Colleen Dulle, "Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter" (Image, 2025)

Summary

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New Books Network — Interview with Colleen Dulle

Episode: "Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter"

Host: Chris Odeniec
Guest: Colleen Dulle, Vatican Reporter and Author
Date: October 6, 2025

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Overview

This episode features Vatican correspondent and journalist Colleen Dulle discussing her candid, personal new book Struck Down, Not Destroyed: Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter. Dulle opens up about navigating her journalistic calling and personal faith amid the traumas and scandals of the contemporary Catholic Church. The conversation, both intimate and wide-ranging, touches on the Church’s open wounds, grief and community, polarization, women's leadership, the economics of canonization, and ultimately, hope through wrestling with God.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Wrestling with God During Scandal

• Dulle’s faith crisis sparked by reporting on sexual abuse scandals ([01:45]–[02:18], [09:58]–[14:27])
  • The 2018 “summer of scandal”: Pennsylvania grand jury report, McCarrick allegations, Archbishop Viganò’s accusations, and the Vatican’s summit on abuse.
  • Personal spiritual disorientation: “I felt like kind of the floor had been ripped out from under me. Like, the place that I had often gone for solace in hard moments in life was suddenly the source of my anger.” (Colleen Dulle, [01:45])
  • The retreat in Montreal and wrestling with the passage of Jacob and the angel:
    • Not just permitted, but necessary to wrestle with God, to “throw plates.”
    • The value is in the struggle ("God could have beat him right away... there had to be an inherent value that God wanted to communicate in the wrestling." [14:29])
  • Dulle’s journey: angry, spiritually lost, but finds solace and direction through honest confrontation with pain.

2. The Scandal’s Spiritual Dimension & Accountability

• Why the Church’s failings cut differently than others ([08:47]–[10:02])
  • “Your run-of-the-mill pedophile doesn’t claim to have a special relationship with God… that’s the biggest, most damaging part — it messes people up spiritually as well as psychologically.” (Colleen Dulle, [08:47])
  • Anger and disappointment with institutional responses: “That wasn’t a satisfactory answer. It wasn’t the point.” (Chris Odeniec, [08:30])
  • The additional gravity and betrayal because clergy claim to mediate the sacred.

3. Power, Persistence, and Theodicy

• How abusers maintain power and the deeper question of theodicy ([16:16]–[19:33])
  • The “cult of personality,” benefits to the institution (e.g., ability to bring in money), and blackmail dynamics inside the Church.
  • Why do monsters persist in leadership? Power, ego, covering up for others’ secrets.
  • “The other and maybe more fundamental question... is the theodicy question, right? It’s why does God let these things happen? Why does God let these people continue in their offices? And yeah, that’s the hard part. That’s the wrestling part.” (Colleen Dulle, [17:17])
  • The host reflects on Satan as the archetypal unrepentant sinner as a comparison ([18:23]–[19:03]).

4. Grief, Suicide, and Community

• Reconciling doctrine and community after a friend’s suicide ([22:02]–[26:34])
  • The Church’s evolving stance on suicide and hope for mercy.
  • The biggest crisis wasn’t loss of faith, but fear of the community’s judgment: "I feared judgment from that community. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to grieve there." (Colleen Dulle, [23:33])
  • Contrast between two experiences of grief, the first resulting in withdrawal, the second—after her grandfather’s death—leaning into community support, echoing the Synod’s theme of moving “from I to we.”
  • Ends with Dorothy Day: “We’ve all known the long loneliness, and the solution is love, and the love that’s found in community.” ([26:34])

5. Polarization, Liturgical Preference, and the Hope for Unity

• On the Latin Mass, ecclesial division, and Pope Leo’s path ([26:42]–[33:54])
  • Dulle’s personal experience attending the Latin Mass: initial anger, then growing comfort. Recognizes diversity of spiritual needs and the challenge of Catholic unity.
  • The schism “of the heart”: “I draw a parallel to this thing that Jesus says—if you look at somebody with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart... even if you're not schismatic... some of us have, like, schismatic tendencies, in terms of viewing each other as the wrong kind of Catholic.” (Colleen Dulle, [32:24])
  • Host and guest reflect on the growing polarization and the hope that Pope Leo’s inclusive, listening-oriented style will help “lower the temperature.”

6. Women’s Leadership in the Church

• Dulle’s nuanced take on women in ministry and leadership ([35:27]–[39:15])
  • Dulle distinguishes her own vocation to the lay state and journalism, but strongly affirms the pressing contributions of women to church leadership in all the roles canon law permits.
  • “I see women who really feel that they’re held back from serving in the church in the way that they feel called to. And I’m a big believer in… our ability to discern what it is that God’s asking of us… I think it’s worth listening to people when they say that.”
  • Pushes back on the “Mary as queen” argument as sidestepping real inclusion.
  • Finds inspiration in Mary Magdalene as the “apostle to the apostles”—the first witness and messenger of the Resurrection ([38:06]–[39:02]).

7. The Economics (and Politics) of Canonization

• Why are there so few saints from poor regions? ([39:57]–[48:05])
  • Exposes the high (often $400,000–$1,000,000+) cost of promoting a canonization cause, which effectively bars poor communities from recognition.
  • “It’s mind boggling. It’s like 35% of saints lived in Italy when they died... and then you get to the other continents and they all get single digits and Africa is like 0.5%.” (Colleen Dulle, [41:03])
  • Canonization often politicized (e.g. John Paul II seeking a Latin American candidate).
  • Details technical and bureaucratic barriers: paperwork, printing standards, and a system with financial conflicts of interest.
  • Despite the flaws, Dulle feels the process still preserves the miracle requirement as an authentic sign of God’s will.

8. Personal Growth and Hope

• Coming to terms with Church humanity and renewed hope ([49:04]–[53:47])
  • “The first time I saw St. Peter’s Basilica, I felt nothing... the beauty of the buildings is seemingly in contrast with the ugliness of the decisions being made in them.”
  • Today, Dulle recognizes the Vatican as a human institution: “I have come to see the Vatican not as big imposing buildings... but as an institution that is made up of people...”
  • The key to moving forward: reckoning honestly with the truth and broadening participation. “My job is to help get the church closer to a place of healing, which I think happens by having an honest reckoning with the truth. Back to the wrestling—having value itself.”
  • Personally, parenting has deepened her understanding of God’s love: “This is how God looks at me. This is how God looks at everybody, even the people I don’t like.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On spiritual crisis:

  “The place that I had often gone for solace in hard moments in life was suddenly the source of my anger.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [01:45])

• On wrestling with God:

  “God could have beat him right away... there had to be an inherent value that God wanted to communicate in the wrestling. Right. The wrestling itself, all night long, evenly matched. That’s so frustrating. Like, that meant something.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [14:29])

• On systemic betrayal:

  “Your run-of-the-mill pedophile doesn’t claim to have a special relationship with God... that’s the biggest, most damaging part—it messes people up spiritually as well as psychologically and in every other way.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [08:47])

• On grief and community:

  “It’s not a crisis of faith, it’s a crisis of community. Right. At the time... I feared that I wouldn’t be able to grieve there... Instead, I pulled away. I kept myself away and ultimately ended up finding, like, other faith communities...”
  (Colleen Dulle, [23:33])

• On intra-Church division:

  “Some of us have, like, schismatic tendencies... viewing each other as the wrong kind of Catholic or, like, not really a Catholic. People say that... about, like, oh, you work for the Jesuits, not really Catholic... it’s actually a really harmful way to be viewing the body of Christ.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [32:24])

• On women in Church leadership:

  “I see women who really feel that they’re held back from serving in the church in the way they feel called to... I’m a big believer in discernment of spirits and our ability to discern what it is that God’s asking of us. And so I think it’s worth listening to people when they say that.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [35:27])

• On the cost of canonization:

  “I have like... the financial updates [on Dorothy Day's cause]. It’s going to be approaching a million dollars in cost by the time she gets canonized. And that’s relatively expensive for a canonization cause.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [41:04])

• On hope and institutional humility:

  “I have come to see the Vatican not as... big imposing buildings with kind of like, bogeymen inside... but as an institution that is made up of people... My job is to try to help get the church closer to a place of healing, which I think happens by having an honest reckoning with the truth.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [49:04])

• On parenting and understanding God’s love:

  “Sitting in my son’s room and watching him sleep and feeling this overwhelming love for him and then having the natural realization... this is how God looks at me. Two, this is how God looks at everybody, even the people I don’t like. That’s astounding.”
  (Colleen Dulle, [52:51])

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• 01:45 — Dulle describes her experience of disillusionment with the Church
• 09:58 — 2018 scandals, professional crisis, and spiritual fallout
• 14:29 — Lessons from wrestling with God, Jacob’s story
• 23:33 — On grief, community, and the long loneliness
• 32:24 — Division within the Church: “schism of the heart”
• 35:27 — Women’s leadership and discernment
• 41:03 — Exposing the Eurocentric, expensive canonization process
• 49:04 — From institutional despair to hope and engagement as a layperson
• 52:51 — The spiritual transformations brought by motherhood

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Final Reflections

The episode concludes with a hopeful message—that confronting ugly truths, participating honestly, and cultivating community are essential to renewing faith. Dulle’s path, marked by wrestling, grief, and eventual restoration, becomes a model for faithful resilience amid the Church’s wounds.

The conversation closes with a poetic prayer by Madeleine Delbrêl:

“You’ve chosen us to be in a strange balance, a balance that can establish and sustain itself only in motion, only with momentum. Rather like a bicycle that cannot stay upright without moving...”

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Listeners are left with this encouragement:
“We are struck down but not destroyed. We are perplexed, but not [abandoned]...” (paraphrasing 2 Cor 4:9).

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Transcript

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[A]

By you welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

I felt like kind of the the floor had been ripped out from under me. Like the place that I had often gone for for solace in hard moments in life was suddenly the source of my anger.

[A]

You know Colleen Del, Vatican correspondent at America magazine, a Jesuit magazine, and the co host of Inside the Vatican Podcast. Today we're talking about her new book, Struck Down Not Keeping the Faith as a Vatican Reporter. It's the book we're talking about because it's about her wrestling with God as a young Catholic journalist covering the terrible scandals of recent years.

[B]

You have to reckon with and accept the truth, even if it's really ugly, before you can move forward. So I see that as a real like like a role that I have to play in the healing of the church.

[A]

Good morning and welcome to Almost Good Catholics, the podcast about theology and apologetics about religion and about culture. I'm your host, Chris Udinit, and I get to talk to interesting people about interesting things. They share their conclusions and I hope that together we can get closer to the truth and have a really good time doing it. If you'd like to join the conversation, please email me atalmostgoodcatholicsmail.com. today, my guest is Colleen Dully, author of a new book, Struck Down, Not Destroyed. She's a multimedia correspondent covering and analyzing Catholic and Vatican news at American Media, where she hosts and produces the weekly podcast Inside the Vatican, which I listen to almost every week. She was the ABC News correspondent during the 2025 conclave, and she's commented on Vatican news for MSNBC, the BBC, CBC, and lots of other things. She's been named Catholic Media Association Multimedia Journalist of the Year, which I'm not surprised. But she's done this three times, so. Last time we were talking a couple of years ago, Colleen, you were at that time associate editor at America magazine, and I recently learned from you and your colleague Jerry o' Connell that you have been promoted to Vatican correspondent.

[B]

I have.

[A]

So congratulations.

[B]

Thanks. Yeah, no, it's been the dream for a long time, as has writing a book. So I feel like all the things that were, like, nascent as you and I were talking last time are actually happening now, which is amazing.

[A]

I got the feeling from his tone that you're kind of his successor.

[B]

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we're not really talking that far down the line right now. It's just like, we're excited to be a team in Rome. You know, we have an American Pope, and we're beefing up our coverage, and that's. That's fantastic. Jerry was America's first Vatican correspondent ever. So, like, this is a big step for the magazine and for our Vatican coverage.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I really enjoy the friendship that you guys have, and you always have an intergenerational conversation, and, you know, it's what they call a parasocial relationship, because I feel I know everything about what you guys are doing, as do many, many of your listeners, but you're probably just, you know, you're just talking to us, so.

[B]

Yeah, no, me and Jerry, like, are genuinely great friends, though.

[A]

No, I can tell. Okay. So when we talked a couple of years ago, you had mentioned that a friend of yours from high school had reminded you at that time that you wanted to be Vatican correspondent back when you were a little girl.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Yeah. So here you are.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

And since last time we talked, you're now a new mom.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. I guess.

[A]

Be even a bigger deal, maybe.

[B]

I was pregnant when I talked to you. I don't remember now, but I don't remember.

[A]

Two and a half. Two years ago. Two and a half. So maybe.

[B]

Okay, well, he's two and a half, so right okay.

[A]

Anyway, thank you so much for coming back. And your book is. Well, it's a very personal book. Last time we talked about Madeline Delbrell, a topic you had researched. Well, this one requires no research. This is your life. This is a cry from the heart, which I very much share. And I have a joke for you, but it's more of a funny story. And what made me think of it is the very first thing I'm going to ask you. And it's your deeply felt anger at our beloved Mother Church that, you know, that we all have. When you were dealing with all of these. All of these scandals. And so you're in a tabernacle at an adoration, an adoration chapel in Montreal, and your friend, your old professor, your husband's godfather, had given you some crampons to go walk on the snow and then on the ice up there in Montreal. And you had been struggling with this passage of Peter getting out of the boat and. And walking on water toward Jesus. And you were thinking that this priest. Sorry, this professor, is he a priest?

[B]

No priest. He's a priest. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, yeah, okay. Okay. So this priest gives you these shoes to go walk on the ice. And so I thought to myself, colleen, you're literally walking on water.

[B]

I was hoping someone would notice that in the.

[A]

Right. No, I had. I noticed that. So my story is exactly a week ago, okay, so we are talking now on Wednesday, September 24, but exactly a week ago, at this little high school in Northern California where I work, I went up to the Christian club, right? And so it's kind of a. Well, first of all, it's kind of nice and extraordinary that we have this very dynamic Christian club at a public high school, thanks to the First Amendment. And so many kids came that they ran out of pizza. And you know, one of my students said, like, here, take this last piece of pizza. And I was like, no, I can't take that. You know, a kid should eat that. But then I made this joke and I said, why don't you guys bless the pizza and see if God will multiply it? And everyone was like, haha, you know, dumb joke. So I immediately felt stupid saying it. And even as I was. Even as I was making this joke, so I was like, well, I'll go to the cafeteria and see if they have some more nachos. So I went to the cafeteria, the food was all gone, no nachos. But the cafeteria had left out a basket of tuna fish sandwiches.

[B]

You are kidding me.

[A]

Yeah, that is exactly what happened. So here it was a basket of loaves and fishes waiting for me. And I thought, like, I did not think my joke was funny. The kids did not think my joke was funny. But God, God thought my joke was funny.

[B]

God was like, here's the punchline.

[A]

Yeah, that was exactly a week ago.

[B]

God has a sense of humor. I do believe that.

[A]

Right. As people say, he made hippos.

[B]

I never heard that.

[A]

So there we go. Why don't you, why don't we start there? You know, you went from Montreal to Rome to Galilee and you know, this is a subject I feel very strongly about. I can't believe I've had over 100 guests, but we've never talked about this big open wound that we live with, which you know, is like, you know, all this, all the sex scandals and child abuse scandals and cover up scandals. And when we had, when we had that synod and synodality, people, you know, brought this up to my local pastor. His response was like, well, you know, you know, we're all human and the proportion of abusers in church is much smaller than that in the general population.

[B]

And I thought, yeah, but like that's not the point. Yeah.

[A]

And I love my pastor, he's a great pastor. But that wasn't a satisfactory answer. It wasn't the point. I'm sure the proportion of, you know, meth heads and car thieves is also much smaller among the, the Catholic clergy. But, but we have a really weird problem.

[B]

No, I mean, first of all, like, the reason that that doesn't work is that you're, you know, I feel bad saying this, but like your run of the mill pedophile doesn't have, doesn't claim to have like a special relationship with God and be kind of a mediator between God and you. Like that's. Yeah, I think that's the biggest, most damaging part is that it messes people up like spiritually as well as psychologically and in every other way. But no. So, like, do you want more story? Like what do you, what do you want me to chat about?

[A]

Thank you. I think you should tell us the story.

[B]

You want the story of the trip?

[A]

Yeah. You are, you know, you're a young reporter. Yeah. And you're in it, you know, you're.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You're throwing the plates at Jesus as what is, is what you're doing.

[B]

The plates are flying.

[A]

Pope Francis said that a marriage is healthy when plates are free flying. Because it's all out. It's out. People are talking and you're like, you're like, wtf? But you said something strong.

[B]

I do. I. Yeah, I do. I. I use curse words in this.

[A]

Book, which I love.

[B]

Who's offended? It's. It's very. It's an honest book. No. Yeah. So I might have talked about this trip the last time that I was on here. I feel like I did.

[A]

You did. But I didn't know the context, and I got it.

[B]

Okay. Yeah. So it's like, it's 2018. It's the summer of scandal. So you have, like, the Pennsylvania grand jury report comes out, and then there's all the McCarrick allegations, and he's removed from the College of Cardinals eventually. And then you have the Archbishop Vigano letter where he's like, pope Francis knew about McCarrick and covered up and he should resign. And all of this is happening. And, like, as reporters, we have to check it out. And so, like, I'm reading the Pennsylvania grand jury report. I'm reading, like, all of these horrific details about McCarrick. I'm checking out Vigano's. And as somebody who had, like, just come out of college and just taken on a role in the public Catholic Church, you know, like, being publicly a Catholic. Right. I was like, did I make the wrong call being, like, publicly associating myself with this institution, like, going to work for a Jesuit magazine? Yeah. The way that I phrase it in the book is, like, I felt like kind of the floor had been ripped out from under me. Like, the place that I had often gone for, for solace in hard moments in life was suddenly the source of my anger. And so I didn't feel like I could stop into a church for consolation the way that I used to. And so it was like, well, then what's left? And around this time, it so happened that just by some weirdo scheduling conflict, I happened to be slated to go on a silent retreat in Montreal, which I was kind of going on to help out this friend, this former professor of mine, Sylvester, because he needed to draw more young people, so he needed, like, show that he could bring young people in. And I needed a retreat. And so I was like, yeah, So I signed up, you know, probably before even a lot of this stuff was coming out, so not really with an idea of how badly I would need a retreat then. And then I was gonna go straight from there. So that was in Montreal, straight from there to cover the summit on the prevention of abuse of minors at the Vatican, which, like, going in, everybody in the news was like, this is great. This is good for optics, but it's not going to change anything. I had a slightly less skeptical view. I was like, it actually means something to listen to survivors. And that's what all these bishops from around the world are being called to the Vatican to do. But we knew that at the end of it, it would be a while before law changes, that kind of thing came out. And so I knew that going into this, I was going to gonna be feeling like nothing had happened at the end. And then I was going straight from there to Tel Aviv, where I would join up with one of the America magazine pilgrimages. Cause we have a Holy Land pilgrimage program that I pray it will calm down there enough that we can start doing that again for many reasons, not just for the sake of the tours. And we toured around Galilee and then we went down to Jerusalem. So we kind of followed Jesus's life and like, I guess having some experience being in Europe pretty frequently. Like, I've seen how a lot of churches become just like tourist sites. And so I was like, oh, my gosh, this is like, it's just gonna be that. It's gonna be a lot of crowds, a lot of, like, wrangling pilgrims, whatever. I was not in a good place. So everything seemed bad, right?

[A]

Yeah, but.

[B]

But yeah. So I was like, with these three things, back to back retreat, Vatican summit, where nothing will change, and then Holy Land pilgrimage, I was like, I will either come out of this an atheist or I'll have some kind of direction coming out of it, some kind of new resolve to keep going. And I mean, you can tell from the subtitle of the book, Keeping the Faith as a Vatican reporter, where it ended up. But yeah, the big lesson for me on that Montreal retreat was like, that it's okay to yell at God and that I needed to set aside time to sit there with God in my anger and just like, yeah, throw plates metaphorically, right? So I'm like, I'm sitting in this chapel. My spiritual director gave me the passage of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Old Testament, where he's like, yeah, they wrestle all night long and Jacob gets hurt. He hurts his hip or something.

[A]

Yeah. Dislocates his hip.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And only at the end of it does God kind of reveal that this was God or an angel. It's never really clear. And he blesses Jacob and changes his name, which is always one of these big, important, transformative moments in the Bible. But praying with that on the retreat, I was like, oh, God could have beat him right away. God could have blessed him right away. So there had to be an inherent value that God wanted to communicate in the wrestling. Right. The wrestling itself, all night long, evenly matched. That's so frustrating. Like, that meant something. And. Yeah, that became, like, a really foundational idea for me all the way through this. Like, even today, when. When awful things happen in the church, like, I'm like, okay, well, there's. There's value in the wrestling. So, like, let me. Let me take it to God and let me wrestle with it and let me try to find the truth. And. Yeah, so yelling at God, wrestling with God, ultimately learning to. To rest.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And the people who are closest to God are the ones who wrestle. Right. Moses arguing in the desert and Abraham negotiating and Job, for crying out loud. You know, like, my God, literally, for crying out loud. Right. And. And that's super, super interesting. And why do you think, on the. On the question of scandal, you know, why do you think that our moral monsters don't just disappear and go hide under a rock and, you know, live their struggle quietly, you know, and suffer privately when such leaders bring catastrophe on us all? Somebody like, thoroughly Theodore McCarrick or, you know, Rupnik, or the fellow that you admire so much. Jean.

[B]

Jean Vanier.

[A]

Yeah, Jean Vanier. Like, they persist in their office. And so even as a tiny podcaster, I'm kind of careful. Don't be a jerk to your neighbors because they're like, oh, oh, so you have a Catholic pod, you know. Okay, okay, I see how you are, you know.

[B]

No, yeah, exactly. Like, you realize that you represent something that's way beyond you and that's a responsibility and a weight. I think. Think that. I mean, I think that the power goes to people's heads. You know, These are all people who. There was a bit of a cult of personality around, especially in terms of, like, McCarrick. He could bring in money, you know, and so that makes people willing to ignore things when they are benefiting from the money you're bringing in or, like. Yeah, Vanier was, like. He was head of such a great movement, and so it would risk the movement for people to speak out. And I think that's probably why people waited until he was dead to do it. But, yeah, I mean, so the question of why they do it, I really. I'm not like, a spiritual director. Like, I feel weird diagnosing people's sins. Right. But, like, I see a lot of pride in it. I see a lot of ego. I see a lot of, like, desire to protect a person's own power and to, like, wield power over Others, not in a loving, authoritative way, but yeah, in a way that keeps people kind of enslaved to secrets. Right. This is a way that we know that a lot of the clerical sexual abuse cover up happened is that somebody would know a secret about somebody, that they were gay or whatever. And so they would use that to hold that over their head and make them turn a blind eye to other things that were going on that they might report. But I mean, the other and maybe more fundamental question, or at least the one that I find Christians dealing with the most is it's the theodicy question, right? It's why does God let these things happen? Why does God let these people continue in their offices? And yeah, that's the hard part. That's the wrestling part.

[A]

Do you feel that there's prisoners of their own sin and that they wake up every day and say, okay, today I'm going to be different? Or do you think it's kind of like who's the biggest sinner there is? Right. Satan. And he's never sorry. Right. He's always bent on pride and yet God allows him to work. A third of the angels are fallen angels. And we know, or at least we believe that Satan is at work in our day just as God is. But we don't think that Satan is wondering to himself, oh, should, should I repent? Would God take me back? You know, it's been thousands of years, but this really isn't working for me. Do you have any sense of that?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, again, like, I, I'm very aware that I'm coming into this just like as a reporter, so. So I don't think that I can.

[A]

But this is your day job.

[B]

I know, but I don't think I can sit in judgment of like, what's motivating these people.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

But I guess I would say, I mean, just looking at the facts, like, McCarrick maintained that he was innocent until the day he died. He always said he did nothing wrong. Even when he admitted to the things he was accused, he was still like, there's nothing wrong.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, And Marco Rubnik, we still have his art up here and there. And yeah, so there's people who are willing to go along with it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. There's also like a bigger argument there. You know, people always want to get into, like, how much can you judge the art by the artist and all that. Personally sympathetic to the request of survivors who are like, hey, this makes us feel that we can't enter a church. That in itself feels like enough justification to me. But again, there's a bigger philosophical debate that you can have in that case.

[A]

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[A]

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, like you, I'm sympathetic because there's lots of great artists and. Yeah, not all of them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Bring scandal, you know.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, right. No, but the always the counter example, and I've been told this by Vatican people is like, they always use Caravaggio as the counter example. They're like, he made all this great art that, you know, has inspired so much devotion and whatever, but he like killed a guy.

[A]

I did not know that. Yeah, I did it. So I. So I didn't know that he killed a guy. Well, did he murder a guy, which is prohibited, or did he kill a guy in. That's just how it went.

[B]

I don't know, man. I'm not Caravaggio's lawyer. Yeah.

[A]

Okay. A second really powerful topic is a topic that you write about is when you learned about your close friends suicide. And I feel that you resolve this because the Catechism of the Catholic Church doesn't condemn people who die by suicide to hell. Which I think it used to. It used to tell us before. I think you say before 1993.

[B]

It used to.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Or used to. And I had as a guest on the show, Fr. Chris Allar, I don't know if you know him. He runs the Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, who promote the work of Saint Faustina in America. Anyway, his grandmother had killed herself, and he learned from his studies of Saint Faustina, the Polish mystic, that in the moment of death, Christ comes to us three times, or she writes in her journal, anyway, so I don't know the other authoritativeness, I'm unable to fact check that, but she does. Yeah, well, exactly. But in the moment of death and once you're removed from the timeline, so like, once you're from the. Once you remove from the storyboard of the planet and you're in eternity, you have. You have opportunities. And so. And so he says, we pray for grace. I think, as you say, like, we. We pray for grace for your. For your friend Christina and anybody. Anybody like that. And so there's a lot of room for the intervention of God's mercy and for the. For God's mercy to work instead of justice. Right. And then we all depend on the mercy. I mean, I'm not going through the door of justice or, like, if I do, I'm not getting very far.

[B]

No, for sure. Yeah. None of us. None of us deserve that. But the big conflict in that chapter is actually it's not a crisis of faith, it's a crisis of community. Right. It's that at the time, I was going to this Latin mass church that I loved, but after I found out how Christina had died, I feared judgment from that community. I feared that I wouldn't be able to grieve there. And I feared that people there might still hold kind of the older view on suicide, this older Catholic teaching. And so I was too afraid to go and be vulnerable in that space. Instead, I pulled away. I kept myself away and ultimately ended up finding, like, other faith communities and then had to kind of, you know, learn to kind of open my heart back up to this. This traditionalist community that I had grown so estranged from. And that's kind of the whole narrative of the chapter. But, yeah, and I really, like. I don't know if you noticed this. You probably did since you noticed the walking on water thing, but there's two grief narratives in the book that are kind of. They contrast with each other. They're foils to each other. So that happens with Christina. But then in 2023, I'm in Rome for the synod and my grandfather dies, and I have this kind of parallel experience to what the people inside the synod are having where they're learning to be together in A new way. They're learning to kind of embrace a community that has a lot of differences and actually talk honestly about what's going on in their local situations and try to find some common ground and identify divergences and all this. And the way Timothy Radcliffe, the spiritual director of the Synod, phrase it, he was like, we're going from I to we. And when I look back at my grief experience over Christina, I see a lot of. I. I see myself withdrawing from the communities that could have helped me. And on the contrary, when I'm there in Rome for the Synod, I'm far away from my family again. Again. Because when Christina died, I was also abroad. I lean into community. I go visit these nuns that I've known since I was a little kid who happened to be in Rome and sit there in grief. And I go to Jerry's house and I just sit with him in silence on the couch. Yeah. So it's. I end the book with Dorothy Day's last line. Just kind of stole it. Maybe lazy writing, but from the long loneliness, where she says, you know, we've all known the long loneliness, and the solution is love, and the love that's found in community. And she goes on, you know, where there is just a crust of bread, there is community. Right. But that has become really important.

[A]

You know, where two or three are gathered.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. So that is extremely beautiful. And your husband dared you to go to the Latin Mass.

[B]

He did.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I glossed over that part in my little recap because.

[A]

Did you stick with it? And how did. How did that. How did that change your. You know, because I. I think we're especially divided now, and I think the TLM folks really did not like it how Pope Francis took that away. And I think Pope Leo said, hey, you can do what you want. Where. Where are we? Today's Americans. And you and I are Americans. The Pope is American. Your. Your magazine is called America.

[B]

Where are we in terms of polarization? Or what are you thinking?

[A]

How are we doing better? Yeah. Like, where are we figuring out that Thanksgiving? You know, how last time we talked about the metaphorical Thanksgiving as an American example of community and that, you know, say, oh, my uncle is, you know, he's a MAGA guy, and my niece is changing her. Changing their gender. How are they going to have Thanksgiving together? How are they going to do it together?

[B]

Yeah. No, I mean, I don't know. I think that Pope Leo's leadership style is, like, it's very grounded in. Actually, it's very grounded. Obviously, in his Augustinian formation. Right. Where the prior general or the prior of an Augustinian community, and I'm sorry if I'm bungling these terms, I'm still adapting from Jesuit world, but they have a responsibility before God to make the decision that is best for their community. And they are supposed to do that by talking to everyone about how these decisions will affect them and use that listening to inform their decision. And as we've heard from everybody who's ever known Leo, that's exactly how he makes decisions. And so I think that we're seeing, especially right now in these early months of his papacy, that he's doing a ton of that listening. And I will not be surprised if he lifts some of the restrictions on the Latin Mass. I think he understood Francis reasons for doing it, this concern about people denying the legitimacy of Vatican II or it becoming too politicized. But I think that his priority, as he said a million times, is unity. And it's unity and diversity, as he has also said a million times. And so I think he's going to try to find a way to allow that diversity to flourish. As long as it's not fracturing. Unity.

[A]

Unity, not uniformity.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Well, I think at the time that you were going, I also attended Latin Mass. I was living in Anchorage at the time, or it was popping back then.

[B]

Can I just say that?

[A]

Right. I'd never seen anything. It was nothing like it. I'd never seen a woman cover her hair. Is it a mantilla? Mantilla.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I don't know how to say that. But as you know, I would drive from my little town in Alaska, and I drive all the way to Anchorage to go to the cathedral and I would hear this. And it was always on, you know, like a Saturday night at 7 or something. And so we could still go the following morning as a family. But I just wanted to see it. I. I was studying Latin at the time, and I was. I was surprised that Latin in our church is really Italian.

[B]

Oh, completely, yeah. The. The pronunciation. Ecclesial Latin.

[A]

Yeah, because of the pronunciation.

[B]

I'm married to a Latinist.

[A]

Oh, I did not know that. So. So what does he think? What does he think about the, you know. Right.

[B]

I mean, he's just. The ecclesial pronunciation is not what he teaches in school.

[A]

Okay, great. Okay, great. Because I was like, you know, I'm. I'm a historian. I was. At that time, I was reading a lot of 16th century letters and stuff like that. And at that time, there Was. I was. There's no way it sounded like this. There's let alone, you know, the Romans. But does he like Latin Mass? Do you guys go once in a while or.

[B]

Not really. And I don't know his reasons for not really going anymore. But, you know, for me it was like that summer, so it was in like May of I don't even know what year that he dared me to go to Latin Mass every other week for the rest of the summer. And I probably did it, I don't know, like three or four times. And as I write in the book, like the first time I was like, very angry, very upset. Like, lots of, you know, just knee jerk reactions to things. I was like, where are the women in the, like, crew that is going up to the altar? Like, yeah, seeing that women were kind of stopped at the altar rail and couldn't enter the sanctuary really, really got to me. And then the next time.

[A]

And then it was really hard for the Eucharist to kneel in that environment.

[B]

And receive those things. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And I write about that. It was very hard for me. And then at the end, of course, the consolation that you got from receiving the Eucharist, anyway, no matter where the heck it is, it still comes. And I had this moment of realizing whether I'm here at this Latin Mass church in lower Manhattan or I'm a few blocks away at the Catholic Worker soup kitchen where they're having mass on the table, where they prep the soup. It is the same God. It is the same real presence. But yeah, so I went to this one church I really didn't like. I experienced a lot of anger there. And then I went to a different one because New York has plenty of options for this. And that one was just a much nicer environment. It felt very welcoming. And so I kind of got over some of my worries about it. And I did go back there several times. And I say in the book too, even throughout the year, even past that summer, I brought a friend back for Tenebrae. I was there during Advent in Lent. So, yeah, it's something that I don't feel super estranged from now. I will say I called the chapter Schism in the Heart or Schism of the Heart, because I draw a parallel to this thing that Jesus says about, like, if you look at somebody with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart. But, like, even if you're not schismatic, even if you're not declaring formal schism from the church, like, I think that that in our very polarized Church. Some of us have, like, schismatic tendencies, like, in terms of viewing each other as the wrong kind of Catholic or, like, not really a Catholic. And people say that a hundred stuff. Insert bad word here to me all the time about, like, oh, you work for the Jesuits, not really Catholic. And I'm like, yeah, I get that it's lol, whatever, but it's actually a really harmful way to be viewing the, like, the body of Christ, you know, so, no, I think that we have an obligation to try to overcome the, like, the schismatic tendencies in ourselves or, like, the judgmental tendencies that we have. And my hope is that Pope Leo can help lower the temperature a little bit so that we can start to see each other that way, because God knows the rest of society isn't gonna do it.

[A]

Yeah, And I love his tone. I mean. I mean, I love his voice, I love his face, but I love his tone. And I totally agree. And for everyone who thinks that Father Jim Martin is a wolf in sheep's clothing or something, somebody else is gonna say the same thing about J.D. vance, right?

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

And so that's just. It's the way we are as humans. We're just, you know, even though I said where two or three are gathered, you know, we have this joke. It's an old. It's an old Polish joke, but I've heard it as a Jewish joke and everything else. It's. Wherever there's two people, there's three opinions. Right? So we're just. We're just contentious. And we're naturally. We're naturally. And God made us. Made us that way. And so anyway, I'm. Yeah, well, I'm 100% with you on the things we've talked about. And there's two other interesting topics in this book that you raise that are your point of view, but I don't feel them. I don't necessarily disagree, but it's just. You're letting. You're talking and you're letting me into a point of view. One is women in leadership. And maybe it's easy for me to say as a guy, but who cares? You really want to be administrator with a scarlet cape or. The most important women for us are Mary, or like you say, Mary Madeline, or who is as apostolic as anyone, or Dorothy Day, whom you admire, or Madeline Delbrell, whom you study. And these are the big figures in our church. And I know, for example, as a teacher, I feel very pastoral when I'm in the classroom, but if I were to seek promotion and end up being some kind of an administrator and drinking coffee and sitting in meetings. I, I don't think I would like it. I don't think I would like it. I think there's. So anyway, there's something about a women's, women's roles, a woman's role in the church that's better. But I don't think you feel like. I think I don't, I don't.

[B]

And it's because I see the gifts of women. Like, I see how many women have so much to contribute, even as like skilled administrators. Like, no, I don't want that job. I don't, I don't really want to be a deacon or a priest. I feel that I have like a genuine calling to the lay state. It means a lot to me actually. And I think maybe we talked about that a little bit when we talked about Madeleine Delbrell last time and also a vocation to journalism. But yeah, I see women who really feel that they're held back from serving in the church in the way that they feel called to. And I don't know, I'm a big believer in discernment of spirits and our ability to discern what it is that God's asking of us. And so I, I think it's worth listening to people when they say that they feel that. And then also, like, I don't know, I, I'm not even pushing, especially in the book. Like, I'm not pushing for any sort of changes to canon law or anything. Like, I just, I'm in alignment with the synod final document which says, you know, women should be able to fill, should be filling the positions that are allowed to them in canon law. Like that seems like a no brainer to me. We're doing it in every other area of society. I also have never really found this, oh well, Mary's the queen of the universe. And so there's no problem with women's inclusion and leadership in the church. I feel like often that gets used as just a way to shut down conversations of women's leadership. And yeah, it doesn't, I don't know, it doesn't feel genuine to me. Like it's, that could be my own myopia or whatever. But yeah, no, I just, I really, I get a lot out of the story of Mary Magdalene as I talk about in the book. Like, this is actually one of the things that gets me out of that Holy Land pilgrimage with a new resolve. It's that I go to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and I realized like, during Mass there, that Mary Magdalene is there the whole time, that she is, at least according to some of the Gospels, you know, entrusted with the mission to the charismatic mission or whatever people say. Right. I don't know how to pronounce Greek words. I'm sorry. But, you know, the mission to proclaim the resurrection and. Yeah, for a while, it's. It's just her. At least according to some of the Gospels, it's just her who's carrying that message. That's incredible. You know, and. Yeah, I just feel like.

[A]

Yeah. And you say how Father Jim saw her sprinting, kind of like John the Evangelist. She's walking and, and she's taking it in.

[B]

In my, in my, like, spiritual imagination. Yeah. I think Mary Maggs would have, would have taken it slow. Maybe that's projection. Maybe it's. If I were Mary Magdalene in that moment, if the friend that I lost, who I loved so much, showed up back to me and was like, colleen, hey. And was like, go tell all of our other friends. Like, I'm not, I'm not dead. I'm not dead anymore. Yeah. I don't think I would run. I think I would be walking really slow and trying to think about what the heck this means and, like, trying to savor what this feeling is of, like, confusion and hope and joy. Like. Yeah, I don't know. I, I wouldn't have run it.

[A]

Yeah, no, I, I, I, I love that. And it's, you know, it's almost like Moses taking off your sandals. Like, here I am. This is a holy moment.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Nothing's gonna be lost. Right. God. God has got this moment, too. It's not like I'm gonna run out of time or something.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, also, if you're like, if you're, like, buddies with a guy who just got executed by the state and then, like, the cops see you running like that, that kind of sucks, too. I think that's maybe also part of it.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I think part of the strength of women in those traditional cultures is their invisibility. Of course, today, I think old people are like that. Old people can do whatever they want. Nobody's going to see. Nobody's going to see you.

[B]

Yeah. Because you're kind of forgotten. Right. You're overlooked.

[A]

Right, Right. But you have a lot of knowledge and wisdom and ability that not everybody else has. So that's a great, that's a great answer. The, the other topic in this book that you tackle is making saints with a capital S. That's actually a dollar sign.

[B]

Like, KE dollar.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

And I was, oh, wait, I guess KE dollar removed the dollar sign from her name. I can't say that anymore.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah. Making saints.

[A]

Very good. But I, I was thinking like, what's the big deal? Because saints are saints. But the reason we have All Saints day is because there are so many, so many saints we don't know about. So who cares if they're recognized in the church? Don't, won't own it all. Wondering. I'll come through. But, but you point out like, well, the result is there's so few saints from poor parts of the world because.

[B]

Of this and there's so many Italians, which Jerry joked to me the other day. I don't know if he wants me to repeat this joke, but he was like, well, obviously it's just that Italians are so much more holy.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I do have a Pierre Giorgio sticker on my computer right here.

[B]

Nice. Yeah, yeah, I'll talk about it.

[A]

Never occurred to me. Yeah, never occurred to me until you said it. You want to explain the dynamic?

[B]

Yeah, sure.

[A]

The expense involved.

[B]

The expense involved. Right, yeah. So kind of the, the personal narrative of this story is that I'm involved in the Dorothy Day canonization cause. And so I have like, I've done reporting on it, but also I get the financial updates and stuff. And so I know, and this is public information that it's going to be approaching a million dollars in cost by the time she gets canonized. And that's relatively expensive for a canonization cause. I believe the minimum is usually like 400, $500,000. But yeah, and then I found this study that these scholars had done, which I was really impressed by, where they analyzed all of these saints who had been canonized from like 1590, when the canonization process was really codified, to 2012. So like end of Benedict's papacy because the paper was published shortly after that. But yeah, they did a geographic analysis and it's mind boggling. It's like 35% of saints lived in Italy when they died. And then you have like another 20 something percent of the rest of Western Europe and then like 17% Eastern Europe and then you get to the other continents and they all get like single digits and Africa is like 0.5% or something. It's crazy. And you know, Jerry had told me this story too about this guy, Hermano Pedro, who lived in Antigua, Guatemala, who was venerated in his community and like his very poor community and had miracles attributed to him and everything, but they never were able to push forward his canonization cause because they just had no resources. And so it takes like 500 years or something for his canonization cause to go through. And it only goes through, at least according to this local guy that I talked to in Guatemala. It only goes through because John Paul wants to do a canonization of a Latin American, and he needs to find somebody who was not critical of, like the Spanish empire at the time. And Hermanna Pedro was not. And so, you know, these causes sometimes get advanced for political reasons. Sometimes it's up to the finances. And there's also like, you know, there's kind of some run of the mill corruption or shadiness in the finances too, where it's like there's a fund that you're supposed to be donating to for the causes of poor saints, that the wealthier causes are supposed to donate some of their money. And for many years, this investigative reporter in Italy discovered it was not really growing. Now they say, now my sources in that office say that it is growing. So I think it's been righted. But all of this goes to create a picture of a canonization process that doesn't actually give the poor who were so privileged by Jesus a chance to be canonized. Right. Unless some investor comes in, somebody's able to fund this, some donations come in, or there's some motivation on the part of the Pope to pull this person through. And the thing that I write about is I don't think this delegitimizes the process. I think it's that a lot of people get forgotten who really are saints. And the thing that does give me faith, at least in the process, in that canonization is still like God's seal of approval on, yep, this person is in heaven is the miracles. Because also working within the Dorothy cause I've seen how tough it is for us to get miracles. They have to meet very, very strict requirements. And I did a whole podcast deep dive on this about like the way that this became so complicated. It was basically the Vatican trying to make it watertight, but also in an era when the church was seen as averse to science. And so you have to have like, basically only medical miracles get through these days because they're so well documented before and after. You have to have like non Catholic doctors testify. We're having a problem with. Actually, I won't say that out loud.

[A]

But yeah, like, so is that what's so expensive is flying people back and forth and recording their testimony and so on? Is that. Is that where the money goes?

[B]

There's a lot of different places the money goes. So first off, you have to gather all the things a person ever wrote. And that's like part of why the Dorothy cause was always going to take so long because Dorothy published so much. But you have to have people go through all of that. You also have to do interviews with people who knew the person. Those, I believe, have to have a canon lawyer or some specially trained person, if not present during the interview, then at least verify it at the end. You have to compile all this stuff into a 100 page biography of the person that lays out the case for their canonization. That's supposed to also include considerations of why they wouldn't be canonized. We don't have the Devil's advocate anymore. But that did used to be a real part of that process where that would be the person who argued against a saints canonization. So that's all on the local level. And then you send it off to Rome. I think that biography actually is prepared in the Roman phase. And in Rome the dicastric for saints cause is like they have to keep their lights on, right. They have to pay their employees. So they send you a bill when they receive your documents. They send you a bill after certain theological and historical reviews of the person's life. And then they send you a bill when they're beatified, I believe. And then you also have to foot the bill for the canonization ceremony, which is not cheap. And usually the people who are responsible for paying for this are either the diocese where the person died or the religious order they belong to. So that is like the official group bringing forward the cause. So they get the financial liability for it. But yeah, so those are some of the expenses. And then there's this whole thing that I also talk about with the printing, which if we get into that for a second, I mean all of this stuff has to be printed to very exact standards. When I was an editor for the Dorothy Day cause, editing transcripts of her journals that we had like 100 something volunteers working on, most of my job as an editor wasn't even checking the text. It was making sure the margins were right and that the typeface and size were right and the spacing was right. Because if you mess any of it up, it all has to be reprinted. And here's the kicker. It had to be reprinted usually at this print shop that was owned by the brother of one of the top postulators for American Crisis. Yep.

[A]

So that's exhausting.

[B]

And. And well, and the kicker, sorry, it Gets worse. The kicker is that they do most of their work on iPads. Yeah.

[A]

Like this. That this maybe doesn't have to be. That's right. That's right. Maybe this will change in the 21st century because it could just be a Google Doc that everybody has access to.

[B]

In the age of loved autoc. Are you kidding me? Yeah.

[A]

That's amazing. So here you are. You've been here for years. Do you find, you know, now as you see how the.

[B]

Don't call it a comeback.

[A]

Yeah. Think about, like, when Lisa Simpson went to Washington and she.

[B]

She.

[A]

She. She thought it was going to be, you know, perfect. And then she's like, oh, actually, it's kind of ugly. How do you feel as a, you know, the. The. The young woman in the 21st century who's our. You're our eyes. Right. And you've thrown the plates. So where are you now? Going forward.

[B]

Yeah. The first sentence of the book is, the first time I saw St. Peter's Basilica, I felt nothing. And I just had this deep ambivalence that I feel at that time because of all the abuse scandals that are going on and everything. And because, like, the beauty of the buildings is seemingly in contrast with the ugliness of the decisions being made in them. And then there's also this whole thing where, I mean, they are all visually imposing. And I was feeling very kind of small and powerless. But I think about that every time I see St. Peter's Basilica now, which is fairly often in my job, and I don't feel that way anymore. I have come to see the Vatican not as, like, big imposing buildings with kind of like, bogeymen inside of them, but, like, as an institution that is made up of people, you know, and some of those people are, like, very deeply devoted to what they do, and some are just doing it to pay the rent. And some of them are doing it out of, like, a desire to serve the church or, like, to get closer to God. And some people are just doing it to serve their own egos, but, like, it is a messy human institution, much like all human institutions. And so, of course, they let us down. My job is to try to help get the church closer to a place of healing, which I think happens by having an honest reckoning with the truth. Back to the wrestling. Having value itself. Right. Francis said this. Actually, he said this in the context of, like, Confederate monuments being taken down. He responded to that in his 2020 book, let us Dream with Austin Ivory, where he's like, a society cannot actually move forward Without a real knowledge of its history, even a shameful history. I mean, I think, you know, he was thinking these monuments are going down and then not going into museums or whatever. Like there was a whole argument over that. But. But I think that he's right. Like, you have to reckon with and accept the truth, even if it's really ugly, before you can move forward. So I see that as a real, like a role that I have to play in the healing of the church. And then I also think that again, like, this movement towards citality, this movement towards including more people in consultation before decisions are made, or in giving laypeople more direct responsibility in the church, like that is a way for us to start to rebuild credibility by just like getting buy in from people. You know, the institutional church, I think, shouldn't be this like, removed, kind of scary, amorphous thing. It's something that we're all part of. It's something that Vatican II said. Like we are protagonists of evangelization. You know, we have a primary mission as lay people who are the majority of the church too, to take this thing into our own hands and to take responsibility for it. You know, take responsibility for the mission of the church, but also I think the institution too. Yeah. So I don't know, those are some scattered thoughts, but I'm in a much more hopeful place. I think also, just like, spiritually, I'm in a little bit more stable of a place. I think, you know, one is that there's little that shakes me anymore because I've seen so much crap. But I also think, as I write about in the afterword of the book, and I didn't want this to turn into a mom blog, but having a kid really changed my spirituality a lot.

[A]

Mine too.

[B]

Yeah. It brought me back to the basics in a way that I really needed. And so I talk in the book about, and I'm sure this is a universal experience. There's nothing original to be written about parenting, but I talk about, you know, just like sitting in my son's room and watching him sleep and like feeling this overwhelming love for him and then having the natural realization, like, one, this is how God looks at me. Two, this is how God looks at everybody, even the people I don't like. Like, that's astounding. And yeah, I try to. I mean, I think it becomes easier when you become a parent to see, like all children as your own in a way. But I think our call as Christians is to see all people as. As related to us in that way, as Brothers and sisters. Yeah. Or at least to try to see them as God sees them.

[A]

Amen. Amen. Amen. That is the perfect conclusion. So, Colleen Dully, thank you so much for talking to me today. The book is called Struck Down, Not Destroyed, which I believe you took from Corinthians, something. Second Corinthians.

[B]

Second Corinthians. I don't know the whole quote off my head, but I can grab it from my bookshelf. But it's like we are struck down but not destroyed. We are perplexed, but not. Yeah. Anyway, all that, it's like. It's a bit of. A. Bit of a subversion of St. Paul, because I think he was talking about the persecution of the Christian community, and I'm talking about how Christians sometimes feel in the church. But.

[A]

Yeah, but here we are. We are but crooked timbers, and look at us try to build a straight edifice out of that. And so I really enjoyed this book, and I hope that everybody listening goes. That. Goes out and buys it. And would you like to close us with a prayer?

[B]

It would be very fitting if we. If we close with some Madeline Delbrell, because that's where we started. Oh, here's a good one. I translated this back in, like, college, but. So this is not my translation, though. But I did. I did help a little bit with checking the translation of this book. This is called the Dazzling Light of a Madeline Delbrell Reader, and it was published, I think, last year by Ignatius Press. Yeah. But it's a little hard to translate her because she's a poet and she's writing in French. And so getting the musicality and also the multiple levels of meaning, it's tough. So this is called Bicycle spirituality, or the poem in French is called La Spiritualite du Velo. Okay. She says go. You tell us at every turn in the gospel to be in your direction. We have to go, even when our laziness begs us to stay. You've chosen us to be in a strange balance, a balance that can establish and sustain itself only in motion, only with momentum. Rather like a bicycle that cannot stay upright without moving, a bicycle that stays leaning against a wall as long as we have not mounted it to make it speed along the road. The condition given to us is an insecurity vertiginous and universal. As soon as we begin to look at it, our life tilts, gives away. We can only remain standing, to walk, to race in the momentum of charity. All the saints who are given to us as models, or many of them were under the Capital I insurance policy, a kind of spiritual security that protected them against danger, sickness, that even took charge of their spiritual births. They had official prayer times, methods for doing penance, a whole code of advice and defense. But for us, it is in a somewhat crazy liberalism that the adventure of your grace plays out. You refuse to provide us with a roadmap. Our journey is made at night. Every act do in turn lights up like signal relays. Often the only thing guaranteed is regular exhaustion from the same work to be be done every day, from the same housework to resume, from the same faults to correct, from the same mistakes not to make. But outside this guarantee, all the rest is left to your fancy, which is at ease with us. Hail the word made flesh. The Babe, the Son of Man.

[A]

Chris Sudiniec and Colleen Dully recorded this conversation episode 107 on September 24, 2025. That was the Feast day of the Blessed Virgin as Our lady of Walsingham, the patron of England now in the 11th century, Lady Richeldie de Faverges was transported by Our lady to Nazareth and saw the house where the Annunciation took place and was instructed to build a replica of it in Norfolk in England. But then this was destroyed during the English reformation in the 16th century and then later refounded in 1897 by Pope Leo XIII. Today it remains a symbol of cooperation between Catholics and Anglicans. It is located now in something called the Chapel of the Slipper. The Slipper, because you take off your shoes when you're on holy ground. Our music is from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band. Check them [e-mail]. and our logo, the image of the dog is taken from a stained glass window at the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain and is used here with the kind permission from the Dominican Friars of England, Scotland and Wales. Www.english.op.org I'm Chris Odiniec. Thank you so much for listening. May God bless you and your family. May our lady of Walsingham and the Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us all and for peace in our troubled world and for our church. This.

[B]

This is Christ the King whom shepherds, God and angels sing.

[A]

It.