Do you want to pray before we start? By all means. So loving God, we thank you for bringing us together. We ask you to help us to proclaim the gospel and open our lips that our mouth might declare your praise. Amen. From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. So interesting, in fact, that God, in his wisdom, has decided to call one Pope home and let the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church choose another. The death of Pope Francis ends, or at least temporarily, suspends, a tumultuous period in the life of the world’s largest religious institution. A period that saw the Pope often pitted against his own bishops and Cardinals. In arguments about how much and in what direction Roman Catholicism should change. My guest today and I were often on the opposite side of those debates. Father James Martin is one of the most famous Catholic priests in the United States. I think the only Jesuit to ever appear on Stephen Colbert’s Late night TV program. Really, you don’t have any desire to wear the scarlet- and the biretta or anything like that? Father James Martin, welcome to Interesting Times. Good to be with you, Ross. So we’re speaking, I think, 72 hours after the death of Pope Francis. And I feel like I’ve already heard at least 117 interviews that start with a big question about the pope’s legacy. So I want to start smaller by talking about Francis, as you personally experienced his pontificate, and also as you experienced him. He was the first Jesuit Pope. You are a Jesuit. You met on a number of occasions. You interacted. He wrote the introduction of your latest book. So I wondered if you could just talk about Pope Francis as a priest, which was something that he very self-consciously aspired to be. Not just the Pope of the Catholic Church, but a priest of Catholicism. Yeah, and I think that’s key to understanding who he was. He was a Jesuit for most of his life, a priest for just almost as long. And that’s the first way that we Jesuits came to know him. Interestingly, he had something of a checkered relationship in the Jesuits because he was, by his own admission, he was rigid and authoritarian, he said. So when he was elected, not every Jesuit was happy. In fact, in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, he was on the list. And interestingly, I was reading a piece in The Times that had a list of all the electors. And I said to a fellow Jesuit who was much older and who had worked in Rome, I said, who is this Jorge Mario Bergoglio? And this old Jesuit said, he’d be terrible. But he soon proved to be a real model Jesuit and was always very close to the Jesuits during his pontificate. And that’s one of the ways I interacted with him and how I understood him. I think a lot of the stuff that he did was… could be mystifying to people questions of discernment, freedom and difference. All Jesuit concepts. And so I think that’s key to understanding who he was. He was always a good Jesuit. When did you meet him for the first time? I met him for the first time after a mass at Casa Santa Marta, very briefly, and just shook his hand and he said, pray for me, reza por mi. And then, really, in earnest in 2017, he appointed me as a consultor for the dicastery for communication, which is a very low level appointment for the communications office. And I was at a— Because of your expertise in podcasting and other. That’s right. I was actually kind of surprised. And before I went over, a friend of mine said, would you like to meet him? And I said, of course, would you like to meet me. That’s the question. And I’d already started doing this LGBTQ ministry, and when we were at the audience, I introduced myself. And he said, I’d like to have an audience with you. And I said oh, yo también. And in September 2019, we had our first one on one meeting. And it really, I’ll just be honest with you, it was really life changing. Just being with him, talking about these issues and just feeling completely relaxed. He was very warm and friendly. One of the things that I want to share with listeners and viewers is he was just a nice guy. He was just a nice guy, friendly, fun. And at the end of the meeting, I’d never spoken to a Pope before. And at minute 25, it was a half hour meeting. I thought oh my gosh, I’ve been talking the whole time about this one issue. Maybe he wants to talk about something else. So I said, Holy Father, what can I do for you? Meaning, do you want to talk about the American church or the Jesuits or something. He said, you can continue this ministry in peace, which I found extremely encouraging and moving. And, he didn’t have to do that, and he didn’t have to meet with me a couple of times. So, and we would exchange notes over email in his little kind of crabbed handwriting. And I would and I saw him- How would you get those- Would you get those notes scanned? Via email. So I ended up getting the email address for his secretaries, which were different people at different times. And I would send him more formal notes typed out and whatnot, in Spanish or Italian. Thanks to Google Translate. And they would send me back PDFs, scanned PDFs of his handwritten note, which they would have to transcribe or transliterate because it was like this tiny little handwriting. And then I would ask to have someone here to translate it. So that’s how we communicate. That’s how it works in the universal church. Yes. Yeah Yeah. Thanks to- yeah. Thanks to Google Translate, I was always struck and thinking about his legacy. Now I’m struck by it even more by what you might call the visual element of his papacy. After he died, a lot of people on social media were sharing the photograph of him in the empty Saint Peter’s Square, holding the monstrance which holds the Eucharist. The host that Catholics believe is the body of Christ. Again, in this empty, darkened, darkened square in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years. And I feel like at the beginning of his pontificate, there were a lot of those kind of moments. The one that I remember most is him embracing a man who had boils, I believe, or who was disfigured in some way. And I feel like he had a certain kind of genius for, in effect, creating Christian iconography in his public moments. Yeah, that I think will be one the more lasting elements of his papacy. Well Yeah. And I mean, as Jesus who taught with words and deeds. I mean, Jesus taught with gestures as well, not just words and teaching. Frances was very good at that, I remember that. Ross, as you were saying, that, to me is the image that I’ll take with me to my grave, which is him embracing that man with the skin condition, which called up Francis of Assisi, embracing the man with leprosy, Jesus embracing people. One of the great things was for me that it was natural, he wasn’t doing it for show. Or I’m going to now do something that’s going to impress people. This was who he was. And he naturally reached out to people like that. But yeah, it made for good teaching moments, I would say, and I agree, I think the visual is just as important as any encyclical that he did. So let’s talk about the doing though as well as well as the showing. So this was a dramatic pontificate in a lot of different ways. But from my perspective, I’d say the great drama of the pontificate was could call it a push to change church teaching or practice on a host of difficult and controversial post 1960s issues. I would say that went on as a thread throughout was it 12 years. 12 years. Where you had controversies that conservative Catholics regarded as having been addressed and settled under prior popes over whether divorced and remarried Catholics should take communion without getting an annulment over the possibility of female deacons, if not female priests, the possibility of allowing blessings for same sex couples, all of these were suddenly in the air. And that mattered a great deal to you because as you just mentioned. One of the forms of work that you took up under Francis was writing and arguing about gay Catholics and their place in the church. So from your perspective as a sympathizer, I would say with that kind of push and that kind of opening of debate. How far do you think it went. How far did Francis go on those issues. That’s a great question. Interestingly, I would say that while those issues were in the forefront of a lot of our minds, I think for Francis, they were secondary. The kind of hot button issues. I mean, basically what he was trying to do. And most of his homilies and his encyclicals and his apostolic pilgrimages to different places would just proclaim the gospel. So most of his time. He was just talking about Jesus, the Resurrection, mercy, love. But I think it’s a fair question. How far did he go. I think he went as far as he could. Basically, one of the things I learned when I was at the synod, I was the delegate at the synod, which is this worldwide gathering of Catholics, and we met in Rome in October 23 and 2024, was realizing how much he wanted church unity. And so some issues women deacons, LGBTQ people, all sorts of things. You could see how much pushback there was from places like sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and even in the United States. And he said a couple of times, unity is more important than these conflicts. So I think he tried to open the door to the discussion about some of these issues without breaking the church. I think one of the fundamental differences, I think, between Pope Francis and a lot of his critics, particularly in the church and sometimes even in the hierarchy, sometimes even in the pages of The New York Times’ sometimes was that he really spent time listening to people talk about their spiritual lives and had a real reverence for the activity, the activity of the Holy Spirit in the individual person’s conscience. And so he really took that seriously. So when he talked about discernment and listening to people. And even in the synod and LGBTQ issues and in amoris laetitia, in his apostolic exhortation on the family, a lot of his critics said Oh, well, anything goes it’s just we’re just going to listen to people. It’s all about polls and opinions, but I think what they missed was that he really did trust the Holy Spirit, active in the individual. So I think that for me encapsulates why people I think struggled with that. Because it is it’s a challenge when you hear something like that. We need to meet people where they are. We need to listen to them. We need to see where the Holy Spirit is active. But to your point, he didn’t want to move the church so far that he would break it. I want to talk about that question of breakage and conflict. But then what were what were the concrete changes. Because the point the point you make about of disturbing or disappointing people runs both ways, right. So you had a certain kind of disturbance from conservative Catholics to the way the Pope talked about these issues, the debates he wanted to open up. But then, especially by the end of his pontificate, there was a certain kind of disappointment from more liberal Catholics. saying, well, he’s left us in a place of ambiguity where he talks about the individual soul and discernment and so on, and issues statements and teachings that can be, let’s say, read in somewhat different ways depending on where you are. But there isn’t like a concrete change to The Catechism in what it says about the immorality of same sex relations. He opened the debate about possibly ordaining women to the diaconate, but it didn’t really go anywhere. So first of all, what concretely change do you think under Francis And then I’ll ask you about where the different sides would want to push things beyond him. Yeah I mean, you could say more broadly that concretely we were brought to a greater understanding of the importance of the human dignity of migrants and refugees, for example. I mean, there’s no church teaching change in that. But to your point, more specifically, for one thing, the Catechism changed on the death penalty. It’s now inadmissible. That’s a small thing for another. Early in his papacy, he said he wanted more. I remember this line incisive roles for women in leadership positions. And now you have a woman who’s the head of a Vatican dicastery or office. The governor of Vatican City is a woman, right. So I think there have been real changes. Maybe not to The Catechism, but changes in church practice for LGBTQ people. I think there’s been significant changes. The ones that are perhaps the most juridical would be the allowance of blessing of same sex couples under certain circumstances. I mean, before that document came out, you couldn’t do it after the document came out. You couldn’t do it. So that’s a change. And then also something that’s I think often overlooked is his call for the decriminalization of homosexuality. Which I think in the West people are greeted with some shrugs like a big deal. But that’s a big deal over in sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe and Latin America. So yeah, I don’t think he set out to change the Catechism, but I think he changed the conversation. And in a sense, in addition to these kind of specific things, I think that’s the kind of change in teaching. I mean, to change the conversation and to change the approach and the tone is a kind of change in teaching. So I think he Yeah, he disappointed conservatives, certainly in different aspects. And liberals, I think, who think he didn’t go far enough. But again, I came away from the synod understanding anew, or maybe for the first time, the importance of church unity and what a difficult job he had. But that the hard limit from your perspective. So let’s say, that we elect Pope Francis. The second or Pope John the 24, someone who’s seen a successor to Francis in terms of being open to liberalization. And you were named head of the Inquisition. I mean, sorry, you were named head of the head of the Office of doctrine, right. Would you see the limits on changes to church teaching as being primarily about church politics. You need to keep conservative Africans and more liberal Germans together in the same church. Or is there just a limit. And here I’m speaking as someone who obviously thinks there is right on just how much the church can change what it says about sex, period in no matter what changes in modern culture. Well, I think the basis as we would both agree, would be the Creed, for example. I mean, you’re not going to change any obvious dogma. You’re not going to say suddenly that Jesus, guess what. Jesus didn’t rise from the dead or you’re not going to say that. So we should start there because I think a lot of Catholics feel that Oh my gosh, Pope Francis was changing everything or anything goes, which is not accurate. I do think that that’s a limit. I do think that church unity is a value. I mean, Christ said that they all may be one. I think that’s a value for us. So I think anything that goes against that needs to be looked at carefully. So it’s a balance for us, I think, between what you might call prophecy and unity. I’ll tell you a story. I wrote to him. I would write to him fairly, not frequently, but a couple times a year. And I suggested that he do something. I forget what it was to be honest about LGBT stuff. And he said Yeah, that’s a good idea. He said, but if I do that, I thought this was an interesting choice of words. I will provoke a chain reaction. And I said, and he’s right. So while I thought that he could have gone further, he would have. He would have provoked a chain reaction. And he saw that as a negative thing. And I came around to agree with him. That it’s not worth breaking the church over some of these things. So that. So I think his approach was to open the discussion, which again, that’s a change. So for listeners who are not intimately familiar. Yeah, this is insight with endless with endless the endless wrangling within the Catholic Church, about some of these questions, which it’s a wrangling that has been going on in every religious tradition. Every certainly every Christian church, but also non-Christian churches as well, that there is just this running tension between where late modern life has ended up in terms of people’s lived experiences who people sleep with, two people get married to when people get divorced, all of these kind of things. And the pretty stringent line on sexual ethics that has been part of Christian teaching from the beginning. And one of the frustrations that, to be honest, conservatives, whatever, however I define myself, some kind of conservative like me sometimes have is that there’s this sense of that the liberal argument is always about it’s always open ended. It’s always saying, we’re not saying exactly what church teaching would be. We just want to start a conversation. But then it seems clear to the Conservatives that in the end, the conversation only ends when the liberal perspective carries the day, which is what has happened in a certain number more liberal Protestant denominations. So I want to push you to be a little bit concrete. I’m going to frame the question in a different way from your perspective on issues related to sex, marriage, sex and marriage in particular. What is the thing that Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ teaches, right. That has to be held on to that is different from what a nice, well-meaning, secular liberal listener of this show might believe about sex. What is the Christian difference that needs to remain, no matter what kind of conversations and evolutions we have That’s a great question. I’m not a theologian. I’m not a moral theologian, so I’ll try my best to answer that. I would say are. You are a Jesuit. You are a priest. You are, a man. I think you’re eminently qualified. All right. Well Thank you. I would say reverence for the other person, I would say. Sex and sexuality is something that is sacred. I’m not using the other person and the value of monogamous relationships. I mean, Jesus, I mean, Jesus doesn’t teach much on marriage. He teaches a lot on divorce, right. His first miracle was at a wedding feast. So there’s a positive outlook. Positive he’s pro that marriage at least pro that marriage favored that one. He of course himself is celibate. He doesn’t get married for a number of reasons. But I would say that’s the distinctive Christian contribution today, which is reverencing the other person and not using the other person and seeing sexuality as sacred and deep and not something to be just kind of used in a relationship. And I think that is different than a lot of liberal, secular understanding of sexuality. I mean, when people come to me in the confessional about that, that’s one of my first questions. Are you reverencing the other person. How are you treating the other person. And I think that’s different because I think in today’s what Pope Francis would call throwaway culture, that’s not accepted by every liberal secular person. I mean, even a good person, it’s accepted by a lot of I mean, I think the secular liberal narrative of sex that I certainly hear would say they might not use terms like reverence and sacred. but they would use terms like consent and respect. And so on. And at least when I read the New Testament. And again, I quite agree. Jesus says much more about the sins of rich people than about sexual sins. That’s absolutely true. But the things he says about sex are quite stringent. He doesn’t say anything in particular about homosexuality, but he speaks very strongly about marriage as lifelong, permanent as divorce, as remarriage after divorce, as a form of adultery. And I would say, I became a Catholic in my teens after some time in different Protestant churches, right. And one of the things that always struck me about Catholicism in its weirdnesses, including the things it says about sex. Including like saying, masturbation is a sin. These, these kind of things is that it seemed it seemed very biblical in that way, that the Catholic Church is the only major Christian church in the West, at least that still seems to say something about what’s wrong with divorce. And there are a lot of divorces in my family tree, and I have a pretty good sense, I think, of what is wrong with divorce and why it’s good for a church to say something about that. And so I think conservatives in these intra Catholic debates are often framed as trying to hold on to some rigid understanding of human beings. And I think that sometimes can be true. But again, just in this conversation, I feel like I can see why I am worried that the more liberalized church of an imagined successor to Pope Francis, that some of those things would slip away. To me, it’s just not enough to say, Christianity teaches some kind of generic reverence. I think it’s important that Christianity teaches something like marriage is an indissoluble one flesh union that you can’t easily get out of. Do you agree with that. Which part. The part that there has to be something more than just a general statement. Oh, sure. There is a specific concreteness to the way Jesus talks about sex as the way he talks about wealth and poverty. Absolutely I think, Yes. I mean, in terms of the sacrament of marriage. But I think what Pope Francis was trying to do, was to remind ourselves that we’re also dealing with individuals. And so we talk about we’ve talked about divorce, masturbation. I brought it up just for the record. I mean it comes up in the I don’t any man that comes to the confessional, at least in my experience, who does not confess that. So it’s common. There’s also a sense of and homosexuality in terms of all these topics, one of the things that Pope Francis is trying to teach. And I think is Christian teaching is encountering the person where they are, and as they are. And he said, the name of God is mercy. So Yes, we have obviously, we have all these rules. We have all these traditions, but what is the pastoral application of these things in the confessional in a person’s life. And I do think there is something of overfocus on some of these topics. And I think Pope Francis was trying to remind us that there are other topics, because I feel like there aren’t many Catholics in the world who don’t understand what the Catholic Church teaches on marriage and homosexuality and masturbation and things like that. There aren’t a lot of Catholics that don’t know what the church teaches on poverty, the environment, those kinds of things. So I think this is what Pope Francis was trying to do. Interestingly in an interview with Jesuit magazines including America in 2013, he said something like, I’m paraphrasing, I’m not changing anything, he said. But when it comes to questions of sexuality and abortion and things like that, I feel like people know it. And it’s time to a good teacher, move on to the next lesson. And I found that a really interesting insight, because I think what people saw as his ignoring that was rather him saying, we’ve understood this, and now let’s move on to other topics which I think have been less stressed. Poverty, the stuff you pointed out. And the environment, which was a surprise. Do you think do you think that’s a stable equilibrium though. I guess it’s my question. Like say 100 years goes by. And that becomes the equilibrium of the Catholic Church. The church has a very pastoral case by case by case approach to issues around sex and sexuality. But nothing ever changes in the formal teaching of the church. The church never recognizes same sex unions the way it recognizes heterosexual unions. It just remains in this place. Are you personally content with that kind of. I think we should. No, because I think we should always be open to the signs of the times and what science teaches us and what we understand about the human condition. And I mean, you can go back to Thomas Aquinas, and he’s talking about that. We have to understand what in terms of homosexuality, for example what are we learning. And we certainly don’t want to say that we’re going to be in the same place that we would be 1,000 years ago about homosexuality because we’ve learned things. And so I think when you look at, for example, the Second Vatican Council, it’s the church in the modern world, not the church against the modern world or the church frustrating the modern world. And so I think this is where discernment comes in, honestly. And I know people might roll their eyes and say, oh, that’s just like a buzzword. I think he really is. He really was the Pope trying to help us reflect on the signs of the times, say, where is the Holy Spirit active. What am I calling. What am I calling people to do. What am I calling the church to do. But that’s an inherently frustrating and messy and open process. Discernment is really open ended. And that’s O.K, right. So I don’t know where it’s going to end up, but I think I would be more how do you how do you think the modern world is going right now. Oh, not too well. Not too well O.K. So you would you be comfortable if in 100 years it seems like the church has to be more oppositional to the modern world than it did in the 1960s. I think the church is very oppositional to the modern world as it is now. I mean, just talking about the poor and migrants and refugees and the sick, and I think that’s very countercultural. I think the thing is that Pope Francis all good church leaders, preached the gospel as he understood it. And if it became political, so be it. But I don’t see him. And in my conversations with him, one of the things he didn’t like was ideologies. He was allergic to that he wanted to meet people where they were. And if he got the sense that you were pushing an agenda or an ideology, he didn’t want any part of that. And so this person who has a deeply pastoral heart. And I think that’s a wonderful thing for the church. Let’s pick up on that and talk about the lived, the lived experience more conservative Catholics during this pontificate, from your point of view. And from the point of view of a lot of Catholics, the Francis pontificate was experienced as just a period of greater freedom. Like you’re a priest, you have vows. You’re part of an order. You’re under certain kinds of obedience. And it was clear to me, certainly, that there were lots and lots of people inside the church who had opinions that they didn’t feel comfortable expressing under John Paul Ii and Benedict, who felt comfortable expressing them under Francis. Is that a fair. I think that’s fair. That’s a fair description. Yeah I mean, Tom Reese, our editor at American media, was fired by Cardinal Ratzinger, which was his right to do. The future Pope Benedict Correct And he often said that I got fired for writing things and publishing things that Pope Francis is now saying, from the pulpit. So I think that’s a fair comment. People felt freer to express themselves. Yeah do you worry, in a different pontificate that you will feel less freedom. Oh, sure. Are you sitting here in this podcast worrying that things you say could be held against you. Under a future. Under a future Pope. I’m just curious. No here’s the thing. Look, I didn’t always agree with Saint John Paul Ii or Benedict. But I tried not to be critical. And also, I was careful not to go out of bounds and try to color in the lines. I think as a Jesuit. I mean, we’ve been dealing with popes for 450 years. And so you have to in a good way have to come to peace with that. And also, this is spiritual. They come and go. But the Jesuit order continues. No, what I meant was in a good way. We take vows of obedience and we have a special vow of obedience with regard to missions to the Pope. So we see him as our leader. And even if we don’t disagree with them, right, we go along, we try to support his way of being Pope. So whoever the next Pope will be, I’ll work with him and try to promote what he’s saying and. Sure Yeah, I’m actually very excited to see who it’s going to be. I think you’re going to see someone who’s a little bit more moderate, a little bit more of a stabilizing influence. Well, no, that’s a good place to take it. Because what I’m curious what stabilization looks like. Because the flip side of what I just described, the phenomenon where some maybe many Catholics felt more comfortable, more free to speak freely under Francis was the experience of a lot of conservatives and traditionalists I knew, which was kind of a mirror image of the liberal experience under John Paul Ii. Which was that you mentioned at the outset that there were a lot of Jesuits in Argentina who felt that Francis’s leadership as a young man was authoritarian and rigid. The reality is that a lot of conservative Catholics felt that his pontificate was not open and free flowing, that it was authoritarian in his own way. It used to be that the papacy would investigate more liberal religious orders, and suddenly it was conservative and traditional orders being investigated. And then especially had a very explicit crackdown on the traditional Latin mass, which is something that is attended by a very small number of Catholics, but is very meaningful to that number of Catholics. And Francis was not an admirer of traditionalists. I would say he was very he spoke very harshly at times about conservatives and traditionalists a kind of paternal but scolding in certain ways. So I’m curious. I’m curious both what you think about that perspective, having been talking about the Pope as a figure of openness and dialogue, but also whether you think, should it be possible for a Pope to be Pope without either liberals or conservatives feeling persecuted. Here’s an answer you don’t get from Jesuits a lot. I don’t that’s interesting because I would say that each person who comes in is going to have his or her or his obviously, predilection and way of governing. You might disagree with this. My sense is that Francis was a lot more patient with his critics, who were much more vocal than critics under Saint John Paul or Pope Benedict, and I think he gave them a lot of leeway. But yeah, I mean, eventually he brought the hammer down on some people. But I think he was I think that was after a long time. So my sense was that he was pretty. The tsar was very patient. Well my subject. Well, my sense was that he was very patient with people who were above and beyond. I mean, I don’t know any example under John Paul or Benedict Cardinals and archbishops who were so vocal calling him a heretic and an apostate and a false Pope. I just don’t I just didn’t see that under John Paul and under Benedict. So I think it was I think he was more patient. Now, in terms of the Latin mass, as I understand it, the Second Vatican Council encouraged the church to turn towards the vernacular. It was in general what the council was trying to do. The Latin mass continued in certain places. Pope Benedict published something that said that it needs to be more widely accepted and more easily celebrated by priests without special permission and stuff. And this is how I understand. I know you might disagree, but that document was saying that this is a kind of testing period to see how it works. And one of the reasons I think Pope Francis limited it limited the use was because he saw that kind of testing period lead to division, where certain people say, we’re more Catholic than you are. And the fall of the sixth mass doesn’t count. And so I think he wanted to really stop that. I know that upsets conservatives. And let me just say that I mean, I can certainly understand that because it’s such a value. I think it’s less I mean, it’s less from my perspective. It’s less about the general idea as to me, a kind of concrete lack of pastoral care in the sense that my impression, again, observing Rome from far away is that Francis had a lot of critics. And he a lot of American critics, very vocal, very vocal, sometimes even in the hierarchy, sometimes, sometimes even in the hierarchy. I was such a critic. I think probably the most challenging emails we ever exchanged were when I was writing some very pointed criticisms of the Holy Father. But most of the people who attend Latin masses, in my experience, they’re in the position of looking as so many people are in this 21st century world of ours for a tangible connection to the divine right. And I don’t think it’s surprising that some people find that connection more fully in an ancient liturgy. And so it seemed to me that there was a failure to again, to use the language that you’ve been using in this conversation, meet the conservative or really the traditionalist part of the church where those people are. And it made me worry. And this is a larger question about the question of unity and how a church that has these divisions holds together. Well, that’s a really interesting question. We had an article in America media by John baldovin, who was a liturgical theologian, that talked about the Latin mass and to go back to church unity. And, I don’t know if I would have made the same decision as the Pope, in terms of the limiting. But I think he saw it as a threat to Unity. I think that was behind that document that he came out with. And so if we’re going to say that we need unity in terms of sexual teaching, and not breaking the church on that, I think he didn’t want to break the church on that as well. On the Latin mass. That was his judgment. So like I said, I don’t know if I would have done it exactly the same way. Yeah I mean, one, one interesting question connected to that right is this question of what draws people to Christianity and what draws people to church right now. Because I think one of the interesting questions hanging over the church right now is that in certain ways, the liberal conservative splits are generational, but not in the way that people usually expect, certainly among priests. If you look at. Sure Yeah. If you look at surveys of priests in the United States, for instance, I think this is true, maybe not to the same degree elsewhere in the world. Younger priests, while not necessarily politically conservative, tend to be more theologically conservative than definitely than older priests. And so as someone who is seen as more on the liberal side of the spectrum. First, what do you just what do you make of that trend. But also, what is it. What does it say to you about sources of zeal, sources of intensity. Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, first of all, I think I may have said this to you before. I’m more traditional than you might think. That’s the first thing. So devotion to the Saints, to the blessed sacrament, to Lourdes, to. So some of these things are right up my alley. My general rule is whatever brings you closer to God and if you like the Latin mass, wonderful. If you’d like to go to Ted’s service. Wonderful if you like sant’egidio. I know this is all inside baseball stuff to non-catholics, but wonderful. And it’s not surprising that people would turn to more traditional ways of being Catholic and traditional rites in times of uncertainty. I think there’s a certain comfort to that in interesting times. Interesting times. There’s a certain comfort in that, and I think it’s great. Here’s the dividing point for me. As long as people who say that. Don’t say that other Catholics are somehow not Catholic. So I think as long as there’s openness right to both sides, as long as you’re not what a friend of mine calls a rigid-arian, then I think it’s great. Look, I grew up in the 1960s, and 1970s Catholic Church, which a lot of people deride as beige Catholicism and felt banners. But you know what. It meant a lot to me. And it still means a lot to me. And I back to my home parish, which is this big 1960s a-frame parish outside of Philadelphia. And I love it. And if that appeals to me, that’s great. If someone else goes to a high mass, a high solemn mass that’s in Latin at some cathedral, and that appeals to them, that’s great. So I think the key is not cutting off the other side. And really taking the other person’s spirituality and faith seriously. And I do see that in Catholicism. I do see a lot of you’re not really Catholic if you do this or that. And that’s frustrating because the Catholic Church really should be here comes everyone, particularly in spirituality. I’m really strong about that. I really hate when people say, you’re not a good Catholic because you don’t pray the rosary, or you’re not a good Catholic because you don’t go to Ted’s services or sant’egidio. Or something that’s a little more liberal or you’re not a good Catholic because you’re a convert, right. There’s a whole no that’s a big there’s a whole discourse where I mean, there are phenomena, certainly where people convert to Catholicism and within six months have decided that they know absolutely everything about the faith. Well, there’s that can become very annoying. But there is also I think, a weird anti convert tendency and discourse. I hope not, given that we’re speaking right after Easter and we’ve just welcomed one, one would think there wouldn’t be. But I really do think for me, the trouble is when people say, because you don’t do this, you’re a bad Catholic. And it’s basically because you don’t do what I like doing. And that’s really frustrating to me. And also I’ll just say, I mean, this is not to gather sympathy. But when I tell people that I love the rosary, I went to Lourdes. People kind of cocked their head at me and say, how can you believe in that stuff. And I say, well, I’m Catholic. And that to be kind of diminished that way is a very strange feeling. How so then. How does it all hold together. You’ve described something that is real, right. The vast diversity of the Catholic Church. But you do have this set of issues that have led to outright schism in many of our fellow Christian churches, Anglicans, Methodists, and so on. And you do have a landscape where, as you said at the outset, the Pope pushed a certain distance on hot button issues and then said, O.K, if we’re keeping the Germans and the Africans in the same church, we can’t push any further. But what does hold the church together. That’s actually that’s actually a good question. Easy question actually, which is the Holy Spirit. Yes, truly. I mean, the Holy Spirit holds the church together, and we have to believe that. And the Holy Spirit’s guiding the church. We really have to believe that Jesus Christ, who is present to us through the spirit, holds us together. We believe that in terms. That’s all true, but in terms of the person we have had, we had a Great Schism where we lost, we lost the Orthodox or they lost us. We had the Protestant Reformation, an unfortunate period of trouble that we’re still recovering from. So the Holy Spirit holds the church together in some form. But in this form, the Church of you and I in the 21st century, what makes people of these different perspectives want to stay together. Well, I would say the second part of that answer was the Pope and the primacy of Saint Peter. And I think that’s why he was so focused on unity. And all the different things we’re talking about sexual teaching, traditional Latin mass, that’s the constant theme of unity and hopefully the hierarchy. And hopefully our local priests and lay leaders, those are all kind of unifying forces, we hope. But really, the unifying person is the Pope, which is, that’s what he was trying to do. So he is now a cynic and I don’t think I don’t think this is entirely unfair. But a cynic might say it is the Pope that holds the church together. It’s the papacy that holds the church together. But it does because it offers this point of influence and shaping power that everybody wants a chance to ultimately control. So no one, in the end, wants to leave the Roman Catholic Church and just become the German Catholic Church or the sub-Saharan African Catholic Church, right. Because Rome itself offers this place of influence over the world, that you would be foolish to give up. And I don’t mean I think the cynical perspective has some of the truth. Like, I’m very interested as someone who was a Protestant, who watched how quickly Protestant churches could break up and split apart, how much people who really disagree with each other inside Catholicism tend to stay in Catholicism. And I really do think that’s less a political thing and more of a spiritual thing. I think people really want to stay in the church because they believe in the Catholic Church. They believe in the apostolic succession, they believe in the Pope. They believe this goes back to St Peter. I just think that’s so powerful. Someone said to me recently or asked me recently, do you think there’s going to be a schism because of homosexuality and the teaching of the church and same sex unions and all that, the blessing stuff. And I just said these people who are opposed to what the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith published. They want to be Catholic. They don’t want to leave the church who wants to leave the church. So I think it’s much more a spiritual question. And that’s why. And even when Pope Francis was asked, do you think there’ll be a Schism. He said, no, because I think he understood that people don’t want to leave. Why would they. They might want to see changes. And the other thing is, for priests and Cardinals and members of religious order, we’ve also made promises and vows not to leave. So right. No, no, you guys are you guys are. You guys are stuck. Let’s be let’s be clear about that. I also wonder, though, in this landscape. How much influence can a Pope or the hierarchy have over Catholics, lay Catholics, not priests and religious, but lay Catholics who disagree with them. Because you said, well, hopefully the hierarchy unites us. Hopefully the Pope unites us. I think the Pope is unifying. But since the sex abuse crisis I think, when I think about how ordinary Catholics think about the hierarchy, just in my own lifetime, I think it’s changed dramatically. And people have just less respect for the bishops than they did. And just in terms of Catholic politics. That cashes out in this world where it just doesn’t seem like the bishops have very much authority over Catholic politicians, for instance. So for a long time, you had pro-choice Catholic politicians who favored abortion rights and the bishops would criticize them. And that didn’t seem to go anywhere. And now you’ll have something politicians on the right who take anti-immigration stances and the bishops will criticize them. And that doesn’t go anywhere either. So do you think that the hierarchy has real influence. Can it regain real influence of that kind, or is it just presiding in this way. That doesn’t matter that much to a lot of ordinary Catholics. That’s a great question. I definitely think you’re right that the bishops have less authority in the wake of the sex abuse crisis. I think the Pope still has a great deal of influence. And I think as you were saying earlier, it’s not just his words, but it’s his deeds. I think that they can help people understand Catholicism and Christianity more. That’s an influence, right. I think when he does speak out on the death penalty, on migrants and refugees, on the environment, I do think Catholics listen, maybe not to their local bishop. I’ve often had the experience of saying to someone I mean, I’m both of us are very attentive to these things. I’ll say, by the way, what diocese are you in. And they won’t know. Yeah I was like, well, I remember saying to a very good Catholic whose name I won’t remember, well, you must know what diocese you’re in. When the priest says the Eucharistic prayer and puts the Bishop’s name in, what does he say. I don’t but they know the Pope. And so I think he can have a great deal of influence. And, Ross, it’s interesting you’re talking about that where he embraced that man with the skin condition. And, I looked at that and I was terribly moved. And I thought he’s influencing me. And he didn’t say anything to me. I just saw this picture. So that’s the kind of influence. And that’s the kind of teaching. And that’s a kind of unifying effect. What I mean. So beyond the kind of hot button issues we were talking about. So the answer is Yes, he can have an effect. And local bishops can do that from time to time. I don’t want to dump on the bishops, but I think people see them less. No, I think I mean, they can, but I think certainly bishops, bureaucracies, national councils of bishops and so on, I feel like imagine themselves having a kind of authority that has completely evaporated. And personally, I would like to live in a world where Catholic politicians of both the left and right, not a world where they changed their position entirely because of something a bishop said, but a world where they felt like they had to address a bishops critique. And I just don’t know how we get back to that world. I feel like. And I’m curious for your reaction to this, but I’ve been writing about this a little bit lately. I feel like there is a renewed interest in religion in the Western world right now. Definitely, but I think it’s happening very much at a kind of ground level. And maybe that’s where renewal always happens. But it’s people reacting, as you said, to what’s going on in the world, things in their own lives. But it’s not about suddenly having the debate about gay marriage settled or anything like that, but it’s almost if I’m being optimistic, I would say it’s almost people moving past some of the culture war arguments that you and I have been having for a long time and just saying, well, these are not fully resolved, but I’m going to go back to church anyway. But there’s also a way in which it feels like it’s happening, and it has nothing to do with the hierarchy of the church. The hierarchy is just not in the action at all. Yeah, I think that’s accurate. I think it’s that people probably are looking at their secular lives, their secular lifestyles that might be, not have God in it and say, this feels empty. And I really believe that in every person’s heart there’s a natural desire for God. And I think if that’s suppressed, it eventually comes back and I think that’s what’s happening culture wide. I think people are finding the secular world kind of empty, right. I mean, our hearts are restless until they rest in you, said Saint Augustine. And I think that’s what’s happening. Finally, I’m surprised it took this long, actually. But yeah, I don’t think it has a whole lot to do with the local bishop or even the local priest. It’s a kind of desire for God. And in that desire, I think we have to meet people. And they might not their churches often people say, and sometimes their Jesuit churches, these are the churches for the people on the way in and on the way out. And I think we have to meet them there, we have to meet them there. And I think that’s one of the things that Pope Francis was trying to do. I would say that one of his most memorable images was the church as a field hospital, which he used in the interview with American media in 2013, which I thought was I’d never heard before. And it’s just such a great image. It’s open. I always think of mash the old TV show, it’s open, people are coming in, they’re getting their wounds dressed. They’re getting treated. And then later, one of the images in the synod was the title of one of the working documents was enlarge the space of your tent, which I thought was so beautiful. And so I think one of the things that Pope Francis was trying to do was to reach out exactly to people like that who might be curious and not understand the church and say, welcome. This is about mercy and love, and you’re welcome here. All right. So last two questions for you. Looking beyond some of the culture war issues and church debates we’ve been talking about what would you like to see the next Pope do. Gosh what a great question. Now you’re going to think I’m making this up, but I want him to be a Holy man who proclaims the gospel. I don’t think you’re making that up, but I think it’s I would say on a particular issue, I think there was a lot of convergence at the synod, big word that we used a lot at the synod on the question of women’s ordination to the diaconate. I think there’s actually a lot of convergence in different parts of the world, so I’d like to see him at least continue that conversation, which would be a big deal. This is still you’re still staying though, with the culture. Give me some. Give me somewhere. Give me somewhere. He should go. Oh, gosh. Somewhere he should go. God, let me think about that. Where should he go. I think they’ve all. I mean, they’ve gone everywhere. They’ve gone everywhere. But you’re his traveling Secretary, and you get to pick the first destination refugee camp. I think that would be the first place I would go where gosh. Well, I’m a little biased. I worked with refugees in East Africa. I’d go to a I’d go to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda to greet the Sudanese. That’s a great question. That’s a good. Yeah, that’s a good answer. I’ll accept. Well, let me think. There’s so many other places. Yeah it’s funny. Where is where Because pick it this way. How about a place you mentioned Lourdes. A place associated with the supernatural. Oh, gosh. Where should. Which a shrine, a site a? Well, let me tell you, if I were Pope, which will never happen in a trillion years, I would go to Lourdes first. O.K Yeah. No question. And then I would go to the Sea of Galilee. I mean, this is all selfish. I would go there to pray. Yeah and then I would. It’s never going to happen. And then I’d go to nok. I love nok, this is in Ireland. In Ireland. I love that. But of course, this is now. This is more. This is more tourism. Catholics this is all more like for the pope’s kind of personal spiritual life. But I think going to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda. Lourdes, the Sea of Galilee. And then some big, crazy city like New York, right. I’d probably go back to Argentina because I know the people in Argentina were upset. They were upset he didn’t come back, which was very interesting and kind of mysterious. All right. Where would where would you have them go. I like the idea of Lourdes and the Sea of Galilee, somewhere associated with our lady of Guadalupe and Guadeloupe. But I suspect that we are headed into an era where secular. I mean, the church has been consumed with issues about sexual behavior and its relationship to secular politics and so on. And one of my prevailing views is that we’re entering a much weirder time, when it might be just really good for the Pope to be at the Sea of Galilee, and in places associated with the moments when Christianity claims that God has actually reached down and touched the things of Earth. So something in that zone is appealing to me. Last question. Who is going to be the next Pope. They have that. They have that expression in Italian entra papabile ussita Cardinale, which means you enter a possible candidate, you leave a cardinal. I really don’t know. I think they’re going to go for someone who’s a little bit more moderate, less revolutionary. Missionary some people have told me that the Italians feel like this is their last chance, right. Because it is. The church is kind of moving toward the Global South, and France has certainly appointed a lot of bishops from there. I look at the same candidates that everybody looks at. Parolin, zuppi, Tagle. I really don’t know. It’s kind of exciting because I think it’s pretty wide open. There’s something interesting going on. I think people misunderstand this statistic that Pope Francis has appointed, whatever, 75 percent 80 percent of the Cardinals as thinking they’re all going to be in lockstep with him. If you think about it, I’m sure this. Francis really tried to name Cardinals from far flung places, right. So small. Small dioceses? Exactly I know the I know the Cardinal Archbishop of Mongolia now, who’s a lovely guy. Giorgio marengo, Papua New Guinea. So it was less about people he liked and of historic sees and dioceses than raising things up. That doesn’t mean that the bishop in the Cardinal, in these far flung places, is in lockstep with Francis. So I think it’s more variegated than one would think. That’s the first thing. Secondly, someone said to me, because they are kind of from far flung places, they don’t know each other very well. And so that argues for a more Vatican diplomat, say, for example, who they might know from visiting the Vatican. But the third interesting thing, there’s a couple of interesting things. A lot of them were at the synod. There were a lot of Cardinals at the synod in that room. And a lot of people said to me when I was there, look, look around you. The future Pope could be in this room. So I think they took their measure of one another in the Senate. And then the final thing is, I think the political situation these days, people might look around and see a rise in dictatorships and autocracies and might say, Wow, we need someone who’s going to be strong, a strong voice against that. So I think all these things contribute to make it a really hard conclave to predict. Yeah I mean, I think people talk about a moderate choice, and that could just mean a boring choice, right. In the sense that you could pick someone who is a Vatican bureaucrat or a diplomat who doesn’t have an incredibly strong public presence. That would be my impression of maybe unfairly. But who is the insider candidate. But my assumption is it’s either going to be that very quickly. It’s either going to be a situation where you have all these Cardinals, they don’t know each other as well as normally they might. And so there’s a very quickly a couple of frontrunners and it consolidates very quickly. But then if that doesn’t happen, then it seems like you get into territory where you should just scratch off all of the leading contenders, because almost anything can happen. But then if you have people, if you scratch off the leading contenders, I don’t know how well the other ones are known. That’s the thing. And unlike that movie Conclave, they’re not going to elect somebody who they met last week. Unless the Holy Spirit should, unless, should intervene through a wind and the open exploded windows of the Sistine Chapel, which I’m giving away too much of the movie, I would say, look, they need three things. They need someone who’s Holy. That’s the first thing. They need someone who is a good evangelizer that’s the other thing. And then they need someone who’s a good administrator. Those are three hard things to find in one person. I think each of those names that I mentioned are all three of those things. We’ll see. Who knows. Only the Holy Spirit. All right. Well, on that note, and speaking in agreement in favor of openness to the Holy Spirit. Father James Martin, Thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. God bless you. Thank you.
