pope Benedict XVI said that whoever wishes to heal man must see him in his wholeness and must know that his ultimate healing only comes in God’s love. So I am biased to think that love is ultimately what we need. But love can be expressed through medication too.

Robert Duncan: I think you said you’ve seen personally the spitting out of nails.

Sean Tobin: I haven’t seen the nail part.

Robert Duncan: The nail one, okay.

Sean Tobin: I’ve seen things move around the office. I’ve seen languages, things that they couldn’t know, that they know about me even. Yeah.

Robert Duncan: It would seem to me that if you’ve seen those things, you can’t have had much of a problem with doubt.

Sean Tobin: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: I mean, I’ve never seen such things, but is it an odd kind of consolation when you know that many people struggle not having the evidences of things that they believe in church? And by your own account, you have many of them.

Sean Tobin: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: Even if they’re coming from arguably a different source.

Sean Tobin: Well, I guess it’s kind of like the idea of Thomas the Apostle. Like, isn’t it easier when we can see, right? Again, I think then we’re circumventing the personal struggle of belief that there’s in all of us. Maybe there’s a certain area in your life where it’s hard to believe or to trust in God, right? And faith is empirical. We need evidence. And ultimately, Jesus is the perfecter and pioneer of our faith. He’s the one who calls it out and brings it to life in us. Faith is mysterious. And to me, I don’t so much seek a reassurance in these signs. Again, I don’t think signs and wonders are necessarily meant to be proof of faith as much as they are an argument to make a choice. What do you believe is happening? Because people could see the same thing and think there’s a quantum physics explanation for what’s happening.

Robert Duncan: Or you live in LA and there are sometimes small earthquake tremors.

Sean Tobin: Exactly. That’s why it’s moving on the wall. Exactly. So again, it’s that personal question that we have to respond to. Yeah.

Robert Duncan: There are many popular exorcists online with major followings.

Sean Tobin: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: What do you think of that phenomenon?

Sean Tobin: Yeah. It’s complicated.

Robert Duncan: Imagine you know several of them personally.

Sean Tobin: Some of them. Well, one of my favorites I’ll say is Father Dan Rehill. I was actually in religious life with him and he was one of my first spiritual directors. He was Brother Joshua back then. Awesome guy. Stephen Rossetti has told how a lot of exorcists, when they were asked in recent years to become exorcists, came into a culture that had become very secular. And it’s almost like they needed to prove to people that demons are real to take it seriously, right? Also because they wanted to warn people from some of the practices that were dangerous, like practicing the occult and kind of warning people about demons. Kind of warning people about that. So I think in some regard there is something good. But especially the virality of a lot of these media, people tend—the clickbait is so often these stories that often seem to promote the power of the enemy and what he can do. And some exorcists seem to be experts in demonology and know all about the demon behind this, the demon behind that. Personally, I find that kind of information a little bit problematic. When the disciples came back after they cast out demons and were celebrating about it to Jesus, he redirected their focus to your names written in the Book of Life. When people are studying counterfeit currency, they don’t study the counterfeit currency. They study the real so much so that the counterfeit’s easy to identify. So in the same way, I think we’re really called to understand the nature of God, the power of God. And that in itself exposes then what is of the enemy and why. We have to be very careful with the way that we talk about things. And I think sometimes people can think it’s a form of evangelization too, to scare people about the devil, to send them to Christ. But actually maybe Augustine of Hippo did say that fear can be like the needle pulling the love of God, the thread that sews up the garment, right? Fear enters first. I get that argument. But I just see a lot of believers who are trying to grow deeper in their spiritual life learning this stuff and becoming more anxious and more set in a kind of mixed faith that has a lot of fear. I think what people are really looking for again is they want to know, they want to experience more of the supernatural, more of what’s mystical, more of what’s—you know, that the spiritual is more tangible. But at the end of the day, no matter how much we know about the devil, I think what we’re really looking for is to know God. And it’s not the same thing. And so I think there can be a lot of confusion about those messages. And yeah, I think there should be more testimonies about what Mary did, what Jesus did to bring that liberation. And we should be celebrating those testimonies more than ever. And actually that’s what I focus on in my book, is this is what the person experienced in the context of this deliverance, and this is what God did. And it’s moving to hear how tender Our Lady is, how tender Jesus was in disarming those fears and redeeming some of those wounds and sending the devil running effortlessly, right? That’s the stuff that moves us and inspires faith, not fear.

Robert Duncan: Just because you mentioned it earlier, I do want to ask you about the hot topic you mentioned that came up: generational curses.

Sean Tobin: Sure.

Robert Duncan: I think that—I mean, that’s something I hear about. A lot of people believe that they are under a kind of generational curse in one way or another. So what does that discussion look like among your colleagues?

Sean Tobin: Sure. Well, among my colleagues, scientifically, we recognize that illness is generational. I mean, we inherit a disposition or predisposition towards different things, both in our physical conditions and even certain behaviors that we’re weaker towards, right?

Robert Duncan: Well, mental illness, it can be inherited.

Sean Tobin: Absolutely, absolutely. But a spiritual inheritance in some sense—well, faith is generational. He’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Paul recognized in Timothy that that faith first lived in his mother and his grandmother, right? That there was a flame that was kind of passed on. But I think one of the controversies is if we have a generational curse—and first of all, what is a curse? It’s not just someone cast a spell or did something. A curse is the opposite of a blessing. A blessing builds someone up. It gives life. And a curse tears down and breaks them down and confuses their identity, right? So fundamentally it has an impact psychologically, relationally. When we don’t give a good example to our children, in some sense that can be a form of a curse where we’re not building them up, right? Because with children, more is caught than taught, right? But there is this kind of belief that we do inherit some spiritual thing, like some spirit of a curse comes upon us. And a lot of people look to Exodus that says that the sins of the father will go to the third and fourth generation, right? And so sometimes there seems to be like this mystical transfer of guilt, kind of like original sin. But that’s different because it also says in scripture in Ezekiel that no longer will it be said that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. God really has come in between to separate, to allow the generational bondage to stop. He gives us the opportunity to come to him, to seek healing. Yeah, to recognize that all of our brokenness is in a context that goes generationally, right? But we have an opportunity to end that generational pattern, to really come to God to seek healing, and that the blessings of God go to the thousandth generation, that there’s far more blessing available than there is the power of a curse. But I think a lot of people approach this stuff with a very superstitious attitude and are trying to seek out some formula or some way to change that pattern without taking responsibility for it, almost looking to blame maybe why they’re suffering rather than owning it and doing what they need to do to change.

Robert Duncan: Pope Francis spoke very often in his pontificate about the devil from early on. And maybe this will just show that I haven’t been paying enough attention, but off the top of my head I cannot think of Pope Leo having yet spoken at least quite in the same way. Is that true? What has Pope Leo said about the devil? And is there a particular expectation you or the other exorcists at this conference have about the direction maybe Pope Leo wants your work to go?

Sean Tobin: Well, I love how Pope Francis sometimes lightheartedly talked about the devil too. If I could share one of his jokes, he said he too knows what it’s like to have a mother-in-law because he too suffers with the devil every day. Or one of the lines in my book that I use of his is that “the devil exits by faith, but re-enters through superstition.” And that whenever we engage in superstitious thinking, we’re dialoguing with the devil, and we never dialogue with the devil. I think that’s really important. So he does obviously talk more about the devil, but he’s also been pope a little bit longer. Yeah, Pope Leo XIV, I believe I have read once where he did talk about the devil. But again, we make such a big deal of the devil. When you read the New Testament, he’s almost like a footnote. I mean, in the Gospel of John, there’s not a single exorcism in the entire gospel. It’s pretty interesting. Jesus is confronting unbelief instead and almost freeing the whole world from his power. I think again where we have this false emphasis where we give the devil way too much attention when he’s meant to be really the opportunity for a demonstration of God’s power and love. It’s meant to be part of evangelism even, to bear witness to the reality of the kingdom of God rather than becoming like a phenomenon or fad in itself. So I’m not so worried about him saying much about the devil. I believe that Pope Leo is very well-formed and is not ignorant of the enemy. But I think his heart’s where it needs to be as a pastor right now.

Robert Duncan: For anyone who may be watching who suffers from mental illness and has been listening to you, what would your message be to them? What would your message to them be?

Sean Tobin: Well, I might encourage them to read the book, read my book, Big God, Little Devil. But even more, I think the biggest challenge is to dare to believe in the love of God for them. And I challenge anyone who’s really suffering to simply go to be with Jesus, go to adoration, go to a sanctuary where you can just sit in his presence. And rather than just asking him to change what you’re feeling or to remove the devil from your life, to enjoy his presence, to simply enjoy God’s love. Because the presence of the enemy is not really the problem. We want to turn ourselves, almost by ignoring him, to the greater thing to give our attention to, which is this amazing love of God. And I would really challenge anyone who has beliefs and experiences where they’re forgotten by God or that he doesn’t seem to be doing anything and abandoning them, that they’re not worthy, to say those things at the foot of the cross. Because they’re all lies. You know, we are his beloved. He’s done everything for us. He’s given everything to speak that love to us. And what it really comes down to is receiving that truth and that love. And so I just challenge people to go there.

Robert Duncan: Dr. Sean Tobin, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Sean Tobin: It’s an honor to be here. Thanks.

Consolmagno, a Jesuit brother, planetary scientist, and former director of the Vatican Observatory, argues that the public fascination with extraterrestrials is not fundamentally about physics or government secrecy, but about something deeper: humanity’s fear of being alone in the universe and the growing collapse of trust in institutions, religion, and truth itself.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why Br. Guy remains deeply skeptical of modern UFO claims and government disclosures

• Whether belief in aliens has become a substitute religion in modern secular culture

• The Catholic theological implications of discovering extraterrestrial life

• Why the Church does not see intelligent alien life as a threat to Christianity

• Elon Musk, SpaceX, and the modern myth of the technological savior

• How conspiracy culture, Gnosticism, and distrust of institutions shape the UFO phenomenon

• Pope Leo XIV’s message to the Vatican Observatory about truth, science, and despair

• Why young scientists and STEM students are increasingly returning to faith

• The relationship between astronomy, climate change, AI, and the spiritual crisis of modernity

• Why Consolmagno believes science and religion ultimately share the same goal: the pursuit of truth

This is a conversation about UFOs, faith, technology, the future of humanity and what the search for life in the cosmos reveals about ourselves.

Transcript

Intro: Days after the United States government declassified a new trove of documents and images related to UFOs, I sat down with one of the Vatican’s leading voices on the question of Catholic theology and extraterrestrial life. Br. Guy Consolmagno — former director of the Vatican Observatory and widely known as “the Pope’s astronomer” — is a planetary scientist, Jesuit brother, and one of the Catholic Church’s most recognizable advocates for the compatibility of faith and science. But increasingly, people want to know something else: What does the Church think about aliens? In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we discuss UFOs, the theology of extraterrestrial life, the modern obsession with space, the influence of figures like Elon Musk, and whether our growing awareness of the vastness of the cosmos weakens — or deepens — the credibility of religious belief.

Robert Duncan: Brother Guy Consolmagno, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: It’s a delight to be here, as always.

Robert Duncan: Well, I think the best way to start this conversation is with the Trump administration disclosing on Friday files related to UFOs, or as they are now called, UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. And this has been something in the zeitgeist since The New York Times ran a story in 2017 about these secret CIA programs that study these matters. Before I ask you a couple of particular questions about that, what do you make of the interest in the public at large in this subject?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, the interest in “are there aliens?” because really, that’s what’s driving it. If it turned out to be something really interesting in terms of physics, but nothing to do with aliens, I think people would get bored immediately. The interest is, are there aliens? And it’s got a long and fascinating history. It goes back to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the creatures that, you know, Ulysses runs into on his way home from the Trojan Wars. You can find things like this in scripture. And what it says is that we’re afraid of being alone. A friend of mine, Chris Graney, and a buddy of his have just published a book on multiple Earths and the history of it. And the fascinating thing they find is that even as science continually says it’s unlikely that there are places like Earth with life like Earth, nonetheless, people will grab onto any possibility that there might be life. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing to do, because oftentimes the science, best science of the day that said it was impossible, turns out to be wrong. And it’s a new best science of the day that shows it’s impossible. But the fact is, we still have not found evidence of any kind of life outside of Earth. I’m reminded of the old Pogo cartoon. If you remember, it was a talking animals cartoon from the ‘50s and ‘60s, comic strip in the newspapers. I don’t remember, but... it was sort of like Calvin and Hobbes 30 years earlier, beautifully drawn. The guy, Walt Kelly, who drew it, was involved in the Disney studio. And he has the main character talking to the porcupine, who’s the philosopher of the group. I love the image. And the porcupine says, “You know, there are some people who say that there are creatures in the universe smarter than humans. And there are other people who say that humans are the smartest creatures in the universe. Either way, it’s a sobering thought.” Which is true, because regardless of how it turns out, it’s kind of scary. Either we’re alone, which is scary, or there’s people out there who, in some ways, are going to be superior to us. I’m actually on the science advisory board of the SETI Institute. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The real reason they’re looking, you know, scanning radio waves from radio telescopes, looking for signs of intelligent signals, the reason they’re doing that is not so we can talk to these people, because if there was intelligent life 100 light years from us, which would be really close, you’d say, “Hello.” Two hundred years later, they’d say, “What?” And, you know, you could not have a conversation. It’s just the laws of physics. What would be exciting about finding intelligent life would be that we had found life, because we haven’t found life yet. And we won’t really know what life is until we see more than one kind of life.

Robert Duncan: So what you’re describing, I think, has been true for decades in terms of the—

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it goes back to La Fontenelle and, you know, writing about this in the 1700s.

Robert Duncan: Okay, perfect. Your colleagues, writ large, Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a guest essay May 6th in The New York Times saying, “Give us the Aliens.” And it doesn’t sound like, from the article, that he takes very seriously the possibility that the government is hiding anything.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: He’s saying he’s a real astronomer. He knows we’re incapable of hiding things.

Robert Duncan: Michio Kaku went on Fox News just in the wake of the Trump disclosures and said, “We are at a turning point. This is a big deal.” So specifically on these movements in government, what should—and by the way, I should also say a lot of the Catholic press, I’ve noticed, has not actually engaged in the subject since some of these so-called whistleblowers have come out. There hasn’t been a lot of apparent interest in the Catholic media until the Friday release. And then in Our Sunday Visitor, there was a big write-up about questions that you talk about a lot, extraterrestrial life. So is this a unique moment for people to show their cards if there is anything to these theories?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: No. Because 20 years from now, people will still be claiming that they found new discoveries, and other people will still be incredibly skeptical of it. We just look at the history of how people have reacted to these announcements in the past. And 99 percent of the time, the announcements turn out to be false. We’re always waiting for the 1 percent. I don’t think this is the 1 percent. You know, if these are the best images I’ve got, they’re no better than what we had in 1948. And there’s two real reasons why I’m extremely skeptical. And the first is the cell phone in your pocket. Nowadays, we’ve got machines that show us that cats can play the piano. We’ve got machines that show us that police brutality really happens. We’ve got ways of filming and photographing things, which incidentally, 10 years from now, AI replaces all of this. We won’t be able to believe anymore. But up to now, and we don’t have anything better than that yet.

Robert Duncan: Well, I was thinking even now it would be very difficult to believe in any image that —

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Certainly at this point. But more than that, the people who really know the sky the best, the amateur astronomers, the people who are actually outside with their small telescopes looking at the sky, they’re the ones who know what’s actually there and are not going to be fooled by Venus because they know what Venus looks like. And they’re not going to be fooled by interesting things that happen in the sky because they’ve seen them maybe once every five years, but they’ve seen them before and they know they have natural causes. These are the people who are the most skeptical. I mentioned the SETI Institute. The SETI Institute is exceedingly skeptical of these things. And you’d think they’d be the ones who would be the most desirous of this sort of thing happening. But I’ll go back to another point that Neil makes that I was making earlier. Astronomers sometimes are involved in projects where 50 or 100 scientists are going to be co-authors of a paper. When the paper is submitted, you are under a sort of promise that you won’t talk about it until the referees have gone through it and said, “Yes, we’ve checked the science,” and the editors have said, “Yes, this is worthy of publication.” You don’t want it to go out early, number one, because it may turn out that you’re wrong, and number two, because you don’t want to give other people the idea to go look for it too before you get there. Nonetheless, none of these people are able to keep a secret. By the time the paper has been, you know, saved—has been hidden on the last version of the paper, copies of it are already all across the internet because you’ve got any kind of interesting result. You can’t help but share it.

Robert Duncan: Just because people are asking in these days, there is alleged evidence, especially testimonies people have given. There are some weird images that the U.S. government has released. To what extent have you looked at this evidence and what do you make of what’s out there right now?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: There was a time, you know, when I was much younger, when I did look into it. I haven’t looked in the last 10 or 20 years. I’ve never heard from anybody I trust that this is stuff really worth looking into. I say that with some caution. I have some friends who are true believers. One of the things I’ve discovered is—you mentioned the Catholic press—there are very few religious believers who are UFO believers. It turns out to be a religion substitute for a lot of people. And I have a good friend who is a devout Catholic and a UFO—I wouldn’t say believer—is researcher. Here’s really how I put it. Back in the days when I was running the Vatican Observatory—I just retired—back in those days, if you had come to me with a research project that was a way of searching for life on other planets, and it looked like the kind of science that would give me interesting results even if you found nothing, which is what SETI is doing, I’d say, “Go for it.” Because even if the odds are small, we’d be crazy not to look. But I could be wrong. Maybe we really are alone. You know, the odds, at least to finding life the way we think of it, are getting smaller and smaller the more places we look. Though the oceans of Europa, maybe they’ve got fish or bacteria or something. I hope. I wrote a thesis about that 50 years ago, proposing that. I’d be delighted to find that. If you came to me and said you wanted to study UFOs, I would say, “I’m not going to do that.” I would say, “Forget it. It’s a dead end.” Worse than that, it has been so poisoned by the charlatans who are out there trying to sell you a bill of goods, you know, the Erich von Dänikens and the like. When you look into what they’re writing, you realize they’re faking their data, they’re cherry-picking their data, they desperately want to be the ones to discover. This goes to the deeper question of why do we do the science? Are we doing science so that I will be famous for the discovery I made and my textbooks in the future will have my name in them? Is that the kind of immortality I’m looking for? Or am I doing the science because truth gives me joy and the odds of finding truth in this particular research project are so appealing to me that I will have that little moment of God looking over my shoulder saying, “Wow, did you see what I did there? Isn’t that cool? Let’s look at the next one.” And there is a real issue, especially with the scientists you find on TV, of why are they doing it? Are they doing it because they want to be famous? Are they doing it because they want to sell books? Are they doing it because they’re in love with the truth? And it’s not a single, you know, because all of these things can feed into who you are and what you are.

Robert Duncan: Are you talking about maybe people like Avi Loeb at Harvard, who has been making a big splash about the importance of doing this kind of research?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: I don’t know him, and I’m not going to try to play, you know, guest psychologist trying to figure out what’s going on. I’ll tell you two people who I do know. I knew Carl Sagan pretty well, and I know Neil Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Both of them are good people. Both of them are real scientists. Both of them have changed, you know, would change their minds and change their opinions. I think when they were young, they were both much more ferocious about being anti-religious. And as they get older, they realize the evidence isn’t as simple as I thought. I think both of them did have a hunger to be known, which is why they would go on TV. And also both of them were subject to terrible criticism and jealousy from the people that didn’t get on the Johnny Carson Show or whatever. But both of them also were more interested in telling people about the stuff than in cooking the data to make themselves look good. So I have respect for those guys.

Robert Duncan: Monsignor Corrado Balducci used to speak publicly about extraterrestrial life and even UFOs. And one of the reasons he took it so seriously was because he said, “Our religion is based on eyewitness testimony. And if we don’t take seriously the eyewitness testimony of people who claim to have seen things in the skies, we have a problem.” What’s your reaction to that?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: That’s a really important point. And it is such a tangled mess. Any lawyer will tell you that eyewitness testimony is the worst kind of testimony because five people will see an accident and see five different things. But it works only if there are five different people observing it. It works only if there’s more than one line of evidence. This is the way science doesn’t prove things—science never proves—but creates more confidence in an idea. If it seems to fit many different ways of looking at it, we all come to the same conclusion. So yes, we should take people seriously, but we should also be aware that people will project onto what they see what they expect to see. Happens all the time in science. And that having seen something interesting, you want more. You want more evidence. You want the piece of alien technology that you’ve got in the lab that everybody can poke. You want three or four different kinds of infrared, ultraviolet, other sorts of images of varying clarity, of improving clarity that make you realize this is what I’m looking for. We’re not there. My fear is we’re never going to be there because what people are seeing could very well be something really interesting, but we’re interpreting it in terms of aliens because we can’t think of anything else that it might be, or because we want them to be aliens so much. When in fact, we have to take seriously the “U” in unidentified. As long as we recognize they’re unidentified, we’re not going to be there. But as soon as you leap to the conclusion that I already know what it is, that’s where the downfall occurs.

Robert Duncan: Is there a way of doing research on UFOs that could be responsible?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: It’s very, very difficult at this point because there have been so many people who have been trying to sell you bills of goods. And it’s sad. I can see 50 years from now people doing research on Mars, or we’ve got astronauts there, continually claiming to find life, and it turns out to be life just like life on Earth, and then we don’t know: was it Martian or was it contamination? The important thing to know is that no science is perfect. I’m not perfect. I could be totally wrong. I have to go on my gut of what is the most likely direction to do science, where I think there’s going to be an outcome that I can support. But when you get gray hair like mine, you’ve been around long enough to see theories that we thought were absolutely solid turn out to fall in the face of new evidence, and other theories that we just thought were maybe a possibility, and the new evidence goes, “You know what? That was right all along.” So you have to be prepared to be surprised.

Robert Duncan: So you’ve spoken in the course of these questions about how excited you would be, nevertheless, if we were to discover life. How would that change theology, or would it?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it’s funny. There was a fellow named Ted Peters who works for the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. About 10 years ago, he did a survey of people of every religion, including no religion, to ask, you know, if we found intelligent aliens, how would that change your opinion of religion? And the universal answer—90 percent or more of every different religious group, from the evangelicals to the atheists—was, “It would show I was right all along.” And the fact that we haven’t found that evidence hasn’t stopped people from thinking they were right all along. So it’s not a critical experiment. What I think has happened is that in our heads, we’ve already—living in the world of science fiction, I got nothing against science fiction, I love science fiction—we’re so used to the concept that there ought to be aliens out there that if we did find them, the answer would be, “Well, it’s about time.” I think we’ve already built into the cosmology, the worldview that we happen to have in the West in the year 2026, we’ve got that built into our assumptions about how the universe works already that I don’t think it would change much. And the more scary thing that people kind of are afraid to look at is, what if we are unique?

Robert Duncan: They’re both troubling hypotheses.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Either way, it’s a sobering thought.

Robert Duncan: I don’t want to make too reductionistic of an argument in the sense of, well, if it’s not in the Bible... But if there were such a discovery—I mean, we’re not talking about necessarily amoebas—but it would seem like the Church was ignorant of something very important.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, here’s what’s in the Bible: discussions of the Nephilim in Genesis. Who the heck are the Nephilim? Frankly, I don’t know. And biblical scholars have— What I think is it’s the way of the author of Genesis trying to incorporate the cosmology of 2,500 years ago, which talked about monsters and creatures and strange beings like you find in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and especially the Odyssey. What you find are the Psalms or the Book of Job talking about when God created the stars and named them and called them by name and they sang to Him with joy, which is beautiful poetry. But it shows that the author of Scripture then was not afraid of the idea that God created more than just you and me. We’ve got in our theology the concept of angels, creatures made by God. They’re creatures. They’re not supernatural. They’re creatures, and different from human beings. It really was only the Enlightenment that wanted to paint humans at the top of the pyramid, not in the sense of the Psalms, “Oh my God, you’ve made us a little less than gods,” but in the exclusive—to the point where the Enlightenment scientists refused to believe that meteorites were rocks from outer space. That’s really a very modern idea of this superiority of “we are the pinnacle of creation.” We’re not the pinnacle of creation. We weren’t even made on the seventh day. The Sabbath was the pinnacle of creation. The weekend is the pinnacle of creation.

Robert Duncan: I agree.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: So the weekend, when wherever you are, if you’ve got intellect and free will, you can choose to contemplate creation and be amazed at the Creator and, incidentally, love the other creatures you find in creation.

Robert Duncan: Have you heard this quote that’s been attributed to St. John Paul II that a child had asked him about aliens and the Pope allegedly responded, “Remember that they are children of God,” in quite a positively formulated—

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, I think all he’s saying is really all I’ve been saying. If there’s a creature, which is to say something created, which is able to be aware of itself, aware of other creatures, and free to choose to love or withhold love, that’s, you know, according to Thomas Aquinas, the image and likeness of God. What makes them aliens? They’re our cousins. Or to refer to the way that G.K. Chesterton talked about creation in Orthodoxy, you know, the Earth is not our mother. The Earth is not something we can exploit, not any of those, but the Earth is our sister. And as he says, “a little dancing sister that you can laugh at as well as love.” All of these would be our siblings. And that includes if, you know, somehow we managed to make it out of silicon and wires in some kind of computer, which we’re a long ways from doing, but what the heck? Human beings have been creating such creatures since the first baby was born.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to go back to something else that you said earlier about how imagining things about space, whether we’re talking about UFOs or aliens, is a substitute religion. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit for me. Like, what would the need for a substitute religion be in modernity, and why does it take that particular shape?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Great questions. And you probably need a sociologist more than me to ask that one. I’ll talk about, you know, the way my own experiences and temptations have run. I think people love to be in control, and we’re afraid of anything that we can’t control, we can’t deal with, we can’t— When I go on a trip, I think ahead of all the things that can go wrong. And what would I do if the trains are delayed, and what happens if the plane is diverted, and how would I—none of these things happen. And when they do happen, it never happens the way I expect it anyway. But that’s part of the goofiness of me as a traveler. People, for whatever reasons, are sometimes deathly afraid of God and the concept of God and the possibility of God. But only something outside of our creation can give creation meaning. When you reject God because you had a really bad confirmation teacher, or because you’re desperate to make yourself look like you’re smarter than all those sheep—hey, Jesus came for the sheep. We are the sheep, and I embrace my sheepness. I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a sheep. But people who, especially in our culture of crazy individualism, on the one hand we want to be so individual, and then we’re feeling lonely and wondering why that happened. So out of that loneliness, we then create a desire for something that is not only something that will replace the otherness of God to give my life meaning, but especially knowledge that the community—those scientists, those astronomers, those professors—they’re hiding it from us. They don’t want us to know. It’s secret knowledge.

Robert Duncan: They say that the Vatican’s hiding it too.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Yeah, absolutely. But if you go to this website, I will show you. If you eat this apple, you will become like gods and you’ll find out all the things that God’s been hiding from you. It’s a temptation as old as Adam and Eve. Gnosticism. It’s Gnosticism. It’s the desire for secret knowledge. All the people who think that they’re going to, you know, cure COVID or whatever the next virus is going to be by finding some cure on the internet that nobody else has found. If it’s on the internet, anybody can find it, but forget that. And what’s deeper than that? What’s deeper than that is this desire to think that me being smarter than you makes me better than you, as if smarter is better.

Robert Duncan: I think there’s an interesting way to segue into another question I wanted to ask you here, because what you’re describing has a lot to do with a loss of faith and trust in institutions. We can’t, right? We can’t trust the major institutions to tell us the truth. One way I’ve seen that maybe manifest in terms of space and space exploration is arguably the backseat that NASA has taken in the public sphere and the front seat that SpaceX has taken in terms of its capabilities, the sophistication of the rockets, the landings. Of course, Elon Musk is famous for promising free speech on the internet through his acquisition of X. So I guess what I’m asking you is, how do you see what you’re describing playing out in the domain of space today?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, you’ve got to remember, for all of SpaceX, it was still NASA that got back to the moon again. We have this mythology of the lone genius, whether it’s Doc Brown making the time machine in his garage. You find this in science fiction, the competent man that was the hero of all the classic stories, whether it’s Heinlein or any of the things that John Campbell would publish. A lot of that came, I think, in reaction against the realization that we can’t do it alone anymore. And we desperately would love to believe that Elon Musk built those rockets. I’m sorry, he didn’t. You know, he wouldn’t know how to make a slide rule work. We’d like to believe that, you know, a person who I actually think is a genius, a person who I actually admire, Steve Jobs—his vision made Apple. But he didn’t do the wiring. And even his buddy Steve Wozniak couldn’t eventually have done all the wiring. All of these accomplishments require institutions, which require bureaucracy, which require trusting each other.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: One of the great experiences I had at MIT was actually taking part in musical theater and other plays and seeing how a play only works if the actors trust the other actors rather than thinking they have to carry the entire show themselves. It’s the way that science and engineering works. And to be able to not suppress yourself, but give all of yourself alongside a team of everybody else giving all of themselves, that’s what makes a successful sports team. And you want to say that, oh, the superstar is going to come. Well, how many basketball teams have had one superstar and, you know, get knocked out in the first round of the playoffs because a team of five good players will beat one superstar and four not-so-goods? But people don’t want to hear that. They want to believe in the superstar.

Robert Duncan: The Messiah.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: The Messiah. And the Messiah, first thing he does is to collect 12 other guys. Not that as God He couldn’t, but as God He doesn’t want to do it all Himself. He wants us to participate in creation. He wants us to participate in salvation, which is the most incredible compliment that God can give us: make us little less than gods, to go back to Psalm 8.

Robert Duncan: I think another story that is current now as it relates to space writ large is maybe best exemplified or articulated by somebody like Eric Weinstein, who has said, “You know what? We’re going to blow ourselves up on this planet and we need to stop playing around with chemical rockets and we need to really do physics so that we can go colonize another part of the galaxy, really, and find another habitable planet because this one’s maybe doomed.” So on the one hand, there’s a great message of hope and optimism and encouragement to do really sort of inventive science, maybe science fiction. And on the other hand, there’s a very pessimistic view about what’s going to happen on this planet. So I think that story is something that a lot of people maybe buy into, and I wonder what your response is to it.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: What I do find, and I go around giving a lot of talks, especially to schools, high schools, and universities, is a deep pessimism in young people precisely from hearing this kind of stuff. And the pessimism has enough element of truth that you don’t want to tell people, “Don’t worry, it’s all going to fix itself,” because it’s not. And the longer we put off doing the things we need to do, the harder it’s going to be to recover. But again, that’s nothing new. If anybody had actually read Laudato Si’, rather than the press conference, you know, “Oh, it’s all about ecology.” Really, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical, is about original sin. And all of the crises that are occurring right now on the planet are the result of original sin. And the seven deadly sins—we’ve never invented an eighth one to come along—the selfishness, the greed, the really lack of faith in God and each other, it’s been the crisis since the beginning of time, going back to Adam and Eve. And the answers are not a technological fix, even though we need the technological fix. Because the technological fix will not fix everything and then we’ll have to say, “Got it done.” T.S. Eliot wrote a play 90 years ago called The Rock. And it has a series of poems in the middle of it. And one of them ends up with this marvelous phrase. He’s writing this in the ‘30s, when technocracy or fascism or all these different isms were going to solve everything. And he was talking about social systems, but I think it applies to physical systems. He has this phrase talking about people looking for systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. It doesn’t exist. Every techno-fix will fix what it was designed to fix and create a new problem further down the line. Two examples. The automobile has changed society. And yeah, a lot of bad things, but on the whole, probably for the better. But there’s an example of it solved the problem of transportation and created a bunch of new problems. And it would not have worked because the engines that they had in the 1920s weren’t powerful enough and no one had the bright idea of putting lead in the gasoline, which then created a whole new set of problems. Refrigeration has done fantastic things for allowing people to store food and feed themselves in a way that couldn’t have been done 120 years ago. But the original refrigerators required ammonia, which was incredibly dangerous. And you don’t want to have that in your household. Then somebody came up with this marvelous chemical that was completely chemically inert, chlorofluorocarbons, and only 50 years later we go, “Nope, that’s going to create problems too.”

Robert Duncan: Well, nuclear physics too. I mean, is there not an argument, a Christian theology-based anti-science argument in here that given the circumstances of Original Sin, we probably shouldn’t build more powerful tools?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: That argument could be made, and I find the counter to it in Scripture in a very interesting and odd place. The Book of Job has Job in this deep conversation with God, and Job thinks he’s a holy man and he thinks he’s a good man. And he says, okay, God takes everything. “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.” What do I expect? Because God, you’re God, you’re so big, I can’t even contemplate You. And God’s answer to Job is, no, you missed the point. It’s not just that I’ve made all of these marvelous things, but you haven’t even taken the time to see how I made them. You see the light, you haven’t gone to the dwelling of light. You see the Earth, but you haven’t gone to the foundations of the Earth. It’s an invitation to actually learn more. God creates in the light. God wants us to know. God wants us to know, knowing that we will be tempted and we will fail, and God is bigger than all of that and will forgive us all the time, making us pay for the mistakes we’ve made because that’s part of the rules of the game. But I really do believe it’s two steps forward, one step back. At the end of the day, the two steps forward, one step back gets you one step forward. But we should never take a technology without asking ourselves what are the possible negative consequences, and without looking every step along the way for the negative consequences because they’re going to be there, and never give up the search for how do we make it better, and how do we make it better, because we’re never going to make it perfect. And we’ll never, because that’s the way we have to live our lives. I’m never going to be perfect. I’m going to continually sin. Either I fall into despair looking at the stupid things I’ve done, or I’m amazed that God still loves me, and not only loves me, but loves that guy over there who irritates the heck out of me. God loves that person too, and maybe time for me to start loving that person too, because that’s really how we grow. And usually we grow in directions different from the direction we thought we were facing because we don’t do it ourselves. We do it as a society that stumbles from one crisis to the next crisis to the next crisis, all in good faith, at the end of the day saying, you know, for all of its problems, the year 2026 was better than the year 1926, and a heck of a lot better than the year 1826.

Robert Duncan: So we’ve been talking about technology and crises, and I think that’s maybe a good way to talk about what Pope Leo said to you today. So can you tell the audience why you met the Pope and what he said?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, this is why I’m in town in Rome today. I’m part of an outfit called the Vatican Observatory. I’m a scientist there. I used to be the director. We’ve got a telescope in Arizona, and to support the work of that telescope in Arizona, we formed a foundation which supports us—fundraising supports us—and also encouraging the work that we’re doing. Why is there a Vatican Observatory Foundation? Why is there a Vatican Observatory? To show the world that the Church supports science. So we’re having a meeting of the board this week. Among our board members is Sister Raffaella Petrini, the president of the Governorate of the Vatican, basically the mayor of Vatican City if you want to put it that way, or the president of the Vatican City State. And she arranged for us to get to meet Pope Leo. And the Pope addressed us, remembering that it was his predecessor, Leo XIII, who founded the observatory in 1891 to show the world that the Church supports science, to encourage us to do that because Church and science today are facing a common enemy of people who are despairing of ever knowing the truth and thinking, well, since we never know if anything’s true, or if anything is true, why even worry about it? And I’ll just live my life without worrying about consequences because consequences are only truth, and there is no truth. There’s only truthiness, the way that Stephen Colbert would have put it. And Leo was saying to us, thank God for the observatory. You are showing the world that even though we never expect to know the truth perfectly or completely, we do expect to know more. This actually goes back to something that John Paul II wrote in his Faith and Reason encyclical, which goes, “Faith and reason are the wings that lead us to the truth.” And it sounds very pretty until you realize the significance of that image. First of all, that faith and reason are equals because if one wing is stronger than the other, the bird falls over—and that neither faith nor reason—are the goals. The goal of my life is not to be a Catholic. The goal of evangelization is not to make everybody Catholics. The goal of my life as a scientist is not to be the best scientist I can be because science is the end in itself, much less to make everybody else scientists. The goal is truth. If I’m doing really clever science but it doesn’t lead to the truth, it’s not good science. If I have a really beautiful theology, very clever and glorious liturgies, but my interest ends with the liturgy, then it’s not leading me to God because God is truth. Which is, to put it another way, I worship truth. As a scientist, I have to worship truth. I would not be satisfied publishing a paper that got me the Nobel Prize even though I knew it was a lie. And that means that we are dedicating ourselves to this idea, to the proposition that we can come closer to truth, that we can come closer to God, and that our faith and our science are the tools that we have to bring us closer to the truth that is God.

Robert Duncan: It was interesting because it seemed to me that Pope Leo was saying that the Observatory had a role, even though your telescopes are pointed out, to promote the stewardship of creation.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: How does that work? Well, the Vatican is actually a very small place. There’s the old joke, “How many people work at the Vatican?” “About half.” How many people work at the Vatican is less than the number of people who work for your typical diocese. And the budget is less than the typical diocese. It can’t support all sorts of science. So, in a symbolic way, it supports astronomy as the one science that everybody can appreciate. We all can understand looking at the stars. But we do that using science and, in that way, validating science itself. And that goes back to the way that Pope Leo XIII set it up. We’re doing astronomy to show the world that the Church supports not astronomy only, but science in general. Now, the other cool thing about this is—and I’ve been around long enough to see this—the idea of climate change, that came from looking at Earth as if it were a planet. The idea goes back to the 19th century and a guy named Tyndall. The idea that climate change—we can learn about the Earth’s atmosphere by studying other planets’ atmospheres. Carl Sagan did that and looked at the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus and said, “Ah, that’s why Venus is so incredibly hot. And gee, might that have something to do with...” And that goes back to the 1960s. When I was a student at MIT, there were people working on that topic even then. And so our astronomy does, in fact, have a direct link to how we view the Earth, not as, you know, this pleasant peninsula of Italy that we’re on or the pleasant peninsula of Michigan that I came from, but an entire planet, an entire ecosystem, a science that shows that every nation’s pollution affects every other nation’s pollution. That ties both the astronomy we do with the immediate problems we have here on Earth.

Robert Duncan: Is there another more recent complication in terms of Laudato Si’ in terms of the amount of space junk that’s out there now and you have all these companies launching satellites for internet services like Starlink and others in China? There’s a question about the environmental impact, but it also makes your work more difficult, I think, right?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Yes, it does. There are so many satellites out there, and some—for all, you know, bashing Elon Musk—Starlink, those guys have gone to the effort of trying to make satellites that don’t reflect so much light so that you don’t just have a whole cascade of little dots going overhead, at least in the evening hours. And when they’re finally—you know, at midnight, the sun’s not going to be hitting them. But even though satellites are emitting infrared radiation so that infrared astronomers now have to deal with this glowing sphere of little objects, the problem’s even worse. If one satellite should run into another satellite and create debris, the debris then hits more satellites and you have a cascade of debris until all of the satellites are useless, which doesn’t do anybody any good. Back in 2018, there was the anniversary of the U.N. Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The Vatican Observatory actually hosted a workshop out in Castel Gandolfo of a number of the astronomers and the space industry people and the diplomats where we just outlined that even in 2018, you know, nearly 10 years ago, 90 nations had departments of space. Even if you’re not launching satellites, you’re using the data that come from satellites. If you’re a third-world country and you can’t afford to explore and really map what’s going on in your country, you can view from above with a satellite, see where the deforestation is happening, see where the heat spots are. There were, at that time, 20 different entities capable of launching things into space. There’s probably more now. There is a law, but law only works when everybody agrees that it’s worth following. There’s nothing about a red light that will make you stop until you realize that if I don’t stop for the red light and expect the other guy to stop for the red light, I can’t get across the intersection. It’s for my benefit that I stop for the red light. I fear that it’s going to take a catastrophe in space of some sort before the people using space recognize that coming up with a system of regulating who gets what orbits and a way of enforcing that—it’s doable. It’s possible. But people are going to have to actually experience the need for it. Maybe we’ll be wise. The Starlink people, the SpaceX people, are wise enough to at least realize that having the astronomers mad at them was not good for their business. But having your satellites run into each other is also not good for your business. The only thing we can do is provide a place for these people to talk to each other, not labeling them as evil, not labeling them as, you know, “Oh my gosh, they’re the bad guys, I’m never going to deal with them,” but working with them out of love, out of appreciation of the good they can do and the better good we can do if we work out a way of cooperating.

Robert Duncan: Did you say anything specific? I know you met Pope Leo last year. You probably met him multiple times. But on this occasion, did you say anything to him? Did he say anything to you?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Not me personally. That was not my place. Really, what I wanted to do was to introduce him to the Foundation. And, you know, we’ve raised a million dollars this past year to support the astronomy we’re doing in America.

Robert Duncan: Those are two questions. So one is, what is the specific science you’re doing? And the other is, who are these people that want to support faith and science through the Foundation?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, the work we’re doing with the astronomy, we’ve got a telescope in Arizona of a size that there aren’t too many anymore. It’s a two-meter telescope. It’s not one of these giant ones. But there are things that we can do that they can’t.

Robert Duncan: Such as?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Because it’s much more flexible. A big telescope is in such high demand that it’s got to be scheduled months in advance by people competing for their little tiny bit of time. A telescope like ours can be used to, “Oh my gosh, there’s something interesting. Let’s go look at that tonight.” And we’ll throw away whatever, you know, I was planning to use that telescope for. We’ve now automated it to the point where it can be used remotely, including by students. We’ve got a program now where students at Jesuit universities in America—a few at the moment, we hope to expand it—can actually use this research-level telescope in their classroom or as part of their research. The kind of research we’re doing would be recovering near-Earth asteroids to make their orbits better so we know if they’re going to hit us or not, or if they’re in a place where we can exploit them if we want to do that. Or simply to get an inventory of what’s out there because that tells us a little bit about how the solar system was formed and evolved. So there’s a lot of asteroid work being done with our telescope. There are people looking at stellar clusters, lots of stellar clusters over a long period of time because you need a large amassment of data to be able to see patterns. And these are long-term survey projects that NASA won’t fund because you’re not going to get an answer in three years. But we can do this over a period of 10 or 20 years. The one other thing the Foundation does is provides a place, a website, vaticanobservatory.org, where people can see not only the science we’re doing but the faith and science resources that we’ve put together. Because there are a lot of teachers who want to be able to say, “What about this topic?” And there’s a lot of junk on the internet, let’s face it, a lot of people trying to sell you stuff. Well, this is what we’re trying to sell you, except these are real scientists and people working for the Church who are saying, these are topics and locations and websites that we think you might find useful. So take a look at vaticanobservatory.org.

Robert Duncan: Is there anything specific that maybe you’ve discovered, either you personally or the observatory has discovered, that’s made an advance in our knowledge of the universe that people can wrap their heads around?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: One of the very first things we did with this telescope 30 years ago when we built it was to look at the Andromeda galaxy—people have looked at it a million times—but look for the tiny flashes of light that represented a star being occulted by a bit of dark matter that had been theorized called a MACHO, a Massive Compact Halo Object, in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy. And if there was enough of these dark matter MACHOs to account for the dark matter we see in Andromeda, then we should be seeing these flashes. We saw just enough of the flashes to know that we could observe them if they were there, and not nearly enough to show that MACHOs were the answer. It was a negative result, but it was a very important negative result that said that whatever the dark matter in the universe is, it’s not these guys. We have to go look at some of the other theories. That was a major breakthrough that came from our telescope. A project that I was involved in was to look at the objects out beyond Neptune. We call them trans-Neptunian objects. Pluto is the biggest and most wonderful of them. It’s not a planet.

Robert Duncan: Sometimes it is, right?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: If people who want to make Pluto a planet think that being a planet is better than being something else, you know, you’re guilty of planetism. Come on. Pluto is what Pluto is, which is glorious. But we looked at just doing a survey of the colors of a couple of hundred of these guys. And you get one a night, say five nights, you’ve got five of them. You’ve got to go back, you know, 20 or 30 more times. That took a 10-year research program. Nobody else had the time to do that. We showed not only that the colors were interesting, that there are two populations of colors, that the colors were related to the kinds of orbits that they had. And that gives us an idea of how their orbits evolved over time. And that tied into ideas of how the orbits of the solar system and how the formation of the solar system itself occurred. All of these are, you know, just little bricks in the cathedral. But they allow us to come up with a much more complete inventory of what’s out there and a sense of how it was all made. Now, the cute thing about the origin of the solar system is knowing this is not going to put any more food in your stomach. But it feeds your soul. It’s the kind of question that we just get joy out of seeing. “Oh, God did that? I wouldn’t—you’re right. And that is such a cool way of doing things.” That joy is universal among human beings. I found that when I was living in the poorest parts of Kenya, that people there wanted to look through the telescope and then ask questions. “What are those rings around Saturn? What have they found when they went to the moon?” Because this is the seventh day of creation. This is the Sabbath where we kick back and stop worrying about what’s for lunch for just one day and say, “Who is this God who made this and made me?”

Robert Duncan: Is part of the work of the Observatory, at least historically, a PR effort to undo the Church’s handling of the Galileo case?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: You’d think. That sounds like a very logical way of doing it. But you dig into the history and you find two really curious things. First of all, the Church was doing really good astronomy before there was an observatory. Here in Rome, there’s this marvelous church, the Church of St. Ignatius, famous for the dome that’s a fake dome. They ran out of money. They never built the dome. It’s just painted in perspective. But Angelo Secchi, an Italian Jesuit, used the pillars that were going to support that dome, and instead they used them to support his telescopes. And he invented astrophysics. And he made such a name for himself that it was Secchi’s assistant who went to the Pope: “Let’s have an observatory.” It’s a symbol of national—you know, where every nation had its own national observatory. There is no mention of Galileo and the idea that somehow the Church was embarrassed by Galileo in the founding documents. The whole idea that the Church and Galileo had a falling out because of science is a 19th-century creation. It comes out of the politics of the 19th century, the nationalism in Europe when they’re trying to build nation states, the anti-immigrant fervor in America when they wanted to keep Catholics out, like my grandfather. What the Church did with Galileo was wrong. But what was wrong was not Church being anti-science. It was Church going after Galileo for personal reasons or political reasons, but not scientific reasons. You can read the transcript of the Galileo trial, and they never discuss the science. They never debate the science. It’s not what people think. We have this tendency to look at things in the past through the lens of, well, if I was there, that’s what it would have been. But it turns out the motivations of people doing these things in the past were very different from what we would have thought. And part of the joy of history is to put yourself truly in what was going on rather than a glib and facile imagination of what was going on.

Robert Duncan: I mean, I think that even if—and I’m sure you’re right about the politics of the day being the real explanation for what happened with Galileo—I think the symbol of Galileo for many people is that the Church had previously committed itself to a geocentric model of the universe, and it turned out that that was wrong. So the real case to make is that the Church had never committed itself to that model?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, here’s a little bit of the timeline. It’s 2026. Four hundred years ago, Galileo is writing this book that’s going to get him into trouble in 1626 based on stuff that he’d first written in 1610 or 1616. So he’s been around 16 years, and he won’t get in trouble for another six years. So this is, first of all, if the Church was going to be down on him, they took a long time. The theory that he’s talking about in 1610 or 1626 was a theory that went back to 1542, like World War II to us. It had been around for a real long time when Copernicus published his book. It was just a couple of years before the Council of Trent. Council of Trent spent 18 years looking for heresies all over the place, and they never talk about Copernicus. It’s not because they didn’t know about it. Everybody knew about it. The Copernican system didn’t work with what Galileo knew at the time. He didn’t have the goods. It turns out, in the long run, he was more right than the people against him. But it took 100 years of science before we finally figured out why it worked. The whole story is a lot more complicated, and it’s really a cautionary tale not of religion, “watch out about science,” but rather science, “watch out about being too sure that you know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Robert Duncan: Do you think that the Church has ever, on this issue or on any issue—I don’t want to get into the technicalities of levels of authority—but has it ever committed itself to a scientific view or a claim that’s been proven wrong?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it all depends what you mean by committed and what you mean by the Church. And it is those different levels that matter because in every epoch there will be people who will be saying, “Oh, I’m afraid of that. You can’t talk about that. Don’t say that.” And other people saying, “What do you mean? Of course we can talk about that. Of course we say that.” Because the Church is, if nothing, the world’s biggest debating society. It always has been. And it has never successfully spoken with one voice about anything beyond the Apostles’ Creed. And that’s okay, because we only learn by debating, and we only debate by me strongly taking a side and you disagreeing with me, and in the arguments we eventually discover that we’re probably arguing about the wrong thing.

Robert Duncan: Or we’re both wrong.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: We’re both wrong and both right. Right.

Robert Duncan: So, can we talk a bit about Pope Leo? He’s made a lot of statements in his various homilies. He’ll reference the trillions of stars. He seems to reference mathematics sometimes. Is this going to be a pope for whom science has a particular role in his teaching?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: We can only look and find out. After all, he was trained as a mathematician. He’s very comfortable with science. Villanova, where he came from, has a fantastic astronomy department, and I’m sure he had exposure to great astronomy from them. I hope so. The interesting thing that’s happening at this juncture in the history of the Church is—I’ll tell you what is new and different. Forget about UFOs. There’s some 1948, you know, come on. What is new and different are, first of all, the number of young men who are in STEM studying at universities and becoming active in the local Newman groups and going to daily Mass. I have been, in the last six months, going to lots of universities giving talks, and I’ve been blown away by the number of the very people who a generation ago you thought would have been disciples of Richard Dawkins going, “No, that doesn’t work. Why? Let me find something that does.” Maybe this came out of their experience of COVID and the isolation that came out of that and the realization that the glib—and maybe it won’t last and they’ll all leave the Church tomorrow. But the other thing I found as someone who talks faith and science is the questions I get now from the non-believers are not, “How can you believe in that stuff?” but, “Oh, how do you believe in that stuff?” It’s a very different kind of emphasis. It’s not, “Oh, you’re crazy too,” but, “Okay, there’s something going on here. I’m curious about this because I’ve been having these questions myself.”

Robert Duncan: Do you have specific technical questions that recur in terms of how, on the one hand, the Church says this, on the other hand, this is what we know about the world?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it depends on the audience, but certainly these young people, the more technologically sophisticated ones know the answer to this one, but a lot of people will be surprised to find out that it was a Catholic priest who invented the Big Bang Theory, that it’s not something we’re afraid of, nor is it something that we lean on to say, “Aha, you see, the Bible was right all along.” Georges Lemaître, the father who came up with this, was the first to say no. The Big Bang is not about the creation of the universe. It’s what we think might have happened after the creation of the universe, but the creation was singularity different from what happens afterwards. We find a sophisticated difference between people who realize the science is one thing, the way you use the science is something else. If you say a nuclear bomb is bad, that’s not saying that Einstein’s theory of E equals MC squared is not true. It just means that you want to think before you actually employ some of these possibilities, and that’s not a bad thing to be able to say. Just because I can do it, do I really want to do it? Which goes to anything in life, you know, besides that. But more the kinds of people who in the past would have wanted to show that I’m smarter than everyone else now are not so hungry because I think the smarter scientists are the ones who are not afraid to say, “I don’t know.” Because without saying, “I don’t know,” you could never then say, “Let’s find out,” and you’ll never be doing any progress. You’ll be satisfied with what you think you know. Which incidentally is also true in a life of faith. If you think you’ve got God figured out and I do these five liturgical practices and God will have to let me into the great nightclub in the sky, that’s not a faith based on love.

Any more than saying, “Well, I know my friend, I know my spouse, got them figured out. I got the answers in the back of the book.” That’s not love. Love is always discovering new things. Love is always going, “Oh, I never noticed that. Oh, that’s what they were talking about.” And that’s the way we approach the universe through science. That’s the way we approach God through our religion.

Robert Duncan: I think talking about young people and what you’ve just said would make it a good time for me to ask you about how you became Brother Guy Consolmagno and how you came to marry these two worlds in faith and science.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: I was born at the right place in the right time. Being from a family, an incredibly loving family of college-educated parents, college-educated grandparents, so I was not the first in my family. And it was understood that I’d get a doctorate someday. Going to the Jesuit high school where they made me comfortable because I was surrounded by kids who were smarter than me. And that’s the first step of being able to grow. I had always a deep faith, and I always had a fascination with the universe and how things worked. And I was taught by nuns, the Sisters of Charity, back in Our Lady Queen of Martyrs in Birmingham, Michigan—Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Beverly, whatever town it’s in. It’s one of the northern suburbs of Detroit—who encouraged me in science because this was the ‘60s. And that fear that split the world into “you’ve got to believe science” or “you’ve got to believe religion” hadn’t infected us yet. I think it was the post-World War II sense of science won the war. It was really technology, but people had confused the two. And so I started kindergarten when Sputnik was launched. I was a senior in high school when people landed on the moon. Science and space was in the air. Science fiction was in the air. My best friend was going to MIT. When I visited him, I said, this is a cool place. This is where I’m finding joy. And yet, when I hit 30 and I got my doctorate from Arizona, I’d gotten through my MIT days. I was now an MIT postdoc. I realized that wasn’t enough. So I went off to the Peace Corps and then learned from the Africans the joy of discovering and how we’re hungry for more than bread. I got a job teaching at a little school in Pennsylvania called Lafayette College, and I loved that small-college teaching. I’d been dating somebody. It didn’t work out. We’re much happier not dating each other. Okay, this is God’s way of telling us. You try out different paths, and you find out which ones end in closed doors, which ones end in open doors. It occurred to me then that I was a nerd. I was not going to be great at helping out people with the kinds of problems that I had never experienced because I had such a privileged background, such a privileged life, loving parents, no addictions, none of the crazy things, mostly because liquor and drugs never appealed to me, that kind of thing. What did appeal to me was the academic life and a life that stood for something bigger than myself and this unbroken love of God and the Creator and my religion. I was a nerd about my religion. I was a fanatic about my science. And I realized as a brother, I could indulge these passions for knowing and representing the Church in the field of knowledge without having to deal with the lack I had. I’m great at listening to people. I’m terrible at giving them an idea of what to do because I don’t know, because I’ve never had to deal with that. As a brother, I could be part of the Church and take the unique skills that I had and not worry about all the unique skills I don’t have. A typical Jesuit has to be free to be assigned anywhere in the world that the Pope wants. This is what the fourth vow of the Jesuits is. I can’t take that vow because I’m not free, because there’s a whole range of jobs that I’d be worse than useless at. I’d be a terrible parish priest. But I can do this one job, which is doing astronomy. I thought I’d be doing it at a university when I entered as a brother. Instead, under obedience—I joke—they wouldn’t let me go to a university. They made me come to Rome and eat that terrible food. You look at that horrible scenery. Oh my gosh, I’ve got to deal with a thousand meteorites when meteorites happens to be my science. In other words, I wound up at the place where God could use my talents. And it wasn’t my choice and it wasn’t my plan, except that my choice and my plan was to go where God pushed me. And nothing is more delightful than to feel that you are in the place where God wants you to be.

Robert Duncan: Scientists often, correct me if I’m wrong, subject their own theories and hypotheses to rigorous tests. Have you done that with your faith? Have you experienced doubt or dark nights of the soul?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Only about once or twice a minute. Of course you do. If you’re not testing it that way, if you’re not wondering, you know, do I love enough? Do I love that neighbor who’s irritating me? Am I, you know—a dear friend dies and I accept it. Does that mean that I didn’t love that person? How am I dealing with this? What does this say about my relationship? And the only way you answer that really is to go back to prayer and to go back to be with God once again—and find out where are You and how do I deal with encountering You over and over again? A scientific paper that has never been proved incomplete is a scientific paper that nobody ever bothered to read. You write papers in the hope that they will be superseded someday, that they were useful to get people to that next step, but once you got to the next step, you can forget about— I mean, nobody reads the Principia as a way of learning Newton’s physics. You read it for the history of it because it launched the rocket. It’s not the location of where the rocket ends. No faith should be satisfied with where it is without being tested. And the test, I think, is always a test of love because that’s what faith is ultimately all about.

Robert Duncan: It’s interesting because when I asked you that question, I thought you might have something to say about the ontological argument of the existence of God. But the test that you subject your faith to is a test of charity.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Do I experience love? This really is—it turns out, like most bright ideas that you have, it turns out somebody else came up with it first. There was a philosopher, Raïssa Maritain, famous mostly for being Jacques Maritain’s wife, but herself a great philosopher. And she said the direction to God was the existence of good people. It’s the theodicy argument turned on its head. Instead of saying, “If God is good, why is there evil in the world?” you could say, “If there is no God, why is there good?” Where did this good come from? Or why is there something at all instead of nothing? Why does existence exist? Why is there a universe, much less a universe that I can understand, much less a universe that gives me joy and makes me encounter beauty when I understand it? That’s a universe that smacks me in the face every day with the face of the Creator. And yet, of course, you doubt. And yet, of course, your own inadequacies make you wonder, am I good enough for this? To which the answer is, of course not, but who cares?

Robert Duncan: You look into the sky and you see beauty and the wonder of God’s creation. Other people look into the sky and see emptiness and chaos and meaninglessness. I interviewed Jonathan Lunine, who holds Carl Sagan’s chair at Cornell University.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: He did. He’s now actually at Caltech.

Robert Duncan: Oh, he is?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Yes.

Robert Duncan: When did that change?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Oh, about a year ago.

Robert Duncan: Okay. Apologies for not keeping up. But in any case, he said that people look into outer space and they treat it like an inkblot test. In other words, we see a reflection in the cosmos of our own psychology. And I thought that was interesting. And you also have said that we look into space to know who we are. So, at the risk of being reductive, who are we? What do we learn about ourselves when we look into space?

Br. Guy Consolmagno: When we look into space, we realize that that cosmos also fits inside our head. We are the universe reflecting on itself, being able to look and be afraid or look and be amazed. We are the self-awareness of the universe. We are the locus of love or fear or hatred or amazement. These things which are real even though you can’t quantify them. And by “we,” I mean any entity in any place in any time that had that intellect and free will that we call the image and likeness of God. The breath of God that allows itself to be in this universe. And not only that, it is crystallized in the reality of Jesus Christ incarnate in this universe, the ultimate expression of God’s love and care for the creation. The fact that love and care itself can exist and does exist. And by the Incarnation, the universe has been made redeemed, cleansed. But St. Athanasius has this marvelous phrase on the Incarnation. The universe by the Incarnation is cleansed and quickened. By “quickened,” it’s made pregnant in its essence. There is now a possibility for more. And that’s why, in spite of all the horrible things we’re doing to planet Earth and all the reasons to despair, I don’t despair.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about this in his poem “God’s Grandeur,” that though you look in the black west and everything seems horrible, a universe where all is trod and trod and smeared with man’s smell—Nonetheless, ah, in the bright break eastward, the Holy Ghost is visible with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. We have hope in the face of hopelessness. Not to say that we don’t have to do something about it. Not to say that we can let God do everything. But that our efforts are united with God’s efforts, who has already redeemed the universe.

Robert Duncan: Brother Guy Consolmagno, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Thank you so much.

Veteran Vatican journalist Gerard O’Connell, co-author of The Election of Pope Leo XIV: The Last Surprise of Pope Francis, joins Vatican Access to unpack the hidden dynamics that shaped the conclave that elected Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV.

Drawing on deep reporting and conversations with cardinals close to the process, O’Connell explains how Prevost quietly emerged from under the radar, why Cardinal Parolin’s candidacy collapsed, the role Francis himself may have played in preparing the ground for Leo’s election, and how the new pope is already beginning to shape the future of the Catholic Church.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The secret pre-conclave tensions over Pope Francis’ legacy

• Why many cardinals believed an American pope was impossible

• How Cardinal Prevost rose rapidly during the voting inside the Sistine Chapel

• Whether Leo represents continuity or change from Pope Francis

• Why Gerard O’Connell believes Leo may become one of the world’s strongest moral voices on war, inequality, and global division

This is a conversation about power, faith, history, and the election of a pope at a moment when the Catholic Church — and the world — are searching for unity.

Transcript

CNS Note: This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI tools. For precise quotations, CNS recommends referring to the video above.

Robert Duncan: Thank you so much for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Gerard O’Connell: My pleasure. Thank you.

Robert Duncan: So I would like for you to take me back to the early days of May 2025. Pope Francis had famously internationalized, in a particular and unique way, the College of Cardinals. And I think most journalists at the time had no idea what dynamics would unfold. So before we get into those dynamics, would you just remind people how, from the outside, mysterious and exciting those moments were?

Gerard O’Connell: Well, it was extraordinary. When Francis died, the cardinals came in from 96 countries around the world. There should have been 252. Not all could come, but most of them came. The number of electors turned out to be 133 from 70 countries. But the reality was that many of them did not know each other. About 60 of the electors knew each other very well, but a lot did not. So they had to have name badges saying who they were and where they had come from, because they would pass each other on the street without recognizing each other. Francis died on the 21st of April, and then they began the meetings. But the meetings really started after the funeral, which was on the following Saturday. He died on the Monday, and the funeral was on the Saturday. After that, they really began to focus on who would be the successor.

Robert Duncan: People listening who may not know much about the Church — there is a sense in which it’s almost absurd that all these people who don’t know each other very well are going to be asked, in a very short amount of time, to decide who the Vicar of Christ on earth is. What a task. But also, what is the expectation of how such a thing plays out?

Gerard O’Connell: Well, obviously it’s not like a political convention. It’s not like a party congress. But somehow there is politics at work. There are various religious dynamics, because you are choosing the leader of the largest religious movement in the world. And there is also the hand of God. As Maradona famously said, “the hand of God.” And that works in a strange way, because human factors are obviously decisive. People have to get to know each other. They have to work together. The media had already identified some of the frontrunners.

Robert Duncan: They tend to list like 20 people, so it’s like throwing 20 darts at the board. You’re bound to hit one.

Gerard O’Connell: Exactly. And the cardinals themselves knew that Francis was in declining health, so they were already thinking among themselves. But they hadn’t come to clear conclusions. After the funeral, on the following Monday, they really began to meet in a more serious mode, let us say. The conclave could not start before 15 days after he died. Eventually, the conclave started on the 7th of May. In the meetings before the conclave, several things came out. First of all, they watched those whom they considered potential candidates. They saw some of them being more prima donna, while others made no waves at all and stayed very much under the radar. Prevost was one of those.

Robert Duncan: But nobody took him seriously in the sense that the working assumption was that an American would never be elected.

Gerard O’Connell: The working assumption among most cardinals was that an American would not get elected. But there was a group — and my wife Elisabetta and I write about this in the book — that had heard Prevost’s name mentioned as a serious possibility to succeed Francis as early as March 2024, one year before the conclave. But it was completely under the radar. Nobody was saying it publicly. In the meetings before the conclave, when you had more than 200 cardinals gathered together, there was a series of speeches. Then they would have coffee breaks and meet informally outside as well. They began to work out an identikit: what kind of pope did they want? What qualifications should the next pope have? What were the essential elements they hoped to see in the person? About two or three days before the conclave, they came up with this identikit. That was very important because they entered the conclave with this sort of checklist in their minds. Then, during these meetings, something happened that we write about in the book. One cardinal who was supporting one of the lead candidates — Cardinal Parolin, who had been Secretary of State for 12 years under Pope Francis — had a close ally who effectively acted as his campaign manager, though they would never call it that. This cardinal made an open attack on Francis during the plenary assembly of the cardinals, and that upset many people.

Robert Duncan: What was the attack?

Gerard O’Connell: The criticism was directed at Francis opening the possibility for lay people to hold positions of high responsibility in the Roman Curia and elsewhere in the Church — not just bishops, priests, or clerics, but lay people as well. The more conservative bloc, if you want to use that language, felt this was breaking with tradition.

Robert Duncan: But Cardinal Parolin — you’re saying Cardinal Parolin was, in some sense, at the helm of that faction?

Gerard O’Connell: No, Cardinal Parolin was not at the helm of that. But when the man who was identified as his main campaign manager came out publicly attacking Francis over this and other issues, the impression given was that he was talking about a rollback of the process and progress Francis had made, including on the question of a synodal Church — a Church in which different people share responsibility for governing. The cardinals who were strongly pro-Francis reacted very strongly. But even those in the middle ground, who were not yet sure whom they would support, did not like what they heard.

Robert Duncan: Is it known who this campaign manager was?

Gerard O’Connell: Yes. It was Cardinal Beniamino Stella. He had been a trusted cardinal during the pontificate of Pope Francis. Francis knew him before he became pope, and when he became pope, he appointed him head of the Vatican office for clergy and later made him a cardinal. Francis took his advice very seriously. So for cardinals who knew this relationship, seeing him move in the opposite direction and openly criticize Francis came as a shock. I got the story that same day from a cardinal who was very angry. Then several other cardinals made it clear they were also upset and did not like what had been said. All of this, of course, was meant to remain secret.

Robert Duncan: I want to talk about the secrecy. But do you know whether what angered these cardinals was, in principle, the idea being put forward — namely that laypeople should perhaps not run some of these offices — or was it more a question of delicacy, of offending the legacy of Francis?

Gerard O’Connell: I would say there were three things. First, they knew this man had been trusted by Francis, and here he was attacking Francis. That alone was a shock. Second, this was one of the major reforms Francis introduced when he reorganized the Roman Curia — the Vatican civil service — opening the possibility for laypeople to hold top positions of responsibility. Third, it was seen as an appeal to the more conservative bloc.

Robert Duncan: Maybe they believed they needed that vote. And it was simply political.

Gerard O’Connell: Yes. So people said: he is representing Parolin, he is attacking Francis, and he is attacking one of Francis’ major reforms. There were criticisms of Francis on other issues as well. And many began to feel that this kind of platform, if you wish, would roll back the achievements made under Francis. Remember: 80 percent of the electors had been chosen by Francis. So this played very badly. It did not work. Then there was another group attacking Francis over the opening to China. Through Cardinal Parolin, Francis had brokered an agreement with China regarding the nomination of bishops. The Chinese authorities could organize the selection of candidates, but the pope retained the final word on who would become bishop. Many people attacked this accord, and in doing so they were also attacking Parolin, because he was seen as its chief architect.

Robert Duncan: But in fact, the early drafts of that agreement began under Benedict.

Gerard O’Connell: Yes, it began under Benedict. I followed it very closely. What was eventually signed under Francis was substantially what had already been developed during Benedict’s pontificate, though Benedict ultimately rejected it. Francis, with Parolin’s help, achieved the breakthrough. But the agreement faced significant opposition — especially in the United States among many cardinals, but also from the American government, from parts of Eastern Europe, and from some Asian countries. They were not happy with it.

Robert Duncan: And for people who are not insiders, what was the objection? If you were going to make the strongest possible case against the agreement, what would that look like?

Gerard O’Connell: By the time Francis died, Xi Jinping had been president of China for roughly the same period Francis had been pope. During those twelve years, Xi had cracked down heavily on religion. So critics argued that the Catholic Church had made an agreement with China at precisely the moment when religious repression was intensifying. For example, Catholic families could not bring their children to church or provide them with Catholic education without risking penalties from the authorities. Critics said the Church had forgotten, to some extent, the underground Church — the Church that had resisted being absorbed into the government system — and instead had opened relations with bishops approved by the government. So there were strong feelings about this issue. In the pre-conclave assemblies, all of these questions surfaced. The main targets were Francis and Parolin. Parolin suffered significantly in those meetings.

Robert Duncan: From different directions, it sounds like.

Gerard O’Connell: From different directions, yes. Back in 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio — the future Pope Francis — gave a three-and-a-half-minute speech during the pre-conclave meetings that electrified the assembly. The cardinals suddenly saw someone offering a vision different from the other candidates. In the pre-conclave meetings of 2025, Cardinal Prevost spoke, but he did not make that kind of dramatic impact.

Robert Duncan: He didn’t make a big splash.

Gerard O’Connell: No. Where he made an impact was during the coffee breaks. The cardinals saw him as someone who listened carefully. They saw him as humble. And they liked what they saw.

Robert Duncan: One of the criticisms of Pope Francis had been that he governed, for lack of a better term, in an autocratic way — that he made many decisions personally. The listening quality of Cardinal Prevost gave cardinals from around the world reassurance that, if he became pope, they would have a voice again?

Gerard O’Connell: Well, that was how some of them read it. Francis did listen, but Francis was also a prophetic figure. I think history will show that. He was breaking new ground. He was opening new ways of looking at the Church, new ways of being Church. Some did not like it because they had become accustomed to one particular way of being Church, and Francis was saying, “No, we are going another way. We are going to be a missionary Church. We are going to go out. We are not going to wait for people to come into the sacristy. We are going to give laypeople, ordinary people, the poor, and those without a voice a role in shaping how the Church should exist within a given geographical or cultural area.” So Francis was breaking new ground. And, of course, he was deeply committed to the poor. As a result, one of the major questions in these pre-conclave meetings was whether the legacy of Francis would continue or whether there would be a rollback. That was a central issue. There was an obvious candidate from the more conservative side: the Hungarian cardinal Péter Erdő, a canon lawyer and longtime pastor and bishop. He was seen as less enthusiastic about synodality — about broad participation and shared responsibility within the Church. It was clear that he would have taken things in a different direction. He had supporters as well. But again, he did not make a major impact in the pre-conclave meetings. The speeches that had the greatest impact were actually the attacks on Francis. So when the cardinals entered the conclave on the 7th of May — leaving behind their cell phones, iPads, computers, and all outside communication — nobody was entirely sure who would be elected. I spoke to many cardinals beforehand. Most conclaves over the past fifty years had concluded within two days. But several cardinals told me this one could last three or four days. There was real uncertainty. Many cardinals were saying, “We can never have an American.” At the same time, there was a strong push from the Italians to regain the papacy after 47 years. Since 1978, there had been John Paul II from Poland, then the German Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, and then in 2013 the first Latin American pope. More than 200 of the Church’s 267 popes had been Italian, so many Italians felt almost entitled to the papacy. But this ignored the reality that the center of gravity of the Catholic Church had shifted. Seventy percent of the Catholic population was now in the global south. That was the atmosphere as they entered the conclave: no clear frontrunner. Elisabetta and I discovered before the conclave began that Prevost already had more than 20 votes lined up. Having studied previous conclaves and written a book on the 2013 election, I understood how important the first ballot would be. When there is no obvious candidate, everyone watches where the votes go on the first ballot.

Robert Duncan: To see who could conceivably emerge.

Gerard O’Connell: Exactly. What happened on the first ballot was remarkable. More than 30 different cardinals received votes out of the 133 electors.

Robert Duncan: So it was very spread out.

Gerard O’Connell: Very spread out. But only three candidates received between 20 and 30 votes. Nobody crossed 30, but there were only a handful of votes separating the top three. The leading candidate was Cardinal Erdő of Hungary, the standard-bearer of the more conservative bloc.

Robert Duncan: He was number one outright, or simply one of the top three?

Gerard O’Connell: He came out number one. Second was Cardinal Prevost, the American — and that surprised many people. Third was Cardinal Parolin, whom the Italians had confidently predicted would receive 35 or even 40 votes going into the conclave.

Robert Duncan: I remember that.

Gerard O’Connell: That prediction did not hold up. The fourth candidate was the French cardinal, though he was under 20 votes.

Robert Duncan: Aveline?

Gerard O’Connell: Aveline — Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, the Archbishop of Marseille — a figure who, in some ways, resembled John XXIII. He had a jovial personality and was very good with people and with the public. After the first ballot, the cardinals talked extensively among themselves. They returned to Santa Marta, the Vatican guesthouse that had been restructured under John Paul II to house the cardinals during a conclave. They went to dinner rather late that evening, but many stayed up until midnight discussing and reflecting. Some of them went back and reviewed the biographies they had been given for each cardinal. And many looked more closely at Prevost. They saw that he possessed a remarkable combination of qualities. He was born in Chicago and had spent a little over twenty years of his life in the United States, but another twenty as a missionary priest and later bishop in Peru, and almost twenty years in Rome. In Rome, he first studied canon law and later became Prior General — the worldwide head — of the Augustinian order. So here was a man who had lived on three continents. He spoke many languages: fluent English, Spanish, and Italian, as well as French and Portuguese. Moreover, he held Peruvian citizenship, since bishops in Peru are required to become citizens. The cardinals began to see that he had an unusually broad and international profile. Then there was another factor we describe in the book. Before the first ballot, the cardinals select three scrutineers who oversee and read the votes aloud. On the first ballot, the cardinal chosen to read the names was Cardinal Erdő. One cardinal later remarked, “God has a sense of humor.” Because as Erdő read the votes aloud — including his own name — his voice began to fade. He appeared physically weak. Some cardinals later described him as looking old. At one point they had to move the microphone closer so his voice could be heard.

Robert Duncan: There had already been reports about that. And he had been the relator during the famous synod under Francis.

Gerard O’Connell: Exactly. And he had also hosted the International Eucharistic Congress in Budapest, which gave him significant visibility. But then came the second ballot. And again, as one cardinal put it, God has a sense of humor. Who was chosen to read the votes aloud? Prevost. And he read them calmly, with a clear voice, composed, confident, and very much in control. The impression among many cardinals was: this man can govern.

Robert Duncan: It’s still quite striking that cardinals who did not know whom they were going to vote for could be persuaded in such a short amount of time, on the basis of such evidence.

Gerard O’Connell: Well, after that first ballot, people began paying much more attention to him. Before then, cardinals were asking, “Who is this Prevost?” But now his name was circulating everywhere. Many cardinals from Africa and Latin America had originally arrived expecting to vote for Parolin. They believed he was Pope Francis’ preferred candidate. But Elisabetta, my wife, wrote an article making clear — because we were very close to Pope Francis — that this was not the case.

Robert Duncan: Did Francis himself have a candidate?

Gerard O’Connell: We say in the book that Prevost was “the last surprise of Pope Francis.” That is the subtitle of the book. No pope can dictate his successor. But Francis certainly positioned Prevost in important ways and gave many signals in his favor. Francis had known Prevost long before becoming pope. Back when Bergoglio was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Prevost was Prior General of the Augustinians. They met around 2005 or 2006 in Buenos Aires, and in fact they initially clashed. Prevost wanted to transfer an Augustinian friar to another assignment, while Bergoglio wanted him elsewhere. So there was tension between them. After Bergoglio was elected pope, Prevost was heard joking that he could now relax because he would never become a bishop — recalling that earlier disagreement. But there was another episode, less well known. While Bergoglio was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was being criticized by someone in the Roman Curia, and Prevost defended him.

Robert Duncan: Defended Francis?

Gerard O’Connell: He defended Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Then, in August 2013, just months after Francis became pope, the Augustinians had to elect a new leader because Prevost had completed his second term and could not continue. Prevost invited Francis either to send a message or perhaps attend the gathering. Nobody expected the pope to come personally. But Francis said, “No, I will come and celebrate Mass for you.” So he came to the Church of Saint Augustine here in Rome. The Augustinian electors were gathered there to choose a new Prior General. Francis preached at the Mass, and afterward he told Prevost: “I never forget what you did for me.” In other words, Francis was publicly acknowledging that Prevost had stood by him. Then he essentially told him: “Now go and rest,” because Prevost was finishing twelve years as head of the Augustinians.

Robert Duncan: But they also had their differences, didn’t they? Because of that earlier incident you mentioned…

Gerard O’Connell: Yes, they had their differences. But Francis did not like yes-men. He appreciated people who would tell him directly what they thought.

Robert Duncan: That’s often what people said about the relationship between Cardinal Pell and Francis.

Gerard O’Connell: Yes, it’s true. Francis respected people who would stand up and say, “Sorry, I don’t agree with you.” He did not like yes-men, and Prevost was not a yes-man.

Robert Duncan: Is it known what they disagreed about in that early period?

Gerard O’Connell: We believe it was connected to the transfer of an Augustinian friar. As I mentioned earlier, Bergoglio wanted the friar in one role within the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, while Prevost, as head of the Augustinian order, had different plans for him.

Robert Duncan: So people online might imagine this was some kind of ideological split — one conservative, one liberal — when really it was more a matter of personnel and governance.

Gerard O’Connell: I don’t think it was ideological at all.

Robert Duncan: I’m just saying what people might assume out of context.

Gerard O’Connell: Yes. We even have photographs of them celebrating Mass together. And when Francis agreed to come personally to the Church of Saint Augustine in Rome to celebrate Mass before the election of the new head of the Augustinian order, nobody expected that. It was clearly a sign of friendship and respect toward Prevost. But these things were not widely noticed at the time. It is only in hindsight that people now recognize their significance. Then, a year later, in 2014, Francis appointed Prevost bishop of a diocese in Peru. Francis knew he had already spent more than ten years there as a missionary. The diocese had previously been governed for thirty-four years by Opus Dei. Opus Dei had considerable influence in Peru and many bishops there — perhaps seven or eight. So Francis appointed an American missionary to lead this diocese. It was not an easy assignment. The Shining Path guerrillas were still active, as was the MRTA, another armed insurgent movement. During Prevost’s time there, the region was also affected by El Niño and severe climate disruptions. And on top of that, more than a million Venezuelans fled the Maduro regime and entered Peru, creating enormous pastoral and social pressures. So Prevost had to manage migration, climate-related crises, political instability, and the challenge of governing a diocese that had been shaped for decades by a very different ecclesial culture. And he handled all of it quietly, calmly, and without creating major conflict. Several years later, there was another crisis in a different diocese several hundred miles away. The bishop there belonged to the Neocatechumenal Way and was trying to reshape the entire diocese around that movement, creating major tensions with priests and widespread disruption. Francis removed the bishop and sent Prevost there as apostolic administrator — not as bishop, but temporarily to stabilize the situation. Within a year, Prevost had calmed the entire diocese. At that point Francis began appointing him to various Vatican offices, putting him, as it were, on the boards of important dicasteries. Then in 2023, Francis brought him to Rome to head one of the most important Vatican offices: the Dicastery for Bishops, responsible for the selection of bishops worldwide. Francis explicitly said: “I want a missionary to lead this office.” Prevost managed it extremely well. A few months later Francis made him a cardinal. The dicastery included twenty-three cardinals, all electors, who met roughly every two weeks. Prevost presided over those meetings. There were also bishops and several women participating in the process. The cardinals who worked with him there became a crucial factor in his eventual election. They saw how carefully he listened, how effectively he managed discussions, how clearly he summarized issues, and how naturally he exercised authority. They saw that he had the linguistic ability, the judgment, and the temperament to govern. So when cardinals entered the conclave asking, “Who is this Prevost?” the men who already knew him were able to explain exactly who he was. By the second ballot the next morning, the situation had changed dramatically. Prevost moved into first place. Erdő, after his weak performance reading the votes, dropped sharply. Parolin remained competitive, but the momentum was clearly shifting toward Prevost. Still, nobody had yet reached the required threshold. To be elected pope, a cardinal needed 89 votes out of 133 — a two-thirds majority plus one.So they proceeded to the third ballot. At that point, Prevost surged ahead. By lunchtime, after the morning voting sessions, it had become clear that Prevost was on the path to the papacy unless something extraordinary intervened.

Robert Duncan: I feel like I could ask at least five hundred more questions about the conclave. But now that we have a full year of Pope Leo behind us, and given how close you were to Pope Francis, I want to ask whether — with the benefit of hindsight — the conclave really did elect a continuity candidate.

Gerard O’Connell: I think it’s very clear that he is a continuity candidate. From the moment Prevost appeared on the balcony, dressed in the traditional papal garments in the style Benedict XVI had worn, many people immediately began constructing a narrative that he was somehow more Benedict than Francis. But that was not true.

Robert Duncan: Why do you think he chose to wear that? He must have known how symbolic it would appear.

Gerard O’Connell: Yes, obviously. I think he likes protocol. He is a canon lawyer, so he respects law and structure. He is also trained in mathematics, so he is very precise. In fact, he came out with a prepared written text. Francis came out with nothing written and simply spoke from the heart.

Robert Duncan: But hadn’t Francis, in a sense, already given future popes permission to depart from some of those protocols? Even if the rules technically remained, Prevost would have been free not to follow them.

Gerard O’Connell: I think Prevost felt that, as pope, he needed to be very careful. That is how I see it. So he scripted carefully what he wanted to say. And the very first word he emphasized was peace. Francis had been deeply committed to peace, and Leo continued that emphasis immediately: “Peace be with you all.” Over the course of this first year of his pontificate, he has remained entirely consistent on that theme: peace, peace, peace. End conflicts. Begin negotiations. He has made no attempt to hide his commitment to peacebuilding. Then he spoke about working together. His core themes have been peace and unity. Francis, at the beginning of his pontificate, spoke of himself as bishop among the people — “I am bishop, you are the people, and we journey together.” Leo expressed something similar, but he emphasized collaboration with the Roman Curia, with bishops, and with the wider Church structure. Then, somewhat surprisingly to some observers, he strongly emphasized concern for the poor — another central theme of Francis. And then he spoke explicitly about synodality. Most people in the global audience probably did not even know what the word meant. But Leo said very clearly that he wanted “a synodal missionary Church.” That was an unmistakable signal: I intend to continue what Francis began. Francis often said, “I begin processes.” He saw himself as someone laying foundations rather than completing structures. In a sense, he saw himself as the architect beginning the work, while others would continue building the house afterward. Leo’s language about a missionary, synodal Church showed very clearly that he saw himself continuing that trajectory. And finally, he emphasized proclaiming Christ to the world. That, he said, is ultimately what the Church exists to do.

Robert Duncan: Has he done anything so far — whether in synodal governance or in these broader themes — that places his own emphasis on Francis’ ideas in such a way that, hypothetically, Francis himself might have been uneasy or concerned about the direction?

Gerard O’Connell: On peace? No. Of course, they have very different personalities. Francis was more Latin in temperament — outgoing, spontaneous, expressive. Leo is more reserved. “Introverted” would be too strong a word, but he is certainly more measured. He likes precision in his language. Francis often spoke off the cuff. He would prepare a text and then set it aside entirely. Leo stays very close to his prepared remarks. We have now seen this repeatedly over the course of the year. You could count on one hand — perhaps not even needing all five fingers — the number of times he has departed from his text.

Robert Duncan: Something that remains mysterious to me is this: Pope Leo has clearly made a deliberate decision to read carefully prepared texts and to speak cautiously, yet he will still meet journalists informally on Tuesday evenings and speak off the cuff about important matters. How do you see those two things fitting together rather than being in tension?

Gerard O’Connell: Well, I think he himself said at the beginning that he was learning how to be pope. Francis, in some ways, was a freer spirit. He had experienced major internal struggles within the Jesuit order. With Leo, there is no evidence of those kinds of conflicts in his background. He governed firmly and challenged people when necessary, but generally in a spirit of harmony. As I said earlier, his two guiding priorities seem to be peace and unity. Soon after his election, he met with the cardinals and made very clear that he intended to continue along Francis’ path. He specifically referenced Francis’ programmatic document Evangelii Gaudium — The Joy of the Gospel — and highlighted several themes from it that he intended to continue. Then, in June 2025, he met with the Council of the Synod, the group elected to continue the synodal process begun under Francis. They immediately began asking him many questions. He entered the meeting carrying a notepad and told them: “I’m not the Lone Ranger. This is synodality. We are meant to work synodally.” Francis pushed the synodal process forward. Leo, in many ways, is now institutionalizing and building it more deeply from within. At the same time, his relationship with the Roman Curia has been notably different from Francis’. Traditionally, during a papal transition, Vatican employees receive a bonus — roughly 500 euros — in recognition of the additional work involved. When Francis became pope, he redirected that money to the poor. Leo restored the bonus to the employees. That immediately generated goodwill. Then he told the Curia: “Popes come and go, but the Curia remains.” That was very significant for them. In particular, the Secretariat of State — the office closest to the pope — feels more valued and strengthened under Leo than it did under Francis.

Robert Duncan: I’m not sure whether this was in your book or elsewhere, but I remember reading that one Vatican official expressed concern that Prevost was “not Curial,” and another replied, “Don’t worry, we’ll make him one of us.”

Gerard O’Connell: Yes. On the night of the election, after the white smoke appeared, nobody yet knew who had been elected. Many officials from the Secretariat of State came out onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square. They were convinced it was Parolin. The election had happened so quickly that many interpreted this as proof that Francis had not left behind a divided Church. In reality, that interpretation was probably correct — the cardinals found unity very quickly. But among those gathered on the balcony from the Secretariat of State, there was a widespread expectation that the new pope would be Parolin. So when Prevost appeared instead, some of them said: “Ah, well, we’ll make him one of us.”

Robert Duncan: For people who may not understand that phrase, what exactly does it mean?

Gerard O’Connell: It means they believed they could gradually shape him into their way of operating and thinking.

Robert Duncan: Can you say more about that?

Gerard O’Connell: I think what they meant was that they hoped to guide him back toward a more traditional style of governance — more in continuity with the Curial culture that existed before Francis.

Robert Duncan: So perhaps the real divide was not inside the College of Cardinals itself. In other words, if the speed of the conclave demonstrates that Francis had not left the Church divided, that only requires a certain unity among the electors. But what you are describing suggests there were still tensions within the Curia itself.

Gerard O’Connell: Yes. The Curia — and I would say also the Vatican media apparatus — had largely convinced themselves that Parolin would be elected. The Italian media had strongly promoted him as the frontrunner, claiming he entered the conclave with thirty-five or forty votes. In reality, that was not true, but many people inside the Vatican believed it. They assumed that such a rapid election could only mean Parolin had won. Some also thought Cardinal Tagle of the Philippines might emerge as a candidate, but he did not perform strongly in the voting. So when Prevost appeared, many inside the Vatican were genuinely surprised. And even the crowd in St. Peter’s Square did not immediately know who Prevost was.

Robert Duncan: Do you think the fact that he was American also created anxiety or hesitation within the Curia?

Gerard O’Connell: They already knew him. He had been part of the Roman Curia for two years, so technically it was a Curial cardinal who had been elected pope. But he had never belonged to any of the major power blocs within the Curia.

Robert Duncan: He kept a low profile.

Gerard O’Connell: Very much so. He remained under the radar, both publicly and privately. He was friendly with people, but he had never publicly clashed with anyone. He was not one of the prima donnas of the Roman Curia. So many people inside the Vatican were somewhat taken aback by his election. At the same time, they regarded him as a good candidate. But because he had maintained such a low profile, some thought he could perhaps be shaped or guided. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the British series Yes, Minister.

Robert Duncan: I haven’t, actually.

Gerard O’Connell: It’s wonderful. It’s decades old now, but the premise was that Britain’s civil service remains constant while elected politicians come and go. A new minister arrives, and the civil servants politely say, “Yes, Minister, yes, Minister,” while gradually ensuring that everything continues operating exactly as it always has. There was a similar mentality among some within the Roman Curia — a feeling that the pope could, over time, be molded or influenced into the established way of doing things.

Robert Duncan: A year later, do you think Pope Leo has maintained his independence?

Gerard O’Connell: I think he is increasingly asserting it. For the first six months or so of his pontificate — really from May until January 6 — much of the program had already been determined because of the Jubilee Year. The schedule and major events had largely been prepared in advance, and Leo was essentially carrying out the program Francis himself would likely have followed, with only a few changes. But since January 7, 2026, he has increasingly begun charting his own course. You can see this especially in his appointments. Several of the people he has chosen were not anticipated at all.

Robert Duncan: How would you characterize the kinds of people he is selecting?

Gerard O’Connell: He is very much his own man. He has his own way of thinking.

Robert Duncan: Which is what, exactly?

Gerard O’Connell: He listens carefully, and then he decides. People often do not know whom he is going to choose. For example, when he appointed his successor at the Dicastery for Bishops, nobody expected Archbishop Iannone — an Italian — to be chosen. There had been many other names circulating, but not his. Likewise, when he appointed the head of the office for legislative texts, he brought in someone from Australia. Again, nobody anticipated it. And his appointment for head of the papal household also surprised people.

Robert Duncan: How does he know? Who is he listening to when he makes these appointments?

Gerard O’Connell: That is a very good question, and honestly, nobody is entirely sure whom he is listening to most closely. He is clearly listening — that much is certain. He meets with many people from different parts of the Church. But no one can confidently identify a fixed inner circle around him. What is clear is that his choices so far have been remarkably independent. Take the appointment of the Archbishop of New York. He chose someone he personally knew and trusted. That tells you something important: he makes up his own mind. I think his response to President Trump was another revealing example of that independence. On the papal flight, he spoke with five or six journalists individually — I was on the plane — and he added slightly different nuances to each conversation. But underneath it all, he had a very clear sense of what he wanted to communicate. And one thing he made clear was: “I am not afraid of the American administration.”

Robert Duncan: The New York Times later portrayed some of his subsequent comments to journalists as a softening or partial retreat from that initial strong stance.

Gerard O’Connell: Well, that is one interpretation. I am not entirely convinced by it. When Leo used the phrase about “tyrants” governing parts of the world, many immediately assumed he was speaking specifically about President Trump. But in reality, those speeches had been prepared before Trump made the statements people were reacting to. If we really want to understand Leo’s thinking, I believe we have to go back to his January 9 address to the diplomatic corps. That speech was prepared very carefully and expressed, in a structured way, his broader worldview. I think that speech provides the interpretive framework for understanding many of his later comments. So I do not entirely agree with the New York Times interpretation. I understand why people thought he was perhaps distancing himself from earlier remarks or blaming journalists for misunderstandings. He did refer to “certain interpretations.” But fundamentally, I think his views on state power, global injustice, poverty, and the concentration of authority need to be read through the lens of that January 9 speech to the 184 ambassadors accredited to the Holy See.

Robert Duncan: Given what you said earlier — that Prevost’s name was already circulating privately as early as March 2024 — did you, as a journalist close to Francis, make an effort at that point to get to know Cardinal Prevost better?

Gerard O’Connell: I had already gotten to know him before then, actually. I had several private conversations with him — some lasting an hour or more — so I already had a sense of who he was. Though certainly not with the same degree of closeness that I had with Pope Francis.

Robert Duncan: Without revealing anything private, is there something you learned from those conversations that perhaps the broader public still does not fully understand about him — either his personality or how he thinks?

Gerard O’Connell: I think many of the essential traits are already becoming visible publicly. He is very direct. He listens extremely carefully. Often, you have to ask him a question before you fully see what he thinks. He is clearly a man capable of governing. He does not rush decisions. That struck me strongly. I also think he is quite attentive to how the media portrays him. At a personal level, I found him genuinely humble. He is not someone who talks down to people. He speaks very directly, person to person, almost as an equal. And that is not always the atmosphere you encounter in the Vatican. Sometimes there is a sense that “we know and you don’t.” With Prevost, I found him very open, very friendly, and very willing to listen. He does not instinctively move toward confrontation.

Robert Duncan: Do you think he has evolved over the course of Francis’ pontificate? At Catholic News Service, we interviewed him in 2012 during the Synod on the New Evangelization. At the time, he gave remarks about cultural trends he believed challenged the Church — issues like gender ideology, same-sex marriage, and positive portrayals of those ideas in Hollywood. Then, when he became a cardinal in 2023, we asked him whether his thinking had changed since that earlier speech, and he pointed to Francis’ emphasis on welcome and mercy. I wonder whether you think it is fair to interpret those 2012 remarks as more conventionally conservative, and whether Francis’ pontificate genuinely changed him in some way.

Gerard O’Connell: I think it is very clear that he is open to learning and developing. He does not have a closed mind. You asked earlier what struck me personally about him. One thing is precisely that: he is not rigid in his thinking. His ideas develop. He grows. And I think we can already see that happening during his pontificate. He himself has acknowledged, for example on the diplomatic front, that he is learning. I have also noticed changes in the way he delivers speeches and presents himself publicly. During the trip to Africa, we saw how powerfully he can speak when he chooses to. He came across very strongly there. I think over time we may see him become more spontaneous — perhaps allowing more room for the Spirit, if you will — and speaking more off the cuff, as he occasionally already does at Castel Gandolfo. If you go back to the Second Vatican Council and read the history carefully, you see that many of the more than two thousand bishops who arrived in Rome came with very fixed ideas. But once they encountered bishops from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America, many realized the Church experienced reality very differently across the world. For many of them, it was almost like going back to school. I think the synods that Prevost participated in — especially the synods on synodality — were also a kind of school for him, and for many other bishops and cardinals as well. They began to understand that perhaps no single person or group possesses a monopoly on truth, and that there are different ways of approaching certain questions. One thing is very clear about Leo: he is not interested in escalating polarization. He is actively looking for ways to bring opposing sides together.

Robert Duncan: On the plane returning from Africa, he was asked about same-sex blessings, and he said he would not go beyond what Francis had already established in the relevant document. Before I ask the broader question, perhaps you want to respond directly to that.

Gerard O’Connell: I think the most important thing he said in that answer came at the very beginning. He said that sexuality is not the central issue of Catholic morality. Then he pointed instead to larger questions: justice, poverty, the suffering of the poor, and many other moral concerns. He made the point that sexuality cannot become the defining center of Catholic moral teaching. That was a very significant statement, and it is entirely consistent with what Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the Gospel. So on these issues Leo is navigating very carefully. He is not trying to provoke polarization. In fact, he is trying to reduce it.

Robert Duncan: Do you think Francis himself bears any responsibility for the polarization?

Gerard O’Connell: Look, the polarization existed before Francis. People accused Francis of creating confusion and division. I remember discussing this directly with Cardinal Müller in an interview we include in the book. He raised the charge that Francis had created confusion. And I asked him: would you say the same thing about John Paul II in 1986, when he organized the interreligious gathering in Assisi? At the time, many accused John Paul II of creating confusion and even syncretism. And Cardinal Müller acknowledged that point. Then I mentioned Paul VI and Humanae Vitae. The reality is that polarization also enters the Church from the political world. People live within political cultures, and increasingly they tend to see everything in black-and-white categories, with no room for nuance or complexity. Francis resisted that mentality very strongly. He consistently argued that reality is not simply black and white. And I think Leo approaches things in a very similar way. He has said he will not go beyond what Francis established, but neither is he going to reverse it. There was a narrative among some people that Leo would immediately roll back Francis’ reforms. That has not happened. He has a different style and a different personality. The cardinals did not want a clone of Francis, and they did not elect one.

Robert Duncan: We’ve spent a lot of time discussing what might be called “inside baseball” — the dynamics of the conclave, the significance of appointments, and the clues they may offer about where Pope Leo intends to lead the Church. But for most ordinary Catholics, when they think about the election of a pope and what a papacy means for their lives, they are often focused on one or two particular issues they care deeply about. That might be sexuality, the liturgy, or another specific concern, and they wonder whether the pope will deliver on that issue. How would you reframe that? How should Catholics more broadly understand the ministry of the pope? And what can Pope Leo do to genuinely bring people together?

Gerard O’Connell: I think, fundamentally, people look to the pope as a spiritual leader — someone who leads them toward God, someone who offers consolation in a divided world, someone who works to overcome conflict and division. Francis was very clear about this, and Leo has been as well: we are all children of God, brothers and sisters — Fratelli Tutti. The Church is open to everyone. Francis famously said, “Todos, todos, todos” — everyone, everyone, everyone. Leo has expressed the same vision. I think people are searching for someone who will help lead them to God, help them live better lives, help them endure suffering and difficulty, help them navigate polarization, and also address the profound injustices present in the world. People see injustice everywhere. They see conflict. They see poverty. And they want someone willing to stand up and say: we are not on the right path. I think that is what Leo is doing. And it is what Francis did. People do not primarily look to the pope as a politician. They look to him as a man of God. They perceive holiness. Many saw that in Francis, and they seek it again in Leo. They are looking for someone who can offer hope for a better world than the one many currently experience — someone who can call people to responsibility. Leo was very striking, for example, when he contrasted the immense wealth accumulated by figures like Elon Musk with the suffering of people at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. He said clearly that we cannot continue with a world in which inequality continues to grow. People want someone willing to say those things openly. I was also struck when Leo visited Algeria — the first pope in the history of the Church to do so. At one point, speaking on national television, he read the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit…” And afterward, the president of the country publicly welcomed him as a champion of justice and a champion of peace. I think it is very significant that the cardinals elected a pope deeply committed to social justice and peace at a moment in history marked by conflict, inequality, and instability. For me, this is part of how God works in human history. And I think that is what we are witnessing now.

Robert Duncan: If you had one big-picture, concrete prediction for the future of Pope Leo’s papacy, what would it be?

Gerard O’Connell: I think he is going to emerge more and more as a major voice on the question of peace and on overcoming division between peoples — helping humanity rediscover that we belong to one human family, that we are brothers and sisters. And I think he will speak very strongly about poverty and economic injustice. Using Francis’ language, which Leo himself has repeated, he will continue insisting that “this economy kills,” and he will challenge the world by asking whether we cannot build something better and more just. Within the Church itself, I think he will bring a significant degree of unity.

Robert Duncan: Even with President Trump?

Gerard O’Connell: Look, President Trump has perhaps three more years. Leo could have twenty. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, Leo will outlast President Trump. And Trump is not the only leader in the world. We see what is happening in the Holy Land with Netanyahu. We see what is happening in Ukraine with Putin. The Church has watched empires come and go throughout history, and it will watch this pass as well. Presidents come and go.

Robert Duncan: Gerry O’Connell, thank you so much for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Gerard O’Connell: Thank you.

Following a private audience with Pope Leo XIV, Kerry Alys Robinson, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, reflects on what is at stake. This conversation explores how Catholic Charities navigates growing tension between mission and politics—and what it means for the future of the Church’s public role.

Matthew Sanders, a technologist who has built major digital platforms for the Catholic Church—including projects for the Vatican Observatory and the Vatican’s Office for Migrants and Refugees—has been at the forefront of this shift. His latest initiative, Magisterium AI, seeks to bring the Church’s intellectual and spiritual tradition into direct conversation with users through AI.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Sanders’ career in technology, design, and spreading the Church’s message

• What people are actually asking AI about faith and God

• The risks of outsourcing spiritual authority to technology

• What Pope Leo might say in his forthcoming encyclical on artificial intelligence

This is a conversation about technology, the Catholic faith, and the unexpected places where spiritual life is beginning to unfold.

Transcript

CNS Note: This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI tools. For precise quotations, CNS recommends referring to the video above.

Intro: Matthew Sanders is a technologist who has created some of the most significant digital products for the Catholic Church in the past decade. He has designed websites for the Vatican Observatory, for the Vatican’s Office for Migrants and Refugees -- advancing a key priority of Pope Francis -- and for several central offices of religious orders in Rome. Most recently, he has tried to bring artificial intelligence into the Church’s efforts to evangelize by creating a chatbot -- Magisterium AI -- built on the advances of ChatGPT. Sanders says that millions of users around the world are now using his product. And while user data is private, he can see the kinds of conversations taking place—highly personal, often deeply spiritual exchanges—and the kind of evolution they seem to encourage in users. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we talk about Sanders’ career in technology and his service to the Church, the emergence of AI as a tool for evangelization, and where he thinks Pope Leo will take the Church in the digital frontier.

Robert Duncan: Matthew Sanders, thanks for sitting down with Catholic News Service. Tell me a little bit about how you came to be what I think many people know you as, the guru, or at least one of them in the Catholic Church.

Matthew Sanders: I really have no idea. I mean, definitely, I think it’s more down to providence than any kind of intentional decision that I made. More than anything else, I think I was just a guy, like many, who was on a journey. And along that journey, there were times in, you know, becoming Catholic initially and then preparing to be a priest, and then eventually working at an archdiocese. There were just times when I just felt very ill-equipped. And I wish that there were more efficient ways to apprehend the knowledge and impart it in a more efficient way. And I think because it kept coming up, this issue of, I don’t know enough, I need to know more. If I’m going to be more of service to the Church, kept coming up again and again at different intervals in my life. And because I kind of grew up in the technology age, I think I was always kind of waiting for a technology solution to this problem. And so when ChatGPT kind of demonstrated that there might be a way to do this finally, I think I said, this is it. So we got to go all in here. I didn’t, we didn’t really go all in initially, but as soon as it became clear, it might be possible, I said, this is it. We have to make this work. Because I imagine there’s, you know, millions, billions of other people who are probably on a similar journey who could benefit in the same way I did.

Robert Duncan: I mean, I know, though, that your journey with where you are now with Magisterium AI, which we’ll talk about, and your other projects are more recent since ChatGPT. But I mean, you were always a great lover of technology, and you came to Rome, initially building websites. Can you tell me about how you got here?

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, sure. I, when, like I said, I grew up in the technology age and, you know, I fell in love with the church. It became very clear to me that, I mean, the founder of the community that I entered was called, his name was Isaac Hecker, and he’s the founder of the Paulist Fathers. The Paulist Fathers, you know, kind of made it a name for themselves by leveraging the most modern technology at the time to evangelize. You know, they used the printing press and the radio, and eventually went into TV and film production. I always, so I always resonated with the pragmatism of that approach. When eventually I started working with the Archdiocese, initially, we were just trying to leverage technology to make the office run more efficiently. But eventually I moved into the special projects office and ran that, and one of the projects they gave me was, was reaching young people. Basically we were trying to launch student Steubenville Conferences in Toronto. I had never been given a marketing task like that before. So basically put together materials and try to entice the youth to sign up for this conference. And so I, you know, we had to do research. Well, what does it take to, to win on platforms like social media? And of course I was like, wow, this is, this is actually really going to be really hard. Especially at the time that the assets they were giving me to reach young people. I was like, okay, that that’s, those are obviously not anything near what the, what the secular industry is using. So it’s probably not going to be effective on that war for the feed for people’s attention. Anyway, eventually we got the job done, but I realized that the Church has got to leverage technology, especially leverage the web and a much more kind of focused and deliberate way, specifically around the area of evangelization. So we left the archdiocese to found a company and that the company’s kind of mission was to help the Church leverage technology more effectively to, kind of, win.

Robert Duncan: And do you know why that is? Because, I remember, I know what you’re describing because when I came to Rome, there was a lot more opportunity and a lot more need, I think, than there is today. There’s still a lot of need, but it’s changed a lot in 15 years. But even then, like around 2010, if you looked at Protestant and Evangelical outreach online, it was far more sophisticated than the Catholic Church’s. Do you have any idea why that is?

Matthew Sanders: So it’s funny you bring that up. I mean, I, when we were trying to figure out a way to convince people that going to Steubenville, Toronto was going to be worth it, we wanted to look at exemplars. So who had actually, who had done something like this before and did really, really well. We studied LifeTeen, the LifeTeen conferences, the LifeTeen Steubenville conferences were pretty good. They filled stadiums. But you know, the real exemplar, the one who really had really knocked us out of the park and really built a global brand for themselves was Hillsong, which was an Evangelical outfit. And they started, you know, they had a church, but then they, they focused a lot on music and that music basically went global, right? They built like a music empire and that led to a kind of a ministry empire and then these large events where they fill football stadiums and their marketing was top notch. I mean, every piece of collateral that they produced to market what they’re doing, whether it be their music or their conferences was top notch. I mean, just as good as the secular industry. That’s what really impressed me. These are people who recognized how important, if you want to win the feed, if you want people’s attention, you have to invest in making sure that your collateral is engaging. You’re telling your story in a way that people find inspiring. So that’s when I, when I really realized that has to be the bar, like, you know, we have to look at who’s doing, who’s doing the best marketing in the world and then what can we learn from them and try and try to ensure that our own marketing for the Church is up to the same standard, which was, which was a challenge, but I think that’s, that’s one of the reasons why it took, it took, you know, 10 years for the Church to really finally kind of get the message and then be willing to put the resources into actually doing this the right way.

Robert Duncan: It’s expensive.

Matthew Sanders: Right. And I mean, it’s, and a lot of it comes down to tactical expertise and taste, right? So finding people who know how to execute these campaigns, knowing people to just know what a, what a good campaign like looks like, right. You understand where people are at and know what message they need to hear and know how to package it. There’s not a lot of people who know how to do that really, really well. Now there’s lots of people I think who are mission aligned with the church who’d be willing to give their gifts to the Church, but they have to be asked.

Robert Duncan: Can you tell me a few of your early successes in doing this, either with the archdiocese or once you launched Longbeard, I mean, people watching this, they may not even know who you are and what you’ve built. So what are some of the —before we get to Magisterium AI and some of the more AI focused stuff — talking about marketing specifically and making the Church’s message more sort of effective online, what were some of those early projects you had that led you to Rome and then once you got to Rome…

Matthew Sanders: We did a bunch of, we initially started with very small projects, but I remember that one phone call where I was like, it’s really the first time I think where I was like, man, we may have finally started to make a dent outside of the, you know, Toronto, Toronto area was, I got a call from the Monks of Norcia and they wanted help building their website and their, and their beer website. And I was like, the Monks of Norcia, I’ve been listening to them, you know, listening to their chant every morning from my office at the archdiocese for at least I think a year or two. So that was, that was pretty exciting for me. Mainly cause they were kind of heroes of mine, you know, you know, later on we ended up working on the Vatican Observatory, kind of new website as well and helping them.

Robert Duncan: I didn’t know that.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. So we built their website. I’m, you know, it’s been some time since we’ve, you know, I basically have been custodian of it, but that was a really fun project.

Robert Duncan: And your contact then, that would have been with Brother Guy.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, that’s right. They were great to work with. We ended up working with the Australian Catholic University, building a product called Ethics Finder, which was another interesting kind of technology project. And then eventually we started consulting here in Rome—more on technological infrastructure—starting with trying to modernize a typical university. So Father David Nazar, who’s the rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute—and also Canadian, so it’s not just the Italians who practice nepotism—I like to think Father Nazar is just pragmatic. When he inherited the Oriental, he had a number of challenges he was facing. One of them was improving the educational experience, but also finding a way to universalize the institution more—making the knowledge in the library and the expertise of the faculty more accessible. So part of that project was doing an audit: how can we integrate technology more effectively into this building? That was really fun. We installed, I believe, one of the first Wi-Fi mesh networks—certainly among the pontifical universities, maybe even in Italy. We put in robotic cameras in their Aula Magna, their main conference hall, so they could do dynamic live streaming—it was like having a TV crew on site. We set up Google Meet kits in all the classrooms to hybridize them, so anyone—even someone sitting in the back—could raise their hand, ask a question, and people online could hear them. It created a really immersive environment. What was really notable is Father Nazar did all that simply because he thought, “this just makes sense.” And then COVID hit just after we installed everything. So he likes to say they were probably the only pontifical university that never missed a class—they just pivoted straight to online.

Robert Duncan: Do you ever, during that time, feel like you were getting mired in IT-related internal work, where maybe what you originally wanted to do was revamp the Church’s public image online? Or did you see those things as both necessary and important?

Matthew Sanders: I think they were both. I have to say, it did feel at times like I was taking a bit of an off-ramp from what I thought we had built the company to do. But it felt essential. Especially working here in Rome, you realize that if you can’t help decision-makers operate more effectively and efficiently, it’s very difficult to get their time or attention for things like, “Hey, maybe we should be doing a better job on marketing.” And these were immediate problems they were feeling. So I felt like we were trying to build relationships and trust. Instead of going in and telling them, “This is what you need to do—you need to improve your marketing, build a new website,” I just tried to listen and understand what practical problems they were experiencing, and whether technology could help address those. And I found that the more we helped solve those immediate, practical problems, the more open they were to other ideas. A good example is when we started working with the Holy See. At the time, Pope Francis was directly overseeing the migrants and refugees section, and that’s when we started working with Cardinal Czerny—Father Michael Czerny back then. They were setting up a new office and wanted to be as effective as possible. They wanted to leverage the most contemporary technology, and they essentially said, “Let’s just use the best tools that Fortune 500 companies are using”—obviously respecting privacy and security, but otherwise without constraints. So working with them to figure out what that would take, understanding how they operate and what it’s like to run an office with global reach—those lessons became very useful for us later on.

Robert Duncan: And meanwhile, while you were working with the Orientale, I remember watching you sort of take over Rome—at least online. You did the Franciscan website, the Curia of the Franciscan Order. You mentioned the Vatican Observatory. You started working with the Holy See. That must have been exhilarating—to arrive and then just client after client, working your way up to the Holy See.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, I mean, it was. For a systems guy from Toronto, it was all kind of remarkable. There was no grand strategy where we said years in advance, “We need to land the Holy See as a client.” It wasn’t like that at all. It was really just arriving here, having conversations, hearing problems, and saying, “I think we can figure that out.” And then you solve a few problems, word gets out, and someone else says, “I’ve got a few problems over here.” And that’s really how it all came about. The Angelicum is another example—I loved working with them, building their website. That was a unique experience. The Franciscans, the Benedictines—just getting to understand the different religious orders. They have a lot of problems in common, but also some very unique ones. And as a byproduct of helping them tell their story online, you inevitably get more immersed in their traditions, which I found spiritually very uplifting—not to say there weren’t challenges as well.

Robert Duncan: I want to talk specifically about your consultation client work with the Holy See. How did that come about? And you had been picking up all these ecclesiastical clients, and then you get, let’s say, to the top—to a dicastery level. What had you learned about the way the Church works with technology that maybe was crystallized when you started working with the Holy See?

Matthew Sanders: I remember when we initially started conversations about working, in a case like the Migrants and Refugees section—which later became public that Pope Francis wanted to run it directly because he wanted to see something done there meaningfully. Part of the conversation was: if you were building a dicastery or a section and you had kind of carte blanche on what technologies to use in order to create a modern office, what would you use? And I remember thinking, I mean, I can tell you, but that’s never going to happen. There’s too much red tape—you know how these things go. But they said, no, we’re curious. So I laid it out for them—what I would do, what I’ve seen work, what is kind of industry best practice. And what was shocking to me was that eventually the direction came down: okay, let’s do that. The Vatican is full of great people with amazing intentions, but like any bureaucratic organization, there’s a lot of complexity. Sometimes new ideas take time to work their way through the system. I had presumed something like this would take years. So it was a very unusual experience to have the red tape kind of cut and to be told, just go do it. That was very exhilarating. And what I had hoped was that by demonstrating how these technologies could help an office work more productively, others would see it and say, they’re doing it—so why can’t we? I often joke that in Rome, seeing really is believing when it comes to technology. And I think that’s in large part because many of the people in leadership are academics, like I said, and they haven’t been exposed to a lot of these technologies or how they solve problems and make things more efficient. So they don’t really have an imagination for it.

If you tell them this could save 50% of your time, it’s hard for them to understand what that means—they need to see it. And I’ve found so far that pilots are usually the most effective way.

Robert Duncan: I would imagine that getting the Holy See—the Vatican—as a client is a hard get in principle. It sounds like it, at least to a lot of people, maybe in your industry, and possibly because a lot of people there don’t speak your language. It takes a lot of translation on your part to do what you did. So I’m wondering if you have any advice—sort of an aside—that you would give to people working with clients in general, maybe something you learned from working with the Holy See.

Matthew Sanders: I think it really comes down to this. When you have this instinct that there’s a problem you need to solve, and you find others who believe the same thing, you kind of want to go on a crusade. You want to share it, make people aware of the problem, get them to agree, and say, “Give me some money and I’ll help you solve it.” The problem is, not everyone’s there. And trying to convince people there’s a problem they’re not ready to acknowledge—or feel like they can’t because they have too many others—that can be a grind. What I found is the best strategy is, when you’re first approached by a client—or you’re in the room with someone who could be a potential client—is to listen. Just ask questions. Get them to talk about the problems they experience day to day. Try to understand their operational workflows—what frustrates them, what they complain about. And then, if some of those problems are things you feel you can address efficiently—especially if you’re new to a market—just take whatever they’re willing to pay you and fix them. Once you do that, it starts building trust. And eventually word gets out, and next thing you know, you’re being introduced to other people. You don’t have to do cold calls or sales emails. You just keep solving problems and listening, and eventually you kind of work your way up the food chain.

Robert Duncan: I want to get to AI, but before I do, there are a couple of things I want to touch on from that time. Did you ever hear directly—either from Pope Francis via Cardinal Czerny, or Father Czerny at the time, or in some other way—about the work you did on the migrants and refugees side?

Matthew Sanders: I prefer not to comment. So suffice it to say, I think we did what we were asked to do, in the sense that we integrated the technologies and they became part of the day-to-day workflow. And I think at a certain point, once they were integrated, we realized that where things needed to go next didn’t necessarily have to involve us. So I felt good about what we did. And I certainly feel that, given we started working with other groups within the Vatican as well, the way the work was done and the effects of it were generally respected and well received. I did have the opportunity to meet Pope Francis at one point, but I was always very reticent to meet the pope. I generally think it’s a good rule of thumb to keep the lowest profile possible when you’re doing work here. I think that’s a good survival strategy. If you’re coming to Rome and your intention is to solve problems, I would keep that in mind.

Robert Duncan: Why is that?

Matthew Sanders: Anyone who’s worked in something like a federal bureaucracy understands there are a lot of complex interests. Ironically, in for-profit corporations—at least in my experience—it’s clear why they exist, and it’s clear what you need to do to keep your job: you have to add value and help increase the bottom line. With non-profits and government organizations, the incentives are much more complex. So when you’re talking to the head of one department or another, their incentives can be very different. There isn’t always a single unifying objective. In principle there is—let’s say evangelization—but how that’s carried out can be interpreted very differently. So you have to be careful. You might come in thinking the way to solve the Church’s problems is one particular approach, and start pushing that, but another group may have a very different approach. And you can end up alienating them or frustrating their efforts. That’s the challenge of working in larger bureaucratic organizations—navigating that complexity. Unless you have a mandate from on high, where leadership is clearly saying, “We want this done this way,” you have to be very careful.

Robert Duncan: I think what you’re describing is something you learn working in and around the Vatican—that it’s not a monolithic structure, but lots of smaller offices that are, hopefully not, but sometimes maybe working at cross purposes.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. I think everyone believes they’re trying to serve the mission of the Church. I firmly believe that. There isn’t anyone I worked with at the Vatican who I thought was in it for themselves. But what surprised me is how differently people can interpret what that mission—evangelization—should look like on the ground. And that makes sense. You have people coming from all over the world with very different pastoral experiences and insights, and then they’re here in Rome. So they bring that past experience to bear on their current work. And that means they tend to look at things in a certain way. And without understanding where someone is coming from—what that pastoral background is—it’s very difficult to get on the same page sometimes. That’s why I think the best posture when you come here is just to listen and respond. That may mean sometimes you’re solving problems you don’t think are that important. But relationships here are paramount. So sometimes it’s better to bite your lip, do what’s asked, build the relationship, and then over time, as that relationship grows, you can begin to suggest other ideas.

Robert Duncan: So during all of this time that you’re consulting with the Holy See and institutions in Rome, I remember you jet-setting—you’d go to Davos for the World Economic Forum—and you were building relationships with executives at Google. Can you tell me about that, those background projects and personal interests?

Matthew Sanders: Sure. One of the unique experiences of being here is realizing how anyone in a position of power or influence sees the relevance of coming into contact with the Holy See in some way.

Robert Duncan: Sorry—who do you mean? People at the World Economic Forum?

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, I mean heads of global corporations, politicians, that kind of thing. Not all politicians, but certainly a good number recognize they have Catholics within their constituencies. And in the case of corporations, their brands are very important—they want to be seen as a force for good in the world. And I think most of these companies, and many countries as well, recognize that the Holy See is a very potent force for good. So it’s important for them to maintain an active dialogue with it. So that means there are a lot of very interesting people coming through Rome. And because we were working on technology at the time, there were others here working on similar questions, but from different angles. For example, Father Philip Larrey, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Pontifical Lateran University, was studying the philosophical implications of AI and emerging technologies, while we were looking at how to apply those technologies in service of the Church’s mission. Cardinal Turkson eventually connected us, and we were asked to attend an event—basically to be his eyes and ears. It was an impact-focused gathering of business leaders and others here in Rome, and we were asked to listen and provide feedback. What struck me was seeing this room of very different actors all coming together, trying to figure out how their companies or countries could work with the Holy See to do good in the world. That was impressive. But what became clear to me—especially after going to the World Economic Forum—is that while almost everyone wants to make the world a better place, the real question is: what does a better world actually look like? What is a human person meant to look like?

And that’s where I felt the Church has a unique role. It has been studying the human condition for 2,000 years. In that sense, it’s the world’s leading expert on the human person. So this is an area where the Church can offer real clarity. That’s one of the reasons Father Philip and I started working together—to bring leaders from technology and government into more direct contact with representatives of the Holy See, and to have more granular conversations about all this technology we’re building. What is the telos of it? What are we actually trying to do? We need a clear sense of where humanity should be going—what “winning” looks like—so we can work backward and make sure the technologies we’re building are aimed at the right problems.

Robert Duncan: It sounds a lot like what Pope Leo is talking about now.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, I think so.

Robert Duncan: I want to get to that, obviously, but just for the sake of detail and richness, can you give me a few examples of some of these people you worked with and what they were after specifically?

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. Over the course of a few years, we had quite a few convenings, and we were privileged to have some pretty remarkable executives come in. For example, Linda Yaccarino, who was CEO of X—formerly Twitter—came to one of our forums. Tae Yoo, who was Senior Vice President of Impact at Cisco, participated. And then Matt Brittin, who was head of Google for EMEA—Europe, Middle East, and Africa—also contributed. And that’s just naming a few. We were also honored to have the President of Malta come to one of the forums and offer insight. So it was a very rewarding experience. It made me feel optimistic, in the sense that, on an individual level, everyone wants to see humanity flourish. People really do internalize the injustices in the world. The real obstacle is that you have these different verticals—business, government, religion, NGOs—with very different incentives. And trying to align those incentives, and then figure out practically how they can work together, is very difficult. That’s not a problem we solved. But I do think some good came out of it. And even today, we continue to benefit from many of those relationships.

Robert Duncan: One thing I know about you from our past conversations is that you were thinking about AI in a serious way long before most people in the Church I knew. This was maybe seven or even ten years before ChatGPT came out. And nobody really predicted—even a year before—that we were this close to what we have today, except maybe people inside the industry. I remember long discussions with you about the moral and theological questions that would arise if AI made those advances. Can you talk about your early interest in artificial intelligence—where that came from—and, before ChatGPT, what you expected the technology to become?

Matthew Sanders: Well, I think like a lot of people, I grew up watching science fiction. And I recognized a pattern: you have science fiction demonstrating the efficacy of a certain kind of technology. If you go back to the original Star Trek, you have the tricorder and the communicator. Maybe the tricorder is still a work in progress, but the communicator—you start to see mobile flip phones emerge. And I realized, okay, Hollywood has a tremendous impact on the creative imagination of people. In some ways, it almost prophetically identifies use cases for technology. Then a few years later, people are primed—they think, “That actually looks useful. Imagine if I had that.” And then industry responds: “Maybe we should try to build this.” And before long, it’s built and in the hands of millions or billions of people. So I saw this pattern happening. Some people watch that and say, this is entertaining, and that’s it. But I looked at it and thought: if we take this seriously, and if these use cases keep showing up—especially with AI and robots, which are often depicted in apocalyptic ways—then there’s a real possibility that, out of curiosity alone, we’ll build these technologies without really thinking through whether they’re good or bad, or what their impact will be. It’s almost like Hollywood presents a problem and a solution, someone at MIT says, “That’s an interesting challenge, let me try to build it,” and then it exists. And before we’ve had time to study it, it’s already affecting us in profound ways. Because of that pattern, I assumed we would eventually have AI. But I was skeptical of the doomsday scenarios. I didn’t really understand why inventing AI would necessarily lead to humanity’s destruction.

Robert Duncan: You were pretty positive about its promise, I think.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. And I think that’s partly because I tend to be an optimist. I think most people are trying to do good. So I didn’t see why the technology would take such a dark turn, especially since we’re building it in some sense in our own image. Obviously, it can have complex incentives, and there are bad actors who can use it in the wrong way. But the idea that the technology itself would “wake up” and decide to take us out—that just didn’t make sense to me. That wasn’t a scientific claim. It just didn’t feel like the doomsday arguments were grounded in science. They seemed more rooted in fear—fear of human beings, really.

Robert Duncan: For me, when ChatGPT dropped and I saw what it could do—we went from very basic chatbots we’d had for years, like the old AOL or Yahoo ones, to something that felt like a quantum leap. Did that surprise you?

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, it did. I’m not entirely sure why I was as surprised as I was. I think, like a lot of people, I underestimated how much of a difference scale would make.

Robert Duncan: When it first came out and it was producing these long, coherent responses, I was kind of shocked that it held together. I figured maybe it could generate sentences—we’d seen chatbots before—but the way it seemed to intuit what you were asking and almost plan its answer and then write it out… for the most part, it felt like magic.

Mathew Sanders: It really did feel like magic. And like a lot of people, I was a bit bewitched by it. I anthropomorphized it. I assumed there was more going on than there actually was. It was hard to understand how something like a next-token predictor—basically an autocomplete model—could handle language at that level and produce what looked like insight. They’re not true insights—it’s drawing from a massive humanities dataset and remixing it.

Robert Duncan: I remember one of the first things people were doing was taking Shakespeare and saying, “Do this in the style of Donald Trump,” or something. And it was remarkable—its ability to imitate. But you say there was a mystery to it, and there still is a mystery to it. Even the designers don’t entirely know how it works.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. I think that was the thing that was most surprising. In the past, technology was very deterministic in the sense that we wrote the logic for it. So yes, it was inherently predictable, because someone wrote that code. With AI, it was very different. Anthropic has talked about this a bit—we set the conditions for its emergence, and it emerged, but we didn’t program a lot of these capabilities. They just arrived. We fed it lots of data, gave it lots of compute and an objective function, and next thing you know, it figured out how to do these things. So that was surprising—how well it worked. And it was also a bit unsettling, because this is the first time we’re building a technology where we don’t exactly know how it’s built. I mean, we do in the sense that we know how to put certain ingredients together, and if we run current through it, something emerges. But we don’t know exactly how it learns to understand concepts or perform certain skills. So in some ways, we don’t really know what the limits of this approach are, which to me is quite unprecedented.

Robert Duncan: How quickly did you think, “I need to apply this technology in the Church?”

Matthew Sanders: Pretty quickly. I had to take a look at it and say, okay, how did they do this? I need to understand this. I had been paying attention to AI, but the use cases were very narrow—classical machine learning—and it usually took a lot of effort to make a particular AI component work in a production setting. So the general use of generative AI was kind of shocking. First I wanted to understand how it was built. And then when I realized how it was built, I thought, okay, hang on a second—that makes a lot of sense. If they’re taking basically everything that’s ever been posted on the internet and training on that, and it’s producing this kind of autocomplete model, then in principle we should be able to reverse engineer that and do something similar for the Catholic Church—leveraging all the Church’s data and being able to distill it reliably. The problem was that the Church’s dataset was too small to get something like a ChatGPT 3 or 3.5.

Robert Duncan: What do I mean by dataset?

Matthew Sanders: The ChatGPT models—especially GPT-3—were trained on basically everything publicly available on the internet, the Common Crawl. It’s a vast ocean of text—everything we’ve said publicly online. That’s hundreds of billions of tokens. You need that density of data for the model to map and understand concepts, build representations, and be able to autocomplete language—understand a prompt and provide an answer. I won’t get too much into the technical details there, but—

Robert Duncan: But you do understand the technical side of it? I mean, when you and I talk, we often stay at a conceptual level about how this will impact the Church. But you run a business, so I imagine you have a technical team behind you—you understand how this works.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah, at a certain level of abstraction. I’m not down at the kernel level, optimizing kernels, for greater efficiency on AI, but yeah, I understand the ingredients in principle and I understand some of the unique challenges and what it will take to, to address those.

Robert Duncan: Right.

Matthew Sanders: It’s one of the reasons why, in addition to building systems, we also are doing kind of research as well, you know, in our own way.

Robert Duncan: So you’re talking about datasets, and there was this particular challenge that the Church had of not having enough data. That might surprise people listening, because the Church is 2,000 years old—we have a ton.

Matthew Sanders: It is surprising. It’s counterintuitive, because yes, I think we probably have more data than any single institution in the world. But it’s still comparatively a very small amount of data. If you look at the data necessary to create something like ChatGPT-3, and then you look at the Catholic dataset—especially what’s been digitized—there’s a lot more data sitting on shelves that hasn’t been extracted and can’t yet be used. So what we have available is woefully insufficient to get those emerging capabilities. That’s not to say you couldn’t train some kind of basic AI system or a basic autocomplete model, but its generalizing capabilities would be extremely limited. Its ability to intuitively understand your prompt would suffer because of the size of the dataset. A lot of the reasoning capability and intelligence of the model comes from having studied a vast amount of text and how it all relates. So the smaller the dataset, the less conceptual understanding it has of language and, to some extent, of the world. It would be like the difference between interacting with, say, a PhD student—which is roughly where modern AI is now—and a model trained only on a small dataset, which would be more like talking to a four-year-old who has learned the basics of the Catholic faith.

Robert Duncan: An advanced four-year-old!

Matthew Sanders: Maybe a slightly advanced four-year-old, but still. It’s not that it doesn’t have access to the knowledge—it’s that its ability to properly understand what you’re asking and give you the answer you’re actually looking for requires a certain level of intelligence. You and I have grown up and developed a complex understanding of the world, and because of that, we can assume a lot about what’s being said. Language is an abstraction of reality. So if you train a model on a very small amount of language, it ends up with a very abstract and limited understanding of reality—and that makes it frustrating to work with.

Robert Duncan: So how’d you fix this, or how are you fixing this?

Matthew Sanders: Well, initially it became very clear to us that eventually the Catholic Church needs to train its own AI. So we said we’re going to have to have our own training program—we can talk more about that, which we do. But we realized we had to find some way—really the question was: if we can’t train our own ChatGPT-3, can we find a way to make it safe? Because right now, two of the major challenges with ChatGPT-3—well, there are more—but one is its tendency to hallucinate, to make things up.

Robert Duncan: They’ve gotten better about that, right?

Matthew Sanders: They have gotten better, but hallucination is still a big problem. And by nature of their training, the models don’t always know why they’re saying what they’re saying, or where it’s coming from.

Robert Duncan: Do they ever know why — well, that’s different—that’s another question.

Matthew Sanders: Right. But what I mean is, when a model is generating, it doesn’t always know what it should be citing, at least in terms of priority. And even citing—saying, “Here’s the source document I referenced to arrive at this insight”—it can do that to some extent, but it’s not very reliable. So there’s this tendency to make things up, because it’s eager to please, and then there’s the issue of lack of transparency. You don’t really know where its outputs are coming from. Is that insight coming from a Reddit thread, or from an encyclical? The model itself doesn’t really know. So we needed to figure out how to leverage its mastery of syntax—its mastery of language—but ensure that everything it’s saying is grounded in primary source documents. And we had to find a way to minimize hallucinations. That’s where the research project, Magisterium AI, came from. We wanted to see how far we could go using scaffolding—different approaches that essentially fence in the model, keep it on rails. It took us about six months to figure out the right initial configuration. Then we needed more people to test the system. That’s when we did an interview with EWTN, and it kind of went viral, which was a big shock to us. We couldn’t get back online—there was too much traffic. And Father Philip had to reach out to Sam Altman to help us increase our rate limits. It was a pretty crazy time.

Robert Duncan: So you had Sam Altman—for people who may not know, he’s the CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT. So you were working with the top?

Matthew Sanders: Well, I should say, he was gracious enough to understand the importance of what we were trying to do. And he knew, given how small we were, that we wouldn’t be able to be prioritized from a compute perspective. So he was willing to step in and get us the capacity we needed to continue the project, which I’m very grateful to him for. It’s rather ironic, but if it wasn’t for Sam, we wouldn’t have been able to get back online and continue the work. And really, the work at the time was just trying to get as many philosophers, theologians, and canon lawyers as possible to test the system, to expose its vulnerabilities and deficiencies, and figure out what more we could do to make it more reliable. That’s eventually what led us to digitizing everything the Church has said, to grow the Catholic dataset and provide access to more. But that’s a more recent project.

Robert Duncan: Right. So you launch Magisterium AI. Just tell people what that is. You actually went online, and it was called Magisterium AI.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. What we ended up building, we call a compound AI system. For most people, you go to ChatGPT, and you interact with ChatGPT through the user interface. In the same way, we built a user interface for people to interact with our compound AI system. So it operates just like ChatGPT. You go and ask a question. The difference between Magisterium AI and interacting with ChatGPT directly is that if you ask ChatGPT a question, that question goes to the model. The model does a lot of highly complex geometry and math, and then it basically does next-token prediction and generates an answer. You’re going directly into the model’s brain, and it’s then spitting out an answer.

Robert Duncan: And for people who don’t know—Magisterium—what does that word mean?

Matthew Sanders: Oh, Magisterium?

Robert Duncan: Yeah.

Matthew Sanders: So Magisterium is the teaching authority of the Church. So it’s basically everything the Church has formally taught—that’s all encompassed within the Magisterium. And of course, the bishops and the Pope are the primary communicators of the Magisterium.

Robert Duncan: So for people coming into this cold, that means all the dogma and doctrine of the Catholic Church—official teaching—your AI system is meant to plumb those depths.

Matthew Sanders: That’s right. So essentially the project was: could we take everything the Church has said formally—all the doctrines and dogmas within the Magisterium—as well as notable scholarly work from the doctors and fathers of the Church, like Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. They’re not all formally part of the Magisterium, but they’re still very important voices. So we wanted to include their insights as well. The idea was to digitize all of this data and make it accessible to anyone in the world, on any device, in their native language. For me, becoming Catholic was a real challenge. It was difficult to understand the faith—I didn’t understand what a Franciscan was, I struggled with certain doctrines. It took a long time to piece it together. So I thought, I wish there were some kind of resource where any question I had, I could find an answer quickly and efficiently. That’s what Magisterium AI is meant to be. You ask a question, it looks across all these source documents—everything the Church has said—finds what’s relevant, and then distills that information so it’s accessible.

Robert Duncan: How many people are using it?

Matthew Sanders: Millions at this point.

Robert Duncan: Millions?

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. So there’s Magisterium AI, which is our own ChatGPT-like product—our user interface. The mission of the company is building and scaling Catholic AI. We spent a lot of time on the building part, but then the question became: how do we scale it? Because building Catholic AI is complicated—it takes a lot of energy and resources to do well. And if every organization had to climb that same mountain, scaling would take forever. So we decided we needed to let people build on top of us. That’s why we created an API—an application programming interface—which allows other organizations to use what we’ve built. For example, Hallow, the world’s number one prayer app—they use our API. We work under the hood in their chat application. So when someone asks a question in Hallow, they can be confident the answer is grounded in primary sources, provided by us. So by building Catholic AI, making it available through Magisterium AI, and allowing others to build on top of it, it enables the Church to leverage faithful AI faster.

Robert Duncan: Do you have age and demographic data on the people who are using it?

Matthew Sanders: No, not really. People can voluntarily provide that information if they want. We do have a personalization component to Magisterium AI. So if you provide that information, it helps, because the AI has more context. If you’re 13 years old, for example, it’s helpful for the system to know that, because it can try to explain things at that level. But it’s not required. Users are anonymized, and that’s intentional, because a lot of people are asking very personal questions. It’s safer for us to keep users anonymous out of respect for them. We do keep data to improve the product, but we don’t share that information without explicit permission.

Robert Duncan: So you can see what people are asking, but you don’t know who. What are some of the trends and patterns? The Church, especially in the United States, is interested in reaching people who have disaffiliated—the “nones.” As people interact with Magisterium AI, you must be getting real insight into their hangups, their questions, their points of confusion. What have you learned?

Matthew Sanders: The short answer is, I’ve learned a lot. I had some instincts about what people would ask, and many of those were confirmed. You see questions ranging from very big ones—what’s the point of the universe—to very personal struggles, like someone dealing with a particular issue, maybe even something like a sexual addiction. People are asking, they’re struggling, they feel lost or discouraged, and they’re looking for insight—from the popes, from the fathers—to help guide them. Those are all things we expected. But what surprised me is that when we first launched, we were focused on building a tool for pastors, for people working in chanceries, for catechists. So I expected more straightforward doctrinal questions—“What does the Church teach on this? Give me the sources.” And that’s still one of the most common types of queries. But what surprised me was how quickly it was adopted by the laity, and how many of the questions were highly pastoral in nature—which was a challenge for us when we first started building the product.

Robert Duncan: Like, “I have a friend who”—or “I have a family member”—”and I want to reach them”?

Matthew Sanders: Yes. Or, “I’m struggling with this particular thing,” or, “Here’s something that happened in my life and I’m not sure what the right thing to do is.”

Robert Duncan: Why do you think people are going to a machine to ask those questions?

Matthew Sanders: My intuition is it’s because they’re not finding someone in their immediate orbit who has studied the faith well enough to answer those questions. For most people, those people just aren’t there. Priests are extremely busy. People know they could ask their priest, but it’s difficult to get ahold of them, or they feel like they’re going to be judged. And so talking to some nameless, faceless machine feels safer than talking to a human.

Robert Duncan: I think that’s part of the core objection you hear. On one hand, these tools are solving a real problem—people are alone and don’t have anyone to talk to about these things. On the other hand, they may encourage that isolation, because some people who might have gone to another person now take the easier path that doesn’t require vulnerability. How do you see that?

Matthew Sanders: It is a problem. It’s a profound problem. Ideally, I don’t think Magisterium AI should have to exist. I wish it didn’t need to exist. I made it, yes—but mainly because there’s a bigger problem than that one, which is that people have very little hope of reforming their lives or ordering their lives if the truth is not available to them. That was my primary concern, because I was in that place. I was trying to make sense of the world, trying to figure out my purpose, and it was very difficult to get good answers. Even when you met someone who purported to represent the Church, what they said wasn’t always accurate—and I had no way to verify it. It was really hard. So what’s most important is that the truth is readily available to everyone. That’s one of the reasons Paul and the apostles went out. They didn’t spend a lot of time with every community—they couldn’t. They just wanted people to have the kernel of the truth, to point them in the right direction, and trusted that God would work through that. That’s how I see Magisterium AI. We’re trying to digitize everything the Church has said and make it accessible. Now, this other problem—people feeling isolated, fearing judgment, not trusting others enough to open up, not being well catechized—that’s real. And if those problems didn’t exist, there would be much less need for something like this. It would just be a research tool. It wouldn’t be something people sit and talk to about their problems all day. So it’s important to say: we didn’t build this to replace pastors, or catechists, or parents, or friends. We built it as a tool—to distill the wisdom and insight of the Church and make it accessible. And the hope is that by making it available, more people will take it upon themselves to learn the faith, internalize it, and live it—and that will make them more effective at evangelization.

Robert Duncan: Do you have any way of tracking whether the people who come and ask these questions—and get answers from Magisterium AI—actually advance? Whether their problems are resolved? You know, some people can be abusive to AIs, saying, “you’re stupid,” or swearing at it. I’m not sure how often they say, “thank you, you’ve answered my question, I’ll return to the Church now.” But do you have any way of tracking how effective it is?

Matthew Sanders: We do. I don’t know if I did a better job of explaining this before, but the users are anonymized. That said, we pay very close attention to the exchanges, because we’re always trying to evaluate the AI’s answers. We’re asking: could we have improved that answer? Could we have used different sources? Are there gaps in the knowledge base we need to fill? Did it have the right tone? Did it understand, in that moment, that the right course of action was to recommend speaking to a priest, rather than giving a direct answer? Sometimes it’s better not to give an answer, and to let a priest handle it, because there may be pastoral sensitivity around the issue. So we’re always trying to optimize the system. And for that reason, yes—we study the exchanges, and we see patterns. We see people come in basically yelling at Magisterium AI. They heard something on a podcast—“the Church says this”—they Google Catholic AI to check it, they find Magisterium AI, and now they’re unloading: “how wrong you are, is this true?” What’s fascinating is watching how, over the course of weeks, those conversations change. They move from that initial anger into something more fruitful. They start digging in. The conversation shifts from very specific objections to curiosity. And then eventually, you start seeing questions like: what does it mean to be a Catholic? How do you become a Catholic?

Robert Duncan: Really?

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. And then we also ask users to fill out surveys at certain intervals—after, say, 50 exchanges: “how’s your experience so far?” Then again later: “how’s it going?” We track those metrics over time. And at those points—and sometimes just spontaneously—we get feedback like: “thank you, I’ve entered the RCIA process, and Magisterium AI was very helpful.”

Robert Duncan: That’s the process to become Catholic?

Matthew Sanders: Yes. We get a lot of that. A lot. We also get feedback from parents, from catechists, from teachers preparing lesson plans. That’s what motivates me. This is a difficult project. You have people on the left who think it’s too conservative, people on the right who think it’s too liberal. Addressing that can be spiritually draining. But when you look at what users are actually saying—what their experience is—that’s what keeps me going. And also their willingness to provide feedback, to help improve the system. They want it to be better. That’s very encouraging.

Robert Duncan: So that leads into what you’re working on now. You just had a conference last fall called the Builders Forum. It was multifaceted, but one of the questions it tried to answer was how to off-ramp people—so that when they get to the point of wanting to enter the Church, you can guide them on how to do that and where to do that. So that’s a more real-world application. You think of AI as a technological, virtual service, but you’re adding to that the service of how to put people back into the world.

Matthew Sanders: Yeah. The off-ramping problem is one of the problems that preoccupies our time the most. As I said before, Magisterium AI was built to help distill the truth for people—to get the answers they’re looking for. And it’s important to note that when you’re speaking to it, you’re not really speaking to the AI system. Who you’re dialoguing with is the popes, the doctors and fathers of the Church. The AI is not rewarded for novel insights. We don’t want it accessing its neural net and providing its own ideas. It operates under very specific constraints. When someone asks a question, one system retrieves relevant documents, and another reads and distills them. The insights come from human beings. But the off-ramping problem is about recognizing when someone has, in a sense, intellectually converted. At that point, they might ask: what’s next? I’m interested in becoming Catholic—what does that mean? The AI can explain the OCIA process. Then they ask: how do I do that? You need to find a parish. How do I find a parish? Some people don’t even know to ask those questions. So we want the AI to be able to suggest it—to say, have you thought about speaking to a priest? Then the challenge is: how do we move them from Magisterium AI into a real parish? And is that always the right step? Sometimes it might be better to connect them to a lay movement or a community where they can engage with real people. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. The Church has been working on this for a long time, so we’re identifying partners—places and people we can connect them to. Then ideally we stay in touch and see how it goes. Based on that, we can determine whether we need to build additional tools, or whether there’s pastoral intelligence we can pass back to bishops and priests to help them be more effective. That’s one of the next phases—taking the insight we’ve gathered and making sure it’s fed back to the shepherds.

Robert Duncan: So maybe we should close by talking about Pope Leo. When he chose his name, he mentioned the challenge the Church is facing with artificial intelligence. What did his election—and that choice of name—mean to you personally?

Matthew Sanders: I was greatly relieved. Mainly because I have a fairly strong conviction about where this technology is going and the kind of impact it’s going to have on society. It’s going to be profound. And I worry that if this transition into a new age isn’t managed properly, there could be a lot of fallout.

Robert Duncan: And everybody’s talking about all this—if you go on YouTube or Spotify, all the podcasts are warning. It sounds like a lot of the warning is coming from the people who are actually creating AI.

Matthew Sanders: That’s right. And this is what’s very confusing. The people who are closest to the technology, for the most part, are setting off flares. They’re saying: listen, we see where this is going in the next six months to a year, and we don’t see a world where this doesn’t start causing significant unemployment—displacing a lot of human beings. And I think a lot of us still think of AI as this disembodied reality, but now we’re starting to embody it in robots. So this isn’t just a white-collar issue. It’s a blue-collar issue too. This impacts all labor in one way or another. Then you have another group saying: no, it’s going to be fine. This is just like the Industrial Revolution. Yes, there will be unemployment in certain sectors, but new jobs will be created—it’ll all balance out. Now, over certain time horizons, maybe that’s true. There was a moment where hiring for developers dropped close to zero—companies just weren’t hiring anymore. And now hiring is going up again. That’s confusing. If AI is replacing people, why are companies hiring developers? It’s because AI is starting to eat into other fields, so companies need developers to build the AI and the scaffolding around it. So yes, it is displacing work—it’s just not displacing developers right now, because we need them to build the systems. It’s confusing because you have these two narratives. You have people—especially in corporations—who want to underhype it, because they don’t want to rattle investors. You have people in government who don’t want a strong public reaction, because they don’t yet have answers, so they kick the can. What concerns me is that we should be listening to the people closest to the technology. And I think in the next two, five, and ten years, there will be waves of significant economic realignment. I think the Church, like in the past, is poised to help shepherd humanity through these transitions. But her intellectual and spiritual formation is going to be needed more than ever. So to have a Pope say, “I recognize the world is about to change, and I’m committing my papacy to ensuring the Church is pastorally ready to respond”—that was very encouraging.

Robert Duncan: Do you think the leadership of the Church—from universities all the way through the clergy—faces a particular challenge in understanding this as a major issue? Because they might assume, rightly or wrongly, that their livelihoods won’t be affected. Priests aren’t going to be replaced by robots. We’ll still need theologians, people working in Caritas, service roles. Is there a mentality that this issue doesn’t really touch them as much?

Matthew Sanders: I mean, I think from a jobs perspective, you’re absolutely right. I don’t think any of the pastoral workers per se are really at risk of being unemployed by this. I think there are certainly people working in administration in the Church who have to recognize that if the Church adopts this technology—which would make sense, because it would free up more time for pastors to focus on pastoral work as opposed to administration—there is some risk of disruption there. But I generally agree. I think more than anything, it’s just—they’re not really aware. Maybe “ignorance” is too strong a word, but they’re just not aware. And that’s largely because of how they were educated. They’re philosophers, theologians, pastoral workers. I think it’s very easy for them to look at this technology and say, “yeah, I’ve been around 70 years, I’ve seen lots of these technologies—this is just another one.” And they don’t understand how different this is, how extensive it’s going to be. And if they think they’re busy now—I think in 10 years they’re going to be a lot busier. Because there will be a lot more people having existential crises. People who no longer have a job to go to. Maybe the government provides basic needs—they have a roof, they’re not starving—but they don’t know what to do with themselves. The things they spent their whole life cultivating—the gifts they thought they had—are no longer needed by the economy. So what do they do with their time? And I think a lot of people, because they feel ill-equipped to answer that question, will turn to distraction. They don’t have good answers, so they just keep themselves distracted. And I think that’s the cataclysm we’re potentially heading toward. If we can’t find a way, at scale, to provide human intellectual and spiritual formation—to help people understand who they are, remind them of their dignity, help them discern their gifts, their vocation, and find ways to contribute to their communities—then we’re going to be dealing with a lot of people going off an existential cliff.

Robert Duncan: Pope Leo chose his name in part because of the AI challenge. You’ve developed an AI system that reaches millions of people. Has he reached out to you? Have you reached out to him?

Matthew Sanders: No—he hasn’t reached out, and I haven’t reached out. I think he’s doing exactly what he needs to be doing. I like to think that what we’re doing is directly responding to his call. He’s cautioned about the use of AI—we have to be very prudent. We can’t anthropomorphize it. We can’t rely on it as a crutch. For instance, priests are very busy, and there may be a temptation to use something like Magisterium AI to generate a homily on the fly, hit print, and read it. But that’s not what it was created for. It’s meant to augment pastoral workers. A good homily, if it’s really going to land, has to reflect the unique pastoral reality. Magisterium AI can help by drawing on what the popes, the doctors, and the fathers have said—that’s valuable. It allows priests to access that easily and weave it into their homilies. But it’s still a high level of abstraction. If a homily is going to land, the priest has to take time to shape it. So I think he recognizes that these tools can support the Church’s ministry, but we have to be cautious. We need proper formation and training so people know how to use them well. I like to think what we’re doing is in service to the Church. We pay close attention to what he’s signaling and try to build in a way that he would support. We also work with people in the Church—we have a theological advisory committee to ensure we’re focused on the right problems and improving the product in the right ways. But he’s a busy man. I don’t think he has any immediate need to talk to me.

Robert Duncan: Besides the words of caution that he’s outlined, what else specifically have we gotten from him so far? What indications has he given for where he might take the Church on this issue?

Matthew Sanders: Well, I think more than anything else, he’s mentioned before—and I’m paraphrasing—but he believes that building this technology in the right way is like participating in a divine act of creation.

It’s almost a sacred responsibility to use the tools available to us to serve the mission of the Church, to help the Church in its mission of evangelization. So I think what you’ll see is that the real area we need to focus on right now is helping—or reminding—humanity what life is supposed to be about. Because the way we understand life is about to be disrupted. And I think in a good way. For too long, the economy has looked at us as widgets—part of a larger machine, contributing to that machine running, whose purpose is to generate profit or economic output. But that’s an unhealthy anthropology. And I think what he can do, in his role—and given how respected he is, and how many people are listening right now because they sense the disruption coming—is to re-baseline what the human condition is supposed to be. To remind people of their dignity. To remind them that just because AI and robots are doing more of these GDP-type jobs, that doesn’t mean there won’t be work to do—work we can choose to commit ourselves to. And that we can refocus on what gives life meaning: growing in our relationship with God, serving others, cultivating our vocation. So I think he’ll remind us that this could be one of the greatest opportunities we’ve ever had to rediscover our humanity. I hope he focuses on that, because I think that’s what’s needed. Even large corporations and AI labs are looking to him for that kind of leadership. And then, as we become more aware of how these tools can add value, I think he—and the dicasteries—can point to specific technologies and say: we think these can be helpful in this way, and we encourage you to use them.

Robert Duncan: Matthew Sanders, thanks for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Matthew Sanders: Thank you.

Curtis Martin, founder of the FOCUS, argues that both trends are real. While many cradle Catholics continue to drift away, a distinct and unexpected movement is emerging: young people, often college-educated, are discovering the faith for the first time and entering it with intensity.

In this conversation, he reflects on nearly three decades of campus evangelization, the changing cultural conditions shaping belief, and why he sees this moment not as a contradiction—but as a turning point.

At the center is a contested idea: evangelization. What it is, what it isn’t, and why—despite renewed emphasis from Church leadership—it remains widely misunderstood, even within Catholic institutions.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The role of college campuses as a strategic “entry point” for revival

• Whether political polarization is driving religious interest

• The influence of figures like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan on religious curiosity

• Internal tensions within the Church over how explicitly to propose the faith

• Whether this moment represents a durable renewal—or a temporary spike

This is a conversation about competing narratives, institutional uncertainty, and whether or not the Catholic Church is witnessing the early stages of a genuine revival.

Transcript

Robert Duncan: Curtis Martin, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Curtis Martin: Great to be with you.

Robert Duncan: I’d like to frame this conversation around the alleged rise in interest and in conversions to Catholicism. The New York Times reported in the run-up to Easter that there were many new converts across American dioceses. However, there are other studies, for example, a Pew survey that also found that the general trend still held true. In other words, people who were raised Catholic, cradle Catholics, are still disaffiliating. So, it seems like two things can be true at the same time. There are new converts, but at the same time, Christianity and Catholicism is becoming less popular. So, what’s going on?

Curtis Martin: I think two things can be true at the same time, but not in the same way. And there are two things that are very much going on. Those who have been raised Catholic are disengaged, as they have been for decades now, and they’re drifting away. And that’s been a real trend. What is unique and is also true is a re-engagement, both of those who drifted away a while ago and are returning, those who were never Catholic but may have been raised Christian, and those who were never Christian are now becoming Catholic. And it’s a significant trend. I mean, we’re talking about our work on college campuses, and college campuses — just to go back, we’ve been at this for 30 years. They’re not the place to go to become Catholic. It was the place to go to leave the faith. But we’re talking dozens of campuses with hundreds of converts. Texas A&M breaks the record with 500 this year alone. But it’s taking place all over the place. And it’s not just FOCUS. It’s not just the United States. It’s a global phenomenon. But we’re seeing a large dose of it in the United States. And through focus, both in parishes and on campuses, there’s a very real trend that is trending towards the young and trending at a higher percentage than usual towards men. So young men in particular, young women, and then people of all ages are all coming in. And it’s extraordinary to see. I think there’s some fun things we can talk about.

Robert Duncan: Just for people who don’t know who you are, tell us a little bit about FOCUS. You mentioned that you work on college campuses.

Curtis Martin: Yeah, I founded focus about 28 years ago. We’ve been working on college campuses all that time. About 10 years ago, we started experimenting in parishes as well. What does work mean? It means we send live missionaries onto campuses, into parishes, and they start to work with the people and engage them. The average priest in a busy parish doesn’t have time to do a lot of outreach. So we keep doing outreach, welcoming new people in. So we like to say we can’t make a parish or a campus a great ministry. But if the priest does, we can make it big. So we’re able to invite people in. And it’s been extraordinarily fruitful. 28 years of consistent growth year over year. And in the last few years, explosive new momentum to even greater growth.

Robert Duncan: Great. So one interesting intersection is there’s a religion analyst, Ryan Burge, who said that an important segment of the new converts are people who are from maybe higher-income families or the college-educated, which is sort of the opposite of what’s happening in Europe. The more college-educated you are, the less likely it is that you’re going to continue to go to church when you graduate.

Curtis Martin: No, I think that trend is true on both the United States and Europe. And it was true in the United States until maybe post-COVID, where all of a sudden this swing started to happen. And I think Europe, in talking to friends, I think that it’s happening probably first in Eastern Europe and then hopefully in Western Europe, where this trend is going to take place, where people are returning, even those with education. But let’s be honest. I mean, the universities have been loaded for bear against the church for decades. And so to recognize the attack in the classroom through deconstruction, radical theories, the attack in the lives of students through student life programs and kind of the free love activities that are on campus, all of this undermines the faith. And yet in the midst of all of that, almost like salmon beginning to swim upstream into fresh water. It’s kind of a weird thing. Who would do that? We’re a saltwater fish. These young people are swimming against the current of the culture and surprising the Church and Church leaders by their interest. I actually think it presents a tremendous challenge to the Church. Are we ready to welcome them? I don’t think we are. So what can we do to welcome them? Because they will need to be welcomed personally, graciously, or they will drift right into the Church and right through the Church, and hopefully not, but right back outside of the Church. So it’s a tremendous opportunity and challenge for us who have faith to recognize now is the time. The fields are ripe for harvest. Jesus said that 2,000 years ago, but it is uniquely present in my life. I’ve never seen anything like what we’re living through.

Robert Duncan: To what extent do you think this sort of cynical read of this trend, which would say that this revival is in part a proxy for political polarization, that as people are more divided politically, conservatives are more likely to embrace sort of a hardline religious take or perspective?

Curtis Martin: I think that cynical read, as is often the case, is half true. I mean, there’s a certain sense in which pressures are absolutely at work. It doesn’t mean that necessarily people are functioning with the same level of despair as the critics have. And so I think what’s happening is that the young people today have drunk deeply of the culture and are wildly dissatisfied. That doesn’t mean they take their dissatisfaction and move to the church. I think what we’re seeing in talking to them, they find Christ, He satisfies, and then from a place of satisfaction, they move into the church. So there’s a shift in experience and temperament and personality that people are experiencing first that are Christ-centered, these experiences, and then they’re finding a home. The skeptics would say, well, I’m a grumpy liberal, and now you’re becoming a grumpy conservative. Actually, the grumpiness is the part that’s changing. When you meet these people, you were at NYU, you were in New York, I mean, these people live differently. They’re filled with joy. You don’t find a lot of joy in the culture. And to take the joy out of this journey would be to miss the entire point completely.

Robert Duncan: So do you feel that FOCUS is there to catch this new wave of converts that maybe many of them have discovered Catholicism on their own? Or is FOCUS part of the agency, the causal explanation for why this rise is happening in the first place?

Curtis Martin: I think it’s both and. I mean, the reality of the matter is it’s the opposite of a vicious cycle. It’s a cycle of grace. And so God is working first, and then we go out into the field. But our presence in the field also increases the energy that draws people to grace, and then the grace returns. And so it’s this wonderful cycle that we see. And so oftentimes our missionaries are working very, very hard. They’re spending hundreds of hours with people, and the response rate is relatively slow but real. Other times people just fall into our lap. We showed up in Ireland. The first person we met walked up to us and said, “What are you guys doing?” “Well, we’re Catholic missionaries.” “Are you kidding me? I was just hoping that I could meet some Catholics.” A divine appointment. So sometimes it’s super, super easy. Sometimes they’re knocking our door down. Our job is to go out and befriend people. Because God loves us. He loves them. And to befriend them, period. But in the midst of those friendships, Christianity comes up. Catholicism comes up. And so we’ve seen momentum for 28 years. But there is something different going on right now. And it’s not just in the first world. It’s going on throughout the world. But excitingly enough, in the first world, which has been the part of the world that’s been so devastated by the lack of faith in North America, Western Europe, and we’re seeing France. FOCUS doesn’t have a presence in France. But articles are being written about a return to the faith there as well. So we’re a very small player in this much bigger work of God. But I grew up in Southern California surfing. And when the waves come, when surf is up, go surfing. And the waves are up. The waves of grace are up. So it’s a great time to be out there working with people.

Robert Duncan: I want to talk more with you about the reasons for that. But before I do, can you just give me a clearer sense of what FOCUS missionaries do? And if somebody came to you and wants to be a FOCUS missionary, what do you train them to do? What are the specific sort of …

Curtis Martin: Yeah, so they’re trained in the Catholic life. So they’re praying. They’re praying a holy hour every day. They’re going to Mass every day. It’s the foundation of everything, the relationship with Jesus Christ. You can’t give what you don’t have. And so they’re living a life of deep faith. And then from that overflow, they go out and do their work. I remember I was playing volleyball one day with a group of FOCUS missionaries. And a guy walks up and says, “So what do you guys do?” And I said, “We go out and live with college students and share a life with them.” And I’m waiting to cycle in on the volleyball court. And he goes, “Well, you just hang out with them?” “Yeah.” “And they talk to you?” “Yeah.” He goes, “I don’t think that’ll work.” I said, “It’s working right now. You came up to me and asked me what we’re doing here.” You know what happens at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, at USC, at Harvard, when people are together, particularly when they’re radiating joy, people are attracted to it almost like a moth to light. I mean, our hearts were made for joy. We live in a world with not much joy.

When you see a group of people living in joy, we just find ourselves gravitating. We have a gal who just left our staff after about seven years. It’s her first day of college. She saw a group of people that were joyful and happy, all by herself, desperately alone, thinking, what am I going to do? And she just kind of gravitates to the group. The group opens up the circle a little more. And they’re laughing. And she said, this is interesting. She finds out, well, they’re Catholic. That’s interesting. She wasn’t Catholic. And they’re all involved with FOCUS, either staff or students. And she goes, interesting. They invite her to dinner. She went. She didn’t have any other friends. And she said, it was interesting. She had been raised Buddhist in Asia. She had no concept of Christianity. But these friendships made it so that by the end of the first semester, by Christmas, she wanted to be a Catholic. And by the end of the second semester, she was Catholic. So these people are converting from all walks of life to Christ because other people who know Christ live friendship and joy right in front of them.

Robert Duncan: So one thing I remember from my time at NYU and my encounters with FOCUS missionaries there was that the FOCUS missionaries would not only organize prayer groups and facilitate Bible studies, but also that they would approach people sort of randomly, and in our case, Washington Square Park, and just strike up conversations with people they may not have known if they were Catholic or not. So how do you train people for that kind of cold call, so to speak?

Curtis Martin: No, the primary work is friendship. And so it’s activities like that. But we also do train our staff to be able to start a conversation from nothing. And what’s surprising is most people think, well, that’s weird. That’s going to be awkward. And it does feel awkward. But people are desperately lonely, more lonely than at any point in time in history. And when we lean in in a friendly sort of way, it never goes really badly. People never say, ah, get out of here. They never call the police. They never start a physical altercation. Some people say, you know what, no thanks. And that’s fine. We respect that and move on. But frequently, we’re met by people who are intrigued. I was just flying out to Rome on the plane. The woman, I was traveling with one of our priest friends. And the gal next to him said, I just came into the Church last week. And they started a two-hour conversation on the airplane. Just trying to be present. We like to think of the model of Jesus, who didn’t sit in heaven, but rather took flesh and came down and shared life, first with Joseph and Mary, but then later with the apostles. This radical attention. I mean, it’s crazy how much time he spent. Think about it. He was 30 years old when he started his public ministry, which means he had the biggest job in the history of the world. And he was 30 years old and living at home. Most people say, really, he probably ought to get a job. But think about where, it sounds like my house, where he was living. He was living with the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, the greatest place on earth since the Garden of Eden. No rush to get on with it. And when he got on with it, he really got on with it. But he did the same thing. He just went and lived a radical relationship with 12 men for three years. Didn’t get on an airplane. He could have come when there were airplanes. Didn’t use a phone. Could have come when there were phones. Didn’t even travel outside the Middle East or the Holy Land as an adult. It was a crazy, deep dive. And that’s what we’re offering. Deep dive first with God, love Him, and spend lots of time with Him. And then deep dive with a few other people and spend lots of time with Him. And it’s changing lives.

Robert Duncan: I’m sure you get this a lot. Some people listening may think, oh, gosh, that sounds more Protestant than Catholic.

Curtis Martin: Right.

Robert Duncan: Well, what have you learned from the way Protestants, evangelicals do outreach?

Curtis Martin: No, I mean, the evangelicals and the Protestants are great. I mean, they do a wonderful job. But I was asked one time to go back and give a talk to Campus Crusade for Christ, or CRU as it’s known now. I said, why did you leave CRU? I was away from the Church for a few years, formed by CRU. Why did you leave CRU and return to the Catholic Church? I said, well, you taught me to memorize Scripture. And it was one word in one of the verses you taught me, the Great Commission. Go teach them to observe all that I’ve commanded you. As an evangelical, I believed most of what he taught. But as a Catholic, I believe in the real presence in the Eucharist. I believe in Marian devotion. I believe in bishops. And to be able to see this is all that he taught. And so we have the encouragement by the example of our evangelicals, but we’re bringing an authentically Catholic Gospel. And the Church is very clear about this. So not all Catholics read all the Church documents, but St. Paul VI said the Church exists in order to evangelize. It’s her deepest identity. By the very nature of that statement, you can’t make that statement about a lot of different things. A lot of things aren’t your deepest identity. But according to St. Paul VI, in one of the most beautiful documents on evangelization, he says the Church exists in order to evangelize. It’s her deepest identity. So when people say, well, that sounds Protestant, I would say, I think you’ve got a memory problem. Our deepest identity is that we would be evangelizing. We should be inspired by them, just as we should be inspired by the fact that they read their Scriptures regularly. We should, too. We should understand it within the heart of the Church. And that’s a beautiful thing about being Catholic.

Robert Duncan: Great. So let’s talk about evangelization and what works and what doesn’t work. The company I work for, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, their 2025-2028 Mission Directive is to “equip bishops, clergy, religious, and the laity in evangelizing those who are religiously unaffiliated or disaffiliated from the Church with a special focus on young adults and the youth.” To some extent — first, I mean, you may want to react to that. That’s the mission priority. If that’s our deepest identity, why is it now a mission priority?

Curtis Martin: Well, I had the good fortune of serving the bishop’s conference and the committee on evangelization. Bishop Barron, that’s his language. He was referencing the nones, those who have no religious affiliation. It was a strong emphasis that was coming about. And it took a while to get there for the national priority. But I remember sitting in the committee meetings, I served for six years, and I think it’s just this, we have to return to who we are. I would argue that in some ways Catholics have a memory problem. We need to remember who we are. In fact, memory problem can be quite serious. If you have Alzheimer’s, it will kill you, and it’s a memory problem. So knowing who we are is critically important. And, in fact, the key, the first sentence in the Catechism of the Catholic Church talks about knowing. It quotes Jesus. There are 2,865 articles in the Catechism. The first three sentences are quotes from Jesus, Paul, and Peter before Article I. The first sentence, Jesus says, this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent. To remember, to know. And so we want to awaken Catholics to this knowledge that it’s important to know things about God, and Catholics do. We know when he was born. We know that he died. But do we know him? Do we talk to him? It’s actually easier to be in relationship with him now than it was 2,000 years ago. 2,000 years ago, you would have had to get to Palestine to meet him. Because of the resurrection, he can meet you in prayer at any moment and at every moment of your life. He’s radically present to you. But do we take the time, or do we allow ourselves to be distracted and then forget who we are and why we’re here? So I think the bishops are wisely calling Catholics to remember who we are, maybe more important, whose we are. We’re God’s. We were created by him and for him. And then to get on mission. And so I love the emphasis that the bishops have. I think it’s also true in the Universal Church. I serve and have served on the Dicastery for the Vatican here on evangelization. It’s gone through a couple of name changes. But I was a founding member of the council when it began for the new evangelization, and it’s kind of morphed, and it’s now the Dicastery for Evangelization. But this is the Holy Father’s effort on a universal level to evangelize. And I’m hearing very similar things. I actually think that in some ways the U.S. bishops are quite a bit more clear than the international bishops. And that’s not a criticism of the international bishops. Evangelization means something very different. I served at the Synod of Bishops here in Rome with Pope Benedict. We were together with the Holy Father for three and a half weeks. And in the first few days, I realized evangelization means one thing in Western Europe, the United States, kind of waking up comatose Catholics, if you will, and then getting them on mission. And that’s a great sense. But in Asia and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it means finding resources because people are coming by the hundreds of thousands, and there’s just no resources. But in Islamic countries, it means if I baptize this person, they’re going to burn the village down. How do I welcome people without setting off cultural chaos? Those are very different questions. And so it makes sense that the international bishops would be a little more disjointed because they’re actually answering parts of that question differently. U.S. bishops are highly aligned on the realization that the Catholic Church needs to become an evangelizing force. It’s who we are, and we’ve forgotten who we are.

Robert Duncan: So that’s a really interesting global sort of view of how it can mean different things in different contexts. In the U.S. context, you’ve said on some of these meetings, that this language was developed by particular bishops. But speaking to you now, it seems very plain what evangelization means in the U.S. context. But nevertheless, there are meetings that develop. And so I wonder, what are the different shades of perspective as that language is crafted and the specifics of how that priority sort of come to fruition? What are the different perspectives or considerations that could take place?

Curtis Martin: No, I think it’s a great question. I would say it’s clearer, but I don’t think it’s clear. In fact, I would say that you mentioned this a little while ago, but 28 years ago when we were announcing, hey, we’re going to do this with FOCUS, the typical response was, “I don’t think that’s Catholic. What do you mean you’re going to evangelize?” And there was a resistance to the notion of evangelization. Thanks to the great work of the Holy Fathers, the American bishops, the work of God, hopefully to some degree the work of FOCUS, there’s an openness to evangelization that is dramatically different than it was 30 years ago.

Robert Duncan: What would explain the resistance?

Curtis Martin: Well, I do think the only experience they’d had of evangelization were evangelicals or Mormons, you know, going door to door and knocking, like, we’re not kind of the — nothing wrong with going door to door, but that’s not the typical mode. And so there was just kind of this stiffening in the back. Even I would say the same thing was true 30 years ago when we said, we’re going to do small group Bible studies. And a response that you’d hear from Catholics is, I don’t know if we should be studying the Bible, because that’s what Protestants did, and Protestants, God bless them, would come up with wrong conclusions. The Catholic Church isn’t the true Church. And so there was a nervousness, and to be able to lead by example, not get into the argument, I don’t think explanation works nearly as well as demonstration. So we just demonstrated, you can study the Scriptures and evangelize young people, and they will come to faith. I mean, now FOCUS, by the grace of God, is the largest vocational resource in the Church. More men in seminary, more women in the convents, more young people getting married and really intending what the Church intends when it talks about marriage.

That’s all happening through evangelization and Scripture study. And so I would say today the idea of evangelization would be met much more warmly, but not much more clearly. You get into a conversation, people say, yeah, I’m in favor of evangelization. Well, let’s talk about that. Well, you know, I think it’s important to be welcoming. Okay, that’s hospitality, that’s not evangelization. Well, I think it’s important to be forgiving. Okay, that’s forgiveness, that’s not evangelization. Evangelization is in the midst of this relationship to be able to share with somebody clearly that there’s a God who loves them, and that we are separated from His love because of sin. Adam and Eve sinned first in our sin, and it’s a big problem. It’s an insurmountable problem. We sinned against an infinitely good God. We have an infinite debt that we can’t pay. And Jesus Christ, the only one who could because He was God and man, came and took our sins upon Himself and reunited us with God through His passion and death. But it’s not enough to know that. That’s the gift. But you have to open the gift and receive it. And do you want to do that and accept Him as Lord and as Savior? And our experience is as Catholics make these decisions explicitly, even though implicitly was already kind of there, when it becomes explicit, it changes everything. You can imagine being in a relationship with a girl, and it’s nice and you’re getting to know each other, and all of a sudden it comes to the point where you say, I love you. Now, you must have loved her two minutes earlier, or you couldn’t have said it. You’d be a liar. But you hadn’t said it yet. And when you declare your love, it changes a relationship. And most Catholics have never had an opportunity. I have a priest friend, and he said he was talking to his dad. He goes, Dad, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus? I’ll clean it up for the podcast. But he said, What the heck? (That wasn’t) the real word. What the heck are you talking about? I go to Mass every Sunday. It’s just, he’s a good guy. He goes to Mass every Sunday. His son’s a priest. But the idea of a personal relationship with Christ just isn’t a category that Catholics were comfortable with. And that’s a tragedy.

Imagine if somebody said, Well, Curtis, do you have a personal relationship with your wife? And I said, Well, what the heck are you talking about? I have dinner with her every night. You’d say, There’s something weird about that marriage. Of course I have a personal relationship with my wife. And our relationship with God should be reflected. God created marriage as an icon of our relationship with Him and His relationship as a blessed trinity amongst the three persons of the trinity. And so this relationship piece is critical. And we’re getting the word out, and people are hearing it. But when people talk today about evangelization, they’re not as clear about that. They’ll frequently replace it with something. Well, you know, I teach catechism. Okay, that’s catechesis. That’s not evangelization. If we know what it is, and I’m seeing a dramatic swing. We’re in Denver, and we just got a new archbishop, Archbishop Golka. And he preached the Gospel at his installation Mass. It was just Easter Sunday, a couple days later. And the priest who was involved with FOCUS as a college student is now a priest. He’s our pastor, Father Greg. And he got a lot of people there on Easter Sunday that don’t come all the time. And he just preached the Gospel and invited people to make a decision for Christ. And then kind of jokingly at the end said, By the way, I hope to see you next week. We do this every week because a lot of those people, the church was packed, standing room only. And there was a second Mass going on in the hall because so many people were there for Sunday. That should be every Sunday.

Robert Duncan: Yeah, what is going on with Denver? I mean, Denver is seen as, you know, for decades now, a home of so much of this Catholic life. News agencies have been founded there, FOCUS.

Curtis Martin: Absolutely.

Robert Duncan: So what’s going on in that diocese?

Curtis Martin: Well, I don’t want to oversimplify, John Paul II came there for a week in 1993, World Youth Day. And it was extraordinary. I would happen to be there. I didn’t live in Denver at the time. And I don’t know that I ever had been to Denver, but I was there. I’m traveling this week with Dr. Edward Sri. Dr. Edward Sri and I were there. Tim Gray was there. Archbishop Chaput, at that time he was the Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, was there. And it was amazing. I remember being at a youth rally and the emcees said, who was at World Youth Day in 1993? And none of the youth raised their hands because they were all too young. But everybody backstage raised their hand. Like, oh, Jeff Cavins. It was a massive impact. And within a couple of years, the Pope had appointed Archbishop Chaput to Denver. He had become a dear friend by that time. I met him the week of World Youth Day. And he asked me to come and move FOCUS to Denver and move my family to Denver so we could launch FOCUS. And it just became this gathering place. And I do think we’ve been blessed. Cardinal Stafford was there before Archbishop Chaput, then Archbishop Chaput, then Archbishop Aquila, and now Archbishop Golka. We’ve had great leadership. The seminary’s gone through tremendous renewal. And so there’s lots of stuff going on. Endow is there. The Catholic Biblical School is there. Camp Wojtyla is there, again, named after John Paul II, his baptismal name, Karol Wojtyła. All of these things flowing to some degree from an inspiration that came from, I would argue, the greatest man on earth at that time coming and sharing a week with people in Denver. It’s a great place to be.

Robert Duncan: So maybe to get into a bit more of the specifics with regard to helping the bishops do this work of evangelization, if a bishop doesn’t feel, or a person or their staff doesn’t feel that they’re equipped to do evangelization, maybe they reacted the way you described, saying, this feels weird. What do you tell them?

Curtis Martin: Well, I always think that our strategy from the very beginning has been coalition of the willing. I’m not trying to convince anybody. We’re out having conversations, and some people lean in and say, that’s very interesting. Other people sit back and cross their arms and say, that’s fine. I’m not trying to convince you. I want to go with those who want to talk. And so, and FOCUS has grown. And it was actually Pope Benedict, before he was pope, I had an opportunity to meet with Cardinal Ratzinger in the early formative days of FOCUS. And on this issue, I said, the meeting was arranged, and I said, “Your Eminence, we have a limitation we’re placing on ourselves, and it may kill us before we even get started. And that is, we don’t want to go anywhere where the local bishop doesn’t bless us. And we really think it’s important that, you know, the Church is the Church. There’s one Church, and it’s built on bishops. And we want it to be functioning under their authority and with their blessing.” And Cardinal Ratzinger, he’s a very soft-spoken man. He leaned forward and said, “Do you know 10 bishops?” And I said, “I don’t know if I know 10.” And he goes, “If you go to the bishops you know, and God blesses what you’re doing, they will tell their friends, and you will never have a shortage of bishops.” And I think that’s the brilliance. We don’t need to convince the skeptics. Over time, they will either age out or their hearts will soften. But there’s no sense in spending a lot of time with them. Go where you’re wanted, and there’s never been a shortage. We’ve never not grown in FOCUS because of a lack of bishop support. And so it’s been wonderful to see, not only have they supported us in the sense of sending missionaries to their diocese, but they support us in a way we never would have anticipated. They put some of their best, most faithful, most talented priests in the venues we serve, whether it’s a campus or a parish. And that’s an unbelievable gift because one of the things I can testify after 30 years is the priesthood is real, it’s powerful. And I don’t want to oversimplify, but in some ways what we’re doing are bringing people who don’t go to church already, either they’re not Catholic or they’re not practicing, back to the church, to the sacraments, which are offered by the priest. And so that’s powerful. If the priest doesn’t love his priesthood, if he doesn’t love people, if he doesn’t know the Scriptures, if he’s not clear about Christ, they’ll walk away again. And so it’s been amazing to watch this real clarity. And I think the renewal in the lives of the bishops and the lives of the priests has been something that’s been extraordinary to watch for the last 30 years. It’s real, it’s very noticeable. And as a layman, I have no control over it whatsoever, but I can rejoice in it. I feel like I have a front row seat. It’s like you get invited to an athletic event, an NBA game or whatever, and somebody says, you can have the front row seat. I’m not playing the game, but I’m really close to the action. And to be able to see the amazing things that are going on in the lives of the priests and the bishops and the young seminarians will be at the North American College this week and it’s just amazing to see. I’m filled with hope when I see these young, bright, talented, but more importantly, faithful men who are studying and will be the priests of the future very, very quickly.

And because of the nature of the North American College, these men are from all over the country. They’re getting to know each other, but they’re also getting to know leaders in the Church. And so statistically, they’re more likely to become bishops if they’re here than if they were at another seminary back in the States. So the leadership of the Church, not just the priests, but the leadership in all likelihood of the next generation are passing in a very unique way through the North American College for the United States. And it’s just so encouraging to see the quality of these men. And as I travel to the seminaries, we do a lot of work with seminarians now, and absolutely amazing. Not only are the seminaries getting more full, but the quality, and really, quality’s so important. People talk about growth. Well, you got to talk about quality first. If I came home from the doctor and said, I have a growth, that wouldn’t be a good thing. That’d be a bad thing. Growth of what? We’re talking about growth of vibrant, faithful, joyful men in the seminary, but men and women who are pursuing God’s will wherever He’s leading them. And it’s extraordinary, but it’s because of the quality of what God’s doing individually in their lives that makes the quantity something you’d want to count.

Robert Duncan: Earlier, you said that mercy and welcome are not, these are not, this is not what evangelization is. If I were going to steel man, maybe some of the arguments that bishops who may be more skeptical of your approach would be to say, okay, as a pastor, there are a lot of people who feel alienated, actively alienated by the Church and the Church’s attitudes in the past towards people who have been excluded, the LGBT community or migrants. And so actually evangelization needs to be, before you can do the work of evangelization, you actually have to prioritize welcome and mercy.

Curtis Martin: No, I absolutely agree with that. I’m not saying that welcome or mercy aren’t important. They’re absolutely essential, but let’s use words the way they’re intended to be used, and that is not evangelization. If I hand you a cup of water, that is a corporal work of mercy, and it’s beautiful, and Jesus tells us we should do it. But to say that’s evangelization would be to misuse words. Let me give you an example from your old hometown. So we got to, folks got to NYU, and you know the community well. I mean, the LGBT community is very active in that part of New York, and so we were there, and there was a lot of concern. We were committed, faithful Catholics, and there was actually a town hall meeting to consider whether we should be expelled. And so the meeting starts to happen, and it’s not going well. The folks who are agitating for change and for our removal are making the classic arguments that are made. Catholics are judgmental, blah, blah, blah, and all of these things can be true. I don’t believe they are true, and what happened next demonstrates the truth. A young man got up and said, “I just want to testify as a homosexual that I know these people, and they’ve never been bigoted to me. They’ve been kind and loving. And as a Catholic, I live in a gay community, but I experience bigotry from my gay friends because I choose to live chastely. So the only bigotry I’ve experienced is actually coming from the gay community, not from the Catholic community that you’re concerned about.” And the meeting was over, and defensiveness was dropped, and we’ve developed wonderful friendships with people who are living alternative lifestyles. I mean, the fact of the matter is, you go on a college campus, everybody’s sleeping with somebody. Chastity is not happening on college campuses very often. So it really doesn’t matter, but we’re not a chastity program. We’re an evangelization program. My hope is to introduce you to Jesus Christ. He will call you to chastity, whether you’re heterosexual or homosexual. But that’s secondary, again, really important, but different than evangelization. My hope would be that you or anybody we work with would know that God loves them, because I do believe the world thinks that God doesn’t love them, the Christian God doesn’t love them, and that Catholics don’t love them. And that’s just simply not my experience. We’re all sinners. We all make mistakes. But my experience is that, I mean, I worked in an AIDS hospice sponsored by Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity for dying AIDS patients. That is primarily a ministry to homosexual men and some intravenous drug users who also would not be perceived as living by the rules. But that was never the issue. The issue was you need to know that God loves you. You may have lived in a very broken way, but we’d love for you to die knowing God’s love and mercy. And that’s the Catholic heart I know in the pro-life movement. And we just have to live it because the culture would say, we’re judgmental, we’re bigoted. No, we hold ourselves to higher standards because God’s called us to it. But we love people regardless, because God loved me when I was, and still am, a terrible sinner. But St. Paul says, God demonstrates his love for us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God goes first in the work of reconciliation. So we, as his followers, should go first with other people. So these other issues, which are not unimportant at all, forgiveness and mercy, hospitality, are essential. Joy, peace, patience, kindness, these are essential to evangelization. But we have to be clear about what evangelization is or we’re messing with words.

Robert Duncan: Pope Leo is renewing Pope Francis’s emphasis on listening and welcome. Did FOCUS change as a result in any way, as a result of Francis’s papacy and the emphases that he made on the things we’re talking about?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, I mean, I wrote a book called Making Missionary Disciples and begin with a quote from Francis about imagining a Church filled with missionary disciples. And so I think that Francis’s pontificate was incredibly moving in the sense of watching him care for the poor, stopping motorcades to reach out. Very, very compelling. I think his document on the Joy of the Gospel, spectacular. And we read it, studied it together and shared it. So absolutely, I mean, we certainly want to listen to the popes throughout the time. They’re given to us by God for a reason. So now we’re trying to attune our ears to the pontificate of Leo and there’s continuity, which is beautiful and necessary, and there’s also uniqueness. And so Leo is different than John Paul or Benedict or Francis. And at the same time, you can start to chart a line, a trajectory through these pontificates and our hope would be to be aware of that line and trace it all the way back to the pontificate of Peter. We like to talk about a living tradition that we’re right here, right now, alive and faithful to the Church of today. But the Church of today invites us to be faithful to the church of 33 AD, the Church of Pentecost. And so that’s a wonderful tension to live in, of the timelessness and the timeliness of what it means to be a Catholic in the modern world.

Robert Duncan: At the beginning of the conversation, you brought up that many of these new converts are young men. There’s maybe a disproportionate number of men who are interested, again, in religion. You wrote a book called, Boys to Men, and I want to know what your message is to young men and to what extent are you concerned about these fears of toxic masculinity in the religious space?

Curtis Martin: Well, certainly toxic masculinity is a real threat, but I would argue also not what I experience. It’s out there, but the majority of men are striving to be godly men, which is not toxic masculinity at all. For the record, we did write Boys to Men, Tim Gray and I wrote it together. Our dear friend wrote Woman of Grace at the same time. We just felt that the audiences needed to be appealed to differently. In the book for women, the examples are from the scriptures, as is the case with our book, but they’re of the women in the scriptures, and ours are of the men. We weren’t excluding the women in any way, shape, or form. The reality of the matter is what I’ve found is that historically, this is a little bit different the last couple of years, that men are just a lot more work. They are resistant in ways that women aren’t. Women tend to be more open and responsive relationally. If you say we’re going to have a small group discussion group or a small group Bible study, women are like, oh, okay, that’s interesting, and men are like, “I’m not going to sit in a small group. What, am I supposed to share my feelings?” And so you’ve got to approach it differently. But in some ways, I’ve joked that working with women on the college campus is like playing with matches in a dry hay field. I mean, the fire starts and it goes out of control, whereas working with men is like trying to light a big log in a rainstorm. It’s really hard to get things going. And that’s an overstatement, but there’s a certain truth there. On the college campus today, 60% of the college students on college campuses are women, so you’re already outnumbered 60-40. By the time you add any religion, it goes to 67-33, so it swings pretty dramatically. What we’ve seen is not that the men have eclipsed the women, but that that imbalance has been righted. And so for the first time in more than a decade, we’re actually able to hire, for example, enough male missionaries to pair them with women. We’ve had struggles because we’ve not been able to hire all the women who wanted to be missionaries because we didn’t have teams to put them on.

Robert Duncan: So what message are the men responding to?

Curtis Martin: Well, they’re responding to two. First, it’s a message, and it’s funny, and this is overly simplistic. There’s a lot more going on here, but I would say that there is a secular voice out there that is Christian-friendly, but guys like Joe Rogan, who just guys like. He’s a broadcaster of cage fighting, and there’s argh, but Joe Rogan is asking questions, and he’s challenging men. He doesn’t have great answers, but he’s got really fun questions, and then you can kind of move down the spectrum there of different people that are speaking into the lives of men, and you start to see more and more of a Christian message, and then more specifically a Catholic message, and men are leaning in and saying, you know, I’ve been told that I’m a pig, that I’m worthless, that I’m lazy, that if I were to even try to be a man, it’d be toxic. So I sit around, and I play video games, and I look at pornography, and I gamble online, and I’ve been doing that for five, six, seven years, and I hate my life, and Joe Rogan is saying, get up and go do something. And so they’re listening to voices that are not anti-Christian, but not Christian, and then there’s Jordan Peterson, and there’s other people that are speaking into their lives, and I would say that that’s the broader cultural conditions that men are saying, wait a second. If you just look at television, men are portrayed as bullies or stupid wimps all the time. Where are the great examples of men? I think The Chosen does a great job. Jonathan Roumie does a great job of manifesting Jesus as a real man, but as a virtuous man, and to be able to see these examples. And so I think men are tired of the stereotypes. And let’s be honest, the women aren’t interested in the men that this culture is producing. You can see not just in the United States, but in places like Japan, marriage is evaporating. Young people just choosing not to get married because they’re not attractive. And so these men are responding to those broader social and cultural issues. And then I think your podcast, I think lots of different things that are out there, the podcast, the different messaging, that people can go, well, if I’m interested in this, where should I go? There’s never been a better time in the history of the world to learn the truths about Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. The information is there. And once you get on that track, you can feast like never before. I mean, as a young adult, when I was coming back to the Catholic Church, the Internet didn’t exist. Things were hard to gather. I discovered by accident, because I was working on a paper for grad school, I discovered the Fathers of the Church. And I wasn’t really looking for, I was just looking for old Christians. What did old Christians say about the Church? And all of a sudden, I found the Fathers of the Church and realized there’s a whole collection of these guys, and they’re wildly Catholic. I mean, they believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. They have Marian devotion. They believe in a Church that has bishops as an evangelical, fallen-away Catholic evangelical. I didn’t have any of those things. I thought, well, wait a second. And so I think the Catholic Church, in an era when questions are being raised, the Catholic Church has the best answers. So this is great for us. It’s the perfect time to be able to sit back and say, I want to know the truth. Well, the Catholic Church has the fullness of truth. We’re not here to be arrogant about it. That’s not it at all. We’re here to be, welcome to the buffet. I mean, we’re all hungry. The best meal in town is being served by the Catholic Church, literally the Eucharist. And so men are experiencing this. The culture has failed them. The Catholic Church is there, quietly waiting to answer questions, and now they’re coming.

Robert Duncan: You mentioned certain podcasters like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. When some of these young men may discover Catholicism, they may, as you say, go looking for places they can learn what it means to be a Catholic man. And there are certain podcasts out there. I think of maybe Timothy Gordon’s podcast, where there are very specific messages about women and men that are controversial. People can look that up if they don’t know what I’m talking about. Do you see any trends that concern you among the young men that you interact with? And what cautions would you...

Curtis Martin: Well, I mean, the trends are there. Let’s be honest. I mean, I think it’s certainly... Fine, I’ll date myself here, but there was a cartoon called The Flintstones, cavemen. And a couple of times in the scenes, you’d see Fred trying to... The door’s locked. He’s trying to run, and he would run so hard, he’d run in the front door and right out the back door. And I think it’s certainly possible to do that at the Catholic Church. You can run right through Christ and into problems. I think that the Internet, the podcast world, is filled with lots of people asking lots of questions. I talked to my... I have adult sons. I’ve got... I’m blessed with nine kids. Eight of them are boys. And I’ll sit up, you know, until 1 o’clock in the morning talking with my adult sons. And they’re listening to a lot more of this stuff than I am, and they’ll sit back and say, what do you think about this? I say, well, first of all, I think these are great questions, but I don’t think you’ve got great answers here. And again, I think this is where it would be helpful to have some maturity out there that’s speaking into this and saying, let’s... We don’t want just knowledge. We want wisdom. And so where are the limits? You can push so hard on something that you actually fall off the other side. The devil doesn’t care if you drive off the right side of the road or left side of the road. He just wants you off the road. And so the mistakes are there. Our goal would be to live virtue, which is in the middle, and to be able to recognize there are extremes on both sides. We want to avoid those extremes. And then we want to live love. Love is the one virtue that you do live in extreme. And so it moderates all the other virtues. And so to be able to recognize that, I think this is, again, a great moment. I think what you’re doing is so important that we’re having these conversations. But I do think right now we’re at a very vulnerable place. There are many more men and women wanting to come into the Church than there are people who are willing and capable of welcoming them. And there are lots of people asking questions. And there are too many false or half-true answers. And we’re not made for half-truths or for error. We’re made for the truth.

Robert Duncan: Is there anything that men or women that are coming into the Church that are interested in what you’re doing, responding to the message of FOCUS and the Church, but that because of the culture that they say to you or that you hear a lot in group settings or in discussions that just irritates you or concerns you. I mean, any specific thing that’s emerging?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, I would say you’re raising great questions. And I would say no and then yes. This is not my experience. The reality is that we are gathering people in FOCUS within the framework of friendship. And within friendship, somebody can say, dude, you’re out of control. Mellow out. But you do hear of extremes with regards to you mentioned the controversies about comments about men and women or the exclusive, I’m only Traditional Latin Mass, these sorts of things that people push towards. And we’re aware of those. It’s not our experience within FOCUS that that’s happening because you’re sitting down talking with people. There are norms that help to guide us. And if people are aware of that, and that’s also informing. So the Catechism of the Catholic Church, one of the greatest gifts, it’s just this is what the Church teaches. It’s remarkably similar, although I would argue even more beautifully stated than the Catechism of the Council of Trent, written 500 years earlier. Same structure, same outline. Really, really wonderful teaching. But it just, okay, what does this say? And how does this guide us? And then do we have access? One of the things that Jesus calls us to do in the Great Commission is to go make disciples. Well, disciples are people who are being mentored by people who are a few steps further down the road. And it’s a sharing of Christ-centered wisdom. Well, it’s in that Christ-centered wisdom that you’re going to be able to say, hey, that interpretation is completely out of bounds. The corrections are frequently right in the same text. You could sit back and misquote Paul about the differences between men and women, and then you could go to Peter and say, it’s very clear we’re equal in dignity. What are you talking about? This is the same Bible saying the same thing. You’ve got to interpret Scripture in light of the rest of Scripture, and you have to interpret Scripture from the heart of the Church. Well, those guidelines make the Catholic Church the best place on Earth to have this wrestling match. The cool thing is, we’ve got momentum. We did not have momentum 20 years ago. Now, you still have to steer a car in the right direction, but you can’t steer a parked car. It’s just impossible. Even God can’t steer a parked car. It has to be moving.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to talk to you a little bit more about the work you’ve done here at the Vatican, and one possibly controversial prism to talk about that would be the mascot of the Jubilee that we had last year. This was controversial online because people at the Dicastery that you consult for, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, said, I have the quote here, that the use of this Japanese cartoon — for people who don’t know — is “inspired by the Church’s desire to live even within the pop culture beloved by youth.” Other people online maybe have a more conservative or traditional bent, said, you know what, this looks ridiculous. This is not the way I associate in my imaginary space an image of my religion. So what are the challenges and the contours of trying to find a way to talk to young people that maybe is epitomized by that image?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, well, I mean, to be disrespectful to start, I mean, in a certain sense, it looks like a pile of poop in some ways. It’s a silly image. But let’s also go back, and Archbishop Rino Fisichella has been very, very kind to me over the years. It’s World Youth Day. By the way, I don’t hear a whole lot of young people talking about this on either side. It’s older people who are upset. And I get it. I can understand. I mean, FOCUS has a, in our logo or visual identity, we have a symbol that looks a bit like the Eucharist and has a path, and there’s a crucifix. It’s subtle. I believe in all those things. I think the traditional ways of communicating are the best, but they’re not the only. And so I think people should not take themselves so seriously. Yeah, we should do the best we can. And when we don’t, come on, this has got to be, this can’t make the top 50 list of most important things in life or in the Church. It just isn’t that important. And okay, when it’s your turn, if you want to do more, I mean, I’m reminded of young men I work with on college campus. They’re like, well, liturgical abuse. Well, if you want to address liturgical abuse, become a priest and offer Mass reverently. Otherwise, as a layperson, it’s not your game. If you’ve got a friendship with the priest, go talk to him. But if you don’t, don’t criticize him. That won’t make anything better. We have to pray and fast and love our way into this. And when we’ve got friendship, yeah, we can talk. I had a priest friend of mine who we became friends, but it was years in the making. And he said, you know, Curtis, I don’t like to wear my clerics. And I said, well, you don’t have to wear your clerics. But he goes, I don’t like it because people treat me differently. I said, well, Father, they’d treat me differently if I didn’t have a wedding ring on. But I am married. And so they ought to treat me differently. And I think it’s super cool. I’m not telling you you should wear your clerics. That’s between you and God and you and the bishop. But I can tell you as a layman, I love it when I see a priest in clerics. And that was the end of the conversation. But it was in a framework of friendship. And we could have that. A lot of times we’re pushing people around. Well, I don’t like this and you should do it this way. You know what? I can tell you one thing. Young people are not going to be attracted to Christ when they watch you fight about these things. These are not the most important things.

Robert Duncan: Well, the reason I bring it up is I think it’s interesting that it reveals a debate maybe in your circles or more broadly on the internet about to what extent do we look at cultural forms as Catholics in order to reach people. So do you have an answer on that? I mean, this is not only true for logos but for music and concerts. To what extent should the Church be taking its cues from the forms that work in the secular space?

Curtis Martin: I think it’s a great question. I mean, really it’s the $64,000 question. So, I mean, evangelization is building a bridge, right? So you’re building a bridge from the heart of the Church, from Jesus Christ to a person. Well, a person is out in the culture so you have to make some connection or you have a peer. It’s not a bridge. It doesn’t connect. But I would say this. I founded FOCUS. We were working on it when I was even in my 20s. But by the time we had missionaries I was in my late mid-30s, I think 37. I could have done two things. I could have been hip and cool and got an ear piercing and maybe got some ink and been relevant. And I would have been relevant for about five years. And then I still wouldn’t have been relevant. So I have not. I mean, I’m very much a 60-year-old man. And I’ve always been that way. So relevancy, I think, is important in that I take your relevancy seriously but I don’t have to imitate it to be relevant. I don’t have to imitate it to be relevant.

I just have to be a part of it. In fact, I would argue that when a person steps into another person’s life, seeing a difference rather than a similarity actually can be a really good thing. Not difference for its own sake but I’m a married guy. I have nine kids. I’m in my 60s. I act like that. And we’re working with literally 100,000 young people. It seems to be going okay. So when these people come to me that say, I can’t speak I can’t be a Church interpreter because of the way they think. Do you feel like your role has transitioned and it happened because you were such a strong leader that you elevated the general volatility of everything that’s going on? Look, that’s why people don’t see you as having a FOCUS conference because they’re afraid they’re not getting that made sense to his homily, quotes from modern pop stars. And it was electric. So a certain amount of that, that I hear you, that I’m aware of that, I think you don’t wanna be distanced from relevancy, but to make yourself pretend to be relevant, I think is an exercise in futility. I joke with by the people we work with, it changes so quickly. I mean, the 22-year-olds that tease me about how old I am are perceived as very old three years later when they’re 27 by the new 24-year-olds, it’s just crazy how quickly it shifts. So I wanna appreciate you and what you think is relevant. And that’s super, super important. But I don’t need to live in that world and have those same loves in the same way. I’m inviting you to the greatest love, love of Jesus Christ. And I should love the things you love. JP II did this as a priest. Slightly different way, but I think it’ll make sense. And we say this to our staff all the time. Whatever college students love to do, go do that with them, as long as it’s moral. I mean, there’s certain things college students do that you shouldn’t do, but go hiking.

Robert Duncan: I was about to sign up for FOCUS.

Curtis Martin: Yeah, exactly, there you go. And go be with them. JP II did this great as a young priest. He was out kayaking and hiking and writing plays and performing them. He was with young people doing the things they love to do. And in the midst of that, he was sharing his love for Jesus Christ. And so we wanna go and love people, and people love stuff. I don’t know how to play video games. I’m just a little too old for it. But we’ve got some young priest friends who are over our house and they’ll play video games for a couple hours with our kids. It’s super cool. But if they were playing video games a couple hours every day, I’d say, you probably have a priority problem, Father. And I would say the same thing to my sons if they were playing a couple hours every day. And they probably are. And so try to walk that balance. I don’t think we should be, pride ourselves in being irrelevant. And there are some who think we’re gonna stand up on a mountaintop and preach and we’ll see who comes. That’s not what Jesus did.

Robert Duncan: You are a pretty animated speaker, but I feel like on this subject, the relevancy question may be particularly more animated. Is this something that frustrates you in your work with the Dicastery or just generally in the conversation about evangelization?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, again, I will speak about the frustration of the Dicastery, but I want to be clear. I’m not saying that I’ve got a better perspective. I do think I have a unique perspective as we sit back and talk. And so at one point in time, there was a conversation at a meeting maybe two years ago, and they said, this modern culture won’t accept truth claims. I disagree with that. But I said, but when it finally came around to my turn, I said, I think one truth claim that they can’t refute is, “I think you are amazing.” Because it’s a truth claim, but it’s also based in me and you can’t really argue with that. And I could go on, I believe that you’re amazing because I believe that Christ thinks you’re amazing. And so I think we can start this, it’s kind of John Paul II’s personalism. But my sense is that in some of the Dicastery, at least there can be a tone of discouragement of actually winning people to Christ, of having people convert to Catholicism. And there’s kind of a desire of, well, can’t we all just get along? And again, just getting along is really important. We shouldn’t be fighting. I mean, why? But that’s not evangelization.

Robert Duncan: It just sounds mysterious. I think people listening who don’t know much about the Vatican may think, “why in the world would the Vatican not want more Catholics?”

Curtis Martin: Right, well, I’m sure everybody in the Dicastery does. But I think that we have a very different history in the United States than they do in Europe, for example. And so wars and cultural issues have been a real, real issue and led to millions of deaths in the last 125 years here on the continent. And so I’ll give you an example. I was here in Europe talking to a friend of mine who was a religious sister, and they were talking about a political figure here in Europe who was an integralist. I actually had to go look up what integralist was, but essentially, oversimplifying, this is a person who wants their faith life to inform their politics. As an American, that’s the ideal candidate. But we’ve had religious fanatics in Europe and in Latin America who have abused that in the name of God, and it can be a horrible thing. And so I think, again, we have to look at the context and sit back and say, what are we doing? And to the degree that we’re imposing belief, we should all agree that that’s wrong. But to the degree we are proposing the faith, I would like for people to see that that’s a good thing. The difference is, for example, let’s say I found a great restaurant, and we’re friends. Should I tell you about it?

Robert Duncan: Definitely me, yes.

Curtis Martin: Yes, should I force you to go? No, so I don’t want to impose my new restaurant on you, but I should propose it. “Hey, you should check out this place, it’s awesome.” I think that evangelization says, let’s propose with joy and friendship, not impose. If people choose to say no, or maybe that no is just a wait, that’s between them and God. No judgment. My job was to make the invitation, not to get you to go to the restaurant. My job is to make the invitation to Christ, not for you to make you a Christian. And I think those tensions are in some of the work of the Dicastery. These are good men, selected, I’m sure, very wisely. But from my limited experience, at times I’m like, there’s so much work to be done. Can’t we just be a little bit more clear? And I have experienced that in the work with the USCCB, the US bishops, in the committee that I served under Bishop Barron, and then also under Bishop Cozzens, the same committee, different chairs. Just wonderful leadership and real enthusiasm. You mentioned it earlier that now the bishops, this is kind of their battle cry at this point in time, is hey, we really need to be evangelizing, as bishops, as priests, as religious, as laypeople. That’s beautiful, and I think that clarity is something that is inspirational, not only to the rest of the world, which I did an interview yesterday with a gentleman from Eastern Europe. He said, what’s going on in the United States, I think, could be a model, not one-to-one, but an inspiration, we could learn, for the rest of the world. Not to make the rest of the world American, that would be a terrible mistake, but to make the rest of the world more evangelical. Well, that would be great, and this was the interview. And I think that that’s true. So I like where we are, I think what’s going on in the Church universally, from my very limited perspective as a layman, is it’s wonderful. And what God is doing in the church in the United States is, I think, an extraordinary moment. We have to be humble. We are in the community of nations, a younger daughter.

We’re a young nation, and we can come across as arrogant sometimes as Americans. So we have to be humble, but I don’t think that that means we should step away from the many blessings. We are a generous church, we are an entrepreneurial church. There are things that are really, really wonderful that we should not be embarrassed by, and at the same time say, it’s all a gift. And we don’t deserve any credit, but we do want to give the glory to God.

Robert Duncan: I just have a couple more questions if we have time. So at the end of last year, there were articles saying that, correct me if I’m wrong, you were stepping back from FOCUS, or I’m not sure if you were retiring. What is going on now?

Curtis Martin: Yeah, so I’ve been serving as, the titles have changed over time, but always as the founder. My wife and I founded FOCUS 28 years ago, and so I’ve served as president or CEO. So I’m maintaining the founder role. I’m continuing to serve. They’ve asked me to stay. Actually, I was thinking three to five more years. They said, we’d love for you to sign a seven-year contract, which I’ve done. So I’m not going anywhere, but as we continue to grow, the administrative responsibility of the CEO is what I’ve stepped away from. And, you know, any stepping away can be hard, but I can tell you, sitting in administrative meetings all day long didn’t bring me joy. I love my job, I love the people I work with, but to be emphasizing the mentorship piece, the vision casting piece, to be out working with the bishops, whether it’s at the Vatican or at the USCCB, these are the things that I’m most passionate about, and those are the things we’ll continue to do. We’re working out the details. The board’s actually here in Rome right now. I had lunch and dinner with several of them, and so, in fact, I’ve been with them most of the last week. We had a meeting in Miami earlier in the week. And so we’re working out the details of that and praying hard, but no, I’m not going anywhere, God willing, and very much want to continue to move forward. I think this is an exciting time. I think God has shown us some things within focus that can apply to many organizations and groups like parishes that we’d like to share with the early adopters. And we’re seeing this explosion of conversions that we’ve been talking about most of our time together. There is something extraordinary. Whatever is going on, and I don’t understand it completely, was not going on 15 years ago, 25 years ago.

Robert Duncan: So this might seem like a non-sequitur based on your apparent passion, enthusiasm, and the good news that you are describing about the explosion of conversions, but in every life of faith, there’s got to be discouragement. So what gets you down? What discourages you in the current moment?

Curtis Martin: Well, the thing that discourages me most is my own personal sinfulness. There’s no doubt about that. I mean, it’s just, I have been following Christ as an adult Catholic for 35 years or so, and I would like to have made more progress than I have. So that’s very discouraging. Things that foster despair — this might sound redundant — discourage me. I think the virtue of hope is so essential. St. John Paul II was a witness to hope, as his book title states, and he gave reasons for hope. And I think that where the Church, and Church leadership in particular, can be subject to challenges is despair. When you don’t have hope, you won’t strive for the great good because you don’t think it’s possible. And so we have been tempted to be in a maintenance mode within the church.

I remember, what facility or activity do we have to shut down next? And consolidation of parishes. And I’m not saying those are wrong necessarily. They are painful. And they might be wrong. The reality of the matter is that if we were an evangelizing church, we would probably be building churches. And this has been an experience and focus, that more than a quarter of the campuses we serve have actually gone through capital campaigns to build bigger churches. That’s 25%. And it’s not happening in most places in the church right now in the United States. Most of the churches being built are because of demographic shifts. There is no demographic shift on the college campus. There’s just more people believing in Jesus. And the churches are being, sometimes beautiful ones are being torn down and bigger, more beautiful ones are being built. Sometimes they weren’t so beautiful. But bigger ones, and frequently one of the complaints I hear is, I don’t think we built a new one big enough. And so it’s just this really exciting thing. And I think that when somebody’s functioning with hope, they’ll be able to achieve what God wants and they will be attractive to others. Just as we are drawn towards joy, we’re drawn towards hope. We’ll never separate those from faith and love. Those are the theological virtues. But I would say my own personal sinfulness or a sense of despair drive me nuts.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to conclude the conversation by going back to the New York Times’ coverage of all of these matters. And Ross Douthat, writing an op-ed column, mentioned something that I also raised with you at the beginning, which was that many of the new converts are especially in this college-educated camp. And he concludes his Easter analysis here saying, “Jesus did not say,” I’m going to quote Douthat, “Jesus did not say, blessed are the agentic. Christianity is not supposed to be primarily a faith for educated strivers. And any revival that doesn’t give the drifting or disaffected a sure reason for belief, that doesn’t lift up the lowly or reach the poor in spirit, would be a revival unworthy of the name.” So what is your reaction to that?

Curtis Martin: To the degree it doesn’t reach everyone, then there’s a real problem. But it’s gotta start somewhere. And Ross, come on, this has been going on for what, 24 months? This is not a long time in resurgence. So people who criticize, this would be exactly one of the things that drives me crazy. Why do you have to picket this right now? And I realize he’s got a job to do, and I like him, I like his reading. But I think the criticism is like kicking a two-year-old because it hasn’t gone out and done more. When FOCUS first got started, I was giving a talk. I mean, we were months old, and there was a guy in the front row rocking back and forth. The longer I spoke, the more he rocked. And we were talking about evangelizing and winning young people to Christ. And finally I said, any questions? And he couldn’t control himself. What about the poor? I’m like, who do you think’s gonna care for the poor? Christians care for the poor. That’s what we’re known for throughout history. Christianity’s dying. We need more Christians. FOCUS is the largest mission-sending organization in the United States. We send thousands of college students to dozens of missionary places. And that’s just second and third world. When you talk about evangelization as a mission, we are the largest. I mean, we send missionaries out all the time. But you needed to have believers before you could have missionaries. And to not understand that process, it’s gotta start somewhere. And Ross, if you were gonna start it, my argument would be this. If everything in the culture was broken, and I believe it is, everything, marriage, family, law, politics, education, everything, if everything in the culture was broken, including all the people, where would you start? I would start at the college campuses in the United States.

They gather people by the thousands. How many second grade classrooms would you have to go to to get to 1,000 second graders? You can go to hundreds of campuses and find 1,000 freshmen, 10,000 freshmen, some of them. So they’re gathered more effectively than anything else at the very beginning of their life. And so if they made a decision for Christ, they could live that for the rest of their life. They could live it right away. We could work with second graders, but you’d have to wait 15 years for them to be able to go to seminary or to get married. Work with college students, it happens right now. If you wanted to work in geriatric hospitals, and we should, those people won’t be able to serve for very long, they’re in their 80s. So I would argue the place to start are universities and American universities, because there’s more international students studying in American universities than anywhere else in the world. All universities, but American universities. Now, if they don’t care for the disenfranchised, if they don’t serve the people over time, but give them some time, if they don’t serve them, then everything in his criticism is dead on. Christianity must bear fruit in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. Jesus made that really clear. My experience is that this generation of young people, and some of them who have been down 20 years, they’re not so young anymore, are wildly generous, greatly faithful, overflowing with joy. Are they perfect? No. Are they tired? Yeah, I mean, one of the things this group tends to do is they get married, they have kids, and they tend to have more kids than they have culture. Well, kids are exhausting. And so if you’ve got three or four kids under the age of six, you’re probably not doing a lot for the disenfranchised, but you are clothing the naked every day, your own children. You are feeding the hungry every day. And as they mature, they will take their children, as we have and as my friends do, on mission to the disenfranchised. And so if he still wants to make that accusation 15 years from now, I agree. But he wants to make it right now, cheap shot.

Robert Duncan: To be fair to him, I’m not sure it was a criticism more than a word of caution. But in any case, you bring up something we didn’t get a chance to talk about, and I’ll raise it, and if you have time to answer, that’s great. If not, we can wrap it up. But the children of these highly motivated converted couples — there is a question, and we don’t have the data yet, will their children remain in the faith?

Curtis Martin: No, 100%, and I’ve talked to Christian Smith about this, who works out of Notre Dame and really probably knows more sociologically about this than anybody on earth, and it is too early. The reality of the matter is, though, that I have nine children, and each of them, I have a 28-year-old with autism, he has not, although he is a faithful Catholic, but each of them have come on mission. John Zimmer and Barbara Zimmer were the first FOCUS married couple that we hired. Their eldest son was a FOCUS missionary and postponed med school to become a missionary, is now in med school. Their daughter is married to a young man who works for EWTN. They’re on mission. Ed and Beth Sri are the next married couple. Their eldest daughter and her husband work for FOCUS. They’re on mission. There is the reality in the Protestant world of PKs, preacher kids, who rebel, and I’m sure there will be some of that, but the reality of the matter is all of the fruit that we can measure so far would indicate that they are staying in the faith and frequently staying on mission. The sample size is too small, and the sample window is too short to have any kind of scientific sense, but I was with, now Archbishop Carlson, at the time he was Bishop Carlson, and he turned to me before FOCUS put a missionary on campus, and he spent a couple days with me looking at what we were hoping to do to give me advice and counsel, and as we were leaving, he turned to me, I didn’t know him very well, he turned to me and he grabbed my shirt and twisted it. He said, “This may work, but I want you to know if this works, even amazingly, and your kids don’t practice the faith, you are gonna go to hell.” He’s right. Whatever we do as a vocation small V has to be subordinated to what we do as a vocation capital V. I am a married man, a husband, and a father. Anything that I do that undermines the faith of my wife or my kids is sin, and so to be able to recognize first things first, it’s from a place of centered in Christ that I can love my wife and kids, it’s from a place of loving my wife and kids in Christ that I can do other work, and so we don’t know yet. What I do know is there’s a lot more of them. That’s very clear. The family size is four plus, and that trend’s small because the marriage is trend young, so they will have more children, the ones who are younger. I think we’re probably done. We have nine, our youngest is 12, but the reality of the matter is what the average will be 15, 20 years from now when there’s some stability, we will see. In fact, there won’t even be stability if we maintain our growth because the majority of people involved in our program are young because we keep reaching more people. It’s like a pyramid. The most recent things are at the bottom, the big end of the pyramid. We graduated, I think, six people our first year. We’ll graduate 20,000 this year. It’s amazing to see the momentum, and so I like what we’re seeing. I wouldn’t want to make any predictions, and I would never wanna be arrogant about what God’s doing, but I would make this claim. Evangelization works. When God comes into people’s lives, their lives just get better, not just for themselves, but for everybody else in their life.

Robert Duncan: Curtis Martin, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Curtis Martin: Great being with you.

Sister Helen Alford, president of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, argues that the issue is not just external instability, but a deeper intellectual failure: the frameworks guiding today’s decision-makers are increasingly disconnected from the realities they are meant to address.

In this conversation, she reflects on her formation as an engineer, her path into the Dominican order, and her work at the Vatican engaging global experts across disciplines. At the center is a neglected resource: Catholic social teaching—often called the Church’s “best kept secret”—and its potential to reframe how we think about human dignity, systems, and responsibility.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why today’s dominant intellectual frameworks may be incapable of solving modern crises

• The principle of subsidiarity and how it restores agency in a system-driven world

• Why Catholic social teaching remains largely unknown—even within the Church

• The relationship between prayer and action in times of global instability

• Whether a new “way of thinking” is needed to address the scale and complexity of today’s problems

This is a conversation about intellectual crisis, human dignity, and whether the Church’s vision can still offer a coherent path forward in a fractured world.

Transcript

Intro: Sister Helen Alford is a Cambridge-trained engineer who has spent her life making the Catholic Church's social teaching relevant in the modern world. Appointed President of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences by Pope Francis in 2023, she works with top Catholic and non-Catholic thinkers across diverse fields like economics, law, and health care to address the most urgent challenges facing society. In this role, she works closely with the pope to shape the Academy’s priorities and serves as a key reference point for understanding how the Church responds to global issues. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we discuss her recent meeting with Pope Leo, the core principles of Catholic social teaching, and the crises shaping our world. And we ask, in a world facing crisis after crisis, does the Church's voice still matter? As Pope Leo XIV writes in his book, the Church's voice still matters. Pope Leo XIV, who was a Catholic in the early 20th century, still matters. As Pope Pope Leo XIV writes in his April 2026 message to the Academy: “Your work will contribute to the building of a global culture of reconciliation and peace—a peace that is not merely the fragile absence of conflict, but the fruit of justice, born of authority placed humbly at the service of every human being and the entire human family.”

Robert Duncan: Sister Helen Alford, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service. I’m really excited to talk to you.

Sister Alford: Thank you. So good to be here, Robert. Thanks.

Robert Duncan: The Angelicum produced this remarkable series of videos on universal human fraternity. Right. And the trailer has been seen almost a million times in, I think it might be four months. And one word that you, in the trailer that I watched, that you repeat over and over again is crisis, crisis. And that certainly seems to characterize our age. If you go on social media, there’s one crisis after the next. I remember growing up and hearing that, well, you know, that’s just on the news. If you get out in the real world, it’s not so bad.

Sister Alford: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: And some people do say that social media amplifies crisis. How do you see the state of our world today? And to what extent are we genuinely in a state of unending crisis?

Sister Alford: Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s difficult to answer it properly. I think the first thing I’d say is that I started to talk not that long ago with a quote about crisis. And I said, it sounds like it’s talking about today, but that was written a hundred years ago. And I think the main thing I would say is that Pope Francis used to say, we’re not in an era of change, we’re in a change of era. And I think there is something very profound happening. You know, we can look back over history and see the Roman Empire, and then that collapses and we have this long phase of history, which some people call the Dark Ages, and other people call the construction of Europe. And then we get this new kind of phase in the beginning of the second millennium. And then we get sort of a crisis around 1500s, 1600s, big wars and that, and we start to get modernity emerging. So we’ve had now about 250 years of modernity. So I think we, you know, all phases sort of have their strengths and weaknesses. In a way, we could say from an intellectual point of view, and I’m in a university, so I’m thinking about that a lot. The way we think in a particular phase of history is connected with the kind of problems we have to face. We tend to emphasize certain things and not other things. And maybe one way of looking at the crisis that we’re in now is that the big way of thinking about the world that we have, which we’ve inherited from modernity, okay, from the point of view of the Catholic Church, it’s a little bit ambiguous, modernity, but we would recognize that there have been some good things that have happened. And in the end, modernity is the child of a Christian era and in a Christian part of the world. So there’s some connection between modernity and Christianity. We might say that the questions that modernity was set up to answer are no longer the big questions. We have different questions. And if we carry on trying to answer them in the same way, we’re not going to be able to do it. And this may also be part of the reason why we see more and more polarization in society, that the people, the big educational institutions, the people who are producing the big ideas and that, they have a way of thinking which can’t answer the questions that many other people feel. And they feel alienated by it and they want to find solutions elsewhere. And it’s not the only element. It’s a big question is what you asked me, but I think it’s the element that maybe I’m thinking the most about now. So I mentioned that and I’ll say it to you.

Robert Duncan: Some people may be listening to you and may be far from the Church or don’t know much about Catholicism, spiritually seeking, and they see what they’ll call a nun, which is maybe not the right word.

Sister Alford: Well, it’s okay.

Robert Duncan: It’s okay. And say, “What is a nun doing talking about the major crises in the world?” So can you tell me just a little bit about where you come from? (That) you’re an economist and how you came to be working, let’s say, on the Pope’s commission for social problems?

Sister Alford: Okay. Yeah. Good question. Well, again, you know, you have to select. And of course, as somebody said to me recently, really autobiography is fiction. But anyway, I will tell you things that are true, but of course I’m selecting things. So I think the best way to start is with my parents because I had very interesting family background. My mother comes from Catholic family, Irish family, that immigrated to London. Well her two parents, they met in London. They immigrated at a time when you would find in the shop windows, if they’re advertising for sales assistance, they’d write underneath “Irish need not apply.” So it was that kind of situation. Anyway. So she comes from that. So a rather poor family in North London, but absolutely super Catholic. I mean, I would say for my mother, being a Catholic was like breathing. I mean, it was that level, you know, and I feel like I got a lot from it. She was really devotional. She taught me a lot of things about saints and all this sort of thing. My dad became a Catholic when he was 25 years old. At that time, he had a PhD in chemistry. He had been interested in the Anglican church when he was a kid and wanted to become an Anglican priest, but his dad who was very high up in the Freemasons said no. So anyway, later on he goes to work for what was a very big chemicals company in the UK at the time, which was called ICI in Scotland of all places, which for Catholics, we don’t think of Scotland as a place where there’s lots of Catholics. Anyway, he’s in Scotland in a place called Grangemouth. He’s working in the dye stuff division. They’re doing all kinds of experiments. And he has this lab technician who he was talking to the lab technicians, Catholic, and he was interested in religion, you know, my dad. So he says to the lab, the lab technician says to him, why don’t you come to a mission we’re going to have in our church? So he said, okay. So he said, I’ll never forget. It was a Sunday afternoon. It was four o’clock. I walked into the church. It was starting with, exposition and benediction, which he’d never seen before. He said, I walked into that church. He said, all I can say, it was like love at first sight. I just knew I was meant to be here, you know? And then he said to me, it’s quite interesting, you know, to be honest at that point, it wasn’t really the Eucharist that affected me. It was the faith of the people. I just saw these people, obviously were completely involved in this. And it just struck me, you know? And so he started reading lots of things and went to see a priest and after a bit, the priest said, “Oh, you know all this stuff already,” because he’d been reading so much, you know? And so he becomes a Catholic. He tries to become a priest. He had a lot of nervous breakdowns, so it didn’t work out. But the nervous breakdowns had started before he became Catholic, but they didn’t stop afterwards. So anyway, he ends up meeting my mum on a pilgrimage to Rome. And so they get married a bit later. And so I think for them, their marriage was pretty tough because he was very intellectual and she wasn’t at all. The thing that held them together was their faith. But for me as a kid, I felt was amazing because I had on the one side, this person who was so absolutely grounded. And this other person who, especially when I was a teenager, I could go and say, “Why do we believe this? And why do we believe that?” And he would have big discussions with me. And it really helped me develop a way of thinking about faith. And he was a chemist. He was a scientist. And then he went on, did a master’s degree in philosophy of science. And so he was talking about all the ways in which the Church understands science, which I thought was fantastic. I just listened to him talking to me, you know? So I had these two inputs, which I think have been, they kind of set me up for life really. So I always felt the Church had something interesting to say about intellectual life, you know? So when I went to university, I didn’t think I was going to have a problem with my faith and then I went to Cambridge and I studied engineering. And then I had an experience, which I sometimes tell people was my Damascus road experience, which wasn’t really anything to do directly with religion because it was reading an article. I had to read an article to write an essay and the title of it was “Engineers and the Work People Do.” The first line of the article was, “What I’m going to describe to you in this article, you’ll find really normal, but I hope by the end of it, I’ve convinced you it’s really strange.” Now this article was written by one of the top professors of engineering. At that time, you only had one professor in a faculty in UK. You had one professor at the top and everybody else was a lecturer. So if you were a professor, you were a really important person. So this guy was a professor of engineering in Manchester, you know, it was one of the top places. So he’d written this article. So he starts off describing a production line, which as he expects, all people who know something about production lines thought this was normal, you know. It’s 1980s, so there are a few people doing things in this production line. They’re making lamp bulbs. So one of these is a woman who’s picking up every three and a half seconds, a little piece of wire and putting it into the coil of the lamp bulb. A bit later, that piece of wire is going to be vaporized, make a coating for the coil. Now he says, look, people need jobs. We’ll talk about that later. Let’s just think about the type of job we’re asking her to do. He says, maybe we should automate it. He says, you could give this as a job to students. So he talks about what the students would do. He says, then at a certain point, a more intelligent or more thoughtful student might say, wait a minute, it’s great fun designing a machine, but it’s really expensive. We should buy a robot and program the robot to do this, because they’ve already been mass produced at that time. So he says, now there, that’s interesting, engineer, because he’s not just thinking about technical problem, but also economic problem, a bigger problem. He says, but still, if you’re a good engineer, you’d think this machine is really advanced. We should try to redesign things around the machine and use it better. And you can maybe see where it’s going, this argument. He then says, but nobody thinks about doing that when the woman’s doing the job. And then he had this line, if engineers could think about human beings as if they were robots, they’d give them more human work to do. And I just thought, I’ve been doing everything wrong. Everything’s upside down. It’s all the wrong way round. We designed the machines and put the people around the machines. We should be putting the machines around the people.

That’s what we should be doing. So I just got on a train, went up to Manchester and said, please, can I work with you? This had such a big impact on me, this article. And he was retiring. He said, look, I can’t take on any more students because I’m retiring, but there’s this project, there’s that project, there’s the other project. Why don’t you stay where you are and do a PhD there? Because whoever gave you my article to read is interested in this and you can get into this project. So he gave me some outlines. So then I go back, I start working on it. My dad, who as I told you, became a Catholic when he was 25. When I tell him about my project, he says, you should read Rerum Novarum. I didn’t know anything about Rerum Novarum. I’m a true born Catholic child, never been taught anything about this. So he knew about it because he’d read it as a young person. So he gave me his little copy of it and I read it and I thought, it’s a bit old fashioned, but there’s some interesting things here. So I started reading some other things and then I read Pope John Paul’s Laborum Exercens. And when I read that, I thought, I can use this in my thesis. So I went back to my professor. I said, I’ve got to write a chapter about this. I’ve got to do this. She didn’t say anything to me about it, but it was really interesting that basically she and everybody else, and this is a faculty of engineering in Cambridge University. As soon as I decided I was going to do that, everybody stopped talking to me about my project. I just had to do it all on my own. It was embarrassing for them to talk about religion in a thesis on technology. But I thought I have to do it, not because I’m a Catholic, because this is the best ideas I can find about this. That’s why I wanted to do it. And they could see that and they couldn’t say no, basically. And so anyway, what happens, I can’t talk about my project with them. And as you know, you don’t grow if you can’t discuss things with other people. You have to have a community around you talking about things. So there was one religious community in that town, the Dominicans. So I started going to the Dominican house and there I could talk about my project. I could talk about Catholic social teaching and they were giving really interesting talks as well. And so, looking back now, this is where it’s a bit of fiction, I’m making the story up, but it’s, I can see that one door closed and another door opened, basically. And I realized, look, I could go this way. Of course, when you join a religious order, you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to be willing to let them send you and do something completely different. So I thought still, I thought by this stage, the Dominican is really the place where I should be. I felt that God was really calling me to do that. So it ended up then with me being sent to this Faculty of Social Science, where I am now, which is all about connecting social teaching and ethics and all this sort of huge body of thought in the human humanities with all these modern technical subjects, economics, sociology, psychology, international relations, all this stuff. And so my preparation doing that thesis on how can we get engineering to be more focused on putting the human person at the center was a perfect preparation. I had to learn a lot more things when I got here, but it’s all about connecting what this deep thought has to offer out in the world.

Robert Duncan: Some people listening may think, well, the Church teaches about Jesus and heaven and hell, and may not be aware of the body of Catholic Social Teaching. So could you explain what those documents are in general, that the Church also has competence in these areas?

Sister Alford: Sure, sure, sure. Well, I think you could see this thinking going back right to, you know, even before Christ, if you look at the Old Testament, there’s lots of discussions about how you should take care of the widow and the orphan should be cared. You know, God’s saying this to the people of Israel. Then of course, in the life of Christ, he is very concerned about, you know, the most excluded people, the people who are disliked, the people who have leprosy, the people who are excluded. Then, you know, the early Church develops hospitals, develops this idea of hospitality for people on the road, you know, the Benedictine monasteries. So you can go right back to early, even before Christ, you know, in the whole sort of Judeo-Christian tradition, you can see this interest in people having problems in the world, you know, and it’s connected with the revelation. It’s about living according to the life God wants for us. It’s not disconnected, but it has its own importance, you know, independent of praying, you know, don’t just pray and then hope somebody else is going to do it. You’re called to do it too. So in the modern period, where we had a real break in terms of the way the social order worked, you know, starting in UK, we had this total change in the basis of the economy. It shifted from being based on agriculture to being based on use of technology. And then in the political sphere, we got a complete move from the way most cultures had worked before, where you had some kind of king or emperor moving to a democracy, which in Europe happened in a very violent way through the French Revolution, of course, is different in the United States. So we have this really kind of abrupt change that takes place. So the Church, like the wider society, starts developing a special thinking about this. You know, sociology only comes to existence in the 19th century. It didn’t exist before that because people didn’t need to think about social problems, like they suddenly had to start thinking about them. Same with psychology, same with anthropology. Economics is a little bit earlier, but it’s still pretty modern. The only one of the modern social sciences that’s older is law. Law is the only more ancient one. All the others are born in the modern period. And so the church too is trying to think about how do we be church? How do we carry forward the gospel in this completely different situation? What are the injustices we have to face now? What are the problems that human beings are facing? And that starts this body of thinking, which in an official way gets launched with Rerum Novarum, that document we were talking about in 1891. Although there’s a lot of people thinking before and they help the Pope generate the thinking that goes into that document. Then after Pope Leo, we start getting a whole series of other documents that are produced. One during the Depression, which is called Quadragesimo Anno, because it’s exactly 40 years after Rerum Novarum. And that’s looking at the terrible crisis that people are in during the Depression. You’ve got the rise of fascism. You’ve got the beginnings of Nazism. You’ve got Soviet communism. I mean, all around, you’ve got that crisis that we were talking about at the beginning. And the Popes are saying something to the Christian people at that time, making a proposal about how to deal with it. Then we get later on, after Second World War, we get a very important cyclical on development called Populorum Progressio, that’s Pope Paul VI, trying to use the modern thinking about how should we as a church support all the initiatives that are going forward on human development? How are we part of it? How are we maybe challenging some of the thinking too? And how should we work with people of goodwill who are trying to do the same thing that we think is important too? So there’s all those elements as well.

Robert Duncan: For your average Catholic Christian, reading the Gospels, you mentioned taking care of the widow and the homeless. In that society, that might have been someone that was known by name. And now the problems just seem so much bigger. And it’s very hard, I think, for people of goodwill to know how I can personally participate in the social work of the Church, if I’m not going to sort of give my life and become a missionary, or maybe I contribute financially to a charity I think is important. But it still feels like, you know, detached. Is that a real phenomenon?

Sister Alford: I think a lot of people do feel like that. And I think we have to try to help find mechanisms. I mean, one of the ideas in Catholic social teaching is the idea of subsidiarity, that we should try to help people make decisions as close as possible to their own life. It’s a sort of counter to the sense of being not able to do something, you know, being just part of a system where what I do doesn’t really count because it’s the system that’s making everything work. You know, so subsidiarity is the idea that we, yes, we need systems. We’re not saying they’re bad, but that we should create systems in which we try to localize decision making as much as possible so people can really have an impact on what’s going on around them. And in fact, you do see people doing this spontaneously, you know, creating community support, you know, people creating a food bank for people who don’t have food to eat, creating hospitality for people who are in difficulty. So there’s a kind of assistance that people will give. But also, Pope Francis, when he’s doing his social teaching, he was talking about how we should try to bring love into the political system, for instance. Now, that’s a lot more challenging, especially in the kind of polarized political environment that we’re in. And yet, I think we have to try to find ways of doing it. And that’s the sort of thing where we should, I think, create discussions in the parishes or in local communities where we think about what does it mean in our circumstance here to try to love in the context of the political system that we’re in. You know, he says something in Fratelli Tutti about how helping an old person across the road, that’s an act of love. But if you get involved in policymaking where you create a better road system with proper security on it, or you create a bridge that connects people, that’s also an act of love. So that’s kind of interesting. If you start thinking like this, how could we connect our virtue, our love, with things that you do as part of a system, as a politician or as a business person, then I think we open up interesting lines for us to sort of grow as human beings and grow as Christians as well.

Robert Duncan: There is, I think, a narrative that I would imagine you would want to challenge, which would say that the Church before the Second Vatican Council was focused on the vertical dimension. There was a higher emphasis on theology and relationship with God and the sacraments. And following the Council, an increasing emphasis on social problems and maybe more horizontal issues. And despite the fact that Pope Francis said at the beginning of his papacy that the Church cannot become an NGO, some people would criticize him for focusing on political issues and neglecting more vertical issues. That’s a narrative, I think, that’s out there. And I wonder what you have to say about that understanding of the last, say, 100 years of Catholic history and what the right way to look at that would be.

Sister Alford: Well, I think there’s other things we can say which give you a different picture. For instance, before Vatican II, there were these huge lay movements involved in the workplace. And young Christian workers in the 1920s was having meetings of 80,000 young people coming together, you know, at a time when you just didn’t see that sort of thing happening. You had quite important, after the Second World War, the most important political parties in Europe were the Christian Democratic Parties. And three of the founders of European Union, their cause of canonization is going forward. So I think this sort of rhetoric that the Church wasn’t doing anything on the social level before is not realistic. It’s showing that people don’t know enough about the history. It’s true that there was a very active devotional life before. I mean, my mother was one of the people who grew up in that. And that became a little bit more complicated after the Vatican II. But I think that was much more to do with the kind of phase of history. If you look at all the councils in the church, you know, Vatican II isn’t the only council we know. It’s Vatican II because there was Vatican I, and there were councils before that. You tend to find that immediately after a council, there’s a bit of uncertainty about what to do with it. And so some of the things that happened, say in the liturgical reform, people weren’t quite sure what to do with it. They weren’t quite sure how to put devotions together with a real sense of the importance of the Mass, for instance. Because I remember when I was a young kid, you used to go to Mass, and all people would sit there saying their Rosary through the Mass. So in a way, some of the theologians want to say, look, let’s get more involved in the Mass rather than saying our Rosary. What was the side effect of that? It started to downplay a bit the devotions that people had, you know, and that didn’t always work very well. So I think this is a phase of change that we were in. And like all changes, they’re a bit difficult and painful, and we can try to reassess them and bring back some things that we lost and things like that. But this idea that we weren’t doing anything on social justice before the council, and then suddenly it will just change. History doesn’t bear that out, if you know something about the history.

Robert Duncan: Do you think the Church gets the credit it deserves for the social work that it did both before the Council and up through today, from the world?

Sister Alford: I think that is a really good question. I’m glad you asked me that, Robert, because I don’t think so. And I think it’s partly because we’re not very good at telling the story. The Catholic Church is the biggest provider of education in the world today. It’s interesting, we’ve just done an interesting statistical study with some postdocs connected with the Academy. And they found, you’ve got to listen to me carefully on this, they found that where you get more Catholic healthcare institutions, you tend to have a higher mortality rate. Now, not because the Catholic institutions are not doing their job very well, but because they’re going to the places where there are the most difficult health problems. They are focusing their efforts in the places where they are. So, they don’t go to places where it’s so easy. They want to go where there’s really difficulty and they work there. And sometimes they often hand over to other people and then they move on to the more difficult place. So, there’s a lot of data that we could use to show what we’re doing and we don’t show and people don’t know. There is data collected by the Holy See. There’s a feature of statistical office in the Holy See, but we need to do a lot more to get that information out to the world. But it’s there, we can show it. There is a website called Global Catholic Education Org, which has several reports on Catholic education across the world and also development indicators as well, if anybody’s interested to go and look further at it.

Robert Duncan: So you spent time teaching at the Angelicum. How many years did you teach social sciences?

Sister Alford: Yeah, I’ve been there 30 years now.

Robert Duncan: And it was, what, three or four years ago that you were appointed. Can you tell me about that appointment and what that job means?

Sister Alford: Yeah, so I was elected to the Academy in 2020.

Robert Duncan: What is the Academy?

Sister Alford: Okay, the Academy was founded by Pope John Paul II in 1994. There’s a much older academy called the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which was originally founded in the early 1600s. Galileo was a part of it. Many famous scientists were. But with all the vicissitudes of history, it now belongs to Italy. It was lost. So the Pope refounded it in 1936. So the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has had this long history. Social Sciences was founded in 1994 by Pope John Paul II, I think because he realized the importance of the whole social outreach of the Church, the social teaching. He wanted a body of experts working in the Holy See to help with the social teaching. But also, if you look at the statutes of the Academy, the first thing we’re supposed to do is to promote the study of the social sciences and promote the progress of the social sciences. So our first goal is one about improving knowledge, trying to come closer to the truth. Then we have a second goal, which is to help the Church develop her social teaching and to apply the social teaching to contemporary problems. So the two things are connected with each other. But the first thing is, get really good knowledge so then we can use it. Because the whole idea behind that is that God is the creator before he’s the revealer or the redeemer. And we should expect, as Christians, to be able to find convergence between what comes out of science and what is coming out of faith. We shouldn’t be worried or concerned about it. We should be looking for this convergence. And so the Church wants to promote knowledge, the best knowledge we can find, to deal with the problems that we face today.

So from the beginning, the academy had three big projects. One was on work, because that’s historically very important for the social teaching. Another one was on democracy, because they could already see that there were going to be some problems about democracy in the future. And the last one was on intergenerational solidarity, which I think is really prophetic. Other people only started talking about intergenerational solidarity much later. And then since then, the academies worked on all kinds of different topics. We can talk about it more. The one that was closest to creating a social encyclical, I think, was when in 2014, the two academies came together. They had a workshop. They produced a nearly 700-page book under the title, Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Planet. And it was because Pope Francis asked them, please bring together the best science you can find on the question of ecology. It’s human ecology as well as natural ecology. Bring them together. So that’s why there was a shared meeting between the two academies. And he used the results then to produce Laudato Si’ in 2015. So I think that’s a good example of how it’s had a big impact on social teaching. But we’re also meeting with a lot of people. We have people come from the UN, from the European Union, from research institutes, from the Islamic world. We have a lot of scholars, also members who are from India, China. The idea is to promote the best kind of understanding we can get about the problems that we face and help to find solutions to those problems.

Robert Duncan: What do you think motivates people who are not Catholic to participate? I suppose coming to the Vatican and doing something because the Pope asked is pretty cool, but...

Sister Alford: Yeah, I don’t think that’s the main... For that kind of person, I don’t think it’s the main motivation. Although, yeah, it doesn’t hurt, sure. No, I think they think there’s something here. I mean, the social teaching is... For people who get to a certain level, they start hearing about it. I think especially Pope Francis was so much present in the public sphere that people have got to know about it much more. They feel like the UN is in a very bad place. Where else do we go to try to form a kind of shared body of thinkers who can help resolve problems? Vatican might be the place to go and do that. I think they have good experience when they come because they see the church is really interested in listening to them. We have something to say, but we want to listen and learn too. So, there’s a real kind of sharing with a common goal of helping humanity face the difficulties it faces.

Robert Duncan: So, you were elected to the academy, but you’re also now the...

Sister Alford: Yeah, the president. Yeah, since 2023.

Robert Duncan: That’s a papal appointment.

Sister Alford: Yeah, that’s a papal appointment. I always joke with people. The announcement was made, as you know, as a journalist here, that usually the bulletins from the office are published at 12 o’clock. So, it was published at 12 o’clock on April 1st. So, I always joke, was it a joke or was it serious? Anyway, yeah. So, I’m now the president.

Robert Duncan: What is that role? Does that keep you very busy?

Sister Alford: Yeah, it keeps me busy. I now understand much better the concept of sin of omission because you realize all the things you could do and you really have to select what you’re going to do, but there’d be so many more things you could do. Anyway, so, yeah, you have to really kind of set an agenda for the Academy. You have to think about new members because there’s an election process and then it goes to the pope for approval, new candidates. You have to think about, listen to a lot of people coming who want to talk to you, who want to share issues, and then with the academicians, you’re working on topics. So, usually we have meetings. We have about eight meetings a year, something like this, and sometimes they’re in longer-term projects or sometimes they’re one-off meetings. It depends a bit. So, we just a couple of weeks ago had a meeting on measuring well-being because this is a big issue. As you may know, people have been saying for a long time GDP isn’t good enough. We should have a different measure. But it got a new kind of launch, this idea, in September 2024 when they had a big meeting at the UN about the future of the UN, basically, and they produced this document called the pact for the future and one of it was we have to find better measures of well-being. So, that is a big issue that’s being discussed by the UN Statistical Commission at the moment. So, we wanted to do something that would be a part of the discussion, you know, and so we had a meeting. We had some of the members of the high-level expert group that’s piloting the beyond GDP thing at the meeting, but the main point of discussion was a particular kind of measure, which is a really interesting one from the point of view of the Church. You basically got three ways of measuring well-being. You either use a composite index, like there’s one called the Human Development Index, which goes back to 1990. Human Development Index has three elements to it, an element of education. So, it depends. There’s various sub-factors that go into it, but they’re measuring how well education is running. It’s run by country, okay? So, how well education is doing in each country, health is another one, and then income. And so, you put them together and you produce a composite number and then you rank the countries. And the whole idea of the HDI is a competitor to GDP. And in fact, governments do look at it. It’s important to them to know where are we on the HDI compared to where we are on GDP. So, it’s good in that sense, but it loses a lot of information. When you make a composite measure, all the detail gets lost. So, another way of dealing with that is to have a dashboard. And lots of countries have it now. You can have lots of different individual statistics. But the problem with dashboards is what do you do with them? It’s hard to put them all together. How do you weight things? People don’t really know how to use them very well. So, this is third measure, which we were talking about this, which is called multi-dimensional measure. And this started off as a measure of poverty, but it’s now shifting in to be a measure of well-being. And the idea is that you have a number of dimensions. It’s still being discussed how many dimensions you should have, number of dimensions. And you ask people in the country to answer a question about each dimension. And then the idea is that it doesn’t exist yet, but we want to have an app where everybody can see where they are in their country compared to everybody else. What’s the average and where are they? Now, the really interesting thing about that is that you can form a synthesis. You can get overall measures. So, people can use it for policymaking, but also you can see individual people in it. It’s anonymized, of course, but on your own app, you can see where you are. And as one person said in that meeting, that is a kind of measure based on Catholic Social Teaching because it puts the human person at the center. You can see where you are compared to everybody else. And coming back to this sense of people thinking, what could I do? How do I have an impact? You start to give them some data that relates to them. And maybe we could imagine an app where you could have versions of it that’s relating to the local community, not just to people individually. I mean, there’s all sorts of things you could start doing with this. You start to help people, give them agency, and they can start to do things using the help of these measures. So, this is one thing that we’re working on now. Another thing we’ll start in June, a three-year project on pathways to peace. So, we’ll have, for instance, a meeting on religion, conflict and peace. We’ll look at the economic aspects of war and peace and that sort of thing. So, there’s a number of topics that will start on that. We’re going to have a meeting on satellites because satellites have produced a huge amount of data now. And we could use this data much better for human development, looking at where migration is going, looking at climate patterns. You can get really, really detailed data, which, of course, a lot of it’s being used for military purposes right now. But we could do a lot of peaceful use of it, which people maybe are not using enough yet. So, we’ve got a meeting on satellites. We had a big meeting on AI and human development last October. And then right now, the biggest project we have at the moment is a joint project with the Academy of Sciences on climate resilience. Because the idea is mitigation is important. But right now, we need to help people deal with the crises that are already occurring and are going to continue to occur. We can try to keep climate change down as much as possible, but it’s still going to be a factor we’re going to have to deal with. So, people need to learn to be resilient. So, we had a big meeting in Rome in 2024 about that. Now, we’ve organized regional meetings around the world. Because one of the things that’s interesting, the research shows politicians listen much more to the local scientists than they do to some big global scientists who they think doesn’t know anything about what’s going on in their country. So, we want regional meetings where you bring the local scientists and the local decision makers. And the other thing is we’re not working with national governments. We’re only working with mayors of cities and regional because they are often much more able to do things. They’re not so blocked by the political polarization that we have now. So, try to bring together these groups. So, we’ve had a couple of meetings in the US. We’ve had a meeting in Brazil. We’ve had a meeting in Nairobi. There’ll be another one in Dakar for West Africa. There was one in Europe, in Austria, trying to bring Central Europe and Western Europe together. There’s going to be one in Australia, Sydney, mostly oriented towards the Pacific Islands. There could be one in India. There’s going to be one in the Philippines. So, the idea is bring this, get the sort of thing working on local level. And then at the end, we’ll have another global summit at the end, sometime in 2027. So, you know, that’s not all of what we’re doing, but that’s some of the things that we’re doing.

Robert Duncan: So, if I’ve got this right, just last month in the middle of February, you met with Pope Leo. How often does that take place?

Sister Alford: Not very often.

Robert Duncan: Can you tell me anything about that meeting?

Sister Alford: He was mostly listening. I think that’s his definite mode at the moment. The things that he talked about were more kind of concrete things to do with how we could coordinate better in the Holy See, things like that. With regard to the big issues, he wanted to listen to us. And I brought him some books and things. And I said, you know, these are the topics we’re working on. If you want us to change anything, tell us, you know. So, he wanted to hear what we were doing. And then he may come back to us later and say, I’m interested in this. Or if you just modify this a bit or something, I don’t know. He didn’t want to tell us what to do.

Robert Duncan: Is he hard to read? Did you notice whether his eyes lit up or he was particularly interested in any of the things?

Sister Alford: Well, I think he’s very interested in the peace question. And you could tell he was really following when we were talking about that. But I mean, that’s no surprise to anybody. He’s been talking such a lot about peace.

Robert Duncan: And that was before...

Sister Alford: That was before the current situation in Iran.

Robert Duncan: So, it seems to me that you have a privileged position, more or less, to hear from a lot of different experts. How would you say you and your role see the question of peace? And when the stakes are so high, what can the Church do?

Sister Alford: Well, I think one of the key things we need to do is share the church’s tradition on how to build peace. I mean, we’ve got a wonderful document in Pacem in Terris, which we had commemorative events in the Academy. By the way, all the Academy’s publications are open access. They are all available free on the website. So, there’s a very big publication that came out on the anniversary of Pacem in Terris, which people can look at. So, I think, first of all, the Church is teaching. We really need to know it really well, because what happens is some elements of it get applied given the historical circumstances that people are in. But then situation changes, like this situation, this war that’s currently on at the moment, or wars that are currently on at the moment, they are not exactly the same. The content of them, the contours, as in previous. So, we have to, if we really want to use the richness of the Christian tradition, we have to go back and look at that teaching again, and then try to see how can we use it in these circumstances. We also need to try and find good information. And I think one very good source of information is the Institute for Economics and Peace in Australia, which produces the Global Peace Index, which produces Positive Peace Index. They’ve been working for a long time. There’s also the Nordic agencies, the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, the Swedish one, the name’s gone out of my head. Anyway, so they also, you know, these are people who don’t have anything to gain by selling information or anything like that. And they’re really interested to understand what’s going on. So, these are really good sources of information. So, I think we need to really root ourselves in the teaching. We have to try and use the best information we can get. And then, we have to try to have some kind of judgments about things, knowing that probably they’re going to be provisional judgments, because as you say, not all the information is available. There’s a big discussion right now about what to do about Just War Theory, for instance. You know, a lot of people started saying we should talk about just peace and not just war. I think we see in the Ukrainian situation that we have to find a way of saying people have a legitimate right to defend themselves. The question is, as St. Thomas would say, look, if you’re going to use military means to defend yourself, you have to have a realistic possibility of winning. You know, just throwing your people into a mincing machine with the idea of glory or something, when you don’t have a realistic view of winning, it’s not morally acceptable. Because of course, you’re always trying to limit the death. You’re trying to keep the human person in the center. But on the other hand, freedom is really important. Cultural identity is really important. So, we’re trying to put these things together. So, you need to have a realistic view that you could actually achieve something with this goal with using military means. And then they have to be proportionate. You know, you don’t just drop a nuclear bomb on Russia. That’s not proportionate, you know. So, there’s various ways of thinking about this. So, you know, one way is how to help people to think about it. There might be some judgments that we can make about specific situations. Draw on the teaching and get the best information we can. I mean, one of the things maybe we should do, I’m thinking, talking to you now, is maybe curate a list of the really good sources of information that we could put on the website so people could go there and look at it.

Robert Duncan: I think that would be helpful. That would help the journalists. This may seem like an insensitive question, but at almost every Angelus or general audience, there’s now an appeal. And if you go to Google and you search “Pope news,” or “Pope Leo news,” almost all the news stories are “Pope against war,” “Pope says no more war.” What is that accomplishing? And how should Catholics follow the news and implement that?

Sister Alford: Yeah. Well, I would say some of the time you should go back and actually listen to what the Pope said. You know, he’s not speaking for too long. It’s like 10 minutes or 15 minutes or something, rather than going to the news report. Because as you say, there’s usually an appeal, but there’s also a lot of teaching. There’s prayer. There’s, you know, it’s not only the appeal. What tends to get picked up in the media is the appeal. Yeah. But the appeal is in a context, you know. So I think, again, it’s coming back to this question we were talking about right at the beginning about living our faith. You know, prayer is essential to who we are. I think, given the crisis that we’re in, prayer is becoming more important, not less. We should be trying to deeply root ourselves in a life of prayer. We need God’s grace more than ever now. But alongside that, we are called to work in the world. You know, we’re called to be brothers and sisters to the people who are suffering around us, you know. And so this idea that we should put together in a papal Angelus or something, some reflection on the Gospel, some prayer, and some kind of appeal, telling people, please do something about this. So the Pope is trying to help guide people to a bit on where they should be giving their attention. That seems to me quite a good thing. So the Pope could do it at his level. Bishops could do it at their level. Parish priests could do it at their level. Parents could do it with their kids. You know, the sense of putting these things together and living a sort of full Christian life in that and being open to the world’s problems. I think, you know, that would be my comment to that sort of problem.

Robert Duncan: I think that it’s clear how, you know, the reminders of the appeals are summons to pray, and Catholics believe prayer is effective. But insofar as those are geopolitical appeals, do you believe they work? I mean, the Vatican and the Pope is often called the moral conscience of the West.

Sister Alford: Well, I think, firstly, I would say in answer to that question is, well, did what Jesus did work? Okay, so I won’t answer that question. I’ll let everybody think about it. So I think there’s a sense, there’s just value in just doing it, in just having a witness, in just, you know, even if it’s completely ignored. But I think one of the things you learn if you look at the history of the papacy over the 20th century is that the papacy is actually listened to. I mean, we get some really striking examples of it in history. In the First World War, you had Benedict XV trying to stop the war at the time. He tries in 1916, and he tries again in 1917. In 1917, he produces a document, August the 1st, which has seven points in it. It comes out, August the 1st, 1917. January the 8th or something like that, Wilson produces his 14 points.

There are scholars, political scientists, not all connected with Catholic Church, who are convinced there’s a direct connection between those seven points of Benedict XV and Wilson’s 14 points, even though Wilson didn’t like the Catholic Church. So that’s just one example. You know, you get words and ideas and things picked up from what the popes are saying. You know, Pope John Paul II was a really important figure during the collapse of the Soviet period. He wrote a very important letter to Gorbachev, reminding him about the Helsinki Final Act and talking about human rights. Exactly what the impact was, we don’t know, but it certainly might help. Even if it doesn’t, it’s setting a tone. It’s a voice. It’s present.

Robert Duncan: One of the things the Church is often criticized for is not having enough female voices in leadership and that the male mentality is the one that wants to go to war. Given that you work in social issues and that you are a woman, do you feel that your voice is heard in Rome and in the Catholic Church generally?

Sister Alford: Well, I think there is a big willingness, at least from my personal experience in Rome, to try to get more women in those kinds of positions. I mean, I think often we have this historical problem that women haven’t been in that position, and so the religious orders and the systems that kind of produce those kinds of things are not really producing them because they don’t expect them to go. So we have a bit of a sort of what the people in finance would call a pipeline problem. We need to produce a few more women who can do this sort of thing, but I think you’re kind of pushing against an open door in the Vatican and you don’t want tokenism. You don’t want women just put there just because you want to have a woman. That would also be undermining. So we need to have the women who’ve got the capacity to do these roles. I think obviously there are women who have that kind of, we just have to make sure they get the background. So I think we will see more of it. The fact that the Pope has started to do it will sort of filter down. We already see women judges in the diocese and things like this. So it’s gradually happening, I think, but maybe from the point of view of the media and the visual thing, it’s not enough yet. And I think there is something, it’s not a stupid point, but I think the tendency is hopefully good on this one.

Robert Duncan: In the series of videos I mentioned at the beginning, climate change is mentioned, artificial intelligence. We’ve already talked a bit about war and peace. When you are not in planning meetings with the Pope and doing all the things that you do, teaching classes, what are the issues, the social issues that really keep you up at night or occupy your heart, your passions? What would you spend your time thinking about? And maybe what should we be talking about more in the Church that we’re not?

Sister Alford: A really good question. I mean, I think I want to say something to you that will sound maybe very academic, but I don’t think it is. I think the thing that really worries me is that I feel like the main thinkers in the world today, they are using a way of thinking about the world, which is not able to help us resolve our problems. And that we in the academy, we have to try to help reorient this way of thinking. And because we can’t be experts on everything. I can’t be an expert on all these issues, but we need to be having a sort of shared way of looking at the world so that we can all work together to resolve these problems. If we’re at cross purposes, we’re not able to build on each other’s work. We’re not going to be able to do the sort of thing. You look at what happens in technology. They’re using each other’s work. They can build on each other. In the social sciences, we need to be much more, I think, have a much more realistic view about human beings, rather than say the idea in economics of the homo economicus, which would be a sociopath, as people have talked about, if you really existed, this person. We’ve got these problems in our way of thinking, which block us being able to work properly together. We need a sort of rethinking. And that’s the thing where I feel, when I talked about the sins of omission, that’s the thing where I think we really need to be doing something. I’m not sure that we’re doing enough. We need to do more. And then that would release amongst the goodwill of so many people to resolve the capacity, I think, to work together, because we can’t resolve problems just on our own. We really need what these problems are so complex. They’re so interrelated, and we need people at different levels. We need people on the local level who’ve got a basic idea. That was the idea of this universal fraternity idea. The universal fraternity can work on all different levels. People can start in the family, in the local community, and we can be somehow connected, working towards a shared goal.

And yeah, it gets more complicated when you get to higher levels, global level or whatever, but we can still have this kind of point of contact which links us. That’s one sort of thing we need to do. But I think we need a new kind of Enlightenment, in a way. The Enlightenment was trying to deal with a whole network of problems, and it produced a new way of thinking, which partly built on the old, but partly did new things. We have to do this with modernity. Modernity did a lot of good things, but it’s weak in many ways. And the Church, because it was in a slightly marginal relationship to modernity, in some ways it saw there were good things, but it has a lot of issues with modernity as well. It’s in quite a good place to try to help input ideas into the discussion, try to help us think differently. I’m sorry I might be disappointing people with that answer, but I think that’s where someone like me in the Academy, that’s where I’ve got to be working at that level, hoping that we can help other people do things that are more concrete to resolve those big problems you’re talking about.

Robert Duncan: For people who want to get more involved at home, that are not in the Academy, do you have any advice for them, how they can apply in their own lives the social teaching of the Church?

Sister Alford: Okay. I’d say they could learn more about it, because there’s always this joke that Catholic Social Teaching is the best kept secret in the Catholic Church. I mean, there are some people who know a lot about it, but a lot of people, even if they’ve had very good Christian formation, don’t know anything about it. So alongside that video series that I sent you the thing about, we have another one called Fraternitas, which is all about basic Catholic social teaching. But you can find, I’m sure, other good resources too. So first thing, learn something about this. Then next thing, have discussions. I think families are great places to have a kind of deliberation. Let’s think about this idea. How could we do something about it?

Then maybe the kids talk to each other amongst their friends, or you meet your friends in a coffee bar or something. So in other words, deliberate with each other. I think we’ve kind of lost this art of deliberation. We’re so used to being a bit passive and being told by experts how you should do things. But if we could try to rediscover this, the ideas are important, but then we have to do something with them. Put them into practice. Start to live them. Start to incarnate them. And I think if we try to do it, we can find a way of doing it. We have to try to do it.

Robert Duncan: Sister Helen Alford, thank you for sitting down with us.

Sister Alford: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

In this conversation, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu offers a clear-eyed account of that shift, arguing that the Church is entering a new phase: no longer defined by Western missionary outreach, but by a global return.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why blaming colonialism is not enough—and how tribalism has become its modern counterpart

• The Church as the only force capable of healing ethnic division and forming the human mind

• How Pope Leo’s upcoming visit to Africa speaks not just to the continent, but to Europe and the world

• The deeper spiritual crisis behind war, violence, and what he calls the “selfie” culture of modern humanity

• What Western Christians must learn from a Church that is growing, vibrant, and confident

This is a conversation about power, responsibility, and a renewal in a rapidly changing global Church.

Transcript

Intro: Fortunatus Nwachukwu is a Nigerian archbishop serving at the Vatican in the Dicastery for Evangelization, where he helps oversee its mission in some of the fastest-growing parts of the Church. A biblical scholar and former Vatican diplomat, he has served across Africa and Europe, including at the Holy See’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva and in the Secretariat of State of the Vatican. Now, he stands at a unique crossroads—watching the center of gravity of Christianity shift. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, filmed at the Palazzo Propaganda Fide ahead of Pope Leo’s April 2026 visit to four African countries, we turn to the questions shaping the Church’s future—and what the West can learn from a Christianity that is still alive and expanding. And we ask: as Catholicism in the West shows signs of decline, is Africa becoming the heart of the Church?

Robert Duncan: Archbishop Nwachukwu, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Thank you for having me.

Robert Duncan: Well, I’m at your house today. I’m in your offices.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Well, it’s a pleasure having you here.

Robert Duncan: I want to talk a little bit about the future of Catholicism and how Africa plays a role in that. People say that the global South is where the Church is growing. Do you see that Africa and the Church in Africa is going to play an important role in the Church’s future? And what would that look like?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: I think the Church in Africa is already playing an important role. We must bear in mind that the Church in Africa has grown from being a receiving church and is gradually becoming a giving church. And that is why we are talking of what I call the Church of the Sheaves. Because if you remember in Psalm 126, the Psalm that speaks of the return of the exiles of Zion, in verse 6, we read, they go out, they go out full of tears, carrying seed for the sowing. They come back, they come back full of songs, carrying their sheaves. My interpretation, our reading is currently that those who went out in tears, carrying seed for the sowing, were the missionaries that came from the West, going to the mission countries, not only in Africa. They left at a time when we did not have the current means of communication or transportation. So most of them, at their departure, did not think they would come back. So their going was like a dying. And one can only imagine the amount of tears that flowed as they bade farewell to their beloved, to their loved ones. And so they fit perfectly. The text of the Psalms, Psalm 126, verse 6, they go out, they go out full of tears. But they did not go empty handed. They were carrying the seed of the Gospel. So carrying seed for the sowing. They are the missionaries that went out and they sowed the seeds. And the seeds they sowed have germinated, produced plants, and those plants are now producing abundant fruit. We are now living the time of the harvest, the time of the sheaves. So we see the harvest in Africa, all over the place in Africa. We see it in Asia. We see it in various parts of the world where the churches that grew from this missionary endeavor are now flourishing. And so we are at the moment of saying, they come back, they come back full of songs. Think of the songs, the joy in the African liturgy. They come back, they come back full of songs, carrying their sheaves. The young churches are now bringing in the sheaves, which are the fruits of the sacrifice, the missionary endeavor of those heroes of our faith, the missionaries.

Robert Duncan: Is the church in Rome ready for African church leadership? Often those who have followed the Church and the media in particular have portrayed leaders from the African church and leaders from the European or Western church as being at odds in different matters like sexuality and church authority during recent synods. Do you see unity at risk if Africa is playing an increasingly important role, globally?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Wherever you have two people, you have diversity of opinions. Even among Africans in Africa, we have diversity of opinions. Think of the situation in Rome. One thing I can tell you is that the Church had been blessed with excellent popes. And these popes from the time even before, but especially from the time of Pope Paul VI, have been very, very open and not just supportive, but also very encouraging to the African church. Think of the declaration of Pope Paul VI in Uganda in 1969, when he called the Africans that they have to become now the missionaries of their own continent. And then it was like telling the Africans that the church has become adult, no longer a teenage church, but an adult church. I’m going to come back maybe to talk about that. But then you think also of Saint John Paul II, and how the amount of attention he gave to Africa, even calling the first special assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Africa. And then you think of his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, who called also the second special assembly on Africa of the Synod of Bishops. And then Pope Francis, all the openness. It was Pope Francis, for example, that brought me to Rome. And now we have Pope Leo XIV. Maybe people should know that once Pope Leo XIV was elected the Superior General of the Augustinians, when he was elected Superior General of the Augustinian Order, one of his first trips, I don’t know whether it was actually the very first, but one of his first trips was to Africa. So we have people, popes, that have been open to Africa and very welcoming to Africans. Is that a generalized thing? Of course, we have also people, Westerners, not just in Rome, but all over the place, that look at Africans with some diffidence. And they look at Africans as these immigrants. Even some priests and some people think that Africans, if not just African immigrants, laypersons, but even priests and religious, like people who were coming to get jobs from them. And now that is a mentality we are trying to help them to correct. And I go back always to the text of Psalm 126, verse 6, to let them know we wouldn’t be here if there were no Europeans, no Westerners, that sacrificed the most important, the most beautiful moments of their lives, of their youth, to come to our countries to preach the Gospel. So we are not here out of accident. We are here as the children, the sons and daughters that came from the sacrifice of Western missionaries.

Robert Duncan: I’d like to pick up on that. I’m jumping around a bit from my plan, but because it’s the second time you’ve mentioned the missionary activity in Africa. I was, in preparing for this interview, I found a talk that you gave at the Gregorian a couple years ago online, and you said some very interesting things. For example: “We criticize (speaking of Africans), we criticize colonialism, but then we bring it home. We have enculturated colonialism in the form of tribalism and ethnic supremacy.” You also say, “We condemn white supremacy, but in Africa, we often practice ethnic supremacy ourselves.” And the last quote I’ll read you is, “In some places, people would rather accept a European bishop than a fellow African from another tribe. That is racism enculturated.” That is very true. And I still hold some opinion.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: That is very true. And I still hold (that) opinion.

Robert Duncan: Can you give more context?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: I can tell you, all of us criticize colonialism. And it is not rare to find Africans wanting to blame everything that is going bad, badly in Africa on colonialism. And then I tell people, look at other countries that have experienced also colonialism. I take Ireland, for example. They experienced colonialism. They are not just there licking their wounds. They have gone beyond. Of course, we don’t negate history, but we should not allow ourselves to be tied down to history. We have to go beyond what wounded us and find a show that we can go beyond our wounds. Colonialism was a very bad thing in history. We think of even the Shoah, of the Jews, for example. The Jews are not just there, staying there and weeping and wobbling on the ground. They keep the history. They don’t want to forget what was done to them, but they don’t let it pin them down. They have grown and they have gone far beyond. Now, this is what Africa should do. We should not just be there criticizing colonialism all the time and then remaining in the blame game. We should go beyond. Unfortunately, instead of working to go beyond colonialism, what we have done is almost, I put it in inverted commas, inculturating colonialism. The evils that we criticize in colonialism, we now practice to our own brothers and sisters, just because they belong to another clan, to another ethnic group, to another part, or even of the same ethnic group. And this, unfortunately, has crept into the Church in some places. This is very dangerous because we know that tribalism is rampant in many societies in Africa and who is going to heal it? The military have tried. Politicians have tried. Orders have tried. The only person, the only group we think should help in healing it is the Church. Why? Because the Church gives a common ground to everybody, a common principle, the principle of loving, not just like oneself. I have to underline that. Love your neighbor like yourself is not the basic principle of the church. That is Old Testament. Leviticus chapter 19, verse 18. It comes from the Old Testament. Loving your neighbor like yourself, almost as it were, making yourself the point of departure. No, Jesus changed that. Jesus said, loving your neighbor no longer like yourself, but like I, Jesus, have loved. So, all Christians have one point of reference, Jesus Christ. John chapter 13, verse 34. If we were to keep to what we take as our basic text, which is the Bible, for Christians, the gospel especially, we wouldn’t have space for this new colonialism that presents itself as tribalism and ethnocentrism.

Robert Duncan: Many people, though, in the West will say that the Church itself is part of colonialism’s legacy.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: No, the Church, the people, the colonialists came looking for what they would take away. The Church did not come looking for what it would take away. The Church came looking for what it would give to those in need, to the local populations. Of course, even as we have it today, we have people, politicians especially, people that are self-centered, who try to manipulate religion and use it for their personal interests. We had that also among colonial powers, among some colonialists. And so, they tried to, some places, manipulate agents of the Church. But the sincere, true missionaries had no colonial interests. Their interest was bringing new way of living, education, new way of health care, health care, new way of hygiene. They were focused on the health, the life, and well-being of the people to whom they brought the Gospel.

Robert Duncan: What formed you spiritually growing up? You’re from Nigeria. What were your early life experiences and how did they shape your vocation?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: My vocation actually came especially from my father. My father was a primary school headmaster. He was formed under the Irish missionaries and he believed very firmly, he imbibed the principles taught by the Irish missionaries. And those were the principles he transferred to us. I must tell you that my mother was Anglican until marriage. So, I began growing as a child on two legs, the firm leg of Catholicism and the other leg, weaker one, of Anglicanism. Whenever I went to my maternal home, my maternal siblings would try to make a mockery of me because of our devotions to the saints and the blessed Virgin Mary and so on. And that pushed me early to start digging into the Bible to know how to prepare my defense when I met them. Now, at the age of six, five or six, they told me I started mimicking the priest that came to celebrate in my father’s school. And that was only twice or thrice every year because the parish was so big. It had more than 50, 60 outstations and the priest was coming to our part only twice or three times a year. And although I was small, whenever the priest left, I came to learn from my parents that I would go there and I began to mimic the priest. And I tried to tell them that I would be like that priest. He later on became a monsignor. That was the priest that baptized me. So, at the age of five, six, I was already thinking of being like that parish priest. And my father started also giving me some religious books to read. Unfortunately, that dream, that lofty dream of a child was cut shut and destroyed. In 1967, when at the age of seven, I experienced the most horrible thing any child would experience. The Biafran Civil War. I was a child of Biafra and I saw my own friends, colleagues, overnight develop distended stomachs due to kwashiorkor or beriberi and they died.

Robert Duncan: What was the conflict about?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: It was a conflict between Nigeria and my part of Nigeria, which took the name of Biafra and wanted to be independent. I don’t want to go into the causes and so on, but this part of Nigeria felt there was some bit of discrimination against it and felt, okay, if you don’t want us inside, we want to be independent. And Nigeria did not want it. And so the civil war broke out and it seemed that Nigeria used hunger as one of its weapons of war. And sorry to say, Nigeria had the support, tacit or in some cases open, of most European countries of the time. And so I lost two of my sisters, not in combat, but to war, to lax. And for three years, I saw the dreams of my childhood, you know, vanish, disappear. Thanks to God, the war came to an end. When the war finished, of course, you can imagine how I felt towards the rest of the Christians of Nigeria, because many of those who came to fight us were also Christians, not Muslims. The head of the Nigerian government, Yakubu Gowon, was a Christian. He’s still alive. He’s still a Christian. So I began as a young person to ask myself, how could Christians do such things to their fellow Christians? Of course, the Nigerian side had also the Muslims with them, but the leader of Nigeria was Christian. Most of the generals and leaders of the Nigerian army were Christians. As a child, of course, I was asking myself, was it not possible for the Christians to reach an agreement? I don’t even know. I came to know that the two leaders, Yakubu Gowon, a Christian, and Odumegwu Ojukwu, a Christian, the leader of the Biafrans, met in Ghana, and they were not able to reach an agreement. Of course, they reached an agreement, an Aburi agreement. Why were they not able to implement it? So, the same feeling is the feeling I had when I heard of the Russian-Ukrainian war. People were telling me of political, geographical interests, and I was asking them, excuse me, Russia is full of Orthodox Christians. Ukraine is full of Orthodox Christians. Which Christ are we worshipping? How can we profess to be sincerely Christians and we cannot sit down and negotiate and find meeting ground based on the gospel that we receive from Christ? This is a total betrayal of Christ.

Robert Duncan: So, in a context like that, what does it mean that Christianity is growing? Are they rival Christianities? Is it all positive news that Christianity is growing in Africa?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Christianity is growing in Africa. What I’m talking about is, of course, Christianity has always tried to challenge the consequences of sin. You know that the origin of violence in humanity is not directly from God. It is from turning away from God. I will take you, maybe, if you don’t worry, I take you quickly back to the Bible a little bit. God created the human being, according to the Bible, to be his reflection, God’s reflection. If we read Genesis 1:26-27, and God said, “Let us make man and woman in our image and likeness.” So, God made the human being in God’s image and likeness. What does that mean? That God made the human being to be like a mirror or a camera focused on God so that whoever looks into it does not see himself or herself, but sees God. That’s capturing the reflection of God. And so, God said to this human being, you must maintain me as a measure of what is good and bad. Eat of every fruit, but not that of the measure of good and bad. This is now Genesis 2:16. But then in Genesis 3, man and woman did exactly what God said they should not do. And once they ate of that fruit, what happened? They changed their camera from being focused on God, capturing God’s image, to doing selfie. So, they started capturing their image. That is why once they ate of that fruit and God called them, their eyes were opened and they saw not God, but they saw themselves as naked. So, which means eyes opening is almost like a subtle way of saying that their camera was turned the other way and they began to see themselves and no longer God, because they had eaten the fruit of using themselves as measure. And so, they began to see themselves. They became the center. And so, God put them away from the place of intimacy with God. That’s how at the end of Genesis 3, they were moved away from the Garden of Eden. And once the focus was no longer on God, but on self with the selfie, violence came. And until today, all the cases of violence we have are the consequence of selfie in human relations. Look at them. It is about me, about my interests. It is about me and my selfishness against my brother, my sister. Now, what does Christianity preach? Move the focus from yourself, return to Christ, the perfect image of God. That is where Christ says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” John chapter 14 verse 6. If only Christians were to know that they have the most formidable arm, weapon, for not defeating every violence, every misunderstanding, every war, we have the Gospel.

So, the Gospel, the Church growing in Africa, means also putting this weapon in the hands of many more people. Now we have the weapon. The challenge of the Church today is to teach the people how to use that weapon, which is the Gospel, and to reach the reconciliation and the peace and justice that that weapon brings. You know, I was amazed thinking of the theme of the Second Assembly for Africa, of the Synod of Bishops that was convoked by Pope Benedict XVI, the Church of Africa. Reconciliation, peace, and justice. These are the things that flow from a good evangelization. We are not having the numbers. The challenge is to tell the people how to harness the weapon in our hands in making the numbers work.

Robert Duncan: When this interview airs, the Pope will be just days away from a four-country trip to Africa. He’ll be going to Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea. Why does this trip matter beyond Africa? What should the global Church, and in particular, maybe people in the Western world, be paying attention to as the Pope goes to Africa?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: This visit is very important because the world is no longer fragmented as it used to be, especially in our moment. Since we started talking about globalization, globalization, and now we are talking about the era of social media, so we no longer have distances, as it were. We are all together. We form one single village. So, what happens in Africa reverberates also in Europe or in the U.S. If things are not good in Africa, you do whatever you want, the people are going to flood towards Europe. So, it is necessary, people are speaking, saying here in Europe, let us try to help them, help their country so that they will remain home. To change a person, you begin with the mind. And the visit of the Pope, the message of the Pope, is a message that always goes towards the formation of the mind. Think of his visit to Algeria. The symbol of the visit is that of two doves, now drinking from a common cup, sharing peace. And that means telling people, peace is what we need. Algeria, I served in Algeria as Secretary of the Nunciature for three years, in a difficult moment, from 1999 to 2002. And I saw, I visited much of the country, even down south up to Tamanrasset, to the tomb of Charles de Foucauld. I visited the tomb, that is almost, the desert sands are coming so close to the tomb. So, I visited this country. It is a country where we have a very small, a tiny population of Catholics in a predominantly Muslim country. But the Pope is giving the message that the little ship we have there is a flock that loves peace and that loves also to drink with the rest of the doves from the same cup of peace. So, his message there is going to be certainly the message of peace. I understand he’s going to visit the Grand Mosque, the Great Mosque, and then he is going to celebrate and then speak with the Christians, Catholics, at Notre Dame d’Afrique, just in front of the Apostolic Nunciature. So, that is a message also focused on the mind, speaking of peace and sharing. He goes on to Cameroon, and that is, the message of Cameroon is very important because Cameroon stands at a meeting point between West Africa, Central Africa, Savannah Africa towards the north, and a bit moving a bit towards the south. So, it is very central. And the problems, the issues we have in Cameroon are issues that we have in various parts of Africa. So, the symbol we have there is a symbol we should be able to apply to every part of Africa. Think of the Bible lying below the image of the country, and then from the Bible, the cross of Christ coming out. So, this is like saying the message of the Gospel that brings us the image of Christ. The cross is not just the cross of death, it is the cross that is the embrace. The embrace that gathers people together, irrespective of their ethnic or tribal affiliations, irrespective of their political, social affiliations, in a country that is also the part, the English-speaking part, is facing some internal conflicts. This type of message of the Bible bringing Christ and trying to speak of, there is also another image of a dove, which means peace through the Gospel and the presence of Christ. That is a very strong message. And so, the Pope is going to be certainly talking about peace, reconciliation, justice and peace. I don’t know the text, but from the symbol, from the image, you can have the intuition that the Pope is going to be addressing these issues. You go on to Angola. Angola, as we know, for various years encountered wars, and so there was a lot of shedding of blood. Maybe that is why the color red is very strong in the symbol that we have in Angola. But then also we have the other elements of nature and then of family, which means that the Pope is also going to be talking about the suffering of the people. He is going to be talking about the need to rise from the ashes and to move towards a better future.

Robert Duncan: Also mining?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Well, he’s going to be talking about... I said we did not participate directly in preparing the Pope’s visit, so I do not have any access to his texts. If I were requested to contribute, maybe when he talks about justice and peace, you cannot talk about justice in a country like that without touching things like the question of mining.

Robert Duncan: And the reason for that, I mean, one possible connection, Pope Leo has talked about artificial intelligence, and many of the raw materials that go to build the data centers and the phones, you were talking about selfies earlier, come from mining in Africa, in places like Angola.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Well, that’s true. Angola, but especially RDC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And then, unfortunately, these are countries that are battered by the selfie, personal interests of people that are not thinking of the local populations, but are thinking of their own personal interests. The selfie in man that has turned man into agent of sin. So, this is the thing that the Gospel is trying to contrast, the tendency of selfie. The Gospel is saying, change the camera, return it to Christ. Now, I have to tell you, the expression, their eyes were opened, I found in two interesting moments, permit me to just make this little digression. At the moment of the selfie in Genesis, when man and woman, people say they ate apple. No, what they did was twist what God said. God said, do not touch the question of judgment of good and evil. That belongs to me. God wants himself to be the yard stick for measuring good and evil. So, we should be focused on God. In Genesis chapter 3, that fruit they ate turned them, and they were focused no longer on God, but themselves. Think that in Genesis chapter 2, verse 24. The two of them were naked, but they were not ashamed. Why? Because they were not even seeing themselves as naked, because they were totally focused on God. But in Genesis chapter 3, once they ate of this fruit, we see their eyes were opened, which means the eyes turned, they began to do selfie. The eyes again turned again, opened again, in Luke chapter 24. If you read up to verses 31 and 32, these are the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, after the resurrection of Christ. When they received the bread, blessed and broken by Christ, we read their eyes were opened. Exactly the same Greek expression that we have in Genesis chapter 3. We have it here. Their eyes were opened, but they did not see themselves. They recognized Christ. So, it was like the selfie of Genesis was turned back and refocused on Christ through the Eucharistic bread that was blessed by Christ. So, the Eucharist brings us back from selfishness to Christ. Are we able to bring this message to our people, the message of the Gospel, that makes us focus on Christ as a center? That is the challenge we have in our Africa and in the universal Church.

Robert Duncan: The last of the four countries was Equatorial Guinea.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: In Equatorial Guinea, I think the symbol there focuses mainly on symbols like the family and so on, but it also has a boat there. I think there again, the attention is on mission and then on the family life. That is also a place that the Holy Father is going to again be focusing on the mind of the people. It’s just like saying he’s going to tell the people a new mind for a new life.

Robert Duncan: Many people listening may have heard of these countries, but may not be able to identify them on the map. Do you have a key for what they could be paying attention to, why they should tune into this trip, even if the Pope is not coming to see them and it seems like something far away?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Okay, I’ll just tell you some specific things about them. Algeria stays in the North and the dominant language in Algeria is Arabic. St. Augustine is from there. That was the powerhouse of the Latin church in the first years of Christianity in Northern Africa. The Pope, thanks be to God, is visiting there. He’s Augustinian. And so it is what you could call Arab Africa. Cameroon is a meeting point between English-speaking Africa and French-speaking Africa. So you just come below, you come immediately sub-Saharan Africa, the first level there. As I said, from the West, Western Africa and from Eastern Africa, they meet in Cameroon. From the North and the South, they meet in Cameroon. And so in Cameroon, you have a meeting of French-speaking Africa and English-speaking West Africa also, they meet in Cameroon. Now below Cameroon, a little bit below and towards the West, staying just below Nigeria, you have Equatorial Guinea. That is one of the few countries in Africa that speak Spanish. So you have the purpose of visiting Spanish-speaking Africa. And then Angola is a little bit further. You know, Angola is interesting. Angola was the seat of what used to be the Congo, where Catholicism stayed in the Middle Ages. The first Catholic ambassador that was accredited to the Holy See came from the Congo in today, the Kingdom of the Congo, that is today Angola. Today’s Angola. The ambassador Ne Vunda left, I think it was about the 15th or the 16th, early 16th century. He was accredited to the Holy Father, to the Holy See, and he left by ship traveling from Angola by sea towards Spain and Portugal. And then eventually, after various months, he arrived in Rome, but was already sick when he arrived. And when he arrived in Rome, he died. And the Pope then wanted him to be buried in Santa Maria Maggiore. He is the only African buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. So to tell you how important Angola is to the presence of Christianity in Africa, presence of Catholicism in Africa, and this Angola today is Portuguese-speaking Africa. So with these four countries, the Pope with one shot is taking Arabic-speaking Africa, French and English-speaking Africa, Spanish-speaking Africa, and Portuguese-speaking Africa in one shot.

Robert Duncan: I’d like to conclude by asking you, what worries you most about the future of Africa or the current situation now? Generally, it’s a large continent. We didn’t really have a chance to talk about Islam and the threat of religious violence. What are the issues that maybe we didn’t talk about that keep you up at night?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Well, the issue that keeps me up at night most is what you mentioned at the beginning, and that was the enculturation of colonialism and colonialistic tendencies in the form of tribalism, in the form of ethnocentrism, in the form of clannishness that has dominated the political sphere. And where you have tribalism and clannishness and ethnocentrism, you have corruption, corruption tribes, because people don’t work for the public good. They work for the preservation of their interests, because they know that when the leader of the group changes to another tribe, they might lose their job. So they try to make hay while the sun shines. So that is a danger. That is a major danger we have there. Another danger, which is close to that, is the danger of non-acceptance. Unfortunately, if you go to the Arab North Africa, people speak of racism towards blacks in Europe and other places. Well, I can tell you, we also have it very, very strongly in the northern part of Africa towards sub-Saharan Africans. So it is an extended form of tribalism, but now influenced by the difference of color, because people in northern Africa, many of them are of lighter skin complexion, and so sometimes they have a tendency to despise their brothers from sub-Saharan Africa who have a darker skin color. That is also a challenge. Now, what about the challenge of Islam? I have to mention that violent Islam is not from Africa. I have to repeat that and underline it. Violent Islam is not from Africa. Well, you would say, I would even say further, neither Christianity nor Islam originated in Africa. Both of them came from outside. Now, if a person is a guest in your place, we ask the guest to behave himself or herself. So we are asking people who are exponents of Islam and Christianity in Africa to behave themselves. We have to behave ourselves in the continent and represent exactly and live exactly what our religions preach. Islam —from Salaam — says (it’s) a religion of peace, then let them be a religion of peace and not of violence and not of terrorism. Christianity, we say, is a religion of love, religion of the person of Christ. Then let us be a religion that speaks of Christ and not of trying to manipulate the Gospel for personal interests and personal gains. This, the thing that worries me currently, is the question of manipulating religion, whether it is Islam or Christianity, manipulating religion for personal interests and personal gains instead of using or following religion for what it really teaches and what it really represents.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to end on a positive note. Often Africa is described as being exuberant and the church in Africa being alive, whereas churches in Western European countries or even maybe the U.S. can be described as sleepy or in decline. So what can Christians in the Western world learn from African Christians?

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Well, the first thing I tell the Christians in the Western world is that God has made them hungry and they are passing a period of hunger so that they will be able to receive the fresh food that is coming from the mission lands. Because if the Church were still to be luxuriant, to be flourishing in the West, I’m sure they would be feeling, oh, we are satisfied, we don’t have need for these others. If you want to make a person enjoy food, you tell the person to fast a little bit. So God is making the West to fast a little bit so that they will be ready to welcome the sheaves that are coming back. And once they have imbibed that mentality of welcome, I call it the mentality of the mother who welcomes her child, once that has been done, the church in the West will rise again from its trunks. I don’t see the Church in the West as dying. It is passing through a phase of hunger to help it welcome the sheaves that are coming home.

Robert Duncan: Archbishop Nwachukwu, thank you so much for your time.

Archbishop Nwachukwu: Thank you very much.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• His family background and personal ties to a statue in St. Peter’s Square

• Why the Church avoids political framing on migration

• Whether arguments about culture and identity hold up

• Why social issues have become front-and-center in the modern Church

This is a serious exchange about one of the defining tensions of our time: the necessity of politics—and the refusal of the Church to be reduced to it.

Transcript

Intro: Cardinal Michael Czerny has been one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent voices on social questions for more than a decade. The son of immigrants of Jewish and Christian background, whose parents’ story is reflected in a 2019 installation in St. Peter’s Square, his advocacy is rooted in a personal history shaped by displacement and resilience. His priestly vocation was forged through human rights work in El Salvador and later in the fight against AIDS in Africa, before eventually being called to Rome. There, he became one of the closest collaborators of Pope Francis, helping shape the Vatican’s response to migration and environmental care through the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development—work he continues into the early days of Pope Leo’s pontificate. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we explore the roots of his convictions and how his life experience has helped popes shape the Church’s engagement with the defining issues of the 21st century. And we ask: as debates over national borders and identity intensify in Europe and the United States, is the Church being heard—or does its message risk falling on deaf ears?

Robert Duncan: I was wondering whether I would start the interview this way or end it.

Cardinal Czerny: Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it and then you can edit it.

Robert Duncan: You may disagree with this, Cardinal Czerny. First of all, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service. But I’ve been both present at many interviews with you and I’ve watched many interviews with you, most recently during the recent conclave. And one thing that I’ve noticed is you often will reframe the question that the journalist asks. And that makes me wonder whether you think that journalists, whether they be Catholic or secular, often get the church’s story wrong.

Cardinal Czerny: Well, I mean, my feeling is they get the story wrong if they ask the wrong question. And so if the question is not going to get us to a happy answer, then it’s better to reformulate it.

Robert Duncan: Well, I will be on my best behavior. I want to start with St. Peter’s Square, which is now a testament to your own life story. I believe if I’ve got this right, the last time St. Peter’s Square was permanently altered was in the 19th century with the statues of St. Peter and St. Paul. In 2019, a new permanent feature was installed. Can you tell me about that statue and what is your personal connection to it?

Cardinal Czerny: My personal connection with Angels Unawares is a pretty long-running friendship with the sculptor, Timothy Schmaltz. And the way I remember the particular story is that there was a boat that went down in the Mediterranean with I don’t know how many hundred migrants on board. And Timothy was here for some other reason and he said to me, Father, when is this tragedy of migration going to stop? And I said to him, Timothy, migration is not a tragedy, it’s a fact of life. And he says that this inspired him to try to portray the migrants of all times and all places. And in their midst, following a citation from the Letter to the Hebrews, in their midst, there’s an angel. The sculpture is called Angels Unawares. And the angel is ambiguous in an interesting way. Because it’s not clear whether the angel is someone who is welcoming a migrant or whether the angel is the migrant bringing life into the life of whoever is helping.

Robert Duncan: And your parents are depicted in the statue.

Cardinal Czerny: And my parents are on the back of the boat.

Robert Duncan: Can you tell people who don’t know your story?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, we’re refugees from Czechoslovakia who came to Canada in late 1948. And so when Timothy was doing the sculpture, he asked for examples of people who were forced to flee. And my parents happened to fit that category. So I shared a photo with him and so they ended up on a boat. Why were they forced to flee? Several reasons. They had scarcely survived the tragedy of World War II and the persecution. And then the regime in Czechoslovakia turned communist and my father was afraid for his own life and especially for the future of his family. And so we fled.

Robert Duncan: How old were you at the time?

Cardinal Czerny: Two and a bit.

Robert Duncan: Any memories, images?

Cardinal Czerny: Not really. I mean, probably stories that I’ve been told and that I now make my own. But I mean, I think I remember a moment in the train station in Paris when we were on our way to Le Havre. I remember some moments on the boat or on the train from Halifax to Montreal. We arrived for Christmas of 1948. But the important thing of our story is that we would not have been able to go to Canada if we didn’t have sponsors. And a school friend of my parents heard that we were stuck in Europe and wanted to get to Canada. And even though he had only arrived recently himself and had his own young family, he took the risk of sponsoring us and making it possible for us to come to Canada. And that marked me very much. It was something that our family always remembered and that we are grateful for to this day. And so when the Church encourages us to welcome, it’s something that I believe in very much and that my own experience backs up.

Robert Duncan: I walk through St. Peter’s Square every day as I come to work. And, you know, people do, of course, stare at the Basilica and the Saints and the Square and all the different features. And they certainly also stare for a while and they touch — you can see certain parts where they’ve venerated the statue. And I just wonder, I mean, it must be both a source of pride and mystery and humility, I don’t know — What does it feel like to be a permanent part of St. Peter’s Square?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, that’s quite astonishing, I would say. I mean, that’s not something that I easily, I can easily believe. And especially being a refugee family, to think that you have a permanent place anywhere, much less in St. Peter’s Square, is quite astonishing. But, you know, the thing that I find most touching is how people relate to the sculpture. Because unlike many other works like that, there’s no sign. There’s no word around that tells you what it is or who did it or why it is or any of that. And so people, in a certain sense, stumble upon it and very quickly identify with it. And I think it’s fair to say that most people are walking around the boat looking for their ancestors. Because most people are the offspring of refugees or migrants of one kind or another. In fact, we all are, finally. So the fact that people recognize the meaning and relate to the sculpture so personally, that as you say, there are places which have been touched by thousands and thousands of people in a sense of connectedness. I don’t know if it’s veneration exactly, but certainly a sense of connectedness. That’s very cool because what the false narrative about migrants and refugees and displaced people and unaccompanied minors, the false narrative is that they have nothing to do with us. Whereas the sculpture says, no, no, they are us. They are us.

Robert Duncan: So this experience, you say it marked you permanently. And it’s clear from your Wikipedia page, your biography, that you decided relatively early on to give your life to the cause of human rights. Would you just talk a bit about where that vocation came from and how it fit in with your priestly vocation?

Cardinal Czerny: Yeah, no, but I would never describe my vocation as a vocation to human rights. That’s not, I wouldn’t be right. No, my vocation was a gift and a call from God to serve him and to serve his people. And in fact, and I was attracted to the Jesuits because I had studied in a Jesuit school in Montreal in Loyola. But at first I thought I was probably going to be a professor. So I don’t think, you know, it wasn’t a question of human rights. It is true, people have studied that survivors of the Holocaust often have gone into the service part of life. It’s as if this gratuitous or doubly or triply gratuitous gift of life means you have to give back and that it’s not worth living if you’re not giving back. So many of us make that option. And I suppose, unawares, I made that option too. But my vocation, you might say, or my calling to work in the social ministry came later as part of my Jesuit formation. And now looking back, it all makes sense, but I didn’t see it so clearly then. I didn’t think that much about being a migrant or refugee until, in fact, until I was appointed to the new migrant and refugee section by Pope Francis and sort of had to learn all about it. And after listening to migrants and refugees talking after a while being said, but that sounds very much like what I went through.

Robert Duncan: Right. I wanted to put a pin in it because it’s slightly going back a step. But one thing that we didn’t discuss was your Jewish heritage. And when did you or your family become Catholic?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, on my father’s side, we’re traditionally Catholic. We’re not at all Jewish. And on my mother’s side, my paternal grandfather was a second-generation Catholic. In other words, his father converted. My great-great-grandfather was the last one who died as a Jew. So on my grandfather’s side, we’ve been Catholic for four generations. On my mother’s side, in fact, my grandmother was baptized not long before she married. So she was... But being Jewish at that time in Czechoslovakia was more of a cultural thing than religious. And so we were basically a Catholic family. We went to the parish from us. And being Jewish is part of our spiritual, cultural, and human heritage. And so it’s part of us. But we haven’t been Jewish, at least on my father’s side, or grandfather’s side for a long time.

Robert Duncan: So how did that awareness of Jewish heritage shape your Catholic faith growing up?

Cardinal Czerny: We didn’t talk about it much. Partly because it was traumatic and so there wasn’t much motivation to sort of keep digging around in it. Partly because coming to a new country with a new language and new culture, there’s a very strong motivation to inculturate rather than to dwell in the past. And because of implicit, mostly implicit instinct that anti-Semitism is never over. It’s always ready to come back. And so we didn’t need to go through that again.

Robert Duncan: So there are a few... I want to get to your roles at the Vatican, the roles. But there are two very important chapters of your life in San Salvador and then Africa. And I wonder if there’s anything that maybe you would want to share in sort of a biographical broad sketch with people about how those two experiences prepared you for the role that you’ve had in Rome.

Cardinal Czerny: Well, that would take a thousand years to explain all that. I’m often astonished how my past has prepared me for my present. So that’s a long story. The two years in El Salvador were of course a very moving experience to step into the shoes of these Jesuit martyrs, to live in the same community where the women had been involved and to participate in the ending of the civil war. These are all very, very meaningful experiences. And that’s where maybe the human rights thing became explicit because my primary work at the university was as director of the Human Rights Institute. So I got very involved in that aspect. It became an important issue in terms of the relationship between the government and the opposition and an important instrument that the United Nations used to help bring about the peaceful settlement.

Robert Duncan: And then in Africa?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, that was another story. That’s a different story. So I went, in between the two, between El Salvador and Africa, I spent 11 years here in Rome as secretary for the social apostolate of the Jesuits. And towards the end of my time, one of my tasks was to help the Jesuits in Africa to figure out how they were going to respond to AIDS, which was just bursting at the end of the 90s, beginning of the 2000s. And so after two or three years of consultation and discussion and thinking, I came to the decision to establish a network amongst the Jesuits in Africa so that together we might face this issue of AIDS, supporting each other and learning from each other. And my responsibility here was to get us to that point. But then it got turned around and said, well, if you help create it, you may as well run it. So that’s how I ended up in Africa.

Robert Duncan: Was your work on combating AIDS in Africa informed by, and if so, what were the challenges taking Catholic teaching against contraception and trying to shape a response that was plausible in Africa?

Cardinal Czerny: Yeah, the contraception thing was more of a problem here in the North and the West than it was in Africa. The real issue in Africa was alienation, abandonment, trauma and semi-prejudice. In other words, a person got HIV and as if that wasn’t enough, they also became ostracized. And that became the real problem because that made everything else impossible. Kids would come home and confess to their families and be thrown out. And the fear was terrible. So the task was to, you might say, to face AIDS, not to run from it, to understand it well enough and to care for one another. And that’s what we tried to do. Our network wasn’t trying to persuade Jesuits to leave what they were doing originally and come and work on AIDS. It was to help them to face AIDS in whatever ministry they were already involved in, whether school or parish or retreat house or university.

Robert Duncan: So is that what you were doing on the eve of being called to Rome to work in Pope Francis’ Curia?

Cardinal Czerny: No, it was what I was doing, but I came to Rome in 2010. Pope Benedict was still Pope.

Robert Duncan: Oh, that’s right.

Cardinal Czerny: And I was his assistant to Cardinal Peter Turkson as President of Justice and Peace. And then after that came the new Dicastery and the Migrants and Refugees section.

Robert Duncan: What was, for people who don’t know, not maybe revolutionary — some people have described Pope Francis as revolutionary — but what was striking about the dedication of an office within that Dicastery to the migrants and refugee issue?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, I mean, in plain English, we might say that he was putting his money where his mouth was. He had clearly stood up for the migrants and refugees. He had taught significantly about them. He had made very moving and unforgettable gestures. But someone could ask, yeah, but what about your shop? And so one of his motivations, I think, in establishing the Migrants and Refugees section was to say, yes, here is our effort. Here’s what we can contribute. And along with my co-undersecretary, who is now Cardinal, also Cardinal, Fabio Baggio. So we developed an approach in which we tried to help the local churches to face the questions and challenges and opportunities of migrants and refugees.

Robert Duncan: A friend of mine who we both know, built, I think, the website — that was Matthew Sanders. And it was, I think, the most attractive Vatican website, at least for a while.

Cardinal Czerny: All compliments are welcome.

Robert Duncan: And it looked like, I mean, when something like that happens, when you get a new website, it looks like there’s a communications effort being made. To what extent did you and do you see the work of the Migrants and Refugees section of that dicastery as making a case politically in the communication space amid the rise of sort of more anti-immigration politics in Europe?

Cardinal Czerny: Yeah. No, you’re quite right to raise up that aspect because it is, you can’t reduce it to a communication problem, but communications is an important part of the problem and also the solution. And so an explicit challenge for our new Migrants and Refugees section was how could we deal with and respond to and, if possible, reduce the toxic rhetoric. And we were convinced, I think, right from the start that the only plausible response was good practice, positive stories, case studies. In other words, that we would be wasting our time to engage in the shouting match because, in fact, the shouting is not based on reality, it’s based on false ideas. And instead dedicate ourselves to telling the truth based on what people were actually living and doing. So the communication part was essential and we worked very hard on it. And, in fact, when COVID broke, we immediately started a special newsletter on how, in our sector of Migrants and Refugees, we were dealing also with COVID since that was, you might say, a cross-cutting challenge wherever you went and whatever you were doing. And I’m glad that our website made a good impression.

Robert Duncan: What challenges did you face internally in getting that project and those priorities of Pope Francis off the ground? Were there any?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, I suppose the big challenge was to get started simultaneously practically everywhere in the world. There’s no place in the world that’s not touched one way or the other by migration and refugee issues or questions. And in some cases it’s very difficult, in other cases it goes quite well, but all the situations deserve attention. And I think we recognize that for Church leadership, for bishops, for those who work with them in pastoral ministry, that these questions were sometimes quite new and quite sharp, quite urgent. What were some of the questions? Well, one of the best examples, I would say, is the church on two sides of a border. So you have a diocese on this side that belongs to the National Bishops’ Conference in this country, and they speak this language, and this is their tradition. And on the other side of the river, on the other side of the border, there’s a different diocese, they speak a different language, they belong to a different bishops’ conference in a different country. And you would think, well, these differences become part of the obstacle for the person who’s fleeing, the person who’s seeking refuge. Whereas if you put the two diocese together, if you help them to, let’s say, recognize each other as being really two parts of the same church on two sides of a border, you can practically make the border disappear. And that’s a great miracle of pastoral ministry in the migratory area, that we can’t solve the problem, that’s not our job, but we can help the migrants and refugees, the people who are fleeing, to live their experience in a more human way and to feel that the church is accompanying them. And not that they’re passing through a whole bunch of churches, but that basically they’re passing through one church, which cooperates in such a way that they can keep moving with at least some extra security and self-respect.

Robert Duncan: You have said that the migration and refugee fact of the matter is that it’s always been a part of the human story. And on the other hand, there’s this communications challenge today to speak to people about its importance and government leaders. How do you understand the situation? In other words, do you see the particular communications challenges as coming out of the 2014 Syrian refugee crisis, or do they have antecedents that go farther back? I mean, the particular political challenges of making the case for migrants and refugees.

Cardinal Czerny: Well, I mean, I don’t know if I understand fully, but I mean, why do we have to make a case for them? You know, why do we have to make a case for them?

Robert Duncan: Well, you said part of it’s a communications challenge.

Cardinal Czerny: Well, I know, but why? Why are we in this mess?

Robert Duncan: Why do you think we’re in the mess?

Cardinal Czerny: Because I think governments have lost their way and have, instead of exercising responsibility in dealing with the issue, they’re using scapegoating and stereotypes in order to try to wash their hands of it.

Robert Duncan: What do you think Pope Francis’ success was? I mean, he openly obviously made it a priority of the Catholic Church, and it seems that Pope Leo has continued this priority. But is it a lot of preaching that is falling on deaf ears?

Cardinal Czerny: Oh, no, no, no, no. Now you are part of the problem. No, it’s not falling on deaf ears. The large majority of Christians are responding. It’s a myth. It’s a false myth to associate us with this kind of blindness and deafness.

Robert Duncan: Who’s us in this case?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, you’re talking about Church people. In other words, this is the problem, is that the bad news prevails. And so you don’t know how many thousands and thousands and thousands of gestures of welcome. Pope Francis identified the four steps very clearly. Welcome, protect, promote and integrate. That’s what all of us are called to do for every person who is fleeing for their lives. And we’re committed to it as a human family by the Conventions on Refugees, which continue to be valid and which we are blithely ignoring.

Robert Duncan: Are there any challenges that are internal to the Church?

Cardinal Czerny: No, the same challenges internal to the Church as with every other important issue. That is that we need better education, better formation, more resources. And most of all, we need our faithful, our members, our baptized people to recognize their gospel responsibilities in the world. And these many different issues, whether the migrants and refugees or other marginalized or rejected people or the environment or human rights or drug trafficking, the list is very long, the ways in which sin plays out in reality. And that’s, we’re here to bring the Gospel.

Robert Duncan: Can you tell me about your pectoral cross?

Cardinal Czerny: So my pectoral cross is made from the wood of a migrant boat. And you can see the back too, it’s the old paint from the boat. So this is the wood of an old fishing boat that migrants would have used coming from Northern Africa. Probably from Tunisia or Libya, coming towards Lampedusa. And some of the boats arrived and never went back. Some of the boats crashed and fell apart. But this wood is now used by people, especially by Christians, as an expression of solidarity with the migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. And so this cross is a contemporary crucifixion, it’s Jesus.

Robert Duncan: So it’s from an actual boat or from the wood that’s...

Cardinal Czerny: Yeah. Okay. You can see it was painted many times.

Robert Duncan: Those who say that Europe cannot accommodate the waves of migration, and there are complicated social and economic cases that can be made in that regard, there are some people worried that the crisis in Iran is going to dwarf the Syrian refugee crisis. Is this something that your office is preparing for, planning for, anticipating?

Cardinal Czerny: The basic point is that our work is not predicated on current affairs. We don’t look at the newspapers or listen to the media and say, ah, this is what we need to work on. Our work depends on the requests and concerns and needs of the church. And so we try to accompany the church wherever in the world there are tensions, struggles, challenges, especially ongoing difficulties. The Iranian, whatever you want to call it, let’s call it crisis, the Iranian crisis is very new. It’s premature to talk about refugees. And so no, we’re not preparing. What we do in our dicastery is to try to help the bishops and their co-workers wherever they are in the world with the problems that they actually have. And that’s what we do. So we’ll wait to see what, if anything, this particular war is going to bring up.

Robert Duncan: Is there ever news that, in regard to refugees and migration worldwide, that shakes your faith or that frustrates you?

Cardinal Czerny: Much of it frustrates me, but it doesn’t discourage me. I understand that given many social, economic, political, cultural, media factors, this is a difficult, it’s difficult. And our role is, as I said, is not to solve the problem. That’s a political responsibility. It’s people’s civic responsibility to solve the problem. And their faith hopefully motivates them to exercise their civic responsibility. But we are there to help the church to accompany the people in their need. And this is what we try to do. And no, I’m never discouraged about that because the Church is, I don’t think we’ve ever been in a situation where a church said, yeah, there’s these hordes of people who need help but we’re not interested. I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Robert Duncan: The message that was resounding all the time with Francis, and it’s been continued with Leo, is welcome. Is that a moral category or is that a, it also sounds like it has political consequences.

Cardinal Czerny: All of life has political consequences.

Robert Duncan: Or policy consequences.

Cardinal Czerny: All of life has policy consequences.

Robert Duncan: The hard work is implementing the policy in a way that’s sustainable and just and fair. Is the Church — does it have it too easy to be able to make the claim, you know, that welcome is the morally just attitude without proposing concrete policy?

Cardinal Czerny: The Church is not a policy machine. The Church proclaims or teaches or testifies to the importance of welcome and it welcomes. And it tries to help people to welcome.

Robert Duncan: But the question is how do we do that?

Cardinal Czerny: It depends who’s asking, you know. If you’re asking Christians how to help, you know, we can do it through our parish, we can do it through Caritas, we can do it through other projects and many people do. In Canada we have this private sponsorship program where parishes and other groups can sponsor refugees and take care of them. Which, as you know, reminds me of our own being sponsored when we needed to find someone to welcome us. And so there are many ways in which the Church can and does respond. And now under the special stresses there’s as much as possible, the Church is trying to protect people and help them to deal with their terrible insecurities and all the things that are so painful right now. But the responsibility for the borders, for quotas, for systems is the responsibility of the state.

Robert Duncan: Does the argument hold any water that there is a cultural limit of migration? I mean, concerns about Christian Europe or what would happen if too many Muslims came to Europe and what would that do to the long-term future? Do any of those arguments hold any water for you?

Cardinal Czerny: No.

Robert Duncan: Why is that?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, because they’re not real questions. They’re polemical. They’re based on caricatures and bogeymen. And if you’re having a problem relating with Muslims, solve the problem. Don’t then create a category of unwelcome people. And you can ask with some critical penetration about how migrants or refugees from Islamic countries have been welcomed and treated and what has happened and all that. And maybe there were big mistakes made and we’re facing the consequences. And those remain the responsibility of the state to resolve. But you’re not going to convince the church to say, well, in that case, they’re not welcome. We’ll never do that.

Robert Duncan: I’d like to move on and talk, if we could, about Laudato Si’ in the environment. I don’t know if you’ve ever been asked on camera, but you were rumored to have been, in large part, responsible for drafting that text. Is that true?

Cardinal Czerny: It’s a rumor. It’s a rumor.

Robert Duncan: I’ll take that as a yes. Who is the audience of Laudato Si’ and how did it make its argument, taking into account people’s sensitivities about that issue?

Cardinal Czerny: I would say the genius of Laudato Si’ was to treat the environment, well, it’s in the subtitle, as our common home, which is already a big step forward. And to, you might say, wash it of its greenness. In other words, wash it from a particular, you might say, ideological stance, legitimate as it might be in many contexts, but not necessarily for the Church. To wash it of its greenness and instead to understand it as a problem in basically all the other, in all the real social dimensions, including the economic, of course, the scientific, the spiritual, the communal, the aesthetic, et cetera. So it’s a real common home. It’s everything of what it means to live here on earth. And it’s not just, pardon to use the word, but it’s not just a green question.

Robert Duncan: Pope Francis talked about the technocratic paradigm and also with Pope Leo, we’re talking about technology — AI — as questions of moral discernment. Is the Church late to talking about technology as an ethical and spiritual domain?

Cardinal Czerny: I think if you look at issues from this point of view, what is their place in the worldwide discourse and who’s talking about it and so forth, I suspect that we’re always late. We’re always late and I would say God bless us. We don’t need another voice, you know, trying to figure out what we’re talking about. It’s not our job. We are not the UN. We’re not a think tank. We’re not a first class university. Let them do that. Go talk to them if you want to know what’s the cutting edge. That’s not our problem. Our problem is how to live the faith in this world.

Robert Duncan: So what made it an issue?

Cardinal Czerny: Well, because it was obviously an accumulating problem and it was even though a reasonable person would say, well, if the human race is making this huge mistake, they’re going to correct it. Apparently, we don’t have that rational capacity. So it’s getting worse and worse and more and more dangerous and more and more dangerous for people who otherwise don’t have a voice. So those are all reasons for the Church to speak up.

Robert Duncan: There’s Borgo Laudato Si’ in Castel Gandolfo, and Father Manuel Dorantes was saying how — he was making a case that this is actually a way to evangelize because if you listen to young people, Gen Z, there’s a lot of concern for the environment. And I’m sure there wasn’t a cold political calculation that this is how we could get people interested in the Church again. But have you seen evidence that the Church’s relatively recent focus on the environment has had an effect on attracting young people to the Church?

Cardinal Czerny: As far as I know, yeah, I think so. You have to ask the bishops, you know, in their respective countries to get a good sense of that. But I’m pretty sure it’s true, yeah. And it’s true, you know, we have this very beautiful experience, I don’t know if your listeners know about it, the Laudato Si’ Action Platform, which is a place online where people can get together to work out their concerns about the environment and find good ways to respond together. And it’s organized according to sectors for families and for parishes and for schools and for businesses and so on. Anyway, that to me is a great sign of people’s desire and willingness and generosity to get a hold of this thing and wisely thinking we’d best do it together.

Robert Duncan: There is a perception that we’ve talked about, Pope Francis inaugurated the Migrants and Refugees section. Even though Pope Benedict also spoke about the environment in a very important way, Laudato Si’ was a step forward. And Pope Leo is talking about AI, and he chose his name in part because of Pope Leo XIII and social issues in general. From the outside, it might look like the Catholic Church is trying to do a rebrand. Like the primary issues are social. Some people have claimed that theology has taken a bit of a backseat, and the Church’s primary role in the world is horizontal. This is a story. Do you think there’s any truth to that story? And if not, how can you, how would you persuade people that these are indeed the core issues that should occupy the minds of Christians today?

Cardinal Czerny: The issues are so many ways of living our faith. What the Church is concerned, and the Church’s brief, is to help us to live the Gospel in our time, with our brothers and sisters. And so, I think we will always be coming late to issues. It will always be looking at, we suddenly discovered the wheel, and everybody else already knows. But that’s fine. It doesn’t really matter. Because the real question is not, were we the first to think of it, or are we part of the cutting-edge discussion? That’s not our business. That’s not what we’re for. What we’re for is to help people to live their faith authentically and evangelically in this world and thereafter. And so, the real question is, what help do people need to live their faith? That’s the real question. And if you’re in California, and reality all around you is burning, you need help to live your faith in that context, and making your struggle to survive and to protect your life and the life of your community, that’s part of your faith. It’s not a sideshow. The theoretical, ontological, metaphysical questions are all aids and supports to help us to live, and to live as humanly and as fully as possible, which in terms of our dicastery is called integral human development. So everything is supposed to help us to do that. And unfortunately, many people are excluded. Many people are abused and exploited. And our common home is in danger. And we’re doing a very bad job of treating each other humanly. But these are all questions of faith, and questions of morality, if you want, and questions of practice.

Robert Duncan: Maybe I’d like to wrap up with a few questions that are more personal. What is it like to be a cardinal? For people who maybe don’t know much about the Church, do you feel that people see you in a particular way? A lot of people think the Church and cardinals are very rich. Or do you feel that people want you for access to the Pope?

Cardinal Czerny: To be a cardinal, honestly, to be a cardinal is to have a special calling, a special invitation, a special designation to help the Holy Father. That’s what we exist for. When I became a cardinal, I gave myself five years to figure out the answer to your question. Now I’m in my seventh, but I’m still not ready to answer your question. I don’t know what it means. No, seriously, it’s a wonderful opportunity. It was great to be able to work with Pope Francis, and it is great to work with Pope Leo. And that’s what we’re for. Within the somewhat complex structure of the Church, to have a few people who are really somehow specially dedicated to helping the Holy Father to carry out his mission, I think it’s really cool.

Robert Duncan: What are your hopes for the way you will carry out Pope Leo’s vision of the Church? Do you feel it’s in continuity with what you’ve been doing?

Cardinal Czerny: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. No, because the Holy Father is not the custodian of issues. The Holy Father is the custodian of the Gospel and of our response, living the Gospel as Church. He’s the successor of St. Peter. He’s not a world guru or a world professor or a world politician. So, yes, each person has their gifts, and so whatever I can bring to helping him, I’m really happy to do that. And I do have now some experience here also in the Vatican, so that’s of some help. But also just having had the wonderful life I’ve had and living and working in different places and doing things like we’ve talked about, it’s all a contribution, I guess.

Robert Duncan: I asked you at the beginning of the interview about the reframing of questions. You did that a couple of times to me, which I’m grateful for. I wonder, what are the things that Catholics are not talking about that you wish we would talk about more?

Cardinal Czerny: I wish we would... I mean, there’s a one-word answer, and I haven’t given it yet, but I can give it now, and the answer is synod. I wish we would live and therefore talk about the synodal process more, more and more and more. And before you ask, I will tell you, no, I’m not impatient. I think we’ve made a very good start. These things take a while. Rushing is not going to help. But if you ask me what I wish for, I really wish that every parish, every Christian, every person responsible in the church, whether ordained or not, every church leader, whether bishop or others, that we all get involved, each according to our calling in the synodal process. And that would answer most of the questions you asked me.

Robert Duncan: I’m hoping that people who are not Catholic are also listening to this podcast, and synodality may sound like church speak to them. What does this process that the Church is going through and has been going through for some years now have to do with, or does it have to do with the wider world?

Cardinal Czerny: I would suggest that the people who are listening who don’t know what the word synod means is ask themselves, is anyone listening to me? Is anyone listening to me? And what synodality intends to do is to help the different parts or elements or components of the church to listen to one another so that together we may find how Jesus is calling us to live our faith and how we are supposed to help and serve the world. So Pope Francis went quite far. He said that listening was not only the first step, it was also the solution. And of all the difficult things we talked about during this interview, you could go back at each one and say, now what would happen to this issue if we listened? And I think you’d see that we would find our way forward. But as we tend not to listen, which is part of the human condition, it’s sin at work in us, so we need help. And the synodal process, the effort to be a Church that moves forward by listening is a very great step forward.

Robert Duncan: What do you think we will hear? What will we hear if we listen?

Cardinal Czerny: We’ll hear the, it’s like asking, what do you hear when you hear a symphony? That’s the answer.

Robert Duncan: Cardinal Michael Czerny, thanks for your time.

Cardinal Czerny: You’re very welcome.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• His childhood and rise in international investment banking

• How faith shaped his understanding of leadership, responsibility, and success

• The founding vision behind the Genesis Foundation and its focus on human dignity

• His collaboration with Vatican figures on projects in human rights, education, and the arts

• The story behind Angels Unawares, the sacred composition by Sir James MacMillan performed in the Sistine Chapel

• What it means to live with an awareness of the unseen — and how that informs a life of generosity

This isn’t just about philanthropy—it’s about what it looks like to take faith seriously in public life.

Transcript

Intro: John Studzinski is one of the world’s leading investment bankers and a philanthropist whose work, often in collaboration with Vatican officials, has supported initiatives in human rights, charitable outreach, and the arts. Born to Polish Catholic parents in the United States, he now divides his time between New York and London, where he remains an active presence in global finance. A trusted advisor and longtime friend to popes and cardinals, Studzinski recently marked his 70th birthday in Rome with a notable gesture: through his Genesis Foundation, he commissioned a new work of sacred music by Sir James MacMillan, Angels Unawares, performed in the Sistine Chapel and scheduled for broadcast on the BBC. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we explore his early desire to serve those in need, his rise on Wall Street, and the deeper philosophy that underpins his philanthropy. As the title of his recent concert suggests, Studzinski’s vision is shaped by an awareness of the unseen—the angels, and the forces of light and darkness, that accompany human life. It is a vision that calls each of us to generosity, echoing the reminder of Scripture: we do not know when we may be entertaining angels unawares.

Robert Duncan: John Studzinski, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

John Studzinski: Great to be here. Thank you.

Robert Duncan: I want to start with what may sound like a difficult question and a challenge, but I think it’s something probably you’ve thought about a lot over your life and probably have a very interesting perspective on. So in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that it is harder for a camel to enter into the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. As a very successful person in finance, what does that mean to you? And how has that warning, challenge, statement of Jesus affected your spiritual life?

John Studzinski: Well, I’m a long-time student and fan of the parables. And that, of course, is a powerful parable. And, of course, when you go to that part of Jerusalem, you understand what it means. The needle is not a needle, but it is, in fact, a challenging place through which a camel would go. Like all the parables, they’re not meant to be absolute. They’re teaching exercises. And I think in the context of that, not dissimilar from the rich man who ignores Lazarus and wants his siblings to be referenced. And the reference from above is, if they don’t pay attention to the Scriptures through Moses and Elijah and others, then they’re wasting their time. I’ve always looked at the Scriptures and that particular parable through the words of, to those who’ve been given much, or to whom much has been given, much is expected. And to those who’ve been given more, even more is expected. So I’ve always felt that there was a bit of a cross to carry early on. Now, the good news is, I grew up in a working-class, blue-collar, Polish Catholic family. And the first thing I did when I was six years old, when I noticed we had a community of Polish women who were very good at cooking and had a great sense of community, and there was a tribe there, I said to my mother when we kept seeing all these people in the streets of Boston, why don’t we have all these people, why don’t we, on Saturday nights, invite all these homeless people for supper?

Robert Duncan: This was your idea?

John Studzinski: At the age of six, because I was— my mother, of course, she knew there was something up, because the previous year, when I started nursery school, I came home and I said, I was so enthusiastic, because it was May Day and we were celebrating the Virgin Mary, and I came in and said, great group of people, we had a great celebration, and my mother said, how many? She said, I said, 22. And she said, well, at some point, I’ll look forward to meeting them. And I said, well, actually, you will meet them, because I’ve invited them all to supper next Monday night. And she then knew that this child was not exactly going to be very straightforward about being a passive child in terms of certain types of work. And so I became very, very focused on— because my mother taught me early on, you should be prepared to give the shirt off your back. So I grew up in this mindset that despite the fact that we were, for the most part, working class and didn’t have very much money, it was necessary and it was an obligation. And it wasn’t just because of faith and Christianity. It was just part of respecting human dignity. And then, of course, later on, you associate human dignity with the face of Christ.

Robert Duncan: Do you have any idea where that came from? I mean, I sometimes wondered why I, more than some of my peers, had questions in Sunday school growing up about theological matters when we were all receiving the same instruction. Do you have a sense of why at that young age…?

John Studzinski: I think, you know, this is—and, of course, we’re getting into lots of debates today about what comes from above. And, you know, I think that even at a young age, the Holy Spirit is active and one has divine and creative inspiration. And I had a very strong feeling. I was conscious of the fact that I was born on St. Joseph’s Day, March 19th.

Robert Duncan: Happy early birthday.

John Studzinski: Thank you. And I was conscious of the fact that I was a child that was not expected. In other words, my mother had already had a child and was told she would have no more children. But being very devout, she prayed. And I was also conscious of the fact, having studied my catechism probably prematurely, that I arrived in a blizzard and my mother had to walk several miles. And then I was born almost immediately. And then it was—so fairly dramatic people arrive in dramatic circumstances. So from that point, I was—my mother always felt that— so St. Joseph was my patron, that he would always watch out for me. And he has. He’s been very close to me. And so I’ve always been very conscious of that identity and, if you will, that role model.

Robert Duncan: I would like to focus on the reason why you’re in Rome. But maybe for listeners who don’t know who you are, how did you, in sort of a 30,000-foot view, get from this young boy who had an inclination to invite the homeless over for dinner to the success you had in business and finance and the beginnings of your philanthropic work?

John Studzinski: Well, I’ve been on Wall Street for 45 years. In university, I studied biochemistry and sociology. I was expecting, and I went for a short period of time to medical school. But I felt that most of the people in medical school were more interested in saving themselves than saving society. So I left and went to business school and law school. And then I was rather serendipitously hired by Morgan Stanley. I stayed in Morgan Stanley. And I remember they actually recruited me in those wonderful interviews where someone says, why do you want to be an investment banker on Wall Street? I said, well, you invited me. I did not ask to be here. So tell me why I should be an investment banker.

Robert Duncan: I read that you were one of the first Catholics at Morgan Stanley.

John Studzinski: You’ve got good research. That’s true. And I remember walking in, and I also remember that I worked. I was very disciplined. I’ve always been focused on time management because I think time is the most precious gift from God. So you can never, ever abuse time.

And I would always go to 7 o’clock Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And now I’m on the board of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. So that was quite auspicious that I would continue to stay involved but in a broader capacity. So I was. But I decided to become an investment banker because I thought it was about advising people. And it was about giving trusted advice to people. And I like people. And it was about allocating advice, allocating resources. Of course, investment banking is at the crossroads of capital. You stand between the sources of capital and the uses of capital. So you become, whether you’re an investment banker or an asset manager or an investor, you play a pivotal role in society. So I thought this was a very interesting place to be because I met a gamut of people. But I always made sure that I devoted enough time to my faith and I devoted enough time to other things like arts and culture and certain types of community work, which meant, of course, that you could fill 15 to 18 hours a day with a whole range of things. But I’m still on Wall Street. I love Wall Street because I’ve met and — I’ve lived in London now for the last 40 years — I’ve met an extraordinary group of people. And the more people you meet, the more you realize there’s just such a beautiful, rich universe of people.

And people are interested in you for so many reasons. I think people know the story of, I was at Morgan Stanley for 23 years. Then I was briefly at HSBC for four years running the wholesale bank. Then I was recruited by Blackstone and I was there for 15 years. And one day when I was at Blackstone, my assistant comes in, Wendy, who’s still working with me, and she says, the office of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew would like to come and call on you when he’s in New York next month. And I said, that sounds very interesting, but I’m not the head of Blackstone. That’s Steve Schwartzman. I think he should see Mr. Schwartzman. He doesn’t need to see me. He’s president of Singapore. She comes back, and this story has a purpose. She comes back and says, he wants to see you. So he comes on his own and he said, I’ve read a lot about you and your relationship on Wall Street, but your whole focus on prayer and meditation and how you use prayer and meditation to think and to relax and to work with people. And can you give me a brief tutorial on that? He wasn’t there to talk about business. He wanted to understand how I related my faith to my business. And he is a Buddhist. So I thought that was fascinating. And what I’ve discovered in my 45 years is, people want to do business with you often for the reasons that have principally nothing to do with business, but to do with your personality, your faith. Perhaps you’re interested in charity or something else. So people want to see the holistic side of you. And many of my clients that I worked with in the last 40 years still are fascinated by wanting to better understand God.

Robert Duncan: It’s not the classic picture of Wall Street that you get from cinema and popular culture. Are you an exception to the rule or is the image mistaken?

John Studzinski: You’re talking about Wall Street and show me the money. Right. Money talks, bullshit walks. That’s right. There’s a gamut of people on Wall Street. But remember, it’s like anything else. Wall Street is a cross-section of the human condition. There are lots of people who are very focused on power and money, people who are focused on success, people who are sharp-elbowed. And I’ve always believed, and often when I’m, and I lecture on a number of private equity and governance classes at different schools in America, and I often go to Teresa of Avila. When I really think I’m dealing with a very tough crowd, I say, you know, Teresa of Avila really understands people like you. And they say, what do you mean? And then I have to explain that she was a Spanish mystic, 16th century. I say, one of her more profound expressions, and I don’t know if you know this expression, but you’re welcome to use it. The devil enters your soul through your ego. And I’ve used that so much. And when you actually use it with someone who is very narcissistic or egocentrical or power-driven, people realize when you say it that perhaps your ego is your own downfall.

Robert Duncan: I was listening to a podcast of you talking about when you wake up quite early, and you mentioned the fact that you don’t wake up at three o’clock, even though you know that some people believe that waking up at three is the best time to pray, to combat dark spiritual forces. And you’ve just mentioned the devil. Because of your domain of work and money and finance, do you feel maybe particularly sensitively the battle between light and darkness in this world?

John Studzinski: It’s very real. And I’m witnessing a couple of situations right now in the world where there are some very dark characters who know they’re dark and are conscious of playing a role they’re playing. And I’m focused on prayer, and I’m focusing on prayer around those people. So I am focused on that. And God has given me many gifts, but the Holy Spirit often guides me when I hear people or see people and spend enough time with people where I sense a dark agenda. There’s no question that the devil and the supernatural is very rife at the moment. You can see it across the world, given a lot of the things that are happening.

Robert Duncan: I want to come back to that because it seems to me part of the theme of the concert, that of angels being all around us, and that would include demons and dark forces. But before we get there, I want to get to the beginning of Genesis Foundation and also, I think, for people for whom this is their introduction to you.

John Studzinski: The Genesis of Genesis.

Robert Duncan: The Genesis of Genesis, but also the car crash, which is such an important part of your life. So I’m not sure if the car crash and the foundation were causally related, but the car crash came first. Is that right?

John Studzinski: The — Genesis — this is interesting. You’re the first person that asked me to link the two. The car crash took place when I was in May of 1987. Genesis was founded in 2001, so it’s a lag of about 10 years. There was a lot of work going on that probably sowed the seeds of Genesis, but the car crash was very much driven by I was doing my day job, and I was on the autobahn in a Mercedes with my seat belt on in the back seat, and there was a group of cars around. It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, 4.15 in the afternoon, and there had just been a very heavy downpour, thunderstorm. And the German word is aquaplana, which is water planing or hydroplaning, and there was so much water that accumulated on the autobahn very quickly that a number of cars lost control, and there were several cars that were going far too fast. Of course, if you’ve ever been on the autobahn, it’s a very well-made road. It’s some of the best spent money of the European Union, but this was a good example of when going too fast. And there was a nine-car crash, no survivors. I was the only survivor.

So my driver, who I developed a really good rapport with, it was very shocking because he went through the windshield, and he died. And then I had a very strong experience after that. It was that day, but then I think probably what you’re referring to is I was in intensive care, and I actually found that fascinating, being in intensive care with having lost a lung. And then it was very interesting because I was taken to the Hertz Institute. They did all the x-rays, and the doctor came back and said, well, we’ve got to take out your lung, one of your lungs. Your other lung is very full of fluid. We don’t know. We’ll have to put you on a life support system. And you’ve broken all your ribs in three places, and your left arm is broken in 63 pieces. So we’ll have to have two separate surgeries. And I didn’t have my parents with me, or I didn’t have any friends with me. I was on my own. So I looked at them, and I said, well, I said, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do both operations at once, even if it’s 14, 18 hours. We’re going to pray, and I’ll sign a piece of paper right now that basically just says that if I die, it’s my decision. There’s no negligence. And this is one of these things in life where you must give it to God. And I survived the operation. My mother arrived the following day and told me I was out of my mind for being- and I looked at her and I said, you know, you’ve got to give it to God. This was God. God had to decide, do I live or die? And I lived.

John Studzinski: So eight days later, I’m still on this life support system. The doctor walks in, and he was a fairly- he was the orthopedic surgeon for the German Olympic Committee, and he was quite a sort of- what you’d say is a sort of tough, male, macho type. And he walked in, and he had a medicine ball with him, and he threw the medicine ball right in my face and said, everyone here has noticed, and I’ve noticed, that you pray, and you’re clearly very devout. And he’d also noticed that Basil Hume, Cardinal Hume, had come from London to see me, and actually to give me last rites in case I passed away. And he said, I’m going to give you this medicine ball. I want you to try to inflate it, and I have a feeling you will inflate it, because I want you to pray and inflate that ball. It’ll take you about an hour, if you can inflate it. And he said, and if you don’t inflate it, you’ll be on the life support system the rest of your life. And I said, okay. And I decided it was a- this was before John Paul II created the Luminous Mysteries, and I think it was- I don’t know what day of the week it was, but I decided the Glorious Mysteries I would pray. So I just prayed the rosary. I just said, okay, it’s time for the rosary, and I inflated my lung after about 40 minutes. And when you have that experience, it just reconfirms you have a purpose in life. We all have a purpose in life, and this is one of the things I’ve learned with the Genesis Foundation, but also my recent book called A Talent for Giving, which is everyone has talent that God has given them. It doesn’t come from them. It comes from God, but it’s up to them to find the right tools to nurture that talent. And I decided, okay, it’s time to put some more of my talents to use for the broader good.

Robert Duncan: So am I right in thinking that the Genesis Foundation has a particular focus on the arts?

John Studzinski: The Genesis Foundation is focused on giving artists, creatives, their first break or their first commission, their first opportunity to learn how to write a play, how to write a piece of music. Sir James McMillan, who has been a partner to the Genesis Foundation and to me for 20-plus years, he’s now a very good friend, he’s been one of our first people that we’ve supported. Because think back in your own life when you started your media career. There were probably two or three people who gave you your first internship, your first job, your first opportunity. And what I’m really interested in is one of my dear friends is an actress in the UK, Janet Sussman, and we were talking one day, we’d gone to see a Chekhov play, and we were talking one day about the Cherry Orchard and some of the people in the Cherry Orchard and some of the characters. And she said something which really struck me. She said, you know, it’s very important, the arts are such an important but fragile area. We can’t just have people in this economic environment coming from the upper middle class. If you really want the arts to be a rich place, they have to come from all levels of society. And I thought at that point, let’s create a foundation that creates commissions for people, particularly people, because if you’re from an upper middle class family, you probably know people who are in the arts. You probably have a network. You probably have financial resources. You probably can do a job and not necessarily need to be paid. But that’s also not the real world. The real world has to do a job and also doesn’t always have the social confidence or the self-confidence to get engaged. So ironically, the first thing we commissioned was a piece of sacred music. I was having a real taffy pull, an argument with Basil Hume about giving him a party for his 75th birthday because he was a Benedictine, he was very austere, focused on the poor, but focused on Benedictine values and lifestyle. So I said, okay, how am I going to get him to let us give him a party? So I thought, then I had met, somewhat serendipitously, an emerging young composer, Roxanna Panufnik, whose father was Andrzej Panufnik, the Polish composer. She had just converted to become a Catholic. And I then thought, hmm, when’s the last time Westminster Cathedral in London had a mass commissioned for Westminster Cathedral? And then I looked back and it wasn’t until Ralph Vaughan Williams had written something almost 100 years ago. So I thought, okay, I talked to Roxanna, said, could we commission you to write a Westminster Mass? And I used that as a tactic to get Basil Hume to give, you know, we’d have the debut, we’d have a mass, and we’d use it also as his gift. And he taught me something really important. He said, I will agree to this mass, to this piece of music to be commissioned in my name if you score it not just for orchestra, but you also score it for simple church organ, so that people can play it around the UK. And I learned a lot at that point, because he was taking my vision of Genesis and looking at on the user side and saying, okay, we can’t have these grand spiritual orchestral things that no one’s going to have access to in terms of putting them on, it’s too expensive. And that was a good leveler for me. So we did. And that was the first pilot of the Genesis Foundation where we had a new composer, a commission, profile, PR, newly converted Catholic, Basil Hume celebrating his 75th birthday, and the celebration. So, and that became the basis for if Genesis can do things that help people, but also have a broader impact, I mean, the way what we’re doing this Sunday has a much broader impact and does many more things. Proper commissions should have multiple purposes.

Robert Duncan: So I just want to get a sense of your vision, philanthropic vision. So do you see sort of different domains when giving to the poor or the homeless and the arts, or do you see a kind of unity between both of these domains?

John Studzinski: It’s important, if we’re going to get on as friends long term, that you not think about the world in terms of a bunch of collection boxes. The world is not a bunch of collection boxes. You have to start with values. And my principal focus is protecting, respecting, and in many cases, nurturing human dignity.

So whether I’m working with the homeless in the night shelter, I was involved in starting the passage with Basil Hume in Westminster, or whether I’m involved in helping a young artist with their first commission, that’s also an element of helping their dignity. Or whether we work with, you talked about Michael Czerny. Michael Czerny, Cardinal Czerny, 10 years ago, asked me to get involved with Talitha Kum here in London per Pope Francis because he says they need someone to work with them like you who can really focus more systematically on modern slavery and human trafficking. And I’ve subsequently set up another foundation, Arise, which deals with that. So that also deals with human dignity. And at one point I was chair of Human Rights Watch. Again, human rights, human dignity. So everything comes down to human dignity. And that, for me, is very, very close to my faith because man was only given his or her dignity by virtue of God sending his son to the earth and Jesus Christ being God and man. And the God part of Christ is what basically gives man his or her dignity. And that is something we all must pay attention to. I think people forget, particularly in this day and age, and we’re seeing this a lot now with adolescents, we’ve done a fabulous, powerful, compelling new opera which I’ll ask Cecile to send you the link, and maybe you could actually, it might be something you put on, it’s called Angels on the Underground, which deals with a homeless man who encounters three angels, all of whom are different types of angels, and he’s contemplating, he’s going through depression, and he’s contemplating suicide on the underground. It’s about a 35-minute video. It’s very powerful. But again, it deals with the issue of mental illness, which is one of the bigger problems we have. It’s probably always been a big problem, but we’re just very conscious of it today in the Jonathan Haidt version of the age of anxiety.

Robert Duncan: Your fascination with angels. I mean, Catholics, of course, pray to angels. It says that in our catechism. In theory, we do that. But most often I hear people either praying to God, to Jesus, to Mary, the saints, but it seems somewhat more rare to me to have someone who is focused on the supernatural realm and the angels specifically as part of — you know, guardian angels, of course, we know this. But where did your fascination for that layer of the supernatural come from?

John Studzinski: Well, first of all, angels aren’t just in Catholic or Christian scriptures. You can find angels in Greek and Roman literature, poetry, and you also find angels among other faiths as well.

Robert Duncan: What do you think they are?

John Studzinski: Well, let’s be clear. First of all, I don’t want to unpack some of the things you said earlier, but you don’t pray to saints. You don’t pray to angels. You pray to God. You ask for the intercession of a saint. You ask for the guidance. And remember, all angels refer directly. All angels get their power and their reference. And whether they’re a messenger, a mentor... Or a warrior, they all get their guidance and their instructions from the Holy Spirit. That is absolutely true. And I’ve got a very close relationship with my guardian angel, and I think everybody should spend more time either in meditation or prayer. Because I think there’s a... And I’m not saying this to make you laugh or to make people laugh, but I think a lot of guardian angels are quite disappointed because it’s a bit like a great resource that many people don’t use.

I mean, the most powerful time to use a guardian angel and to rely on a guardian angel is the point of the offertory in the Mass when you want to offer your gifts to God. And whether it’s your thanking God or glorifying God or giving some other gift to God, you’re bringing your gifts to God, but you’re asking your guardian angel to present your gifts on the altar. And when I think of the number of guardian angels that are standing in the back of the church that don’t have any gifts to present because no one had asked them to present them, you’re smiling at me. I’m not trying to be funny. I’m dead serious.

Robert Duncan: Did the prayer to the guardian angel, is that something that was encouraged in your nightly prayer as a child? When you were young? Or did the awareness of the angelic realm, let’s say, grow as you grew?

John Studzinski: Guardian angels, I’ve always been conscious of mystical things in my life. So I always felt the presence of things. I mean, I’ve had examples of things. The car accident we talked about where I had access to a mobile phone. These two, they were allegedly American soldiers who I thought appeared, gave me a, at the time, this is the time when there was like the walkie-talkie large Nokia mobile phones that looked like the size of a club, gave me one of those. And then I turned to thank them and they were gone. The mobile phone existed. And then they went, because finally when we had to go to court and testify about the accident, because I was the only one who was there, I had a mystical experience. After these two characters left, I was able to look down and see the entire arrangement of all the nine cars. So we were, when we went to court, I was very clear. I sort of drew, I went to a chalkboard, well, it was a big whiteboard, and I drew for the entire court because it was basically a group of insurance companies that were all suing each other for who was liable for the accident. And I said, and I was very clear on where all nine cars were. The judge said, given you were sitting in the car, it would have been physically impossible for you to know what you drew. And I said, well, what I drew, I drew. So I had that experience. I also had the experience that the mobile phone, they were trying to trace as witnesses these two soldiers. The mobile phone was certified to two people who didn’t exist. So I’ve also had many other experiences. The guardian angel does, if you give the guardian angel time, you do have insights that guardian angels share with you.

Robert Duncan: I think it’s important to talk about your view of the angelic realm because of the reason you’re here now is that this concert is named after. Would you talk a bit about that?

John Studzinski: This is a world premiere in the Sistine Chapel of a new piece of music called Angels Unawares. It’s dealing with angels in the Old Testament and the New Testament, angels as mentors, messengers, motivators, guardians, and warriors, and people who love us. It focuses on 12 sequences, six from the Old Testament, six from the New Testament. And actually, they’re fabulous sequences. I mean, you start, of course, with some of the early references to angels in the Old Testament. And then, of course, you end with the great John Book of Revelation as the 12th tableau, which is very, very powerful and, of course, one of the most mystical things ever written in so many different ways of interpreting it. It’s written by Sir James MacMillan, who is Catholic, Scottish, and he’s written a number of other things with us before. We also commissioned him to write what I think is one of the most powerful, dramatic Stabat Mater. And the reason I asked him to do the Stabat Mater is I was sick and tired of hearing the Rossini Stabat Mater, which I thought was like a chocolate box. Stabat Mater is a serious subject. It doesn’t belong in a chocolate box. And even the Pergolesi, which everyone hears, is a little too romantic. The Stabat Mater is a serious subject. It’s standing at the foot of the cross as Christ dies.

This is about the most dramatic moment in man’s history. And I just felt it was time to have a piece of music that reflected the reality of that, and not just sugarcoating it. He wrote a very powerful piece. And I remember when I was talking to James about it, we were in a panel discussion with the BBC when it debuted, and the BBC interviewer said to James, so how do you channel the divine when you’re writing a piece of sacred music? And he says, it’s really hard to do that. I don’t always do that. James is a great composer. He’s very humble. And I rolled my eyes, and she looked at me, and she said, John, you’re rolling your eyes. Why are you so... And I said, let’s just get one thing straight here. You don’t decide you’re going to channel the divine. The divine decides who the divine is going to use as their vehicles. And James has been chosen to channel the divine, and his writing reflects it. It’s the whole notion of wisdom cannot be discovered. Wisdom is revealed. Wisdom and creativity are revealed by God. And that’s very clear. This commission, it’s 70 minutes. It comes from the scripture, Hebrews 13, of how we encounter angels often in our daily lives in different circumstances, and we’re perhaps unaware that angels...

And that’s why I always liked the notion that many of us have encountered angels for different reasons. Certainly I have. You have, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. And many people have. I’ve had people sit down next to me at a dinner party, and they sort of look at me and think, oh, I’m sitting next to this serious Catholic. And they say, so I understand you believe in God. And I say, well, yes.

Robert Duncan: At English dinner parties.

John Studzinski: At English dinner parties. I said, I do believe in God. I said, well, tell me something. When’s the last time you were in the presence of God? And they say, what do you mean? And I said, all of us have moments in our lives when God, the presence of God, is profound. And actually, you know, it’s an interesting exercise because people, I would say in 8 out of 10 cases, people start thinking carefully and inevitably find moments. And these are people who are often agnostic or atheist, find moments when they have had an experience or something that they’ve always wanted to talk about but were afraid of it or didn’t really know how to unpack it. So this commission, it’s a piece of sacred music. And James has written it to be accessible, which means even though it’s going to be written for an orchestra, two vocalists with a big emphasis on which two instruments would you associate with angels. Obviously the harp, but also the trumpet. So we’ll hear both instruments. But also, in looking back at the history of music in the last 2,000 years, sacred music, there have not been any major pieces of, there’s Tobias and the Angel in the opera world, but there have not been any major pieces of music dedicated to the holy angels. Because I feel as though people all have angels in their lives. Most people don’t recognize it. And the angels play a very constructive role at helping people provide almost a bigger foundation and a framework for their faith.

Robert Duncan: We don’t have that much time left, but I feel like we’ve only just built a foundation for which I could ask you a lot of the questions I’m really interested in. But I think it would be helpful to maybe use these last minutes to talk about some practical things you’ve learned through your charitable giving. I mean, one thing that occurs to me that might be a question would be, well, if I had more money, it would be easy to give and to be charitable. But my budget is tight. So is that true? Have you found it easy? Has it been hard still to…?

John Studzinski: No, no, no. That is the wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That is not what you want to be talking about. I’m trying to turn. You’ve got to think about philanthropy from two different ways. There’s enormous wealth in the world right now. The top 1% is just continuing to do brilliantly in this K-shaped economy. That’s great. They will continue to build buildings, museums, universities. Many of them will create the next artificial intelligence universe and all of that. Real philanthropy, I think, stems from people rethinking their lifestyle. And that’s the whole origin of my book, A Talent For Giving. I’m very interested in everyone.

Look at your own time, for example. You have treasure. You just told me you don’t have a lot of treasure. Fine.

Robert Duncan: I was speaking for everybody.

John Studzinski: Well, everyone listening, park your treasure. But you have time. You have talent. Young people are exceptionally good at ties and convening. They’re very good at technology. I’ve just written a new chapter on what I call tone for the paperback that’s coming out in the fall, which has to do with following up on that Maya Angelou quote about it’s not what you give, it’s not what you tell somebody, but it’s how you make them feel. And so much about giving and how you work with people that you’re giving things to. And one of the biggest elements of giving today is something which people overlook too much now, and that’s the power of two, which is mentoring. And I actually believe that real philanthropy is about partnership, long-term, about helping people, teaching people to fish, not giving them a fish. Giving people a fish is a transaction. It’s great. A lot of people need fish. They need to live. They need a place to sleep. They need clothes. They need health care. That’s part, that’s charity, and that’s important. Catholic charities, I do a lot with Catholic charities in New York City, Al Smith dinner every year, St. Patrick’s, all that. But there’s also teaching people to fish because it has that other element of enhancing their self-esteem and their dignity. And remember, philanthropy has to be about this notion: You have what you gave, you had what you spent, and you lost what you kept.

And everything you give in your life, whether it’s even time, that’s something you carry with you as part of your human balance sheet for God, and I do believe that. So I think I’m trying to encourage people to rethink giving. Money is there. Money is important. Money is a tool, but it should not be the first step. It should be talent, time, and other things that you have in your universe.

Robert Duncan: I had just one more question before we close, and that’s there has been with the last two popes in particular — although of course you can make a case that it’s very much in the papal teaching tradition — with Pope Francis and Pope Leo now of a focus on the poor and a focus on the people on the margins. And I know from reading about you that you have had friendships with these popes. How are they challenging people in general, and how do you feel challenged or invigorated perhaps by this new emphasis or this particular emphasis that they put on charity and people on the margins?

John Studzinski: Well, first of all, it’s nothing new. When we founded the passage, I had hammered into my head by these very formidable sisters. Whenever I was trying to sort of feed the poor and rehabilitate them, they would remind me that, you know, and there is an interesting model. Homeless people up until the age of 40, many of them, unless they have a mental illness problem, and the data is different, but let’s say 15, 20% of the people have a mental illness problem. The rest can be given some type of work training, something about life skills, something to get them back on their feet. So I do believe the poor will always be with us, though, and there’s a role to play at taking care of them, but I also believe that you can’t patronize them. You have to find their human anchor, and once you find the human anchor, many of them are thrilled, but remember that wonderful line, which I use all the time, because when I worked with, you didn’t ask me about my time with Mother Teresa, that in itself would be another hour, and those stories are much funnier, but she would always say, don’t give me all this metrics, don’t give me all this money, let’s just focus on one person at a time, and it’s just like the Matthew scripture. Worry about today, tomorrow will take care of itself, and she would say, let’s focus on one person. You can only change the world one person at a time.

So I think it’s important, and we can’t ignore it, and I think charity is important, but I think you have to look at charity, and I’m actually going to raise this with our current Holy Father, that remember charity is very important, but charity shouldn’t be about just giving someone a fish, it should be about teaching them fish, because that’s where you really empower them.

Robert Duncan: On that note, thank you very much for sitting down with Catholic News Service, and again, happy birthday.

John Studzinski: Thank you.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• What most people really mean when they say they want to “visit the Vatican”

• How to approach Rome and the Vatican as a pilgrim rather than merely a tourist

• What makes a good guide — and how to avoid superficial, scandal-driven tours

• The essential places to see in Rome beyond the standard checklist

• Why art still has the power to move people in an age saturated with images

• How the tomb of St. Peter and the tradition of pilgrimage shaped the city of Rome itself

More than a guide to sightseeing, this is a conversation about wonder, beauty, and the deeper meaning of visiting the heart of the Catholic world.

Transcript

Intro: Elizabeth Lev is an American art historian who has spent decades helping visitors unlock the riches of the Vatican collections and the artistic heritage of Rome. A graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Bologna, she's known for bringing the history, symbolism, and spiritual meaning of Rome's art vividly to life. She has even consulted with Hollywood productions filming in Rome, helping actors and filmmakers understand the city they're trying to portray on the big screen. She has witnessed Rome during some of its most intense moments, the deaths of three popes, papal conclaves, the massive waves of visitors during Jubilee years, which means she has seen the best and the worst of how Rome and the Vatican are explained to the millions who come searching for something here. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, she shares how the Vatican is a place she shares her passion for art, the essential things to see on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and why preparing to visit Rome as a pilgrim rather than merely a tourist may be the key to discovering the deeper power of this ancient city.

Robert Duncan: Liz Lev, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service. You were one of the first people that I met when I moved to Rome 15 years ago, and it seems like everybody knows you. Tell us a little bit about what you do and why is it that you are such a monument in the city of monuments?

Elizabeth Lev: It’s funny, I was just looking at you and remembering when I met you all those years ago, and look at you now, this amazing figure. You even cut a fine figure. So I’d say, wow, what a remarkable journey we’ve made. Everything I do is connected to art. At the end of the day, the thing that keeps my economic boat afloat is I do tours. I’ve been doing tours since I passed the licensing exam in 2000 or 2001, whatever it was. And I teach art history, fortunately. It’s very nice to be able to have students to pass this on to between the University of Mary, which has a Rome program, and of course the Angelicum, which is always great to be among Dominicans is something I think we would agree. And I do a lot of writing about art. So it’s very fortunate to be able to not be an art historian as an amateur, but as a professional, which means that every minute of every day is concentrated on thinking about art.

Robert Duncan: How did you fall in love with art and where did you go to school? What courses of study did you take?

Elizabeth Lev: Well, I think it’s a kind of a funny origin. I think when I think back when I was a kid, what I really liked was mythology. I just read books and books and books and books. If it had a story about Zeus or Hera, I was always caught up in what they were doing. And I also liked biographies. I liked stories about people, things that people did. And in high school, when I was already sort of leaning towards becoming probably an English major, which was probably where I was going, some kind of lit major, I had a wonderful, wonderful high school teacher, these kind of many, many stories like this, who said, I’m doing an experimental art history class during Jan term, why don’t you take it? And she was one of those teachers. If she said, I’m going to teach you how to pick garbage, I probably would have said, sure. And we took this class. I got my copy of Gombrich, the story of art. And I remember coming home with that book under my arm and thinking, this is who I am. So I went to the University of Chicago for art history. And then for my graduate program, I went to the University of Bologna, mostly because Dante went there, but really because it was a method of looking at art that was very different from what the University of Chicago did. The University of Chicago was a very kind of clinical connoisseurship, looking at how works of art relate to other works of art in a kind of enclosed circle, which seemed to me to be a little sterile. The University of Bologna was very interested in context and really what one would say in the wine world, the terroir of a work of art. And so what are these factors in the soil, in the sun, in the wind, in the winemaker, in the grape itself, as it were, that produce these works that are unique to these places? You can’t have a Sistine Chapel in Venice. There will never be a charter in Sicily. It’s just the way that this art grows is very much connected to many different factors. And that’s where the art and the history come together. And ever since then, I’ve been hooked.

Robert Duncan: So how do you go from there in your studies to ending up in Rome and doing this in arguably the city — one of the cities that you’d want to live in and do it professionally?

Elizabeth Lev: My thesis was on, it was a fluke. I didn’t like Rome when I first came here. I remember going back after my first trip, thinking, oh my gosh, I can’t wait to get back to Bologna, which is a normal city. But eventually, as we got to the point where I was going to have to write a thesis, you don’t get to choose your thesis. They choose it for you. And so I was given a very small church here in Rome and I had to come back and forth to the archives. And gradually, this kind of coming back and forth to Rome, a few stints where I stayed here for a bit, I also remember the moment I was on the train going back to Bologna and thinking, I don’t want to leave this place. And then from there, it was only a matter of time till the will found a way. And I’ve been here, I think, since it’s right before Jubilee year 2000. So I must have arrived in 97 or 98.

Robert Duncan: How have you seen Rome change over those years?

Elizabeth Lev: Tremendously. As a matter of fact, when I first moved here, it was, it had to have been a little earlier than the Jubilee year because everything was so dingy and horrible. If you’re, oh, you haven’t been here long enough, but there was the place where they now have the five-star Exedra hotel near the baths of Diocletian was actually a porn cinema. And it was this beautiful construction they’d made at the turn of the century with that sort of wonderful fountain. But everything was just encrusted over, you avoided it like the plague. The buildings were all covered with dirt. The museums kind of had things hidden off in corners. In fact, one of my, with a painting of my thesis was like, no one knew where it was. I mean, we were like wandering around in back corners of the Barberini gallery, trying to, it wasn’t in the Barberini gallery, it was in the officers club next door, I mean, of all things. So, I mean, it was a really, it was very, it was kind of a tawdry city. And then suddenly this incredible energy started to be poured into the city, energy and money. And as I’d already decided to throw my lot into this little dreadful, dirty, almost third world corner. And then suddenly they started cleaning it up. And so first of all, the Jubilee year 2000, we saw this unveiling of this new face of Rome. And with a couple of moments of setbacks, it’s been a pretty steady upward journey. I mean, like every other Roman, I complain about the cantiere, but I really feel that our present mayor, politics aside, loves our city and wants the best for our city. So, I look at these really annoying things for traffic, but I keep remembering that when they come down, we get these really lovely piazzas. Few of them probably could have been thought out a little better, but still, I think we are on a very good upward trajectory.

Robert Duncan: I mean, even St. Peter’s Basilica for people, I mean, now it seems like it was a long time ago, but you remember before the Jubilee, if I have this right, the Basilica itself, the icon of Catholic Rome, was black.

Elizabeth Lev: First of all, it was black. And then it was covered in scaffolding. And then it was covered in scaffolding. I remember in ‘99 going around with people saying, yep, and underneath is St. Peter’s Basilica, oh, underneath that is the Trevi Fountain. I think somewhere in there is the Bernini’s Four River Fountain. It was just, but St. Peter’s Basilica, we just looked at that plywood and scaffolding and thought, hmm, I wonder if we’ll ever see that again, but now look at it.

Robert Duncan: So you mentioned earlier that you are a licensed tour guide. And that means also in the museums?

Elizabeth Lev: Yes, yes.

Robert Duncan: For people who don’t know, I mean, there’s this —

Elizabeth Lev: Italy governs the profession of tour guide. And to be a tour guide, one has to have a license, which is a more or less complicated examination process, depending on the government and power at the time. When I took it, the exam was regional, so you would become a tour guide of Lazio, and then there was the tour guides of Tuscany, and then there was, and so on and so forth. Actually, I was just talking to the head of the tour guide union yesterday, and she was regaling me with some very funny stories about how this works. But once upon a time, you received your license for a region. All the exams for Rome had been blocked for over 10 years by the tour guides who didn’t want new tour guides because they didn’t want the competition. So for 10 years, there was no exam until 2000, I think it was 2000. And from what I understand, 5,000 people showed up to take that exam. It was the first time in 10 years. Somehow, miraculously, I passed that exam and became a licensed tour guide. Now, in case people are curious, there’s been a new law passed, I think in the last year, year and a half, which created a national tour guide. So now, when one takes the guiding license, one will become a licensed guide for all of Italy. This is the weeds of Italian craziness, European craziness. But already, there had been a law passed in about 2015 or so, where if you have a guiding license, you can guide anywhere in Europe. So just apparently, you need, and now, everybody wants you to have a QR code because, of course, QR codes are the thing. But yes, it does require a license to guide. The Vatican Museums will honor an Italian license and then they have their own licenses that they distribute.

Robert Duncan: And, you know, to steel man, the argument for having to have a license, I mean, I’m sure you know lots of stories of people who have no licenses, people who solicit tours on the street. And, I mean, I remember hearing stories that people would point out a totally bogus information standing in St. Peter’s Square to unsuspecting tourists who would just say, oh, okay, that’s where the Pope’s swimming pool is, for example.

Elizabeth Lev: Yeah, of course, you have to kind of wonder about the people who sort of show up and let some random person tell them stuff.

Robert Duncan: It can be hard to know what to do.

Elizabeth Lev: Some responsibility of what you’re gonna learn might be in order. But yes, so the reason for the licensing, I mean, the reason for the licensing is that Italy likes to control everything. You’ve lived here long enough, you know everything has to be controlled. So, and then ostensibly, it is to assure the quality of the guiding. But I did spend five years on the examination board. I mean, I was one of the examiners. And I would have difficulty telling you that everybody who passed the exam was that much different than the characters that you’re pointing out. So I think when the exam used to require a high school education, so you needed a high school education to become a guide, then they passed another law that would make, if you had a degree in archeology, history, art history, you could take this exam upon which I was one of the commissioners on that exam to be able to turn that into a guiding license and the stuff I heard.

Robert Duncan: Can you, some examples of the wildest ones?

Elizabeth Lev: Let’s see, I think the one that really floored me, I could usually keep a pretty straight face during these things. But the one that really floored me was that we were coming up to June, we’re doing the exams and I’m like, okay, well, you have, it’s good news that we have this week, this Tuesday off because it’s June 29th. Like, yes, June 29th, it’s a holiday. And so what happened on June 29th? Well, no, it’s a holiday. I’m like, it’s a holiday that only Rome has, right? Nobody else has this holiday in Rome. Why, why? And the guide, this aspiring guide did not know that June 29th is a holiday in only Rome because it’s the feast of our patrons, St. Peter and St. Paul, who were traditionally martyred on that day. I mean, I tried saying, well, did you notice the big church? This guide was planning on becoming a guide where she would be doing tours of the Vatican without knowing, like, why we have this Peter and Paul. They tried to get around, like, how about the two guys who came to Rome? It was just an, that was, and I remember being so surprised. And she, oh my gosh, she was, she was unhappy. She showed up, I think, a few weeks later with a very large boyfriend trying to, like, catch me in a corner to tell me what was what, but that did not work out.

Robert Duncan: So I want to talk more about the tours that you do, but you also have this trained art historian background. So how did you, how have you mixed over the course of your career, your specialization in art history? Have you worked on papers or — I think you’ve written a book?

Elizabeth Lev: So I, the way I try to incorporate are the way that these things all mesh together, and they do, they mesh together very well. It’s, it never really fails to amaze me how it feels very providential when I’m working on something that happens to dovetail with something else and it works out great, that it just makes a tour that maybe I’ve been doing for years and I’m beginning to feel like, ugh, again, and then suddenly it’s all exciting again. So I find that a very, a truly providential aspect of my work. I, for example, my thesis, which was, it’s about counter-reformation art. It’s like it hit your head against the wall, kind of, you know, and I said, then the Council of Trent, and then they wrote this treatise. But, you know, the things I learned, which were kind of heavy and dry, when it got to be 2017, and, you know, we’re talking about the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it became very apparent to me that some of those arguments that we had made, that I, you know, that people were making at the time of the counter-reformation were very similar to what we were living with today. And so all of that work I did in the thesis, which I had been sort of incorporating in my teaching since I was teaching a Baroque art class, suddenly found a way to, it just, it made sense to turn it into a book where you could actually see, and I really do see it this way, that in the course of the late 16th century to the early 18th, late 16th century to the late 17th century, there are a series of questions that are confronted in art that are very close to the heart of the Catholic Church, so sacraments and intercession. And that, the works of art, these famous works of art that people love so much, respond to these questions in a very public way. And so that’s how the book, how Catholic Art Saved the Faith came into being. And so I think it’s been very, very fortunate. And to the touring, there is an aspect of what I do, where you kind of, you’re an art historian, you want to have graduate students and you want to just like, you know, sit in a little room with the people who are writing down every word from your lips and you hear my ideas and I’m gonna pass my ideas into the future and I’m going to be, but you know, I, as I tell an old friend of mine, I’m a grunt, I’m a grunt. My dad was a Marine. I feel like I’m a, I’ve got, that’s, I prefer to be in the trenches. So I don’t teach graduate students. I teach students who are really approaching art history for the very first time. And that’s good, because there is a sort of divorce between art and the public and it’s nice to be able to try to create bridges, but also to remind people that art’s not just like whatever you feel or I’m gonna look at this and see this, if you’re going to use art as a means, particularly to communicate the faith, you better have some sort of methodology behind it. So that’s, I’m very excited that I get to do that. I’m very happy that I get to write and sometimes I even get to write things that are academic, but the bread and butter of my life, those tours is hugely important because it is a different circumstance from teaching. The students, I’m holding the grade book. I’m just not gonna get that much pushback. In the other hand, in a tour, the client is holding the pocket book and they want their questions answered. And so they will hold my feet to the fire. Some will hold my feet to the fire and say, I don’t understand this. Why is this? Well, this doesn’t really make sense. How does this work? And so you learn, you have to learn to not just speak in ways that sound great to you and make you feel like you sound super smart, but you have to learn to speak in a way that speaks to many different people. I may have an engineer in front of me. I may have someone who didn’t make it out of fifth grade and each one of these people deserves an explanation and a way of talking about art that is accessible to them. And without those people, then I would just be stuck in my little classroom mode or my little island of writing in front of my computer and how I sound so great in my own head. So I’m very grateful that I have all of these outlets that allow me to try to make the communication about art as universal as possible.

Robert Duncan: The Church now and for the last several decades has been looking for, really since the Second Vatican Council, a new way to reach and talk to people, especially those outside the Church or who’ve been alienated from the Church. And because you’re not a priest, you’re not a religious, you get these questions in your tours. And so, I mean, it seems to me like you have privileged access to what maybe people are thinking and what the challenges are, especially when you consider that a lot of the time when people come to the museums, I’m sure you get this also some, well, why doesn’t the Church just sell all of this and give it to the poor? So what have you learned about how to reach people? You talk about art specifically, but what lessons might be more universal?

Elizabeth Lev: When I was studying at University of Bologna, I had a professor named Anna Maria Matteucci, who I think was about four feet tall. She was a world-famous, she worked in architecture. She was a world-famous art historian among the very elite world of art history. And we were a little cohort of art history grad students in her class, and we’re so cool that we’re studying art history. I think we might’ve all worn black. And she asked a question, we were studying Renaissance art. She asked a question about a 19th century poet, no, a 20th century poet. And I remember all of us kind of looking at each other like, we’re not doing 20th century poetry. This isn’t our thing. And little forefoot Anna Maria Matteucci smacked her foot on the floor and said, you are art historians. You have chosen the hardest part. You have to know everything. And that’s really the approach that I take to this job. That if there’s something I don’t know, it is my obligation to know it. If I don’t know how to explain, if I’m sitting here talking about a painting that elicits questions, I’m talking about the Pieta that elicits questions about Mary. It elicits questions about how the Christians think about life and afterlife. It is my job to go and to be able to answer those questions to the best of my ability. I mean, to the best of my ability, I’m not gonna be a theologian or a philosopher anytime soon, but with enough thought and enough asking people who do know and reading on my own, I can come up with a plausible answer for people. And if I can’t, I can always say, I don’t really know how to answer that question. But I have made it the point over the past almost 30 years that I’ve been doing this job. I don’t like not being able to answer a question. So if I didn’t know, I would go home and study until I did know, which is very much in keeping with all the Renaissance artists I admire, all the people that I look to in my studies who were the sort of people that Brunelleschi, how am I gonna put the cupola up? I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out. I mean, he left Florence after he lost a competition, said, I’m not coming back until I can do something better than the rest of the Florentines. Michelangelo says, I’m gonna paint a ceiling for you. Like, but Michelangelo, no one’s ever painted stories on the ceiling and you don’t paint. Yeah, I’ll figure it out. So there is something about this wonderful

Robert Duncan: Is that true?

Elizabeth Lev: He painted very little. He had frescoed, he had studied fresco under Ghirlandaio from about 13 to 15, according to him. As I like to point out to my students, he basically slept through fresco class because he planned on becoming a sculptor. We know he did a panel painting and we know he was set up to compete with Michelangelo. So clearly they knew that he could do it, but he just didn’t have the practical experience. And plus what he was planning on doing on the ceiling, which is to do a series of narratives. That’s not been done before. People do narratives on walls, but not on ceilings. So really he did plan something that was beyond what could be done and then he did it. And so there’s something about these characters or even the first professional female painter, the woman who first said in 1580, I’m gonna set up a studio and let’s see what happens. I mean, I’m surrounded by the most extraordinary examples who just tell me, work hard, right? It’s the same beauty of the American work ethic, which I find in these people, the sense of apply yourself, work hard, be bold and you can do it. And I love that gratification of finding myself in the company of these people who did that. So, you know, it can be done.

Robert Duncan: So your domain, which is as it pertains to the Vatican at least is the museums. And when people say they’re going to go visit the Vatican, they really mean the museums and the Basilica, I think, right?

Elizabeth Lev: Yes. And so- It really just means hill. It’s the name of the hill, but okay.

Robert Duncan: Right, right, right. So what can you tell us about what is actually available to be seen when people go visit the Vatican? I mean, when people say, I’d like to see the Vatican, maybe it doesn’t sound to them immediately like they’re talking about a museum and going to the Louvre or something like that. But what does it mean to visit the Vatican and how are the museums that access point for, really, the masses?

Elizabeth Lev: So I think it’s an interesting question. I think what people are really interested in is this teeny tiny state with this strange, mysterious history to it, this figure that the world stops while we wait to vote in our next, when the Pope dies, the whole world stops. And whether you like it or not, whatever religion you are, wherever you are, you got to sit and wait for this group of Catholics to go, this group of guys to go choose this next guy, and then you go back to the regularly scheduled programming. So clearly there’s something about this tiny little space that has a prestige and a mystery to it. So many parts, many elements, they really just want to penetrate into this mystery. Now it depends on whether you’re talking about a person who has no sort of Catholic or Christian experience whatsoever, or you’re talking about the religious pilgrim who for that person, the Vatican, is where St. Peter will be as Petrus. And so where is Peter and where is Peter’s successor? And everything else is gravy because a big part of seeing the Vatican is seeing Pope Leo, as we can see by the fact that you can see outside your window the people spilling out every single Wednesday for the audiences. So the Vatican is remarkably open for visits. I mean, if you think about it, it’s a quarter square mile. You can go, 55% is garden, 45% is building. You can go into the gardens. They have all kinds of tours of the gardens. You can go out and see this theater of the universe. As it were, you have these plants that come from all over the world. You have these little monuments and statues that talk about devotions in different places. You can visit the museums, which is three and a half miles in and of itself and covers a huge stretch. And then of course, the most important part that people visit is St. Peter’s Basilica. The entry point, the calling card into the world at large is generally the museums because of the Sistine Chapel, because of the collection of ancient sculpture, because in the kind of the world of culture, the Vatican museums is the calling card. But there is the aspect of St. Peter’s where first of all, it’s free. And secondly, it has this approach of these big kind of open arms. That is kind of the magnet. And so I think people want to, when they’re thinking about what is there to see, they’re usually thinking about there must be something in the museum. But when they’re thinking about what is drawing them, whether they realize it or not, it’s that Basilica, the presence of Peter and that magnet, which draws people from everywhere.

Robert Duncan: Do you think that the Vatican does a good job? You said that the Vatican is open to visitors, but does the Vatican, the various institutions, the Basilica, the museums, do they do a good job connecting people with the faith or does it feel like you’re visiting a museum?

Elizabeth Lev: Ah, that’s an interesting and somewhat tricky question. There’s a lot of tension in the history of art. So the history of art, as you can well imagine, it’s a modern discipline. It’s not something that’s been around basically, I’d say the 19th century, the field really. Johan Winkelmann invented it in the 18th century. The 19th century, it becomes a field. Art history was created in a very Protestant milieu. Protestant would be the lighter end, moving into the world that was really more or less secular. And as art history developed, it developed in an increasingly secularized environment. Ergo, when we talk about, in art history, it is considered unfashionable, anti-intellectual and flat-out off-putting to try to link faith to art. Fortunately, in the past couple decades, that has changed. There have been some really important, really excellent scholars, whether it’s Rona Goffin or Galvin Bailey, which we have some amazing, amazing, amazing people, Marshall Hall, people I really admire who have done a wonderful job of bringing magnificent scholarship, Pamela Jones and Roman altarpieces and their viewers, the magnificent sculpture as a scholarship without fear of following where the thread of faith might bring you. So instead of it being a hard no, we’re just gonna talk about this in this clinical form, these scholars have been willing to talk more and more about how the faith might inform the art. That, however, is very still, unfortunately, fringe. And most of the time, the religious element of a work of art is treated the same way. Bon temps, you don’t talk about politics and you don’t talk about religion. And so, unfortunately, when we look within the didactic services of the museums in the Basilica, I mean, there are many people who have gone on the Scobie tour, the tour that has the excavation where you go to see Peter’s bones, only to walk out of there asking, did I see Peter’s bones or not? And you have people going through the Vatican museums occasionally on sort of official tours where you’re hearing far more about the scandalous behavior of the popes than the sort of redemptive art that they attempted to produce in order to create the legacy that we have today. So I think it is not exactly hidden that I have some questions about the way the Basilica is run at this exact moment. I have great admiration for the Vatican museums and what they have to do. To accommodate in a very small space, 30, 35,000 visitors a day. I appreciate more than I can possibly say, and I will always stand in their corner, I will fight by their side, the desire to try to limit as little as possible. And I know that people look at this like they’re just, it’s just a cash cup, but that is not the reasoning that the director is using nor the Governato Rato. The concern that I would have about limiting, the only way you can limit these people, limit the number of people, yes, you’re right, limit the number of people who come into the museum, the only way you can limit them is by making the tickets, the only people proposed for limiting is by making the tickets more and more and more expensive. And that becomes a world of art which is limited to a very, very few. And I don’t, I mean, true, the art of the Vatican museums was originally limited to a very, very few, but over the course of 500 years, the Vatican museums has found ways to open that collection and let those works speak to everybody with the most amazing results. So I admire a great deal the way that the Vatican museums is constantly thinking. It’s a very dynamic institution that’s always coming up with things. And the things that people don’t like, like how come I can’t take my pictures in the Sistine Chapel, or even me, I don’t like- What is the reason? Because it makes people move. So I can’t explain in the Sistine Chapel, they don’t let guides explain in the Sistine Chapel, which breaks my heart. And you can’t take pictures in the Sistine Chapel, why? Because if you’re not explaining and people can’t sit there doing selfies, they’ll be out the door in half the time, in two thirds of the time, so it keeps people moving. It is a very intelligent way of using human nature to just allow the flood to go. They come up with all kinds of interesting ideas and I find it very, very, very, very interesting that they’re so proactive in trying to resolve this problem. The problem that I see in the problems of the Basilica are a little bit more complicated, but a problem I see in both cases is a lack of respect for the person of the guide. That’s not for me. Personally, I hear I’m treated very, very well, so obviously I would never lament how I’m treated because I really, for a person who’s a foreigner who came to this country, the way I’ve been welcomed and the way I’ve been treated, I have nothing but gratitude to Italy and the Vatican. But I do see that the figure of the guide, and again, my friend who is the head of the guide union of all of Italy, the government, and even many times the Vatican administrations of both the Basilica and the museums, treat guides as feudal workers. As feudal workers. I mean, the contracts they’re given are feudal. They are, you are tied to the land and you will do nothing else. But even the way that they were addressed in the course of the Jubilee year, the guides at the St. Peter’s Basilica were really made to feel persona non grata. It was a hard year where they were really openly scorned and kept aside. Their work was, they were embarrassed publicly on several occasions. So, I mean, you wonder.

Robert Duncan: Do you think that that’s because maybe they’re, to accommodate the number of pilgrims, there were a lot of guides who maybe weren’t up to a certain standard and so they became, as a class.

Elizabeth Lev: Oh, it had nothing to do with standards. What people were saying or how, what kind of guides, no, it had nothing to do with that. It simply had to do with this plan to control the flow of tourists. They planned to create the fast pass line. There were a number of things that were being put into place for the Jubilee year that needed organization and they found that the guides were just, sort of a necessary evil to bring the paying, the people who are paying for the headsets, the people who are paying for the passes. The only function they have is just to bring these people through. And it really was a difficult year. However, I’ve just been taking the online course for the Basilica to become an official Basilica guide, which I must say is a truly beautiful piece of work. The technology, I wish they’d talked to you, but it’s a beautiful piece of work. And to listen to Dr. Pietro Zander explaining to us aspirante guidee, that how we know the bones of Peter are there and the excitement he has. He’s been on that site for 40 years and he’s talking into a camera and he’s so excited that I, I’m like, I wanna go to St. Peter’s, I wanna go to St. Peter’s right now. So the way they transmit, they had the parish priest of St. Peter’s, they have this, it’s a beautiful piece of work so that if a guide really wants to be well-informed and well-formed, they actually have a system with which that can be done. So that set. I do think there was a kind of an unfortunate divorce between the guides and in particular the Basilica, but it’s not just the Basilica, it’s really the state itself, which will inevitably side with these huge tour operators so that the tour operators have control to all the access to the sites and the tickets. And so a guide has to put him or herself, again, in a feudal position underneath an agency. These are people who, many of these guides, advanced degrees, these are people who love the city, these are the, this is the face that is the link between the city and the tourist.

Robert Duncan: So you are saying that they were mistreated by Rome, by the Italian state?

Elizabeth Lev: Oh, by both. I mean, I really, it’s a blanket situation where the figure of the guide, I don’t think is really respected enough and you can say, and I know, I know you and I have had these conversations a million times about the bad guides and the, but the bad guides are actually not the norm. I mean, there are plenty of people who get off the plane and they, you know, get a guidebook and if you’re gonna fall for that, you’re gonna fall for that. Again, I repeat, some of it is on the shoulders of the tourist, but there are so many guides here who I go to, I’m walking in the Vatican Museums and I see guides by themselves studying. I go to these shows, I know, I give lectures to guides and the room is full and they’re whole, they try to learn and they try to improve because they love their job and they love their country and most of them, most of them are these people. And so to have to be treated all the time, like you’re some charlatan or your job is to simply be the person who takes the group of people that are really going to be dropping money at the restaurant and the ticket booth and the gift shop, your job is just to lead them to the places where they can, like your job is to lead the sheep so that they can be shorn. Really, it undermines the dignity of the figure and so since these are the only people actually talking to the tourists, that’s an excellent way to burn them out, to make them tired, to make them not enthusiastic about what they’re talking about. So if I were to say one thing between A, the Vatican and B, the Italian state is, why don’t you put a little bit more trust and support into the figure of all of these guides we have?

Robert Duncan: It’s encouraging to hear you say that there are a lot of very good guides, especially for people who may be planning a trip to Rome. I have a couple of different directions I’d like to go but maybe now would be a good time to ask: I mean, first of all, what advice would you have for someone who is maybe planning, as many people do who do come to Rome, it’s a once in a lifetime trip and they get on Google or maybe now they ask ChatGPT, what advice would you give to someone planning a trip to Rome in order to make sure that they get a good guide, besides going to your website, of course, and make the best of that possibly once in a lifetime trip?

Elizabeth Lev: Well, again, like everything, if you’re serious about something, you put a little time and effort into it. So first things first, I would say, leave yourself time. Now, if you, for whatever reason, travel expense, you don’t have a lot of time in Rome, I’m not a big fan of more bang for your buck. So you have to run and go see, you’ve got a checklist of 10 things you have to see in the course of the day and it really just involves walking in, looking at it and walking out. I don’t, why don’t you just put it on the TV and just look at the picture. It’s not, I would say that to leave enough time to actually experience the site. So make a decision about what you’re going to do and leave yourself time. And leave yourself time so that you’re not exhausted. And people live one kind of rhythm and then they come here and they think they’re gonna see 25 things in one day and they can’t understand when they’re tired. They’re not used to walking and then suddenly we have to walk for hours. They’re not used for standing and then suddenly you have to stand. So I think, try to, you don’t wanna have dead time where you’re just sitting there doing nothing but sucking down Aperol spritzes. But I think a certain sense.

Robert Duncan: It’s a perfectly valid way to spend time, by the way.

Elizabeth Lev: Yes, you are of course right. I mean, it’s a question of, first of all, there’s a question of time management. Second, when you go to choose a guide, we have many, many excellent guides. We have guides who are extraordinarily accomplished in this city. We have the people, when you see those digs, some of the same people who are the archeologists who dig that stuff, they’re doing your doors. I mean, it’s really quite remarkable what we have out there. And so I would say there is a way, you don’t have to give your guide a test, but I would tell you a couple of things. If you are approaching a historical site and the only thing your guide is telling you or the only thing you’re getting are scandal stories, that’s the refuge of the lazy. That’s the refuge of someone who really doesn’t have a compelling story to tell and has no way of telling the story compellingly. And so the best you can do is to fall back on sex and scandal. You’ve got a bad tour right there. I mean, it’s fine. You drop it in, it’s funny. Alexander VI Borgia, always good for a laugh. Probably not in 1492, but fortunately we’re 500 years later. But the fact is that kind of touring is lazy and people who look for, accept that kind of tour, they are lazy. They feed the market. That’s your problem. If you don’t like your tours because they’re scandal, but they’re scandal-ridden, you think they’re superficial, it’s because you allow that to happen. So the other thing is I would really just read something, learn something, be more responsible about what they’re telling you. I’m not telling you you have to come here an expert on things, but it’s good for you to know that, oh, let’s start with The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci is not here. It’s in Milan. And so just, even when people read novels, it just, it gets you more excited. It gets you more prepared for what you’re gonna see and where you’re going to see it. So these are the things I would propose to bake. So be, manage your time well. So if you can have more time in Rome, that’s great. Leave time for you to not be sort of running around from thing to thing. You look for, when you contact a guide, talk about yourself. Tell who you are, what you’re interested in. I’m a first-time visitor. I’ve enjoyed seeing this. I’ve enjoyed seeing that. It’s like a sommelier. Sommelier, you had the giant, giant wine list. I don’t know what, people don’t know what kind of wine they want, but do you like, well, I like a dry, I like a little bit more fruity. I had this wine once. It was like this. It’s like that. I’ve traveled here. I’ve traveled there. I’ve really liked seeing the ancient sculptures in the Cairo Museum. It helps the guide to begin to get a sense, and the good guides will weave what you’ve, your experience into what they’re talking about. The more that you participate in your experience, the better the experience is going to be.

Robert Duncan: I hate to do this to you because it’s probably a mortal sin in your book, but most people want to see the Vatican, see the Roman Forum, Trevi Fountain, Colosseum, (that’s) probably a short list of what’s out in most people’s book. What are maybe three or five places or things to do that people don’t think to do that you would recommend them to do, even if it’s their first trip?

Elizabeth Lev: Well, the wonderful, there’s a wonderful Bernini-Borromini walk from, say, Santa Maria della Vittoria to Santa Andrea al Quirinale. So you can see the St. Teresa in ecstasy, and you can see this wonderful rivalry between Bernini and Borromini, between this all-white, sort of undulating church of Borromini and the theatrical Andrew going up to heaven in the St. Andrew of the Quirinale. And while you’re in the neighborhood, since it’s very close by, there’s St. Mary Major, which is really just an amazing, amazing church. And as a matter of fact, Mary Major is flanked by two other churches that have the most ancient, incredibly ancient mosaics. So Santa Pudenziana is the oldest Christian mosaic in Rome, and then Santa Braccede has this unique mosaic chapel. So you can see these different types of art forms. The Caravaggio crawl is always wonderful. Nice to start at Piazza del Popolo, which is the northern gate. That’s the way the visitors, if you had come to Rome in 1600, 1500, when Queen Christina came to Rome, that’s the way she came into the city. And so you have Caravaggio placed in the very first church that you encounter coming into the city and kind of thinking about why would you put a guy with an arrest record like that in the first church that you encounter in Rome, which gives us furiously to think. And then you can walk all the way down this wonderful road to Via della Ripetta and see four more of his paintings. And that’s a lovely, lovely thing to do. The San Clemente church with the three layers in one is another incredible site where you can just walk through Roman history. So you’ve got a Mithraic temple, you’ve got a fourth century church, you’ve got 12th century church. It’s really, it’s Roman history and kind of like a, it’s like an elevator speech for Roman history. And of course, the Galleria Borghese is my favorite museum of all. It’s the young Bernini producing his first sculptures, but really an example of art patronage, which is breathtaking. Scipione Borghese, he had some questionable ways of acquiring it, but I find it really hard to condemn him when I see that collection.

Robert Duncan: There are also all sorts of things that perhaps people don’t know about. And this, many Catholics might, but maybe not non-Catholic visitors to Rome. I mean, there’s the Scala Santa, the, I mean, the papal, the idea of a papal basilica and that there are multiple papal basilicas in Rome. Could you talk a bit more about that category of sort of pilgrimage sites or why they might be of interest also to non-Catholics?

Elizabeth Lev: Well, Christian Rome, I love it when people say, I’d like to do a Christian Rome tour. I’m like, well, let me see. We’ve got 360 churches here. I’m not quite sure where we’re gonna do, what we’re gonna do here. 360? Some people say 500, I think it’s 360 active ones.

Robert Duncan: Okay.

Elizabeth Lev: And you have them spread over the seven hills and there are incredible walks you can do to really experience the settling of Christianity into the city and then its growth and then its triumph. One of the places to start, however, if you’re gonna do that is with the catacombs, the Catacombs of Priscila, which have this amazing art. I mean, as an art historian, for me, the Catacombs of Priscila, which have the earliest Christian art in the world, that’s an unmissable thing. You have the First Madonna and Child. You have the Three Magi. St. John Lateran, which is where you’ll find the Scala Sancta, is actually the Cathedral of Rome. And it’s a church that, again, it’s sometimes hard to approach because it’s so piecemeal. It’s a strange looking church because it’s got statues from 1600 and a ceiling from 1500 and a Ciborium from 1300. And it kind of looks like someone’s eccentric aunt’s living room with a lot of brick and rack. But when you look at that museum, when you look at that church through the right eyes, what you’re looking at is 1700 years of Christian history. And it reminds you, in that one space, that this faith, since 313, has been working its way forth in the city. It was legalized in 313 by Constantine. It came up from the underground, the catacombs, the hidden churches, and it comes out onto the landscape. And it’s not easy. It’s a struggle for it to get into the heart of the city. And you can really trace that. You can go from St. John Lateran to the Church of Holy Cross, where we have these relics. When Helena goes to demonstrate, there was a cross that Jesus died on, and here it is. We have the Scala Sancta, which is the old chapel of the popes when they lived at St. John Lateran. Then you can go towards the San Clemente Church, which is remarkable. You can see the first, the St. Peter in Chains in 450, which is where Leo the Great built a church overlooking the Forum. So Christianity had been legalized now for 150 years, but the Christians still couldn’t get a church in the Forum because the resistance to Christianity, despite the fact that it’s the sole religion of the empire, they will not let them dang Christians into that Forum. And there is that Leo the Great builds this church of the Chains for the Chains of Peter, looking down. They’re now buildings, but you have to imagine once upon a time, it was looking down into the Forum, like the general before the next battle. And then you head down in the Forum, and in the Forum, there’s Cosmas and Damian, the first church the Christians managed to build in the Forum. So it’s really, it’s such an exciting tale to watch the Christians moving around in the city. The Caelian Hill with the site of the martyrdom of Saints John and Paul, and then this crazy round surround sound martyrdom church of Santo Stefano Rotondo. It’s everywhere you look, everything you walk into, there is some fragment memory of the Christian history, which just permeates the city.

Robert Duncan: I know you’ve also given a lot of tours because of how long you’ve been in Rome and your success in doing what you do. Certain VIPs, Hollywood types, I don’t know if you’re under any NDAs, but can you talk a little bit about some of the more famous people that you’ve shown around and what their reactions to the Christian story of Rome and the Vatican has been?

Elizabeth Lev: Well, my favorite was always taking Jim Caviezel. Every time they asked me to take Jim Caviezel around, I get excited because I get to take Jesus places. That’s always been my, I’m hoping one of these days, maybe I’ll get to take Jonathan Roumie, so I can have two Jesuses in my resume. But yes, so the way the tour business works is that usually the figures who are the Hollywood, the sets, the stuff like that, that’s usually set up. When a movie star, a famous person is in Rome, it’s usually through the concierge at a hotel, and that’s a different kind of work that I’m not interested in being tied to a concierge. That’s a different kind of call girl, but I’m not gonna be that kind of call girl either. But every now and then, because of some work I’ve done with production companies, they will call me up and they’ll say, we need you to take someone out. So this all began with the infamous Angels and Demons situation where the production company, which a friend of a friend worked for it, and wanted me as someone who knew something about Bernini to help with the Angels and Demons people. And so in the course of that, I met and I took Ron Howard and Tom Hanks and the rest of that gang around. One of my favorite memories is Ron Howard walking into St. Peter’s Basilica. He always wears his baseball cap. He walked into St. Peter’s, big coat baseball cap, and he swept the baseball cap from his head. And it was, no one had to tell him, it was just a, it was, you know when we talk about that gesture of respect of removing the hat? It was, you understood what that meant. And he just stood there, he turned into, I remember I was looking at him, he turned into like Opie, just this huge eyes looking at this place. And I really, I still see that in the movie, which, you know, leaving behind how I feel about Dan Brown. I see that love and that wonder of Rome in the movie, which I think it’s the redeeming quality for what is the most ridiculous story ever. And then I worked with the Conclave people, with the movie, that movie, who were charming. They were lovely. I find it hard to reconcile the, you know, completely uselessness of that, the complete uselessness of that book with the really delightful people who were on that tour. I mean, Ralph Fiennes was, I think he has a relative who is a theologian in the Anglican church. He had a lot of very interesting questions about why Peter. It was actually very, very fun. He kind of stood right in front of me and was like, so why is this Peter guy? And I was like, well, okay. And it was lovely. And he listened and he listened and he responded. And Stanley Tucci loves art. He loved l'Acquario. He loved the works of art, which is a beautiful thing. And I feel myself very, I consider myself again, very, very fortunate because the contact I have had with, you know, whatever these movie star people are, I usually get the thinking movie stars. So I get the people who actually think about things and want to know about things. Because first of all, to get to me, it’s complicated. Like someone’s gone to some trouble to put them in the room with me because that’s like, I’m just not the, I’m not the person that’s the guide for movie stars. So I usually get people who are thoughtful and people who are intelligent. I have taken around a few of the people who are completely self-absorbed and can’t see beyond them, something boring. So I never really wanted a career of taking around movie stars because I’d rather talk about Michelangelo than you.

Robert Duncan: I want to ask you also just about your passion and how, after all these years, you are someone who always is passionate about what you do. And although I know you have various issues as anyone does, you have not become cynical about any of this, as far as I can tell. And, you know, I just think that we’re in this scenario now where all these images, many of them at least, are online for people or we’re oversaturated with images. And it can be difficult to appreciate the way it would have been for someone from a different period in time, seeing a beautiful work of art, because that would have been such a unique experience. You know, we’ve got Hollywood and movies, Instagram, everything else. How have you retained your passion personally, but then also, how is it, as I think you would say it’s the case, that this place, the museums and the art that’s there, how does that still affect people despite what seems to be like the odds are against it?

Elizabeth Lev: Well, I think two thoughts come to mind. One, you don’t really get burned down on your spouse, your kids. I mean, you just, this is my, these works of art are my, I’ve known them longer than I’ve known my kids and my spouse. I mean, these have been what drew me to here, to this country to begin with. So art really never disappoints. I was up on the scaffolding in the last judgment this week and I was standing under Jonah. There was a lot going on. I was talking to somebody and then suddenly I turned around and I’m standing underneath Jonah and I felt something so powerful. It weakened my knees and I was like, I can’t believe, I think I might’ve said, now Lord, you may let your servant go in peace. I mean, it was just, to be there was something that I have seen and talked about, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of times, but I realized that it’s still there. It’s still, the spark is just as strong. Also, the other thing is cynicism. The only person you hurt with being cynical is you. The only thing you’re ruining is you. You’re not smart. I mean, I see cynical guides all over the place. I mean, it’s not intelligent, it’s not smart, it’s not energizing, it’s just draining and it’ll kill you. It’s a poison that will slowly kill you. I mean, a certain jaundiced view of the kookiness that goes over there and if my own head, I just treat it all like a giant sitcom. Like this is just, this is like a funny twilight zone. There’s some days where that’s, you’re just looking at it that way. I mean, in Rome, fortunately, I think you know this, Rome, we tend to laugh. I mean, we’ve been invaded a lot. We had Nazis and at a certain point, you just gotta be able to take a step back and go, I don’t know. So I think the humor is always a very good antidote for the cynicism, and a reminder constantly, I mean, we live in a city filled with saints, so there’s really no excuse to not be remembering this, but a reminder of the tremendous providence I’ve had to be here and what I do. I mean, complaining about my average day of work, I’m not gonna get a lot of traction with people. I have a very, very, very wonderful career and really to not, to descend into the, being unhappy about the various little things that don’t work the way I’d like them to, that would be a level of ingratitude, which would really be sinful. The fear of images, I’m not that concerned about images. I mean, one of the great steps forward, my frenemy in the history of art or my love-hate relationship is with Jacob Burckhardt, who wrote the history of Western civilization. And he is the man who gave us the thesis that Dan Brown is working on. He had studied theology and then realized he didn’t believe in God. Because of that, he really needed to create a thesis that these artists who are working for the church were not invested in the message of the church. And so it’s his work that every single morning I have to get up and deal with. But at the same time, he was the man who believed that art was forever. And so I think that’s a great example But at the same time, he was the man who believed that art was for everybody, that it was something that wasn’t supposed to be an elite thing where only the few who could travel or only the few who could get into these spaces. So he’s the one who pioneered the use of images in his lectures. But we’re talking about 1880, he’s getting photographs and he’s using these photographs. And what he was able to do was to get wet the appetite. And so the photographs are a lot better today, but all they’re ever really going to do is wet the appetite. Because when I was there in the Sistine Chapel this morning when the first group of people who had been waiting outside at eight o’clock, they came running into the Sistine Chapel when they opened the doors. And I was in that chapel when they walked in and happened to turn around long enough to see everybody going like this. Technology can do everything technology can do, but technology cannot take away the wonder of being in a space where 500 years ago, a little cranky guy wandered up on a scaffolding and just changed the way we see the story of salvation.

Robert Duncan: I want to bring the conversation to a close talking about one thing that many people who may not be Catholic, or even maybe if they are, may not know that you mentioned, you alluded to, but St. Peter. I think it’d be appropriate to conclude that the real motivation, or the real reason, or the original reason at least for Christians to come to this city was to see the tombs, the trophies of the apostles. So what would be your pitch for people who maybe never have been, to see their visit to Rome in that primary religious sense?

Elizabeth Lev: So this is a city that’s built on pilgrimage. It’s what it is. The ruins of ancient Rome, I’m leaving behind the ancient city, which is now in ruins. This is a city that is completely built on pilgrimage. The roads we have, the fountains we put in, the decoration, the reconstruction. It’s a city that has been welcoming pilgrims since Gaius wrote that letter which you were referring to to his friend in Asia Minor, come to Rome and I will show you the trophies of Peter and Paul. We have this movement of people here which has determined the way our streets are laid out, the obelisks you see, the way we recouped from the ancient Rome. It’s all about drawing pilgrims into this city, north, south, east, and west, leading them through this adventure of beauty and martyrdom and these many different figures that have walked through these streets and they culminates in the tomb of St. Peter who starts his career unable to catch fish in the Sea of Galilee, ends up, the head of the apostles, ends up in Antioch and then is crucified upside down here in the wake of Nero’s great fire, basically blamed for something, blamed for a fire over a real estate deal essentially. So he’s buried in this hole in the ground. To me, the most amazing thing about this city and again, something that never gets old, every single day talking about it. Peter was crucified upside down in the circus over by the Vatican Hill which was out of sight, out of mind. He was cut down off the cross, buried in the cheapest possible grave that they could come up with. It was a trench covered with some dirt, covered with some pieces of terracotta. That was the end of Peter except it wasn’t. So the Romans put Peter’s body in the ground. The Romans who had built those incredible structures, who took Rome a city of brick, changed it to a city of marble, they conquered everything. The Romans are people who do not make mistakes. They build roads from here to Russia and 40 mile aqueducts. They put his body in a hole in the ground and the Romans assumed they had taken out the trash. But what we see every single day, when you walk out the door, every single day you see it. What the Romans inadvertently did 2,000 years ago was plant a seed and in many ways, that seed which is the vertical of Peter’s body all the way up to the golden ball at the top of Michelangelo’s dome. That’s our beautiful symbol. Of all of these successors of St. Peter, these 267 successors to the present Pope Leo, this continuity in the vertical line and then spreading out like tendrils are these incredible works of art, whether it was the reconstruction of the Trevi Fountain to give pilgrims some fresh, clean water when they came to Rome, whether it’s the straight road that leads to St. Mary Major that allows you to get from Mary Major to the top of the Spanish Steps and see where you’re going. All of these things, they were built for pilgrimage. The entire city is meant to be seen under a Christian lens.

Robert Duncan: Elizabeth, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.

Elizabeth Lev: Thank you very much. This was fun.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• His experience as a military chaplain during the Vietnam War

• What he learned from American soldiers about sacrifice and service

• The role of priests ministering to troops during times of war

• How he helped the Church respond to the 2002 clergy sex abuse crisis and reformed seminary formation

• The situation of Christians in the Holy Land and the work of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre

More than a personal biography, this is a reflection on faith forged amid conflict — and on how suffering, discipline, and service can deepen Christian witness in a divided world.

Subscribe now

Transcript

Intro: Cardinal Edwin O’Brien has spent a lifetime serving both the Catholic Church and the United States military. As a young priest during the Vietnam War, he jumped out of helicopters to minister to American troops in the field. In 1997, he became Archbishop for the Military Services, overseeing Catholic ministry to U.S. service members around the world during a period that included the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He later served in the Holy Land, working closely with Christian communities living amid one of the most volatile and contested regions in the world. He also took part in the conclave that elected Pope Francis. Now 86 years old, Cardinal O’Brien lives in retirement, dividing his time between Rome and Baltimore, where he once served as archbishop of the first diocese established in the United States. In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we talk about his years ministering to American soldiers, the lessons of discipline and virtue forged in war, his role helping reform seminaries after the 2002 clerical sex abuse crisis, and his hopes for the future of the Church under Pope Leo XIV. Recorded just days before the United States entered a new war with Iran, the cardinal reflects on something he has witnessed throughout his life on the front lines of conflict: that suffering, endured with faith, can draw Christians closer to Christ and become a powerful witness beyond the Church’s walls.

Robert Duncan: Your Eminence, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service. I want to start at the moment of your ordination, 1965, if I’ve got that right.

Cardinal O’Brien: That’s right, yeah.

Robert Duncan: The first years of your priesthood, there were a lot of changes in the United States. There was not only the sexual revolution, massive changes in American culture, but then in the early 70s, Roe vs. Wade. As a young priest, looking at the changes in the United States that were underway, how did you see your vocation and your mission as a priest at that time?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I’ve been in seminary work for many years, and I always held that the first five years after ordination are as important as the five years preparing for ordination. And they were very significant years. When I was ordained, I was supposed to go to Puerto Rico to learn Spanish, because we had all kinds of numbers of Puerto Ricans coming to New York, and Cardinal Spellman, for our class, sent half the group, 15 of us. But last minute, they got word from the academy, West Point, that they were doubling the size of the academy, and they wanted a third priest there. So long story short, I went to West Point as a civilian chaplain for almost five years. I was marrying cadets in June week, and two years later I was burying some of them, because they went right over to Vietnam. It was a very sad, sad time. And I figured after a while, gee, these young people are sacrificing. Why don’t I put on a uniform? And I asked Cardinal Spellman, and he didn’t get anywhere, but Cardinal Cooke let me join the military at the end of 69. And I spent three active years. And they were wonderful years. I enjoyed my time at West Point. It was like a seminary. It was so disciplined, and such a place full of goals and virtue and sacrifice. And I was ready then to put on a uniform. I spent a year as a chaplain, a parachute in Fort Bragg in Carolina, a year in Vietnam, and I wound up in Fort Gordon, Georgia. And I was willing to stay on. I said, but I have to study something. I need the books. And the Army said, fine, we’ll send you to study. You’ll get your master’s degree. What would you like to study? I said, theology. They said, can’t study theology. It’s the church and state. We can’t spend money on theology. So at the same time, New York, the Archdiocese, my home, said, we need someone to study theology in Rome. Oh, that was an answer to prayer. And so I spent three years here and got a degree in theology. They were good years. I was with two fine priests for my first five years. In the military, I certainly got to know a lot of chaplains, and it was a great experience. And then when I got out of the military, my life started over again in academia. So it was a good flavor for the priesthood, my first eight years as a priest.

Robert Duncan: I’d love to talk about some of those moments in greater detail. I mean, Vietnam really stands out. You say that you were marrying and then having, unfortunately, to bury men very quickly thereafter, that you also jumped from helicopters. Can you take me back a little bit to maybe some of those memories specifically? What stands out? Were there any…

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I’ve had a lot of honors and so forth and a lot of privileges. But one of my main honor is to be called a vet, an Army veteran, United States military, because I learned so much from the people I served. Their life was full of self-sacrifice. They entered the service. That’s a virtue. Greater love than this no one has than to give up your life for your friends. Peace I leave with you. And I admire the military very much. I do today. I remember at one stage, it was early in the 70s, I was invited up to Boston for the 4th of July concert. And I had my uniform on. As I walked through the crowded field, I was booed. In those days, it was not an honor to be in the military. Changed today, thank goodness. The military has high regard, I think, in America. But those days were very controversial. And the military just did what they were asked to do and I think did it fairly well. And I learned a lot in service then.

Robert Duncan: You were a military chaplain.

Cardinal O’Brien: I put on a uniform in 1970, that’s right, as an active duty chaplain for three years.

Robert Duncan: And you served alongside people of other faiths, Protestants?

Cardinal O’Brien: Oh, yes. Every day in Vietnam, we’d board a helicopter with a Protestant chaplain and fly out to a distant fire base where young people, guys at the time, were waiting for the hot food once a week for their mail. And I’d offer mass, hear confessions, and stay the day. It was a great relief for them and for me as well, great pastoral work. And I saw such generosity in these young people. The mail would have a box of cookies or something. First thing they would do, they’d open the box and pass it around. A sense of these 19 and 20-year-olds, a sense of great service and generosity. And I think that’s true today, too. I have great regard. I guess 18 years of my 60 have been spent dealing with the military in some way or other. And that’s been a great benefit to me, a great blessing for me.

I guess 18 years of my 60 have been spent dealing with the military in some way or other. And that’s been a great benefit to me, a great blessing for me.

Robert Duncan: Was there any experience specifically in Vietnam, someone you met, something that happened that you think had a lifelong impact? You’ve already said that the entire experience had a lifelong impact.

Cardinal O’Brien: Yeah, I have no war stories. It was a daily routine. And I saw a lot of self-sacrifice on the part of troops on the edge of the war. We were trying to get out of Vietnam at the time. And so we were strictly defensive. But it was a difficult time, too, because they’d get restless. And they’d wander off to find a woman in the nearby town or to get some drugs or something. Morale was very low. And so the chaplain’s role was very important. And I valued that at the time.

Robert Duncan: Did you feel prepared for that task?

Cardinal O’Brien: Oh, yes. I think our seminaries do great work. And every four or five years, my job has changed. And I’ve learned flexibility. And the people, wherever I’ve been, I’ve been supported by the people and impressed by the people. And that’s what’s kept me going, with God’s grace.

Robert Duncan: As someone who has done a lot of seminary work, who’s been in charge of the formation of men for the priesthood, what do you think it is that remains attractive about the priestly vocation today?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, it’s God’s grace and very often through the example of other priests. I grew up in the Bronx. And everything revolved around the parish. And the priest was the leader. It was education. It was worship. It was sports. And that was a kind of leadership that got to me. And I saw it as a time to serve God and to serve my neighbor in a very effective way. And to go to the seminary, I had no hesitation. And I enjoyed the seminary. And I enjoyed the challenge once out of the seminary to meet the needs, the changing needs, in a very topsy-turvy world in the 70s.

Robert Duncan: Did your experiences in the military, in Vietnam—did you ever suffer from the consequences that many people do, such as post-traumatic stress? Did those experiences stay with you over the years?

Cardinal O’Brien: Thank goodness. I have many memories. But I came out pretty healthy, I think, still. But I was close to the Lord. I said my prayers. I kept association with other chaplains, other priests. And that kept me going. And I found it a challenge to keep morale among the troops during those years. But it worked. And I came out much better experienced as a priest and ready for whatever the Church was offering. And it offered studies and then working with the Archbishop of New York for a few years.

Robert Duncan: I wonder if you have any advice as a pastor for those who are suffering post-traumatic stress from their military service.

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, it depends on the background. You’re working with men and women from all kinds of experiences in their lives. Some are seeking refuge in the military. And it works. Others are finding it very difficult to serve. It depends on their assignment. It depends on their support system. And I think everyone needs a support system once they leave the familiar surroundings of home and neighborhood. And if they do find that support system among friends and fellow workers, I think they can get by pretty well if they stay true to principle, their religious life, their prayer life, if they’re religious people, which certainly helps to keep balance and to keep perspective. The military has structures which are supposed to help. And I think they do very often. And it’s very, very important for someone who is finding stress to seek help while they are in uniform. To let it go and to wrap yourself in some kind of neurosis is not good for anybody. And so I would stress anyone in uniform to take advantage of the help that the command offers and that medical people offer and the chaplains offer. And many do. And many, because of that, stay pretty healthy.

Robert Duncan: So after your time in Vietnam, if I’m not jumping ahead too much, you then came to study in Rome. So you’ve spent a lot of your life in Rome, also abroad, overseas. What do you remember about Rome in your first visit studying theology?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I remember how emotional it was. I didn’t expect to come. But I recall the Casa Santa Maria, the house of studies for priests, kneeling in the chapel for the first time. And very, very tears came to my eyes. And I was very grateful for what had gone on in my life and for the new opportunity I was given. I lived in a house of studies for all American priests who were wonderful examples. And I spent three years there. And it was a kind of good education. Priests from all over the country and studies from universal teachers at the Angelicum, where I went. And I enjoyed the studies. I thought I’d be teaching afterwards. But Cardinal Cooke decided to open an office for evangelization. He didn’t call it at that time, but pastoral outreach. And for two or three years, I worked on special projects. It was a time of cults, the Moonies, for instance. And we started a group of ecumenical group to counter the cults, separated and divorced, an outreach to separated and divorced, outreach to people homosexually inclined called Courage. And so it was a good pastoral experience, those first three years out of Rome from 73 to 76 when I got my doctorate. And then I worked in the chancery in New York as vice chancellor, head of communications, secretary to Cardinal Cooke and to Cardinal O’Connor before I was put into seminary work.

Robert Duncan: So after you were director, I believe, of St. Joseph’s, you were also director of Rome’s seminary for North American men called the North American College. How did that appointment come about? And what were the different challenges of being a rector of this seminary versus a domestic…?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I remember on a weekend, it was Labor Day weekend. I was driving Cardinal O’Connor up to the country for a pastoral visit. And it was a Sunday of the weekend. And on the way, I said, Your Emminence, I know Dunwoodie needs a rector. And I have been rumored. I said, I really don’t think I’m fit to be a rector. I don’t have that educational background and so forth. So he said nothing. But on the way back, he said, you’ll be the rector of Dunwoodie. So I started the next day. And on Labor Day, we had a big dinner at the seminary. I was welcomed. And I did almost five years, then went to Rome for almost five years, and then back to Dunwoodie for four or five years. And it was great. I love the priesthood. And I loved forming other priests. It was a great privilege. And to this day, I keep in touch with some of them. And I remember the days very fondly. As I said, I was being formed as I was trying to form others. And I found seminary work very supportive of my priesthood and didn’t realize I’d be in that work for so long. But I benefited from it very much. And after I became a bishop, those years proved to be very profitable for me.

But I benefited from it very much. And after I became a bishop, those years proved to be very profitable for me.

Robert Duncan: How did they form you? I can imagine the ways that you would help the others.

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, discipline, a prayer life, a sense of service. I saw people around me serving. And that was very supportive and instructive to me. In ways I didn’t realize at the time, I guess. But when I found myself out of the seminary and served as an auxiliary bishop and then bishop for the Military Services, I found those years in seminary formation formed me in a way that I was self-disciplined and motivated, goal motivated. And that was a wonderful blessing for me for the rest of my life.

Robert Duncan: What mark do you think you had personally on these seminaries? I mean, every rector is different. What were your priorities as you led both the minute at Dunwoodie and then later in Rome?

Cardinal O’Brien: I think as a rector, you set an example. There are always tasks that you have to perform, sometimes to revitalize the community, to set a new policy, to find the right faculty members, to set discipline in a balanced way, and to relate to the seminarians as a father. And I found that very fulfilling. And I think I got a good response both in New York and both trips as seminary rector in Dunwoodie and here in Rome. I enjoyed Rome very much. Didn’t expect it. Didn’t know Rome very well. But it was a good exposure for me, a good experience for me.

Robert Duncan: Would you take me back to the time after your service in Rome as seminary rector to when you were appointed a bishop? Do you remember how you heard about that, how that came about, and what your reaction was?

Cardinal O’Brien: Yes. I was here in Rome, in fact, visiting. I was rector at Dunwoodie. And I was bringing some people up to Orvieto because the North American College needed some help financially. And on the way back, we got a phone call. And they said, please call Cardinal O’Connor at the next stop. We didn’t have cell phones at the time. And I called Cardinal O’Connor. And he said, what is an auxiliary bishop of mine doing in Rome when he should be at the seminary? And of course, he was giving me a hard time. But that’s how I learned I’d be an auxiliary bishop. He said, do you accept? I said, yes. He said, here’s the number. Call the nuncio and tell him you accept. That was in ‘96, I guess. And I was auxiliary bishop for the cardinal for one year. And then the military archdiocese opened up. The archbishop was retiring. And unexpectedly, I was appointed an archbishop after a year as a bishop. And I moved to Washington and spent, I guess, 10 years as military archbishop.

Robert Duncan: I read that you would divide your time as military archbishop. Well, first of all, can you explain to people who may not know how the military archdiocese works?

Cardinal O’Brien: The archbishop of the military is chartered by the pope to take care of all the men and women who are Catholic in uniform in the United States, plus diplomats, plus VA hospitals. We had, I guess, 150 priests far below our quota. And I traveled wherever our military people were, 40 countries, mostly in Europe and North America. And it was a great sense to support our priest chaplains and to support the people they were serving. And it involved a lot of travel, as I say, which I enjoyed. And I had a lot of good support.

Robert Duncan: What were some of the countries that you would have to frequent most in this time?

Cardinal O’Brien: Oh, where did I go? I certainly, the US, half the time was US bases all around the country. Western Europe, Japan. And I was always on the road and had a good budget and was able to fly when necessary and be in the midst of the people, which is, I think, the job of a priest and certainly the job of a bishop.

Robert Duncan: You were still serving as archbishop of military services when the United States went to war in Iraq. How did you see your role as pastor to the Catholic men and women in uniform during that time?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I think the war was a difficult one. It was great divisions. And I just reminded the priests, you’re not here to take a side in the war. Certainly, you’re an American and want to see the Americans safe and bring about peace, and that’s why they’re there. But keep your eye on the mark, and you’re a priest first, and then you put on your uniform as a chaplain. And one of my roles was to keep morale among priests and to help them serve their people who were under great pressures in those days.

Robert Duncan: And I can imagine that the reasons that the morale is low is because people that they know and love are dying.

Cardinal O’Brien: Yeah, and there was criticism. I mean, as I mentioned, to be booed because you were in uniform of the United States is not a pleasant thing. And this country was very divided, and they blamed the military for a war, which is not the case. And so I had a hard time lifting morale of our people by serving the good, healthy work our chaplains were doing.

Robert Duncan: What strategies did you have for lifting morale when, I mean, that was a time, as you described, that was very, the country was very divided.

Cardinal O’Brien: To be present. I think I was welcomed wherever I went. I felt that it was important to be there and to pray and sacraments and just to do what a good priest and a good bishop should be doing, brought life into the community. And that, I think, the role of a bishop is to bring the life of Christ more present into the local parish and the local community. And I found that to be a very, very attractive way of life for me.

Robert Duncan: Are you surprised that you ended up spending so much of your life in the military?

Cardinal O’Brien: Over 60 years as a priest, I think I counted 18 in some way associated with the military. And I didn’t ask for it. The only thing I asked for in my many years was to put on uniform at the end of the 60s and to serve as a captain in the chaplaincy. Other than that, I just went where I was told to go and to do what I was ordained to do. And it’s the same in whatever role it is for a bishop, is to bring the sacraments and to bring Christ into the lives of your people that you’re given to serve. And I found I was prepared to do that and I gained a lot of strength, a lot of grace doing it.

Robert Duncan: Journalists have called you in the past Warrior Priest. Do you like that title?

Cardinal O’Brien: I never accepted it, and I think it’s distracting, but not going to change things.

Robert Duncan: After your time in the military archdiocese, you were made the Archbishop of Baltimore.

Cardinal O’Brien: That’s right.

Robert Duncan: Which is the oldest see in the United States.

Cardinal O’Brien: Yes.

Robert Duncan: And (it’s) highly symbolic. I take you to be a very patriotic American, a patriotic Catholic priest, and so that must have been quite an honor for you.

Cardinal O’Brien: Great history. Baltimore’s great history. And I got a great reception there. I thought I’d be there till God called me to heaven, hopefully. But it didn’t wind up that way. I was called one day and said, the Holy Father would like you to come to Rome and serve as the head of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, which was a great surprise, but one that I accepted and embraced and found very, very rewarding.

Robert Duncan: Was it hard to go back to the United States after so much international travel and experience and be a local bishop?

Cardinal O’Brien: I was with American Catholic communities for the most part, and they were away from home, and therefore I was away from home, too. And we appreciated the role each of us played, both those who are serving in uniform and those who are civilians working with the military. And I found it no tension and no distraction to go where the troops were, to be with the people, to do what a priest does and what a bishop does.

Robert Duncan: You were also an American archbishop in the United States during the greatest challenge and scandal of the Catholic Church’s history in the United States, the fallout of the 2002 sexual abuse crisis. And by all reports, you were a key figure in shaping the response of the Church to that crisis. What did you learn as a part of that experience?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, my predecessor, Cardinal William Keeler, in Baltimore in 1992, made the decision against great opposition to reveal all those who had had accusations against them and what the outcome was. And he really set the foundation in Baltimore for a pretty healthy presbyterate. And I’m very grateful to him for that, but he suffered for it. And when I came there, I guess, in the year 2000, there were a few problems, but by and large, the lawyers kept us clean in the late 90s, and we didn’t take any chances, and any accusations were followed up very clearly. And we were one of the fortunate dioceses because of the decision of Cardinal Keeler to move in with no compromise at all, and I benefited from that.

Robert Duncan: And you went on to work with seminaries in the United States.

Cardinal O’Brien: I was a seminary rector before that, yes.

Robert Duncan: I mean as the apostolic visitator to the American seminaries.

Cardinal O’Brien: Oh, yes, yes.

Robert Duncan: And that had to do with preparing men to, forming men to address...

Cardinal O’Brien: No, there was a question at the time as to what is a seminary doing about this? And Rome asked me to take part in a review of all the American seminaries, and we had maybe 30 or 35 people on our staff. They were all active bishops or religious, men and women, and we set up an agenda out for them, and they would go around to each seminary and review it and report to me, and I would report back to Rome as to what shape the seminaries were in. And by and large, we found the seminaries were doing a pretty good job. I never received a report as to what was done, but I think Rome followed up, and the local bishops were very attentive having that review to keeping an eye on the formation in their seminary.

Robert Duncan: Do you know why you were chosen for that role?

Cardinal O’Brien: I was with a couple of other bishops, and we had experiences. Obviously, I was many years in seminary work, and Rome thought it would be a good idea. I don’t generalize, but by and large, I think our seminaries were doing a fairly good job at the time. They were chastened by the scandal, and many of them had taken action. Most of them had taken action already, and I was happy to report that to Rome.

Robert Duncan: And the action would have been, at least in some cases, greater screening for men, psychological exams before entrance, a higher threshold for who can be admitted?

Cardinal O’Brien: Yeah, in 1992, Pope John Paul had a meeting, and it was on seminary formation here in Rome, and I had just gotten to Rome, and I was helping out in that meeting in kind of a messenger job. But out of that, in 1992, came a document, Pastores dabo vobis, which is my motto. I will give you shepherds. And there was great emphasis on renewing seminary formation, especially in human formation. For the first time, Rome was very strong on a proper psychological approach in screening to get into the seminary, and once in the seminary, to make sure that the balance, personality balance, communications, and performance were those of a mature seminarian. And that was a turning point, I think, that Encyclical, Pastoral Letter of the Pope, and I relied on that in reviewing the seminary, all the seminaries of the United States, and it was a watershed, I believe, in bringing further up to date the formation of priests, especially human formation.

Robert Duncan: After your time in Baltimore, as you’ve already mentioned, you were called back to Rome again, this time as, it’s a complicated title, so maybe you better say it, the Grand Master of the...

Cardinal O’Brien: I’m not sure I’ll remember it.

Robert Duncan: The Grand Master of the Knights of the Holy...

Cardinal O’Brien: …Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.

Robert Duncan: What do they do?

Cardinal O’Brien: There are two papal orders. One is the Order of Malta, which takes care largely of medical attention throughout the world, Catholic hospitals and so forth. The other is the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, and our role, given by the Pope, is to support the Church in the Holy Land. We do that by encouraging pilgrimages on the part of our faithful. We have about 30,000 members of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, men and women, very dedicated, very good, strong Catholics, very generous, maybe $13, $14 million a year we would raise and send it to the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Great support, especially in these days with tourism down. But I visited every year. We’d go to the charitable institutions, the orphanages and hospitals and the parishes, and once again to show universal Catholic support in a land that was under great pressure and persecution at times. So it was a job once more to travel and to be on the ground with those who were challenged to serve the Church on the ground.

Robert Duncan: In that role, what did you learn about the situation of Christians in the Holy Land?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, the (Christian minority) in the Holy Land were under pressure from the Israeli government sometimes, were under pressure from Islam, and to keep the focus on the Church and the role of the universal Church in supporting the smaller, more challenged Church in the Holy Land was the job of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. And our lay people, our membership, responded very well in their pilgrimages. They were sure to be present in the places that most needed Catholic support, and certainly the priests and the bishops of the Holy Land appreciated very much. And the Archbishop, now Cardinal Pizzaballa, would come to our meetings three or four times a year here in Rome and to express his appreciation on behalf of the Catholic community, which was so beleaguered in the Holy Land, and that is still the case.

Robert Duncan: Do you have updates regularly from your contacts there?

Cardinal O’Brien: I’ve virtually lost contact with the changes that have been taking place over the last seven or eight years. I follow the news, and it’s not always good, but I think the Church under Cardinal Pizzaballa is very strong and very well respected among all the factions there. He’s a great, great leader.

Robert Duncan: One thing that I remember very distinctly of our past history is that we interviewed you the day that Pope Benedict XVI resigned from the papacy. You were one of the first interviews we at Catholic News Service had, and there’s this... I think it’s a remarkable clip of you reflecting on the meaning of that resignation, and you become quite emotional in this clip:

Cardinal O’Brien (ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE): It will be easier for him, but in another sense it’s going to be a very traumatic transition, I think. So I’ve been kind of praying and quite taken by it, for his sake mainly, really. END.

Robert Duncan: You can see that the gravity of the moment was sinking in, even as we were speaking. Do you remember how you reacted? Why that moved you so much?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I loved Benedict XVI. I think he’s a saintly man, if ever there was a saint. He served the Church well on a great sacrifice. I don’t think he relished being the Pope, but he took the burden and was, as the Lord said to Peter, support the brethren, and he did. Total surprise that he resigned, but I understood it then, and I think his health was deteriorating, and it was a prudent move. And he handed it over to Pope Francis, but I missed him. I had great fondness for him, and I think his scholarship, his pastoral leadership between John Paul II and Benedict, there’s a whole body of Church teaching and Church tradition, Church life, which is going to be with us for many, many decades to come.

Robert Duncan: What have you been doing in your retirement? What have you been up to besides your travel that you’ve mentioned, going back and forth to Baltimore? Have there been any projects, books, relationships that you’ve wanted to focus on?

Cardinal O’Brien: On retirement, I’m low-key. I have a lot of visitors. When you have a place in Rome and tourists come, they know that they’d be welcome, which is good for me, I think. I keep active that way. It’s kind of armchair evangelization. I have a lot of visitors, and I can talk about the Church and the Gospel and vocation, and I’m kept fairly busy that way, but I get a lot of rest, a lot of reading, a lot of prayer. I say I kind of lead my life like an active monk, and it’s between rest and study and prayer and sociability. It’s a good retirement.

Robert Duncan: I wonder if I could ask you, you are someone who has seen a lot of pain in your life, and whether that was in Vietnam or, we talked about the horrible sex abuse scandal, or your work in the Holy Land. In all of that experience, was there ever a time that your faith was challenged, and how did you hang on, if so?

Cardinal O’Brien: I forget who said it. I think it was John Paul II. There’s nothing so wasted as wasted pain. And when you’re suffering yourself or when you’re suffering in part of others, we just realize we are carrying on in the body of Christ today what Christ left undone.

The Church is continuing as the body of Christ, the suffering of Jesus in the world. And I think when I was very young, we’d say, offer it up. And that’s a Catholic phrase, but join whatever the suffering, in order to pay in your suffering, to the sufferings of Christ for the salvation of the world. And there will always be sufferings, and sometimes I just wonder, for instance, in the Ukraine today and some places, how it can be that people can be so persecuted and so put to the test in many places of the world, in Nigeria, where there’s persecution. And I don’t have a chance to do so in person, but I would think the message is always there. Don’t waste that pain. Join it to the pain of Christ, which is continuing in his mystical body today. And then it becomes productive. It becomes redemptive and has a purpose. And I think whether it’s in a family situation, where there can be often great pain or in a hospital or on the world political scene, don’t waste it. Join it as a Christian to the cross of Christ, and it can then take meaning and redemption follows.

Robert Duncan: I’m thinking of people who may be watching that are perhaps interested in your life and your life story, but don’t have Christian faith. Maybe they’ve never had it or they’ve lost it because of things that have happened in their lives. And I wonder how would you make that message of taking on pain and not wasting pain applicable also to them?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, I know we have many who have drifted from the Church and remain outside the body, but many, having drifted, get lost and realize the Church has something to offer. And I think the mercy of God as it shines through the teaching of the Church and through the sacraments of the Church is something we have a great message to deliver. And I think you hear of people going to confession for the first time in many years and what a relief it is to get back to the sacraments and back to the church. And a lot depends, obviously, on the messenger. And I think the messengers of the Church are not always the bishops and the religious. It’s fellow Catholics and fellow Christians who, by example, are encouraging others to come back, to be nourished by what the church has to offer. And, you know, we’ve been around a long time, and through thick and thin, I think today, from what I understand, there’s a great resurgence of faith on the part of young people, especially young men. And what I’ve heard is they say the church is always there. It’s stable. It’s reliable. It’s helpful. And with so many questions swirling around, it’s one of the sources that I can find meaning in in my life. And I think that’s happening today. I read an article recently in England, the same thing. And the same reasons are given. There’s a stability in the church that I cannot find elsewhere in my life. And I hope that that grows, and it’s a matter of God’s grace coming to work.

Robert Duncan: Pope Francis and Pope Leo have really been on a constant refrain of no more war. They’ve had very, very strong messages encouraging the conflicts around the world in Ukraine and the Middle East to cease. We may, in a short period of time, the United States be going to war with Iran. That’s in the news. There are many, many Americans serving in the places where there already are active conflicts. For the Catholics there, do you see there being a challenge of morale? How do Catholics take to heart the spiritual advice of the Pope and do their duty with honor?

Cardinal O’Brien: I recently heard from the wife of a Navy officer. Two kids, married six or seven years. He was due to come home this month. It’s the second time he’s been extended, another 30 days, another 60 days. And she’s at wit’s end, and he is too. So there’s great pressure on the military. You see the buildup now. Those men and women have been away from home for a long time, and it’s the families that are suffering as well. So I think there is a real question of morale, and I hope our civilian leadership is aware of the pressures we are putting on our military. And the military has shown great restraint, great strength in serving our country and obeying in their command. But there comes a limit, and I think the sensitivity of our national leadership has to be growing as to what we’re asking our military to do in overwhelming pressures. And I would hope not only are we praising our military, but we should be sensitive to their suffering as well.

Robert Duncan: You did not take place in the conclave that elected Pope Leo, although you did take place in the general congregations beforehand. And we now have a year of Pope Leo, more or less, under our belt, and I wonder what, given your life experience, your pastoral experience, how you see his priorities, where he’s going to take the Church. What are your hopes? Where do you hope he takes the church?

Cardinal O’Brien: Well, Leo keeps speaking about unity, and he’s a very disciplined man. He’s always got a script he’s reading from. He’s well-prepared. He’s well-received. His personality is perfect. He’s trusted, and I think he’s going to help the church through difficult days to be predictable. Sometimes, under Francis, we had some surprises we didn’t expect, but I think he’s a man faithful to the teaching of the Church, a man whose personality is well-suited for the role. He’s open to listen. He listens very carefully, evidently, to people who know him well and who have met him. He’s intently interested in what they have to say and responds accordingly. So I think his appointments will be interesting to various dioceses and to the dicasteries, but he comes well-prepared to lead the Church, and I think he’s shown that already by his balance, his receptivity.

Robert Duncan: Have you had any interaction with him?

Cardinal O’Brien: Very briefly, very briefly. I have no office I hold any longer, and I know he’s... I’m not knocking on his door every day, no.

Robert Duncan: I’d like to close by asking you, in your retirement, as you read the news, as you read Church news, what is it that Catholics are not talking about enough? What should we be talking about more that’s not getting enough attention?

Cardinal O’Brien: We need vocations, that’s for sure, and I know in New York, St. Joseph’s Seminary has three dioceses, New York and Brooklyn, Rockwell Center, and they don’t even have 100 seminarians, and so I think we have to highlight the role of priests and religious in serving the people. Some dioceses are doing that better than others, so that is one of the priorities I would think the new Archbishop of New York will find himself faced with. And just to be a listening Church and a supportive Church, especially those areas where the pressures are great, and I think every diocese has those areas, and certainly every area of the world. So the role of the Church is to be present and to serve, especially with the great sacramental gifts that Christ gives us.

Robert Duncan: Cardinal O’Brien, thank you for your time.

Cardinal O’Brien: Thank you for yours.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss:

• Why reflecting on mortality should shape lifestyle

• His position on euthanasia and end-of-life care

• The sustainability crisis facing aging societies

• Whether religious practice improves health

• What surprised him most about Rome

More than a policy discussion, this is an exploration of how secular expertise and religious tradition can converge in unexpected ways — especially around mortality, meaning, and the limits of medicine.

Transcript

Intro: Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is one of the most influential architects of modern American healthcare. Advisor to Presidents. Chair of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. A central figure in some of the most consequential healthcare reforms of our time. Recently, he was invited inside the Vatican to address the Pontifical Academy for Life on how nations like the United States and China might build universal healthcare systems that actually work. He calls himself an atheist and a practicing Jew. He disagrees with the Catholic Church on some of its most foundational bioethical claims, including the right to life from conception. And yet, on questions like euthanasia and end-of-life care, there are surprising points of convergence. In this conversation, recorded in our Catholic News Service studio, we talked about his childhood, his rise to the center of American health policy, what he experienced inside the Vatican, what he told Pope Leo, and why his central message is disarmingly simple: Remember that you are going to die. Because as the Lenten season reminds us, the secret to living well may begin with keeping death before your eyes.

Robert Duncan: Dr. Emmanuel, shall I call you Zeke?

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: Tomorrow in the Catholic calendar is Ash Wednesday. And every Catholic who goes to receive the ashes will hear the words: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. You start your new book, Eat Your Ice Cream, with a reminder that we’re all going to die. What is important to you about that remembrance? And is there something about maybe traditional religion that helps people remember that also?

Dr. Emanuel: I’m an atheist. I’m a practicing atheist. I go to Jewish services most Saturdays in the year. So I don’t find it actually religious. I just think it’s a fact of life. We know that people die. They die all the time. About 2.7 million people will die in the United States this coming year, in 2026. And I think we have a culture, probably driven partially by evolution, driven partially by culture, of trying to minimize our thinking about death.

I actually find it quite helpful to think about the fact that I’ve got 75, 85, 90 years, something in that range, and that it’s not unlimited, and that I think actually can focus you on what’s important and what’s not important. I’m an oncologist, and one of the things you know as an oncologist is you treat a lot of patients, and the ones who are terminally ill, the very focus on what’s most important. Even the ones you cure, they almost always say, you know, I stopped doing X, Y, and Z. I realized they weren’t really important, and I’m really focused on the most important things in life. And I think actually keeping your mortality in front of you and the fact that there will be a decline helps to focus you on important things, trying to do important things in life. And one of the important things of life is not to try to get the next two or three days or an extra week. It’s just that that’s not going to be materially as important as figuring out what you think your purpose is and actualizing it.

Robert Duncan: How has keeping that at the forefront of your mind helped you focus on what your purpose is and helped you live a better life?

Dr. Emanuel: Well, when I was a college freshman, I was sort of flailing around and trying to figure out what to do with my life, actually what course to pursue. There was a lot of pressure on me to do medicine in part because I was very good at science, but that idea didn’t fully satisfy me, and I took a walk. We had a bird sanctuary with a lot of woods, and it was a cold winter day in January, and I took a walk out there and thought. And it really occurred to me, you inherit the world. You come into this world, and so much has been done. We in the 21st century don’t fully realize it. Electricity, indoor plumbing, telecommunications, reliable food supply, weather forecast so you know how to dress and you don’t get caught out, all sorts of things that are there. We live in a democracy, or I hope a democracy, and that hard fought for, people died constantly. And so it occurred to me that my job is to take what I’ve inherited and make it better and make it better for other people. And it could take a variety of roles. I am not, by my character, good at doing that one-on-one-on-one. There are some people, my father was one of those, who loved caring for patients and individuals and getting to know individuals. I have an eldest daughter who that is very, very important for. I tend to think of tens of thousands and hopefully millions of people and try to think what can I do to the social arrangements that are going to help the most people. And then you have a finite amount of time to actually implement that and to try to do it in actuality. And so that, I think, knowing that I don’t have unlimited time here, very helpful. And knowing that I’m not just going to focus on living a few weeks, months, longer. That’s not going to make the difference.

Robert Duncan: You speak about your family, and that’s, in your autobiography, a very important part of who you are. You have two very successful brothers in very different fields. Can you talk a bit about your upbringing and your family?

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah. So my father came to the United States from, he was born in what was then Palestine and became Israel. He studied medicine in Switzerland and then came to the United States with $24 and a Parker pen. And he was an incredibly hard worker and very much devoted to caring for people. My mother was very active in the civil rights movement when it was quite unusual for a white woman. She was active in the late 50s and early 60s and then became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. And they were very much committed to social justice. And my mom would regularly take us to demonstrations, regularly talk to us about our privileges. We had a housekeeper, and she was very, very clear about trying to promote her, get her a better job. We would go and visit them. So we were very, very well aware that we weren’t particularly rich. I’d like to say that most of my pants had patches on the patches. But we had privilege, among which was education. And my father was very devoted to travel so we could see the world, and he thought it was the best form of education. That very, very important. My parents were also very, very willing to let us speak our mind, have different views, not agree. Also very, very important. Mostly it was important to, you know, how are you going to justify your view? What’s the reasons you have this view? And then my mother was particularly, I would say, she was the anti-helicopter parent. She would shoo us out of the house, go play. And, you know, we had to figure it out. We had to figure out what we were going to play, negotiate rules, negotiate disagreements, you know, occupy ourselves. We got into plenty of trouble. She was very good about that, too, actually. She was particularly good, especially at school, when we stood up for something, got us in trouble, coming and defending us. And so we learned a lot of independence, a lot of self-motivation, a lot of how to deal with people, and a commitment to social justice.

Robert Duncan: And your mother would take you to Dr. Kings’…

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah, so when Martin Luther King marched in Chicago, we went. And it was, let us say, a not peaceful demonstration, but not because we weren’t peaceful, but just thrown a lot of food and sometimes rocks at us. Yeah, very memorable demonstration.

Robert Duncan: How did you go from the child that you’ve described in this family to wanting to give your life to medicine?

Dr. Emanuel: Involuntarily. I, the son of an immigrant, the son of an immigrant doctor, and I also happen to be very, very good in science. In America, that tends to over-determine you to become a doctor. As I said, I did a lot of summer research in college, going to various labs, including a very famous lab, Cold Spring Harbor, that Jim Watson was the head of. It just didn’t wildly excite me, being lab work. Lab work just was not something that I enjoyed. Other people enjoyed it. I had a roommate at Cold Spring Harbor who really loved it. He described it as his temple. I went to Oxford for two years. I did pretty well. I published three papers, but it also confirmed to me I didn’t like it. But I got into med school, and I hadn’t had a plan B, so I went to med school. Between my first and second year, I went to Washington to do journalism at the New Republic at that time. I realized I didn’t want to be reporting on events. I wanted to actually do events and do the change that I thought was important. So I went back to our med school and took time off to do a Ph.D. in political philosophy, thinking that would be helpful. So that’s the path. I ended up in oncology because oncology, people are very sick. They’re reexamining their deepest values, what their life’s about, helping them in that. Also great science and great bioethical issues. All the big bioethical issues, whether informed consent, end-of-life care, expensive medicine, all show themselves in oncology. So it was the area for me.

Robert Duncan: It sounds like the social justice background, what you came to do in medicine, had more sort of a social impact.

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah. As I said, I’m not the kind of person, just from a satisfaction standpoint, helping people one-on-one was great. I really love my patients. Hopefully they all love me. I still keep in touch with some of them. I get letters out of the blue. But that wasn’t sufficient motivation. I wasn’t feeling like the system had problems that I could see, and part of what called me to is, well, how do you solve this problem? Initially I started out trying to fix end-of-life care. It was not good for cancer patients but wasn’t good for anyone in America. When I started out, 72%, 75% of Americans died in the hospital. We were resuscitating people who it was quite clear they weren’t going to make it. So I set out to try to change that.

From there you also see the inequalities of the system, the fact that it’s actually not working for a lot of people, so try to fix that.

Robert Duncan: You came to advise at the highest level, right? President Obama and other ways as well.

Dr. Emanuel: It was a great honor to be able to serve and work on the Affordable Care Act. I think it did a lot of good. It clearly gave a lot of people insurance. It also held costs down. But it also had problems. A lot of the things we hoped we could achieve we didn’t. It certainly made the health care system more complicated, which I think was a chief defect. We kept asking, well, are we simplifying the system? Are we making it easier to use? Are we getting rid of a lot of administrative problems in the system? We didn’t ask those questions. We didn’t ask them enough if we ever asked them. I think that has come home to roost to some large extent now.

Robert Duncan: So all of that is a prelude of maybe this particular moment which you find yourself in Rome in the Vatican, I suppose. They called you. They emailed you. How did this come about?

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah. I knew someone who worked for the Pontifical Academy for Life. I had been here once before under his auspices, and he asked me to come and talk about what we could learn from other health care systems in order to guarantee health care for all.

Robert Duncan: Was it surprising given what you said about your faith background, not being Catholic, that the Vatican would reach out to you?

Dr. Emanuel: Yes. It wasn’t something that I had put on my list of things. Well, the Catholic Church is going to call and ask me to advise on health care.

Robert Duncan: When they made the invitation, what specifically did you want to bring? I mean, given the sort of uniqueness of this opportunity, what did you want to communicate?

Dr. Emanuel: Well, I think the reason they brought me is because I have studied. I published a book called Which Country is the World’s Best Health Care. I studied 11 health care systems, including the United States and 10 others. And lessons about how different systems function. As I say in that book, no system is ideal. They all have defects. Every system you study has some squeaky wheel, some problem that really doesn’t work very, very well, and that people complain about. Sometimes there is more than one. I mean, the United States, as I put it today in my presentation, we have five goals in any health care system. Universal coverage, reasonable cost, consistent high quality, reducing disparities, and satisfaction. The United States doesn’t fulfill any one of the five.

There are many other health care systems in the world that fulfill two, three, maybe even four. And there’s a lot we can learn about what the problems are. I think many of the problems have been misdiagnosed or not put together coherently. It’s not just one problem. I’ve identified three major problems. But that’s critical to understanding how to get a good system. And every system in the world, no matter what they spend on health care, complains about the costs. Costs are going up everywhere. It corresponds with aging. As people age, they have more illnesses and therefore will intersect with the system more, will cost more. And how to figure that out is a preoccupation of all countries. And it can help by looking at what other countries do.

Robert Duncan: How do you see the Vatican’s strategic role in the public health policies that you want to promote?

Dr. Emanuel: Well, I think the Vatican can be a source of moral conscience and a source of certainly setting out ideals. But it also can be a source of helping actually implement them.

There’s an extensive Catholic health network around the world, not just in the United States. We do have a lot of Catholic health care systems. One of the questions I think every health care system has to ask is, how is it differentiated because it’s called a Catholic as opposed to some other kind of secular or other denominational health care system? What’s distinctive about it? In the Catholic faith, abortion tends to be the one, but that would seem to be a thin reed to stand on as distinctive. I think a big question is how do they structure what they do and how does it help people who are left out, people who sometimes don’t know where to turn. I think that has to be distinctive. And the Vatican can help in those moments.

Robert Duncan: One of the questions that came up in the press conference had to do with Catholic teaching and public health, especially on bioethical questions. You not being a Catholic, I wonder how you see the challenges of collaborating sometimes with the Catholic Church.

Dr. Emanuel: I don’t have a problem collaborating with them. I do have a problem — we have to figure out how we disagree. The United States is a pluralistic country, just to take abortion, a concrete case. I think this has often been characterized as a secular Catholic issue. I mean, I’m Jewish and Jews don’t have the same problem. We don’t view life as starting at conception. We have a very different view about life quickening, heartbeats and stuff more important, but also we’ve over millennia had lots of arguments about weighing the mother versus the fetus, infant, and baby. And the mother takes precedence. It’s a very different perspective. I’m also, I happen to be, as a matter of fact, against euthanasia and assisted suicide for a whole lot of reasons. I think it’s a mistake.

I think this is one of those fuzzy areas where it’s not clear what the profession and what society, some states have legalized it, some states haven’t. They’ve legalized assisted suicide, not euthanasia. And I do think it’s one of those places where we really are genuinely, as a society, uncertain. I’ve had patients ask me and I’ve explained to them why I don’t think it’s going to be necessary for them, and if it comes up, then we can talk about how to care for them.

Robert Duncan: Do these conceptual sort of philosophical divergences with the Church ever come up in meetings like the one you’ve been at? Did any of the priests or hierarchy, the bishops that are present ever challenge you on any of the issues, or do you ever have constructive dialogues?

Dr. Emanuel: In this conference so far, no. I haven’t been challenged. I mean, we haven’t really talked about abortion or euthanasia. On euthanasia, I think I actually have, my justification or reasons are different than the Church’s as far as I understand it, but I think we come to the same conclusion about that.

Robert Duncan: What are yours?

Dr. Emanuel: On euthanasia? I can imagine, I mean, if you’re an oncologist, it’s hard to say you can’t imagine circumstances, or you haven’t experienced circumstances where if a patient said, I want euthanasia or assisted suicide, you can’t imagine. That seems like a pretty legitimate. On the other hand, I think almost all the cases that you read about, that I read about, I find I don’t think you need them. First of all, it’s a very complicated issue. Most people think that the reason to give euthanasia or assisted suicide is excessive pain. It turns out that is very rarely the reason for people. The reason for people is mostly wanting to control self-determination, wanting their control at the end, their worry about the loss of autonomy. I don’t find that a very persuasive argument, especially if you are terminally ill and you are going to die. The other thing is we clearly know there’s a big debate in the 90s and 2000s whether there was a slippery slope. If you legalize it for this patient, will it…? There is no debate today, can be no debate today, only people who want to put their heads in the sand. There is a slippery slope. Once you do it for a defined group, well, now we can do it for people who are mentally ill. We can do it for infants who have these problems and things like that. So there’s no doubt it’s a slippery slope. The conditions expand that you find acceptable, and I find that unacceptable. I think if you can imagine legitimate cases for euthanasia, they should be pretty darn narrow, and the idea. So I prefer to have it illegal, and for any person who engages in it, any physician who engages, to have to justify it. It turns out in America we’ve had one person who’s been convicted in this, Mr. Kevorkian, a guy who did not stick to any of the rules, violated them on TV. So I think actually it shows that if you have a good reason, most juries and most prosecutors would like, well, it’s not worth prosecuting. There was a good reason behind it. So that’s the kind of circumstance. Does it put someone in potential jeopardy? Yeah, but you should take this exceedingly seriously.

Robert Duncan: What about your trip so far has surprised you? I mean, to Rome and working with the Vatican at this visit.

Dr. Emanuel: Those are two different things. So here’s one. You come to Rome, and the first thing you are confronted by is you’ve got all these ruins that are 2,000 years old. You have to step back and say it’s amazing that they built something that lasted 2,000 years, right? You go to New York, Washington, Chicago. Anything there going to last 2,000 years? And the answer is no, quite clearly no. We don’t think in that kind of timeline. We don’t build for that kind of timeline. We don’t think about, well, what’s necessary for that kind of timeline. And that, I think, changes your mental attitude a lot. We think, well, if it’s going to last 30 or 40 years, that’s great. But I think that actually changes your perspective. And again, going back to what am I going to do? I inherit a lot from the past. What am I going to do to further that and perpetuate it? The second thing, and this probably is far from what you are thinking, but the second thing that strikes you is how little perch the cell phone has in this place. You go to restaurants. You go to wine bars here. And the overwhelming sense is people are actually talking to one another. They’re not on their phones doing parallel play. And I think that’s pretty amazing. It’s a very different phenomenon than exists in the United States where you can go into a restaurant and each side is sort of doing the phone thing. And the result is obviously a lot more social connection. It’s also structurally here. You’ve got a lot more piazzas. You’ve got a lot more parks. There are a lot more venues. I mean, a lot of narrow streets where people are just cheek by jowl interacting. And I think that’s pretty amazing.

Robert Duncan: I don’t want to jump ahead too much, but one of the things in your book that you say is important to general well-being is social health. So there’s something about these medieval societies’ architecture that we engineered it for.

Dr. Emanuel: Yes. Well, partly they didn’t have a car. I mean, one of the big differences between cities developed after 1900 and cities before is the car. And yes, that’s overwhelming. But it also ended up designed to bring people together. You had central fountains. You had central water supplies. There are lots of things that encourage people to interact, and you see it. It still exists in the 21st century, again, thinking about how you design cities and how you design places that people are encouraged to interact. I mean, I think one of the big issues, a question that was asked at the press conference about the rich and poor. One of the things that’s happened in society is the segregation, not on race basis but on income basis, on experience basis. So we are, especially in the United States, very much segregated by political affiliation, by income, and other things. And the opportunity to intermingle very much reduced. It used to be sports was, when I was growing up in Chicago, going to a Cubs game, sitting in the bleachers, was a buck, $1. All right? This is the 1960s. Anyone could afford a dollar for three hours of entertainment. And you mix with lots of different kinds of people for a buck. Very hard to do today. Very hard to do. So I think those kind of opportunities, kind of really important to figure out how we can bring them back to American society, society in general, that phenomena. We are at the far extreme in the United States, but exists everywhere.

Robert Duncan: I’ve heard a lot of arguments over the years about the ways in which classical civilization got being human right from the perspective of classical architecture, beauty in these civilizations. But I’ve never heard quite the argument that they were good for human beings because of — from a perspective of public health.

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah, I think it’s actually, I don’t know if it’s medieval so much as, you know, pre-car, by and large, where it takes you, you know, you can experience this in American cities. I live in Philadelphia, right? You walk in Philadelphia, you’ve got a grid in center city, and it’s definitely, you can easily walk to places. The roads are narrow, the whole city is pretty narrow, and it actually affords lots more opportunities to interact.

Robert Duncan: So you’ve talked about Rome, but what about the Vatican? What about your experience here working with Vatican officials has been noteworthy? Has there been anything that surprised you or…?

Dr. Emanuel: I mean, well, I will say, first of all, I was very impressed by the Pope’s speech. This was an opportunity for the Pope. He gave us 10 minutes, but he clearly, he cares broadly and he wants to make sure that we are inclusive of people from all different backgrounds and that we do think of the fact that it’s very important to focus on the common good so everyone can have opportunities for health, for a long life. That clearly came out, and I think very, very thoughtful in that regard. I would say the people I’ve interacted with in planning this and in participating, very much open to hearing views. There’s nothing particularly Catholic or not Catholic about my views. It wasn’t, if there’s any strong moral undertone to my view, it’s like heavily emphasizing children and prioritizing health care for children, which I think we all tend to underdo because it tends to be sick people who are sick people, old people who tend to have more illnesses. But I think also there is an importance of making sure health care doesn’t financially burden people. We think often in poor countries that people have to pay a lot of money to get health care services, but the same is true in rich countries. And I think making sure that doesn’t become the norm is very, very important. I do think the other thing is this sort of care of how are we going to deal with an aging society is one of those very, very strong themes here. I don’t think we’ve answered it by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a very, very strong theme that everyone’s going to, all societies are going to have to confront over the next few decades.

Robert Duncan: You bring up the issue of aging populations and population decline. That’s something clearly present in Europe with regard to the birth rate. Was that something that came up during these meetings and how is the Vatican thinking about that?

Dr. Emanuel: Well, it is certainly come up right from the start. Dr. Colombo from OECD talked about the demands, mainly because of the aging population, the workforce gap with the amount of aging people. And that, I think, plus the number of workers who are going to support that, the ratio is going down. And so how we balance this and where the resources come from, I think, is a big issue. And I know we haven’t resolved it. I think no country has a secret message on that.

Robert Duncan: You talked about Pope Leo. Did you meet him afterwards? Did you have a chance to shake his hand?

Dr. Emanuel: Yes.

Robert Duncan: What did you say to him?

Dr. Emanuel: I did three things. I said that I was from Chicago. We actually grew up in the city around about the same time. He was on the south side. I was on the north side. That’s why he roots for the White Sox and I root for the Cubs. I gave him a jersey, collecting sports memorabilia, I think, from many people. But I’m 100% sure he doesn’t have it. It’s a jersey from the women’s professional basketball team in Chicago, the Chicago Sky. I gave him a jersey with Pope Leo and the Roman numeral 14 for him on there. Graciously accepted. And I gave him a copy of my book, Eat Your Ice Cream.

Robert Duncan: What did he say to you?

Dr. Emanuel: He was just very gracious about it.

Robert Duncan: Can we talk a bit about your book?

Dr. Emanuel: Sure.

Robert Duncan: There’s been a lot of interest in the media about it because you’re pushing back a little bit on the health and wellness industry and some of the scams or over promises that are out there. Can you tell me why you wrote it and sort of summarize in your own words a bit about this over interest perhaps in American culture with health and wellness?

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah. So there are really three streams that come together that motivated me to write the book. The first is I am a doctor. Lots of people ask me questions about what I should do. I relate one of them, you know, what diet are you on? What diet should I be on? I get asked about all sorts of supplements. I get asked about all sorts of activities. So constant requests for information about that which suggests that people aren’t getting something that they reliably trust. Second, many years ago I was at a conference, many years ago, about three or four years ago I was at a conference, and Arianna Huffington asked me a question about why isn’t there more wellness taught in medical school. And I said, well, you know, first of all, it’s pretty simple. There are six things. Second of all, no one is making a lot of money. You know, the health care system, hospitals aren’t making money on this. Drug companies aren’t making money on this. So there’s no real motivation within the health care system. And truth be told, we don’t focus on wellness in health care and medicine. And the last thing was actually the pivotal proximate cause, as I think you would say in the Catholic Church, was Peter Attia’s book, Outlive. Two years ago I got it. I had just finished teaching. Finals hadn’t come in. Grading wasn’t happening. And I read the book and it made me pissed off. No other word for it. I was just infuriated. First of all, all this emphasis on three things, physical things, exercise, which was the dominant thing, a little on food and a little on sleep. And I’m like leaving out the biggest, most important thing in health care and wellness and longevity, and that is social interaction. And so I then took the next three weeks before grades were due and I basically scribbled out the first version, the first draft of the book. And I just had to do some research, but I had most of it I had known. And if you look at the data on social interaction, it’s overwhelming that it’s the most important thing from a longevity standpoint, from a health standpoint, and from a happiness standpoint. And you can see lots and lots of studies about the social isolation is bad, increases your risk of mortality, social interaction is good, decreases your risk of mortality, plus increases your happiness factor in all sorts of interactions. And that’s true, by the way, even whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. When introverts are asked to behave extroverted, initiate a conversation with a stranger, turns out they’re happier, even though they anticipate that they won’t be happy. It’ll be energy. I won’t learn anything. They’ll rebuff me. All of that turns out generally not, I mean, sometimes it’s true, but generally not to be true. People actually like talking. You actually turn out to be happier because you’ve communicated even with someone who’s not, you know, you don’t know.

Robert Duncan: So you have described yourself as a atheist, but practicing Jew.

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah.

Robert Duncan: And I wonder because some social scientists have pointed out that the decline in religious practice has led to some of the isolation that we see today as church or synagogue would have been the way in which you interacted with your broader community outside of your family, most regularly apart from work.

Dr. Emanuel: Yeah. Those are the three.

Robert Duncan: So I wonder if your own choice to go to synagogue has something to do with your own personal health and wellness program.

Dr. Emanuel: It’s not consciously, it wasn’t consciously as a mechanism to do wellness. I actually find reading the, what we call in Judaism, the Torah, but the five books of Moses, I think Old Testament quite meaningful, quite challenging to think through. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that book. There is a reason it’s remains the world’s biggest bestseller. There’s a lot of stories there that have a lot of deep meaning. And they’re like, you know, ancient Greek myths or stories, very pithy descriptions of very deep issues. And therefore lots of people have been able to spin out interpretations and try to understand that. And so I find that quite enriching. And it’s as much intellectually enriching and morally enriching. So I don’t go to synagogue. I don’t go to synagogue, well, it’s going to keep me healthy. That’s not the reason.

Robert Duncan: It sounds like it could be a valid reason though.

Dr. Emanuel: Oh, for many people it is. Exactly. I mean, I think for many people, that’s as you point out, that’s a place where they have social connection. That’s a place where they can stay mentally engaged. That’s a place of community. Absolutely.

Robert Duncan: When I think about the title of your book, Eat Your Ice Cream, I think about feasting and how Christianity and Judaism share, albeit in different ways, feasts and fasts throughout the year. And when this podcast airs, Catholics will be halfway through Lent, looking forward perhaps to indulging in the thing that they gave up at Easter. And I wonder if you think that this ancient division of the year between feasts and fasts has some health or wellness message for contemporary society.

Dr. Emanuel: Well, and the Muslims have Ramadan and the Eid. So I think these are important communal activities. So in Judaism, we have Passover, which celebrates the leaving of Egypt, the gaining of freedom. And we eat lots of different foods. We deprive ourselves of certain foods. I think, again, I’m not sure how much was wellness and how much is sort of a communal activity, getting people together, but also thinking about what you’re eating, thinking about the meaning of that food. You know, in Judaism, we have a prayer before we eat, a blessing typically over bread. But if you’re not having bread over all the foods that you have, you have a grace after meals. I think those actually are very valuable practices. And they’re practices to make you appreciate that and pause for a minute before you get to serving and everything to appreciate that. You know, we’re lucky enough that we don’t have to go hungry and to appreciate the fact that we have this food. I think that’s a wonderful item. The sort of sequencing, I mean, for me, the sequencing of religion, I mean, there are lots of Jewish holidays, which I do not appreciate, Hanukkah being one of them. I don’t know that it’s actually a holiday we ought to celebrate. Led to a lot of problems in ancient Israel. But the idea of repentance, you know, that we are imperfect, I think is incredibly important. Thinking about moral growth over a year, thinking about how we’ve deviated over the year. I also think it’s kind of important, and this is a difference between Judaism and Catholicism. We only do it once a year and we do it in the fall. And if you think about repenting as a way of starting anew, I think it also, so why is it in the fall after you’ve harvested, you’re not planting? You know, part of that I do think is there’s this, you know, if you’ve planted a garden, you put in the bulbs and then you have to wait. And so it gives you a moment or many months of reflection about the kind of changes you want to put in place to grow.

Robert Duncan: So I’d like to return to where we began the conversation, reflecting on our mortality as part of the recipe for living a meaningful life. I wonder if in your work as an oncologist and dealing with difficult end of life related questions, you have ever been challenged in terms of your worldview or changed your mind about something in that, dare I say, privileged thin space, as some have described it to me, between this world and eternity that is often there in a patient’s last moments of life. What have you learned in those situations and how has it shaped you?

Dr. Emanuel: I do think the most important experience about being close to death, first of all, is people who survive have been in near death experiences and survive. I think the reorientation that that brings is a constant reminder to me about, you know, are you spending time thinking about the right things or doing the right things in the world? Or find a justification for why I’m doing something. And I think that’s a kind of important element. I will say the other thing that is very motivating to me, and I don’t know if it experiences for the same people, if you’re an oncologist, and I began treating patients in my early 30s, having someone who’s younger than you die is really transformative. It’s the sense of tragedy. This is very much, remember, a 19-year-old Yale student who was being treated for acute leukemia and unfortunately the chemotherapy on the first round didn’t work. It was in the second, very low chances that it was going to work. That really is powerful about focusing on kids and focusing on young adults and adolescents in particular. The snuffing out of life when it’s just about to take off. You know, you’ve done all this preparation through college and then you’re about to launch your own life separate from your parents. And that snuffing out I think is very, it weighs on you a lot. Even though you didn’t cause the disease, you did your best to fight it. But that is a transition moment that’s really important. Getting kids to that moment, giving them a safe, healthy launch, I think very much a motivator for me. I couldn’t treat pediatrics. It would just drive me nuts if I had to treat young kids. But I think trying to get kids or people who are younger to live a full life is very much important. And that has changed the way I think about health care. You know, at this conference, a lot of discussion about life expectancy and stuff. I actually think that’s a terrible metric. Life expectancy has gone up, it’s whatever, 84 in Japan and Switzerland and 79 in the United States. That’s not the right measure. The measure is who are the people at the bottom? Who are the people who are dying before 75? That’s the people we ought to really be thinking about and trying to do the most. You know, when someone, a recent actor who died at 49 from colorectal cancer, that’s a real problem. We are missing something here. That’s a totally curable disease. We should not be having young people die of that disease. Same thing of cervical cancer. We shouldn’t be having young people die of, women die of cervical cancer. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, a real metric ought to be how much are we bringing people up to so that they can live a full life. 75 is certainly full enough. 90 is, you know, if you’re in good health, better. But, you know, getting to 75, people should not be dying in their 40s and 50s.

Robert Duncan: I asked you earlier, what did you want to bring to the Vatican in terms of a message? And you said you were invited to speak on a certain key topic. But of all your experiences, having met the Pope, what do you think you will bring back, besides maybe stories about pistachio gelato, to either to your profession or into your personal life? Is there anything you’ll be bringing back with you?

Dr. Emanuel: Again, I think this Pope does seem to me to be very committed to a kind of equality, making sure people have enough for a good life and for their own life. I think that commitment and to the extent that it permeates what the Holy See does and the kind of leadership it can provide is very, very important. I do think, I sense certainly in the United States among the Catholics I know, a kind of hope for him that he humanizes the Catholic Church and is successful. I will say I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, well, if you were the Pope, maybe my egotistical, if you were the Pope, what would you do that would be really transformative? You know, I don’t know a lot about church history. It’s not been part of my education. But thinking about, you know, you had Vatican II. What equivalent could you do? It doesn’t have to be in the Catholic, you know, necessarily changing the theology, but could be very much in changing its role in the world. Anyway, I think it’s a very important question for everyone. Obviously the Pope is the top, but, you know, every bishop, every person who works for an organization like the Church. I have learned here, one of the important, is there’s been an increase in attendance at church, which certainly in France and Germany, and I think people aren’t quite sure why, but I do think there’s an important … if there’s a failure of liberalism, one of it is it doesn’t give a lot of meaning to life, leaves it to the individual to fill that in. We all have the challenge of, well, what, that’s a big question. You know, what’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of my life? And, you know, the Church can help people, I think, in that. There’s obviously a very long tradition of service in the Church, a long tradition of, you know, wrestling with big questions in various aspects. And I think reorienting the Church to help the world address that, I think, and help Catholics in particular, is very, very important. I mean, there are a billion Catholics in the world, right? An enormous, and in the United States, 25% or more of the population. So a lot of people listening and wanting, I think, guidance.

Robert Duncan: So I think that’s a really nice place to end. So, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service and for sharing a bit about your life and your work and your visit to the Vatican.

Dr. Emanuel: Thank you. Not all the questions I had anticipated. Many, many unusual ones.

Robert Duncan: I hope good ones, though.

Dr. Emanuel: Yes. Yeah. Challenged me.