In this conversation, Ruth Gledhill and Liz Dodd discuss the recent developments in LGBTQI inclusion within the Church, particularly focusing on the findings from a conference in Amsterdam. They explore the impact of Pope Francis on the acceptance of LGBTQI individuals in the Catholic Church and delve into the implications of Pope Leo's new document, Dilexi te. They also touch on the intersection of technology and morality, the role of women in the church, and personal reflections on how technology influences faith and community.
Takeaways
The Catholic Church in England and Wales is surprisingly inclusive for LGBTQI individuals.
Grassroots movements play a crucial role in fostering inclusivity within the church.
Pope Francis's language has significantly impacted the treatment of LGBTQI Catholics.
Pope Leo's document, Delexi te, is seen as a powerful and radical statement.
The intertwining of finance and hate speech is a growing concern.
The pride flag is viewed as a symbol of identity and devotion, not just politics.
Technology can enhance community support and social justice efforts.
The moral implications of technology, such as AI, are complex and multifaceted.
Women are increasingly taking on leadership roles within the church.
Personal connections to technology can shape our understanding of morality and ethics.
Sound Bites
"England and Wales is among the most inclusive."
"I think technology can be used for human flourishing."
"If your robot vacuum cleaner unionises, great!"
Ruth Gledhill of The Tablet and Liz Dodd, a sister of St Joseph of Peace, discuss the visit to the UK this week of US President Donald Trump, the Royal family, a recent Star Wars retreat in Ireland – and why people are still attracted to the Religious life.
Ruth Gledhill and Sister Liz Dodd discuss the recent election of Pope Leo and the implications of his leadership style for the Catholic Church. They explore initial reactions to his election, the challenges he faces, particularly regarding the Latin Mass, and the significance of women's roles within the Church. The conversation also touches on Sister Liz's upcoming travels, the influence of Chicago on Pope Leo's formation, and the intersection of physical fitness and spirituality in leadership. Additionally, they discuss the importance of fundraising for social justice causes, particularly in light of the current situation in Gaza, and how running serves as a meditative practice for both hosts.
Takeaways:
To read Liz and Ruth in The Tablet, and the many other writers in news, features, arts, books and more, visit thetablet.co.uk. See our latest subscription offers here.
Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor of The Tablet and Liz Dodd CSJP discuss for the latest Tablet podcast, The Wise and the Wherefores, the legacy of Pope Francis and who might emerge as his successor in the coming conclave.See all our coverage of this hugely significant moment for the Catholic Church and the wider world and sign up for our twice-weekly free newsletters at https://thetablet.co.ukSubscribe at http://thetablet.co.uk/subscribe
In this episode of the Tablet podcast, Ruth Gledhill of The Tablet and Sister Liz Dodd CSJP discuss the recent health concerns surrounding Pope Francis and the implications for the Catholic Church and the world. They explore the transparency of the Vatican regarding the Pope's health, the significance of his leadership in the current political climate, and the role of faith in addressing social issues. The conversation also touches on a new teaching document from the bishops of England and Wales, emphasizing the need for social action and the church's response to contemporary challenges.
Ruth Gledhill and Liz Dodd kick off the first podcast in our new season, a series of ten, with a discussion on women in the Catholic Church, Donald Trump – and top Catholic movies.
Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor of The Tablet and former religion correspondent of The Times and Liz Dodd, a former Tablet journalist who is now a sister with St Joseph of Peace (CSJP), discuss the latest developments on women in the Catholic Church, Donald Trump in the US and recent content in The Tablet such as the top Catholic movies.
Liz’s latest Tablet column, on The Traitors and more. https://www.thetablet.co.uk/columnists/i-read-recently-the-traitors-is-edited-backwards-which-is-what-makes-it-so-compelling/
The Tablet spread on top 20 Catholic movies https://www.thetablet.co.uk/arts/the-top-20-catholic-movies/
Subscribe to The Tablet https://www.thetablet.co.uk/subscribe/
The Tablet podcast, The Wise and the Wherefores, is available on all the usual platforms
Earlier this year, Lorraine Currie was appointed the new chief executive of Sciaf. In this podcast for The Tablet, assistant editor Ruth Gledhill talks to Lorraine about her story of how she progressed into international development, of the work being done in the field by Sciaf and of exciting plans for the future.
You can find out more about Sciaf, including how to donate to the charity’s Advent appeal, here.
Subscribe to The Tablet, the international Catholic weekly, here.
To the surprise and disappointment of many on the left, Donald Trump won the US election. What part did Catholics play in this? And what does this mean for the Democrats, going forward? In our latest podcast, and the first of a series on this subject, Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor of The Tablet, talks to Michael Sean Winters, The Tablet’s US correspondent and senior journalist at National Catholic Reporter.
You can find this podcast on all the usual outlets, including Spotify and Apple.
The environment is a key platform of the papacy of Francis and his encyclical will form a significant part of his legacy over decades if not centuries. So why has Laudato Si’ not taken root in the US as it has in the UK and elsewhere? Could one reason be the polarisation of society and Church where climate change has itself become so politicised? Yet the lack of engagement with Laudato Si’ is not along Democrat-Republican lines, it seems to cross the political divide. At the root of it is how to bring the common good into debate in a society that, across all parties, is fundamentally libertarian, whether in regards to economics or personal morality.
In this podcast, Michael Sean Winters and Sebastian Gomes talk to Tablet assistant editor Ruth Gledhill about a conference Michael helped organise on the encyclical, and from which Sebastian, of America magazine, put together a video which has some of the answers and may contain clues as to how we can all continue to progress this cause as we engage this month of September with this year’s Season of Creation. The radical new direction that is being brought to “The Way Forward” gatherings is bringing bishops, theologians and lay leaders together around the table.
This podcast emerges from the third such gathering at the University of San Diego in February 2024. The aim is to foster honest dialogue within the Catholic Church and to promote the path set out by the Second Vatican Council and Pope Francis. In this year’s meeting the focus was on implementing Francis’s landmark encyclical on care of the earth, Laudato Si’. Watch the video here.
This second video is from the second “Way Forward” initiative in 2023, on synodality.
Michael Sean Winters is a columnist with the National Catholic Reporter and he is the U.S. correspondent for The Tablet. He is also a fellow at the Center for Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. His articles have been published by the New York Times magazine, New Republic, America, and other publications. He is one of the organisers of the Way Forward gatherings. The first was at Loyola University Chicago, and focused on Pope Francis and the ecclesiology of Vatican II. The second was at Boston College and focused on synodality. The most recent gathering was at the University of San Diego and focused on Laudato Si’. In addition to the Center for Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University, the gatherings are co-sponsored by the Boisi Center at Boston College, the Center for Religion and Culture at Fordham University and the Hank Center at Loyola Chicago. Sebastian Gomes is Executive Editor of Audio and Video at America Magazine, the Jesuit media organization based in New York City. He directed the film on “The Way Forward” conference on Laudao Si’, that took place in San Diego in February 2024.
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In September, with JC Journeys, we are going on pilgrimage to Patmos, led by Fr Nicholas King SJ. In this podcast, Ruth Gledhill of The Tablet talks to Fr King about this beautiful island and its place and meaning in the Bible. On this trip, pilgrims can visit the Cave of Revelation, the Monastery of St John and there will be a daily Mass, celebrated outside wherever possible.
Catholic bishops have called for new treaties to regulate weaponised drones and lethal autonomous weapons systems. In a new paper, “Called to be Peacemakers”, the bishops of England and Wales also call for a “global moratorium” on lethal autonomous weapons systems. In this podcast, Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor of The Tablet, talks to Bishop William Kenney, one of the authors, about the challenges and opportunities facing the Catholic Church and wider community on the latest weapons technologies, the continuing debate over nuclear deterrence, and what we can all do to help. Read the latest Tablet article on the paper here.
Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor of The Tablet, discusses with Fr Alban McCoy OFM Conv the question of Pope Francis and his approach to the war in Ukraine, and where this fits in the context of just war theory.
Following on from Plato and Socrates, in the second in our series on why truth still matters, Fr Alban McCoy, OFM Conv, and Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor of The Tablet, discuss St Thomas Aquinas, 750 years after his death.
Journalist Ruth Gledhill is in conversation with Catholic priest, philosopher and theologian Fr Alban McCoy OFM Conv in the first in a new series of podcasts.
Award-winning writer and former Financial Times journalist Jimmy Burns’ latest book A Faithful Spy, based on previously undisclosed personal private papers of former MI6 and MI5 officer, Walter Bell, gives a remarkable insight into the working of British Intelligence. In this Tablet podcast, Emily Buchanan of the BBC talks to Jimmy Burns about the book and some of the startling things that he uncovered during his research.
In this article in The Tablet Jimmy Burns gives further insight into the life of Walter Bell.
The 2023 synod summit in the Vatican ended with a series of openings for reform, including on the role of women, training of priests and a re-think of the church’s sexual teaching.
For those in the hall, a vast majority agreed that the synod process and style — which saw cardinals and lay people gathered around tables listening to each other — is how church business should be done in the future.
But what happens next? Synod 2023 is the first of two assemblies, with another due in October 2024.
In this episode, I talk again to Myriam Wijlens, who took part in the synod as an expert adviser. Professor Wijlens, a theologian and canon lawyer who has been closely involved in the synod process, stressed a general agreement that women need an enlarged role in the church but a “struggle” over how this should happen in practice. The question of women deacons is to be further studied, and Wijlens said a “conclusion” to the discussion over the possibility of women deacons could take place at the synod next year.
Professor Wijlens teaches at the University of Erfurt in Germany. She said that the new synod process marks a “tremendous shift”, which gave everyone the same amount of time to speak, whether they were an Asian woman or a European cardinal.
“There was a general agreement: we have to attend to this question [of women]”, she said. “And there was a great agreement that women do make up the larger portion of active participants in the life of the Church. And then there comes a struggle because we all come from different cultures and from different backgrounds. How does that unfold in real life, on the ground?”
Professor Wijlens points out that a critical challenge is implementing synodality at the local level. But it can no longer be a question of waiting for the authorities in Rome about what to do.
“How can Rome say what you have to do in the inner city of London and in the inner city of Manila or the countryside of Alaska at the same time,” she said. It is up to bishops and local leaders to “take up your own responsibility” and implement synodal reforms in their local areas.
The Church’s Radical Reform podcast is sponsored by the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham in partnership with The Tablet.
Producer: Silvia Sacco
Editor: Jamie Weston
In October 2023 we began a series of articles on Family Matters, the first of which was by our very own Editor, Brendan Walsh. Brendan wrote movingly and candidly about his experience of first-time fatherhood in his early 60s. Other articles followed covering themes of adoption, welcoming strangers into your family, the death of a child, being a mother with cancer, an unconventional upbringing, and grandfathers. Three online webinars accompany this series, the first of which was on 8 November with Brendan Walsh and Carina Murphy, who was diagnosed with cancer five years ago when her children were five and nine years old. This is the conversation between Brendan, Carina and Tablet readers, introduced by deputy editor Maggie Fergusson.
In this podcast, from a Tablet webinar on the Synod on Synodality, Ruth Gledhill, assistant editor, The Tablet – talks to Professor Renee Kohler-Ryan, National Head of the School of Philosophy and Theology and Rev Professor Eamonn Conway, Professor of Integral Human Development, both of the University of Notre Dame Australia.
This was one of a Tablet series of webinars on Synodality, in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, Australia.
To sign up for future Tablet events, go here.
Tablet podcasts are available on all the usual podcast apps such as Apple, or can be listened to via our dedicated page on our own website.
The reflections of Fr Timothy Radcliffe have been one of the highlights of the October 2023 synod assembly in the Vatican. The English Dominican friar led the synod participants on a retreat before the synod gathering and offered wise reflections and spiritual guidance. Some have called him the “spiritual father” of the synod.
In this episode, I sat down with Fr Timothy to discuss the synod process and how to navigate disagreement in an increasingly polarised world and church. Fr Timothy led the worldwide Dominican Order from 1992-2001, the first English friar to do so. He knows the universal Church and the workings of the Vatican and has attended several synods.
“I think to see Roman Curial cardinals sitting with young women from Latin America and Asia and listening, really listening. I think that’s what is most transformative,” he told me.
The process of listening, he says, is the “foundation for any subsequent things to happen” and that both individuals and the Church collectively need to be “changed” before they know which changes need to be made. On one occasion in the synod, he referred to a story that had been told to participants about a bisexual woman who had taken her own life as she did not feel welcomed by the Church.
“The question always put is: is the Church’s teaching going to change? That’s not the issue. The issue is, will we love and welcome our fellow human beings?” he says. “If we love them, and listen to them and make them part of our lives, if there are evolutions to happen, they will happen. But you don’t start by asking what changes have to be made.”
He stressed that the synod is counter-cultural because it demands people listen to those with whom they disagree.
“We inherit a tradition, Catholicism, which does actually believe in reason,” he pointed out.
“We see a lot of irrationality in our society because people don’t believe in reason anymore, but the Church does, and this should act in a healthy way to open not just our hearts but our minds, so we listen attentively with all our intelligence to what the other person is saying, and try to see how even if we disagree it bears some tiny seed of truth that we need. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t turn out, when we look back, that one of the great roles of the Church will be to carry on believing in reason.”
Talking about indifference or scepticism of the synod among the clergy, Fr Timothy said there needs to be a “positive, affirmative vision of the priesthood” to ensure more priests get on board with the synod process. Finally, he talked about his recent health struggles and how Pope Francis took him by surprise and phoned him while he was in hospital.
The Church’s Radical Reform podcast is sponsored by the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham in partnership with The Tablet.
Producer: Silvia Sacco
Editor: Jamie Weston
In Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World, Dr. Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of the Catholic Church in the modern age. Beginning with the aftermath of the French Revolution and the democratic rebellions of 1848, Caiani follows the Church's evolution that sees three popes being forced out of Rome, the secular power of papacy being destroyed, a disastrous series of concordats with fascist states in the 1930s and the Church’s retreat into a fortress of unreason.
As Catholicism lost its temporal power it made huge spiritual strides expanding across the globe and gaining new converts in America, Africa and the Far East; losing a kingdom but gaining the world, he writes.
In this Tablet podcast, assistant editor Ruth Gledhill talks to the author about why he wrote the book, some of his discoveries and their implications, and what he hopes to do next.
Ambrogio A. Caiani grew up in Ireland and spent his summers in Italy and France. Since his early childhood he has had a passion for history, politics, and religion. He was educated at the Universities of York and Caiani received his doctorate from Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge in 2009. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Kent.
He is the author of two previous books: To Kidnap a Pope, Napoleon and Pius VII 1800-1815, which won the Franco-British Society Book Prize 2021, and Louis XVI and the French Revolution 1789-1792.
