PastoralQuotient Charles Klamut

Vince Nyman is a priest for the archdiocese of St Louis with almost twenty years of ministry in several parishes plus a stint as a missionary in Bolivia. He has earned several graduate degrees including an MFA from Washington University and, more recently, a doctorate in preaching from the Aquinas School of Theology. He is also a gifted artist and, now, a published children's author.

Fr Nyman began ministering in urban St Louis a few years ago just as the Michael Brown incident was going down in Ferguson. Troubled by his first-hand experience of the manifest volatility of deep racial wounds and divisions, he began wondering how he, a white priest, could preach to a mixed race congregation in such a context. This led him to pursue doctoral studies in preaching, with a focus on the reconciliation circle as a tool for the encounter with and empowerment of suffering, voiceless, and marginalized people, such as he often encounters in his inner city community of Baden in St Louis.

In this conversation, we talk about the culture of encounter as facilitated by the reconciliation circle and how it can contribute to a renewal of preaching, restorative justice, and the new evangelization.

My guest on this episode is a physician, an OBGYN who has cared for thousands of women and delivered thousands of their babies during her twenty years of practice. In many ways, she is a typical obstetrician. But there is a significant twist. Dr Karla Polaschek decided twenty years ago that she would not do tubal ligations or, perhaps more surprisingly, prescribe the Pill.

For the he 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, I thought, rather than rehashing arguments about contraception, why not find someone who actually has rigorously thought through and accepted HV and its implications, someone who is operating at a very high professional level, and specializes in caring for women and their fertility, and who in fact is a woman herself? So that’s what I did.

In this interview, I speak with Karla about her journey towards medicine, her return to the faith after a lukewarm adolescence and young adulthood, her growth as a maturing disciple of Jesus, and her decision to opt out of prescribing the pill in favor of a more holistic approach to fertility awareness.