The Moderate Catholic

Topics that deepen faith and inspire action.
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The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice. christinagebel.substack.com

  1. Sep 25

    Episode 16: A Family-Centered Response to Immigration

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 16, “A Family-Centered Response to Immigration.” Welcome, everyone, to this episode. I am super excited to sit down today with Christina Ampil and to discuss her work through the Dorothea Project, and Christina will tell us a little bit more about what that is and what they do. Why don’t we just jump right in, ‘cause this is a really excellent, interesting topic today. So, Christina, would you mind introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background? Christina Ampil: Yes. Thank you, Christina, for inviting me to have this wonderful conversation with you. I am a mom of two children, one of whom has special needs. These are my [00:01:00] fiats for life, in addition to my marriage. I’m a Catholic, and at this stage in my life, I have a chance at what Jane Fonda calls “the third act of life,” a time of ascent, not decline. I have the freedom to learn more about discipleship and become more fully a disciple of Jesus because I don’t have to worry about earning a living anymore. And I have been, for close to two years now, reflecting on becoming Easter people in this world, that it isn’t Easter for a day, it is what we are called to, joyful life as Easter people. So that’s in the background, Christina, as something that is animating me. I have a background in thought leadership. This is a space where we write about what we call the “leading-edge thinking.” It was in [00:02:00] business matters, but what that says is I research a lot, I weigh evidence, and I do come up with a point of view, hopefully something that’s helpful to society. And I do have a background in policy. I love policy—economic, social, developmental, environmental—and that informs how I see the world. In my old job, I used to read executive orders and bills, get excited about that. I still do. This is me and the many multitudes that live in me, Christina. Christina Gebel: Wow, that’s incredible. I am, one, really touched by your words about being an Easter people, and then I have a background in policy, too. Oh, you Christina Ampil: do? Christina Gebel: I do. In maternal and child health. Christina Ampil: Oh... Christina Gebel: and I just value it so much, and I think, you know, you’re talking to a true policy person when that excites them, to read [00:03:00] those somewhat dry documents, so I love that. That’s an incredible background to come to this work with, and perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the Dorothea Project. Not everybody listening will be maybe familiar. Like, how did it start? What are its main goals? What inspires the work of the project? Christina Ampil: Yes, I’m very happy to talk about the Dorothea Project. I admire the mission statement of this organization. This is the mission: “Our mission is to educate on Catholic social teaching so that we and our communities are empowered to speak truth and to act in defense of vulnerable people whenever human rights and human dignity are violated.” The Dorothea Project came together in May 2025. It started with about a dozen women who found each other [00:04:00] in Facebook groups of true, faithful Catholics who wanted to help the Church respond to the moment we’re in. Let’s replay a little bit the moment we were in at that time, and what I did was review my prayer journal. As early as March 2025, I was recording policy shifts and their impact on people who were suffering the consequences of such shifts. As the rule of law was set aside in different instances, there were mass layoffs of government workers, the elimination of funds for assistance, foreign aid, education, and medical research. The treatment of immigrants was particularly concerning. It created a pastoral emergency for those who were taken, the children and families they left behind, and the lives and communities that were disrupted. The membership model of the Dorothea [00:05:00] Project is an organization for and by women. Men are welcome to attend public events and public days of action, but the organization itself is animated by women, led by women, and driven by women. So that’s how it started. When we celebrated the first anniversary of the Dorothea Project in April, it had grown from 12 women to 1,300. Now we’re more than 1,800 women in such a short amount of time. We settled on “Rebuilding the Church” as our theme for the year. It is about living the call to prophetic action in a personal, but because it’s prophetic, also a public way. In the Gospels, Jesus tells the crowd that they are the light of the world and salt of the earth (Matthew [00:06:00] 5:14-16), calling for public witness, not just private virtue. Pope St. John Paul II developed that thought further for laypeople in Christifideles Laici. The prophetic mission belongs to the baptized by baptism itself, not by delegation from clergy. So, as I wrote in a Substack post, you don’t need ordination or special permission to act; it comes with the baptismal water. So bringing our faith into the public sphere is a big thrust. It’s what defines us. For example, because of the coming elections, we created a guide for voters to think through their own discernment about who they vote for and how to weigh candidates. In fact, we came up with a candidate interview form, and we’re sending them out to all candidates. We’re non-partisan, so it’s to all parties and all candidates to ask them, “What is your view on the most important questions to us Catholics?” And we will be publishing the responses so that they’re available to Catholics and others who want to vote whole-gospel voting, not single-issue voting. And we have feast day actions as well. Next week, we shall be celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. That will be celebrated in a Mass right in Washington, D.C., at St. Peter’s Church as a way to signify that we are standing with our immigrant brothers and sisters, and that we are committing to immigrant justice and what that would require for us, followed by a prayer rally and a walk to Congress to meet with some of our representatives. That is our public witness, and we choose to do one every quarter. As you can imagine, it requires a lot of discernment as a group what we focus on each quarter. Christina Gebel: That’s incredible. What a beautiful movement of the Spirit, first of all, to take something from 12 to thousands, and I’d be remiss not to point out that the Gospels and the work after the Resurrection started with 12 people and then grew to— Christina Ampil: Oh my gosh, yes. Christina Gebel: —millions and billions. So you can definitely sense that the Spirit’s at work in the multiplication of people drawn to this cause, and perhaps you could tell me a little bit about who within our faith has inspired this work. Christina Ampil: We have three patrons: Servant of God Dorothy Day, Servant of God Thea Bowman, and the Sorrowful Heart of Mary. Dorothy Day built houses of hospitality. She stood up for the rights of workers. She did not wait for others to initiate. She was an initiator, and she did not fit the mold of what we think about holy, pious saints. But she lived Catholic social teaching to her very core. Sister Thea Bowman taught us to see African Americans in our church, because saying that she too felt at some point motherless and neglected, even as a faithful member of the church. And so she reminded the bishops when she was a speaker before them in a conference that if there are people missing around the table, they ought to go out and bring them back to the table, and she famously ended that speech by having the bishops all hold one another, and they sang together “We Shall Overcome.” And Our Lady of Sorrows, like those of us who said yes for life, she honored her commitment and stayed through pain and suffering, such as everything that we witness now, in order to witness to the love of God. Christina Gebel: Yeah. Those are three incredible patrons. And just a word about Thea Bowman: The moment that you’re describing, when she talks to the bishops, is able to be found online, I’m sure somewhere on YouTube. And it was something that I watched, actually, probably only a few months ago. Unless you know who Thea Bowman is or have a particular interest in her life and her witness of faith, it’s easy to not have come across that talk as a Catholic. And for those listening, it is easily one of the most powerful moments in Church history, for me at least. And to see, again, just this very concrete manifestation of the Spirit in her words, and in how it brought the bishops round further [00:11:00] to all the things that she was talking about. So I’m so pleased to hear that you all have selected her among Dorothy Day and Our Lady of Sorrows. Christina Ampil: So Dorothea— Christina Gebel: Dorothea, yes ... Christina Ampil: is a very wonderful portmanteau— Christina Gebel: Oh, okay ... Christina Ampil: of the two servants of God. Christina Gebel: Yes. Yes. Christina Ampil: I was very taken by the words that Servant of God Thea Bowman had asked to be put on her epitaph. It simply says, “I tried.” She tried. It counts for a lot when we make a first movement to say, “I think I’m called. I’m gonna try.” I was really moved by that. Christina Gebel: I didn’t know that about her epitaph, and wow. I just need to sit with that fact for a moment. And it reminds me of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes too, because—and I’ll speak personally here—especially with [00:12:00] the broader policy challenges that we’re facing right now. A lot of people say, “Can I really impact this? Can I really do anything meaningful to really stem the tide of what we’re seeing?” And, when I think of the phrase, “I tried,” a few loaves an

    Episode 16: A Family-Centered Response to Immigration

  2. Sep 1

    Episode 15: Thriving as a Family in Everyday Life

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. This is episode 15, “Thriving as a Family in Everyday Life: What Families Can Do to Live with Intentionality Every Day and in Their Communities.” Welcome, everyone, to this episode. I am so excited to have the pleasure of speaking with Stephanie Malia Krauss today. She is a mom and has also recently written a book that is very relevant to this season’s topic of “Radical Family,” where families are making bold choices to live out their faith. And I think one of the ways that we can define “bold” is by really thinking intentionally about how we live our family lives. So, I’m so excited to be here with Stephanie, [00:01:00] and if you’d like to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are personally, as a mother, as a professional, and kind of what led you to this writing journey. Stephanie Malia Krauss: Thanks, Christina. Yeah, I’m so excited to be in conversation with you. And for folks who are listening, this is such a sweet connection. Christina and my husband went to college together, and she reached out to me after learning about my journey through him, and I’m so grateful and touched. And I feel like if we had gone to college together, we would have been friends. And so, I hope folks feel the intimacy and ease of that kind of quick connection while we’re talking. So I am the mama of a tween and a teen. So my boys are 13 and 15. And if we think about the context of their childhoods, just to put it in historic perspective, they were [00:02:00] in third and first grade when the pandemic happened, and now they are going into eighth and tenth grade. And so their whole lives have really been defined by a level of volatility and disruption, and then also innovation and acceleration that I just don’t have the experience with when I think back to my own childhood. And we’ll dig into what it means to parent intentionally and create stability out of our beliefs and values when you have kids who are so deeply influenced by so many variable, rapidly changing forces. My husband and I have been married for a number of years that he could tell you. I can’t quite remember, but we’re coming up on 20 at some point in the next couple. So, around 20 years we’ve been together, and live in the St. Louis area, which is wild [00:03:00] for me. I grew up in New Jersey and lived all around the country and never imagined myself a Midwesterner, but my background is blended. It is in education and social work, in human development, and then I also spent a number of years professionally thinking about workforce development and higher education. And so the big questions of my life and work, kind of my vocation, have been: What do we need to be both ready for a world that is changing and challenging, and well? Because if you’re ready for all of these things that are so complex and hard, but you’re not enjoying life, like you’re only enduring it, that’s not a good life. And so what do we need so we can thrive, and what does thriving really look like? And as a mom and somebody [00:04:00] who has been a teacher and a social worker and a coach and all of these kind of youth-serving roles, most of my professional work is thinking about that in the context of our kids and how we really protect and defend their childhoods so that they can not just endure life, but enjoy it, and then also the grown-ups who are taking care of kids. While I have Catholicism by affiliation and ancestry, it’s not the direct faith that I practice every day, although we talked about a shared love for the Jesuits and a lot of other incredible Catholic thinkers and activists and doers. But all that to say, I’m really excited about this idea, thinking about radical family and shaping a family in a shifting landscape. Christina Gebel: Absolutely. And I really [00:05:00] enjoyed in our pre-conversation just hearing about, yes, this connection that you have to the Catholic world and also just the faith-filled threads that have weaved their way into your family’s lineage, and maybe we’ll get to talk a little bit more about that as well. In terms of our conversation today, one thing that struck me in a previous episode’s conversation with two wonderful theologians was that while the Church has incredible teaching on Catholic social teaching, it also has teaching about the family. There hasn’t yet been as much done on a parish community level about, okay, how do you really live family life with intentionality? One of the hard things about calling this season Radical [00:06:00] Family is that we tend to go to the extremes of these big, bold choices, incredible things, which we’ve talked about on various episodes. But really, the other incredible thing that families do is just live their day-to-day life navigating this modern world. Just so many parents are asking a lot of deep questions and appealing to their faith, their values, their fellow communities, and really asking, How do I wanna live out our family’s mission and vocation on a daily basis in this ever-changing, and you used a great word, “accelerating landscape?” What were the maybe moments, years, experiences that led up to the start of writing the book? Stephanie Malia Krauss: Yeah, it’s a really good question, and it does take us back to COVID to really understand what my writing and work life has been, which has really been patterned off of what I’m hearing from adults who are caring for kids all across the country, and then what I’m experiencing in my bones myself as a mom as my kids are getting older. Back in the height of COVID, at the time when we were still sterilizing our groceries with masks on, when we really didn’t know anything and it was the scariest point, I had my first book come out, and it’s called Making It: What Today’s Kids Need for Tomorrow’s World. So here at this kind of moment of crisis, I come out with a book that is talking about the future, and I go on a basement book tour because, of course, nobody was going anywhere. And so I’m connecting with people only via screen to talk about the world that is to come, and a couple of things happened in those conversations. The first was that people would see my background was in social work, not just education, and invariably somebody would text or chat and say, “Hey, I know we’re talking about the future, but I’m afraid that our kids or I am going to burn out or give up before I get there. What do we need to be well right now?” So there was an absolute struggle for kids and adults to be thinking about the future when the kind of weather, the storm that we were in, just made the visibility impossible. And then the second thing that happened was I really wanted to get to know what was happening in the lives of these people who I wasn’t with. I wasn’t in their communities. I couldn’t fly or drive to be with them. And so I began to live poll them, and every single time that I would log in, I would ask, “How are your kids? How are your families? And how are you?” And Christina, I ended up continuing to do this poll. I still do this poll every single time that I talk to any group. So across six years, what I have found is that every single community, no matter where they are, no matter what their demographics are, kids and adults are overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed, and tired. And so my work focused on what do young people need to be ready, then transitioned into what do they need to be well. I wrote my second book called Whole Child, Whole Life that really was attending to the child and youth mental health issues that we were seeing just crop up and figuring out what do we as adults need to know, as parents need to know about pediatric health, about developmental science, about how kids learn, how they’re supposed to play, how they’re supposed to grow. All these things. Sometimes we learn more about our cars or computers than these kids that we’re charged with raising, right? There’s no good manual. So that was Whole Child, Whole Life, but there was still something missing because—the family, the unit, the parish, the community—there was this need for collective care, because it wasn’t just kids who were overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed, and tired. It was also their parents, and their teachers, and their counselors, and their pastors, and their grandparents, and, collectively, universally, we were all depleted. And so that led to the writing of this last book, How We Thrive, because what I understood was that our normal is not natural. We are far from home. We are far from how we are made to live and learn and work. So if you want to think about this from a spiritual component, the very ways that God has designed us to be living, and loving, and playing, and growing, and sleeping, and moving, and creating—all these things, what I think about as our human essentials or our evolutionary endowments, these kind of primal birthrights—they’re harder to do right now. And when we can’t tap into them, we actually can’t tap into the very things God gave us to keep us healthy, and happy, and whole, and to help us learn and live and work. And so How We Thrive ended up becoming a deeply personal and provocative journey for me as a parent and as a person, about this deep need, this radical need, to rehumanize my kids’ childhoods, rehumanize how I worked, how I lived, and to work to do that professionally as well, because we have these beautifully, again, God-given capacities that are of our body, and our mind, and our heart, and our spirit that are the very things that are supposed to be helping us evolve and also endure the really hard things and enjoy the really good things. When we’re tapping into community and belonging, or celebration and contribution, or good sleep and good food, or play and wonder,

    Episode 15: Thriving as a Family in Everyday Life

  3. Aug 5

    Episode 14: A Faith-Filled Lens on International Adoption

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 14, “Taking a Faith-Filled Lens to International Adoption.” So, welcome everyone. Welcome back to season two. I know that we have talked about adoption already on season two, and now we’re going to take it in a slightly new direction with Shauna and Sankalp, who are here today. Also, very good friends of mine, near and dear to my heart. People I look up to, both as friends and as faith-filled people that try to discern their path in life. And I’m so pleased to have them here for this conversation to talk about how they made the decision to adopt internationally. So, with that, [00:01:00] Shauna and Sankalp, would you like to introduce yourselves? Shauna Morin: Yes. Thank you, Christina. We’re so happy to be here. My name is Shauna Morin. Sankalp Ranji: My name is Sankalp Ranji. Shauna Morin: We’ve been together now for almost nine years and met actually through your prior guests, the Currans. So, there’s a connection, too. My background professionally has been for a long time in higher education. That’s actually what brought me down to the research triangle in North Carolina. I was here to pursue my doctorate in higher education. My work there led me into a nonprofit space focusing on interfaith engagement and pluralism in our democracy. And I am very recently a stay-at-home mom with our 2-year-old, almost two-and-a-half-year-old son, Kiran. Sankalp Ranji: I moved to the U.S. about 12 years ago now, or it’s been a long time, and came here to study at UNC. I [00:02:00] work in the tech sector. I work as a product manager, and I’m just loving every minute of the last one year, specifically that 2-year-old. Yeah. Christina Gebel: Absolutely. Thank you both for making the time, and perhaps we’ll get right to our conversation. I know that I already said that you internationally adopted your son, but perhaps you could take us back to the beginning. Tell us about that time in your life when you were discerning whether to adopt and what those conversations were like as a couple. Were there any elements of faith or spirituality that came up? What kind of reservations or hopes did you have? Shauna Morin: I think, pretty soon after Sankalp and I met, we both felt pretty quickly that this relationship was going somewhere permanent. We were both a little bit older, and we had a lot of these conversations on the front end of dating. At that time, [00:03:00] I shared with Sankalp that I had actually never been too certain that I wanted to be a parent. I have a very distinct memory, actually, of being around 12 years old and telling my dad that I wasn’t going to have kids because there was too much wrong with the world, and I didn’t want to bring a child into a world that was so broken, something along those lines. My family will tell you, I was never really a child. I’ve been an old soul, and maybe that is reflective of that truth. But I remember very vividly my dad’s response being that we make the world better by raising good humans as parents. So that was always in my mind. Fast forward to the two of us having these conversations, and I wanted to be honest and upfront that this is something I was never really certain of. And also that a path forward that seemed viable to me was adoption and having the opportunity to care for somebody who [00:04:00] was already in the world. So that was not my hard and fast only way, but that’s where I had historically been and was bringing sort of those leanings into our relationship. Sankalp Ranji: Yeah. And I’m from India. As any Indian person would say or tell you, you have pretty big pressure from your family, extended family. Everyone wants you to have a child. And also, I think, I never imagined a scenario where I would not have a child of our own. So having a family, it just was like, yeah, that is definitely a thing for me. And when I met Shauna, that was one of the first things that we discussed. Yes, I am interested in having children. Whether it should be our own child, whether it should be an adopted child, was not a point in my head, but I knew that I wanted to have a family with Shauna. Eventually, once we got married, once we started, we obviously wanted to have a little bit of freedom in the beginning, taking her parents all the way to India and did a lot of different things. But once the dust settled down, [00:05:00] like we did realize, oh, the clock is turning really fast and we are almost like running out of time. So, we started having discussions about having children, and that’s where, okay, do we want to have our own or adoption? For me, personally, I’m Hindu. Not really practicing Hindu per se, throughout Hindu mythology and all, there have been plenty of examples where people have had adoption and stuff. And so it’s not really an alien thing. Once I started having the conversation with Shauna, that’s where I like, okay, this is this is it. This is an important conversation, and I’m glad we landed on this. Shauna Morin: To fast forward a little bit to the conversation point Sankalp is talking about, so at this point, we’re married, we’re really thinking about like our lives potentially changing and growing our family. And by that point, I’ll echo Sankalp in saying that I really felt this is something I want to do with Sankalp. So this is an interesting learning for me. It’s one thing to have feelings about parenthood when you’re on your own, and it’s another thing when you’re part of a couple and you see how the two of you function together. I had this growing instinct that this is something we would do well together and that I wanted to do with him. So I think that was a big part of the conversation. We talked about having a biological child versus adoption. I think, although I wanted to be open to that, I had a lot of reservations, some practical, related to my age and what it might require of us to try to go down that path. So, the reservations I had were not inconsistent with the sort of thought process I named earlier. So I was really grateful that Sankalp was so open to that being a path we could pursue and it could be a chosen path for us. And that’s ultimately where we landed. Christina Gebel: Thank you so much for sharing that. And as you all were doing your intros and talking about these early stages, I kept thinking about all the things that Raman and I have in common with you both, of course, Indian culture being in our interreligious or intercultural marriage. But there’s also, Shauna, you and I have talked a lot about feelings going into parenthood. And I personally have had feelings where I wasn’t always sure. I was also an old soul growing up, but my reservations stemmed from probably really a lot of bad babysitting experiences. So, I didn’t have younger siblings, but when I went to babysit, I remember having a lot of anxiety about that. And just also being older and getting married, slightly older than maybe other peers and wanting to have that time where you are child-free at the beginning of your marriage and you can be married and go on the trips and be unencumbered in those ways. So yeah, there’s so much there that I resonate with in my own personal journey, and I’m grateful for the both of you in sharing that. Moving along to the choice to adopt internationally, I’d like to hear about how you intentionally chose international adoption as opposed to other routes that people come to adoption. Shauna Morin: I think I was the first person to propose adopting from India, and retrospectively I don’t know if this ended up mattering as much as I thought it might. Sankalp’s whole family, extended family, nuclear family, they’re all in India. My thinking was we live here in the US; by default, my family will be very involved in this child’s life in the process of us bringing this child home. And I thought that if we went through the process in India, that would facilitate Sankalp’s [00:09:00] family also getting to be intimately part of the process because it would require us to go there. And that would actually be our first meeting point someday. Also, there will be a lot of cultural connections, and we might talk about this more when we explain the process to you, but there’s a lot of focus, rightfully so, on when you adopt internationally, how you’re going to help that child understand the culture of origin. And so those connections are baked into our family. So, in some ways, it’s almost like it’s not a strictly international adoption for us. It will be for Kiran, right? He lives here; he was born somewhere else. And so surely it is an international adoption. But we’ve talked with folks who have gone through this process when no one in the couple is from the adopting country. And for them, it’s very different; like, you swoop in, you swoop out, you’re probably only in that country a few times. There’s a lot [00:10:00] more work that needs to be done to fulfill that role of cultural stewardship for your child. And this felt more possible and feasible for us. We were familiar with traveling there. We knew we had a home base, and we knew we would be able to provide some supports pretty readily even though it was a quote unquote international adoption. Sankalp Ranji: Shauna has answered that question very nicely, as nicely as she could, but there’s no other way to acknowledge the fact that within the Indian culture, adoption is still not a very acceptable thing. As we were going through the process, we learned that, yes, domestic adoption in India has increased significantly, and that actually has led to a sharp decline in international adoption from India, which is great. That means that children are getting a loving home. And so that’s awesome all over. No doubt about that.

    Episode 14: A Faith-Filled Lens on International Adoption

  4. Jun 29

    Episode 13: What does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families?

    Christina Gebel: Welcome to The Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 13: What Does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families? Welcome, everyone. We have two very special guests today, both of whom I deeply admire for their work in the field of theology. We have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Julie Rubio and Dr. Jake Kohlhaas. They have done much work in the field of theology as it relates to family. As we know, season two is focusing on the family. It’s called Radical Family, and it’s about families making bold choices to live out their faith. I thought, what a great [00:01:00] time in the season to zoom out a little bit and see what the Catholic Church has to say about families living out their faith. I couldn’t ask for two better people to talk to about this topic. So, with that, Dr. Rubio and Dr. Kohlhaas, would you mind introducing yourselves? Julie Rubio: I am currently a professor at the Jesuit School of Theology, which is part of Santa Clara University, but currently in Berkeley, California. I’ve been here for about eight years, and before that, I was at St. Louis University for about 20 years. Family has been central to my work from the very beginning, even as I define myself as a social ethicist. It was really in planning my own wedding liturgy and my wedding that I first started developing an interest in marriage and family. It was the liturgy that really [00:02:00] opened that up for me, and ever since then, I’ve just been fascinated with this tradition and excited about the possibilities for families in Catholic social ethics. Jake Kohlhaas: Yeah, and I’m Jake Kohlhaas. I am a professor of moral theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. I’ve been here for 12 years and have a couple books and edited volumes on family. It’s been what I’ve been doing since my dissertation back at Duquesne University, particularly around parenthood and trying to think about a theology of parenthood. More recently, that’s taken me—yeah—a bit more into social ethics and definitely into history, which is an endless investigation that you can keep going forever if you want. So that’s where I’m at now. Christina Gebel: Yes, thank you. And that’s a great segue to the first question I wanted to talk to you all about today. So, I put two and two together when I cracked open one of the edited [00:03:00] volumes about church teaching on the family, and I met Julie when I was a theology student at SLU. I don’t think theology has ever truly left my brain, and I was so thrilled to see that volume, and it definitely scratched a theology itch that I’ve been missing for a really long time. You both contributed. Jake, I believe you were one of the editors of the volume. And what I liked about it was the commentary on different encyclicals or church teaching on the family, but it went quite far back, and it goes pretty far into the present too. So I was just wondering if you could start us off by distilling that volume into kind of where the arc of theology has been in the church. [00:04:00] What has the Church focused on in its messaging, in its theology on the family? Jake Kohlhaas: I can start. So I was co-editor with Mary Doyle Roche on this volume. The idea of Catholic family teaching is something that kind of came up in my book, Beyond Biology. It’s in the later chapter of thinking about teaching on marriage and family in the parallel way that we think about Catholic social teaching as a developing body of doctrine that grows and expands over time. The challenge is that the documents around marriage and family, you have to read them against their own protesting that they do not in fact change. But if you read them like social documents, there is quite a bit of movement and development going on through their history. So that’s what I set out to do, and it was just so great to be in a field where we found lots of collaborators who were excited about the project and wanted to do it. The way it’s structured, it starts back in 1880 with Arcanum [Divinae Sapientiae], which was by Leo XIII, and then moves forward [00:05:00] throughout time. And one of the things that’s obvious right at the start is if you start stacking up the documents on marriage and family alongside Catholic social teaching documents, it’s the same popes, roughly the same years writing them. They really fall pretty neatly in order. It gets a little more complicated in more recent history, but I would say just the overall short summary arc is that when you start in the late 19th century, most of the concern is really the papacy attempting to assert itself in the face of new liberal democracies that have spread throughout the world. And so, a lot of the concerns are political. They’re trying to really stake their claim in education, stake their claim around marriage and divorce, and insist that these are the purview of the Catholic Church, and that secular states have other legitimate areas, but not these. And so you get a lot of that in the early documents around the place of [00:06:00] education, marriage, and regulation of divorce. And quite a bit around women’s particular place connected to children and home life. By the 1930s, though, you get more interest in actual love in marriage, and the relationship of marriage, and that’s really the part that grows into the 1960s and Vatican II. You get some really remarkable changes with marriage as no longer a hierarchical relationship, but as a more mutual relationship. You move from a Pope Leo, who says that women’s place within the home is part of divine law, to John XXIII, who says women have discovered their own dignity, and it’s different than what the popes had thought. So, there are some really interesting developments. And then as you move towards the present, one of the things I pick up is I think in the 1960s things really take a sharp turn towards reproductive moral issues with Humanae vitae and artificial contraception and things like that. So, family becomes much more concerned with reproductive ethics than it had been. Then more recently it becomes more about sexuality and gender issues, and then as we know at the present, issues of same-sex relationships and how that affects parenthood and inclusivity in the church. And that’s really up to the present, where these questions of who’s included and how are they included and what counts and why remain pretty significant issues for the church today. Julie Rubio: Yeah, and ... The volume is a great contribution. It’s just wonderful to even have the words “the Catholic family teaching” that we didn’t have before. And there are so many great people writing in the volume. I wrote on Familiaris Consortio, so, Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Exhortation from 1981. But I largely agree with the trends. One thing I would start with is that what to me is really unique about Catholic social teaching, Catholic family teaching, is that family is always seen as a part of what is called the social order or society. So it’s never understood as this private, nuclear, romantic, whatever all of that is. That’s just not our teaching. So it’s always seen as one of the many intermediary associations, is the word, in society similar to, or like churches and schools and clubs and nonprofits and that kind of stuff. And it’s prior to government, or the state has its own reality, which means it has its own rights that government has to protect and its own responsibilities. So I think that’s constant, and yet what grows is the sense that not only is it just an important part of the social order, but it has a social mission, and that particularly comes to the fore with John Paul II. It’s not enough just to love and procreate. That’s just the beginning. And he’s really explicit about that, and I find that’s even surprising to people who think they’re JP II Catholics, right? And because they’re used to reading Theology of the Body. No, he really underlines that, and then that just carried [00:09:00] forward with Francis and beyond. And the other part Jake already alluded to this, is about love. I think you can always from the beginning see this idea of mutual support and growth and holiness. So I think sometimes people will say, Oh, Catholic teaching on family is only about procreation. That’s never been true either. It’s always had something else there. But love, th- this was actually a debate. - Is love necessary for a legitimate marriage? Before, no it wasn’t. But it becomes essential, and then we have the, that beautiful language of the intimate partnership of life and love, and I feel like we’re still exploring, honestly, what that intimate partnership is and what it means. This to me is something that we say but, beyond the language of self-gift, which I think is both helpful and not helpful what does that look like over a lifetime? I think we’re still figuring that out and we’re figuring out a new way only really since the 1980s have we had married theologians who can speak to this with experience. And then the [00:10:00] other part is the growing egalitarianism, that’s just really clear. Sometimes I hear younger traditionalist Catholics citing Casti Connubii, and it’s yeah, you can’t do that. That is just not our teaching anymore. Male headship is not our teaching. There is a real egalitarianism which is really actually evident in the marriage rite, which I would argue is less gendered than a lot of our social marriage rituals, including engagement rituals and things like that. You have to read that stuff and put it into the liturgy ‘cause it’s not there except for in few little places. But I would also agree that especially since the 1990s and concern over same-sex marriage, and more recently gender identity, there has been an assertion about gender difference. I would s

    Episode 13: What does Catholic Theology Say About Modern Families?

  5. Jun 5

    Episode 12: International Faith-Based Service as a Family

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Moderate Catholic. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 12 in our second season of Radical Family: International Service as a Family. So welcome, everyone, back to season two. I am thrilled to be here today with two very good friends who have made bold choices in living out their faith as a family. Both are medical doctors, Dr. Anne Berry and Dr. George Stablein. And while that is their professional title, I affectionately know them as Anne and George, and we have a lot of really cool overlaps in our life. But I’m going to let them introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about who you are in the here and now, who your kids are, how old are [00:01:00] they, and then we’ll jump into this amazing choice that you made as a family. Anne Berry: Thanks, Christina. It’s very exciting to be here with you, too. I’m Anne. I am a family doctor and also have a second specialty in preventive medicine. Our kids are Susanna and Louisa. Susanna is 15 and a freshman in high school, and Louisa is 12 and she is in sixth grade. George Stablein: And I am George Stablein. I am a community pediatrician in the area, and that’s my only specialty. Christina Gebel: It’s good. It’s a good specialty. So, George Stablein: thank you. Christina Gebel: Having it is great. So we have had some interesting overlaps, and I officially met Anne and George at the commissioning ceremony for [00:02:00] Maryknoll Lay Missioners. And could one of you start us off by just telling us a 10,000-foot view? What is Maryknoll? Anne Berry: Maryknoll is a hill in New York in Westchester County, named after Mary on the Knoll. And that is where the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters both have their headquarters. Those are orders of Catholic priests and sisters that they’re kind of focus is service in different countries. And then Maryknoll Lay Missioners grew out of both the Maryknoll priests and Maryknoll sisters. It started off that they invited lay people to come in service alongside them in different countries where they were serving. And then over time, that grew into a formal lay service program. And then that, over time, grew into its own separate organization, which is [00:03:00] still very closely affiliated with, always partnering together with both the Maryknoll priests and the Maryknoll sisters in New York and all over the world. But it is its own separate organization where lay Catholics like us can serve in different countries. Christina Gebel: Awesome. Yeah, I actually didn’t know the fact about the hill, so that is something I learned today. I didn’t know that it was actually a knoll, so that’s good. Mary on the Knoll. Okay. Anne Berry: Yeah. Christina Gebel: I love that. So we met at this commissioning ceremony in Ossining, New York, and I didn’t officially know you before that, despite the fact that Anne did the same residency program as my husband, although prior to his being there. Tell me a little bit about your lives before you officially got to Maryknoll Missioners. Like, what was happening in your life? What were some things that led you to that path? Anne Berry: [00:04:00] It really started before I even met George when I was a volunteer with Jesuit Volunteers International at the time, JVI, in Managua, Nicaragua. And I did that after I graduated from college, before I went to medical school. And while I was there, it was when I first learned about Maryknoll. There was a community of Maryknoll sisters. My Jesuit volunteer community made a retreat one time at the Maryknoll sisters’ community. And they were wonderful and lovely. And while I was there during the two years, I was in Managua through the Ben Linder community of like international volunteers and like faith-based volunteers and people working in faith-based organizations. I met a married couple who had young children and they had also previously been with Maryknoll. They weren’t at the time when I met them, but that’s how I first learned about that. And I also met another family that was not with Maryknoll, but I think they were with the Mennonite Central Committee, but they were also from the US and they also had [00:05:00] young children and were living in Nicaragua and living there with their young children. So, it was really those two families, especially, that I always really admired them. I just thought, “Wow, that’s such a great thing that they’re here.” Not just like me, “Oh, I’m just here for two years.” I’m before I then go back to my regular life kind of thing.” But they were doing this as like their regular life and their kids were there and they were living there and growing up there. So that kind of planted that idea in my mind. And from that time, I always had a dream to one day be a Maryknoll lay missioner. And especially I thought if I ever do end up having a family and having kids, I would definitely want to do that. George Stablein: And Anne and I met in medical school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Penn State. When we were early on in dating, we had a conversation one night and Anne said, “If you are interested in us being a long-term couple, just know that I’m going to be living internationally again someday.” And so, consider yourself [00:06:00] forewarned. I was going to be the small-town pediatrician, going back to my home area where I grew up. Just what I had always envisioned for myself. And so, yeah, there was a part of me that was, “Oh, maybe she’ll forget about that.” And then there was a part of me that was just that kind of could be interesting. But I don’t know, I couldn’t see myself doing that. I don’t know. And, fast forward quite a while, we did get married. It was about 10 years after we had gotten married, and she reminded me of that warning that she had given me. And that’s how it unfolded. I honestly do give her a lot of credit for me being a part of that experience, for me having that experience, because it wasn’t something that I had really ever envisioned for myself. But I can say on this side, and even while I was there, I was very glad that I did do it and that we did do it as a family. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s incredible. That’s bringing up for me not only some things I laid on the table very early on when I met my husband, which is maybe a topic for another episode, but also just we have an overlap with Nicaragua [00:07:00], too, and I have spent time in both Managua and León. And León is such a beautiful city. So that’s really cool. And so, as you’re telling this, I’m drawing up vivid images of when I was there and was also there in the capacity of Catholicism and faith. So y’all made this first big commitment, what was it about that particular point that made you say, Okay, now’s the time, now’s the right time to pursue this in earnest. Anne Berry: I had been waiting a long time, and so I really wanted to do it as soon as possible. One of the things I wanted to do most was bring our kids and have this be an experience as a family with our kids, so we had to have kids first. So, we had them. That took a couple years, because then we had one, we had to wait a couple years. So basically that was it. It was like, okay. Now after our second child was born, we decided to wait until she was a little bit older, I guess for different reasons. But one of the biggest [00:08:00] reasons for me was I knew, Maryknoll’s a three-and-a-half-year commitment, and I knew that that may be as long as we would do it. I wanted both of our kids to be old enough to literally remember it. I didn’t want it just to be like something that Louisa kind of thought, yeah, that happened when I was a baby. I don’t really remember any. So when we arrived in Tanzania, she was three. Christina Gebel: Anne, you really had these examples that you had encountered earlier on in your life of families that had done this with kids. I’m curious for George. Obviously, you said yes in a very big way to what had been brewing in Anne for quite some years, but who did you really look to or draw from as you approached that period? George Stablein: That’s a great question. Honestly, that was a bit of a challenging time for me. I didn’t really have any other examples of this in my own life other than Anne. And I knew Anne had done it. I saw how clearly it affected her and how [00:09:00] deeply moving for her the experience was in Nicaragua. And so that was inspiring to me, but it was quite different for me, such a radical change in my plans. I was baptized Catholic, but didn’t really attend church at all except for weddings and funerals and baptisms, essentially, until I was in college. And so, when Anne and I were planning on getting married, I decided to go through the RCIA, or I guess OCIA now, program. It was important to me to be able to take Communion at my own wedding, so I do feel like, as a younger adult and kind of through our early marriage and time together, I would say I was inspired by my church community as well. We went to a small kind of mission parish in central West Virginia. That’s where we were living when we decided to go to Maryknoll. And there were some families that were very devoted Catholics; their children were very much involved in the church. And when we told them about our consideration for [00:10:00] Maryknoll, they were very supportive. Christina Gebel: Yeah, that’s great. Even if this was like writ on your hearts, and as part of your mission as a family, I imagine that it was a little bit daunting during that time period, too, because something that you were saying Anne earlier about your youngest, Louisa, being able to remember it, so some people say, I’m going to delay going to the national parks till my kids remember it, but this was a, this was a bigger journey, so to speak. How did you approach this with the kids and your own families and your own professions also that yo

    Episode 12: International Faith-Based Service as a Family

  6. Apr 28

    Episode 11: Attending the Synod as a Family

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 11: Journeying to the Synod as a family. So, I am really excited for this episode today. I have a good friend here, Casey Stanton, who wears many incredible hats, but I will let her talk about all the incredible things that she does, and she was so kind to come on the podcast today to talk about not only just the work she does, but how it relates specifically to her family life. So, with that, Casey, welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself? Casey Stanton: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited. I’m Casey Stanton, Co-director and Co-founder of Discerning Deacons, which is an [00:01:00] organization seeking to serve the discernment in the Church about women in the diaconate. So, we’re trying to grow the imagination and serve this question, which has been alive and studied in the church for the last 50 plus years. Christina Gebel: Amazing, and we could have a whole episode series archive of audio, just discussing the tremendous efforts that are going on with Discerning Deacons right now, which if you haven’t gotten in touch with them, you absolutely should. But we’re actually here today to talk about that work in light of a decision that you made, and it directly relates to the Synods that were happening globally. And so maybe you could just start us off, first of all, what is a Synod? And then in true Church language awesomeness, what is a Synod on Synodality? [00:02:00] And tell me how you came to be involved. Casey Stanton: Great question. So, this was very much at the heart of Pope Francis’ vision for how the Church was being called to live its mission in the world today, to try to invite the Holy Spirit to be heard through every corner of Church life and out in the world, and to ask the question afresh: What does it mean for the church to journey with you in your life wherever you are, whoever you are, whether you’re in the Church or not, if you’re outside of it? So, it was a process and a path to try to open up a space for renewal in the Spirit. The first Synod is in the Acts of the Apostles. It’s really constitutive of the church. It’s saying, okay, once Jesus left, how do we continue to discern together what is the will of the Spirit for the community of those seeking to follow the way of [00:03:00] Jesus? And so, a Synod is a path of gathering, discerning together, and trying to find the way forward. So, in the Council of Jerusalem, there’s this debate about will new members have to be circumcised. And it’s really a crisis of identity for the community. And the miracle of it is, they come to this kind of middle way, they’re negotiating their life together. What are we gonna do? And what’s funny is that in the next chapter, they do something very different. It just shows that Church politics has always been messy. Doing life together has always been messy. But the beautiful part about doing life together, inspired by and grounded in the witness of Jesus and the Gospels, is that we do trust that we’re not doing it alone, and that it’s not a purely human endeavor. And so, I think what was pretty bold and faith-filled was when Pope Francis called for a global Synod on this theme of Synodality. It was really rolling the dice on the Holy Spirit and the people of God and saying a Church structure that has a lot of distance between bishops and those who make decisions and the people of God in their daily lives and their struggles isn’t a Church that’s walking together. And so, it was really a journey that, you know, in the wake of abuse scandals, in the wake of so many challenges facing our world and humanity, was an invitation for bishops, especially, to turn their attention towards an intentional exercise of listening to ground their own leadership. And as Pope Francis would often talk about, he wanted bishops to smell like their sheep. And so, as Pope Francis has since passed, I think one of the miraculous things about the election of Pope Leo the 14th is that Pope Leo in his previous role as the head of the Dicastery of Bishops, was deeply involved in the Synod. He participated in all the sessions, and there was a sense that Cardinals had elected someone who was going to continue on this path of Synodality. Pope Francis is onto something. This is the way the Church is called to move in the world, that it can’t just be bishops in diocesan offices making decisions that then people follow, but that actually, there’s this more complex dynamic of how we are discerning how we are living the mission today. So that was the Synod and Synodality, and Pope Francis called for it in 2021. It kicked it off, but he had been on a steady path of this, transforming this entity of the Synod. It had been a Synod of bishops, and he was encouraging it to be more participatory all the way up to the Synod on Synodality, where he was really saying we need to reflect on this as the way we move in the world so that we can hold difficult topics. We could learn to have conversations without canceling each other or resorting to enemy camps. I think it’s an invitation for the Church to be a model for humanity, for [00:06:00] how to live with conflict and how to move as a global community in all its complexity. I think the Synod I could talk about all day, which is part of what we’re talking about today, but I could just see the imagination of that, like what Pope Francis was doing throughout his papacy as I was following it. And it felt like a thing worth trying to trust in. And we’re at a time where it’s hard to trust in institutions. It’s definitely hard to trust in people that have power and in our leaders. And part of what was remarkable as the Synod began was that it was truly an invitation to everyone. Everyone was invited to try to find a way to participate, to initiate participation, and to participate. That, to me, rings of the Gospel: this radical welcome and invitation to meet everybody where they are and hear where they are and figure out how we’re connected. And that’s a good use of our time to try to do that. And I [00:07:00] think in the US, there’s skepticism. I think some people felt that this was going to lead to changes that we want. And other people were afraid, oh, this is just some Trojan horse kind of process that’s going to make the Church wildly more progressive and change all these rules and stuff. And it was neither of those things. Instead, it really is an invitation to try to become the people of God and try to learn in this generation what that means. So, I was deeply compelled by the vision and just went all in. As we were just getting started with Discerning Deacons, we went to the opening mass of the Synod around October ‘21. And we were journeying with women who had participated in the Synod on the Amazon, and that really was like them starting to carve the new path of deeply participatory processes that surface what are the needs and hungers of the people of God that need to be [00:08:00] addressed and prioritized for us to move forward. And so, meeting these women who’d led the process across the Amazon and who’d participated in the Amazon Synod as observers—non-voting members, but part of this experience—I just really felt, “Oh, this feels like a way to let the Spirit in.” And it invites us to think of ourselves more as a people on the way, as a pilgrim people as opposed to a people that have all the answers or as just part of an all-knowing church that already knows where we need to go and what we need to do. Christina Gebel: Yeah. Yeah, that’s huge. And thank you for laying the groundwork for explaining that because as somebody who wasn’t as closely involved or even, I think I was aware that it was going on, but the Synod on Synodality piece, I could see my Catholic nun elementary school teacher being like, “You can’t define a word with using the word!” I was stuck on this, what does it mean. I love the part when you brought up that Pope Leo was in attendance. I remember Father Jim Martin saying, Oh, Pope Leo was at my table at the Synod. At the time, he was a Cardinal. Wow, what a great person to have at your table, because he then became Pope! Great seating arrangements. So, Casey Stanton: Yes. [laughs] Christina Gebel: So you, Casey, were just really onboard with what the vision was, but then you made a decision to be a part of it in a really tangible way. And that also involved your family, which is what this series is about. Many families just sat in the pews and said, Okay, what do we need to do? Sure. Great. Maybe they had an opinion, but your family is special. And that’s what I would love to hear about from you in your own words. Casey Stanton: Yeah. So, in terms of our family in this season, my kids were eight and 10. So my husband and I had often dreamt of could we do a missionary season in our family life? We both want to root our own family life deeply in the heart of the Church, and we want our kids to see that the Church is bigger than our local parish, as much as we love and are anchored in our local parish. I think we both were deeply shaped by immersive experiences abroad. My husband spent some time in El Salvador when he was pretty young. And it really deeply shaped his whole worldview and his understanding of the urgency of the Gospel around people’s material needs. And the work of peacebuilding is not abstract. So, it was a dream in the heart of our marriage, and we just weren’t ever sure when the time would be and when to disrupt your life. You’re raising your kids, you’re doing your jobs, you’re trying to do right. And, actually, I was on a retreat with a group of women—it’s a dangerous time—just with some dear, close, old friends. And at the same time, one of my oldest friends from chil

    Episode 11: Attending the Synod as a Family

  7. Apr 2

    Episode 10: Fostering & Adoption through a Faith-Filled Lens

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode 10, “A faith-filled lens of fostering and adoption.” Welcome back, everyone. I am really excited to be here with you today, still in our second season called Radical Family, where families are making bold choices to live out their faith, and I am so pleased today to have two dear friends, local to where I am in North Carolina, who have made the faith filled decision to grow their family, and I think you will really love to hear their story, hear them reflect on that time in their life. So with that, I will hand it over to Heather and Patrick Curran. Would y’all like to introduce yourselves? Heather Curran: I’m Heather and I [00:01:00] am a nurse and a lifelong Catholic. I was raised in Southern California. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick in college when we were both at the Jesuit University of Loyola University Chicago. Woo. And then we married and moved to North Carolina where we have been for a long while now. And we have been married creeping up on 20 years, but about 17 time really flies. I’ll pass it on to Patrick. Patrick Curran: Thank you, Dear. Christina, yeah, it’s great to be doing this with you. I’m Patrick Curran. By way of introduction I’m Heather’s husband and in the foster care journey. I have to say she’s definitely been the leader, but I’m certainly an avid and willing participant so glad to be doing that. As she mentioned, we’ve been married for almost 20 years. And I think for this context, it’s relevant to say that our faith is maybe part of what brought us [00:02:00] together. And our faith is what led us to our faith community here in North Carolina when we moved here in 2020 and our Heather Curran: In 2010. Patrick Curran: Thank you. In 2010, too many zeros. Our decision to become foster parents and the journey through all of that has been supported by that faith community in incredible ways and continues to be so I’m grateful for all of that. And I’m sure we’ll obviously unpack that more and a little bit about our background and how we came to that. Christina Gebel: Yes. And absolutely we will unpack it ‘cause I know personally, just by the pleasure and honor of knowing both of you, that there’s a real discernment journey there and a great story. And I would say a very happy, not ending, but a very happy present that we will get to, certainly Patrick Curran: Ongoing. Christina Gebel: Yes. A very happy ongoing presence. But perhaps you could take us [00:03:00] back to the beginning. I knew you all when you were. In one of the 17 years, and you were think thinking about growing your family and you were attempting to do that. Can you tell us about those years and share as much or as little as you’d like to about your journey to starting a family? Heather Curran: I think from the beginning, both Patrick and I were very interested in having family. That was always a part of our conversations when we were dating. Our way of dating, I think, was always thinking about the future and I don’t think either of us were good at being casual daters. From the time that we were growing in our relationship, what would a family look like if we were to marry, was always a part of the conversation. I knew beginning in college that there was potential that it would be a challenge for me to get pregnant. [00:04:00] So that actually was a conversation that we started having before we were even married. And if that were to be a reality, what would that be like for you, Patrick. And would that be something we could maneuver together? In our marriage at the time, both of us very easily said yes, adoption would be a very reasonable choice for us. And something that even if we were able to have our own kids, we would be open to talking about. And I think that really helped when later on down the line, that became a reality. At least for me, it was very comforting to know that this is something that we had been in alignment on, from the get-go. Fast forward, we’re married, we were open to having kids from the beginning. It was just something both of us had always wanted and imagined for our lives. And it was not happening. And not happening. So the first year, nothing, but that’s okay ‘cause we’re trying to figure [00:05:00] out how to be married, and that’s its own challenge with its own ups and downs. And fast forward probably five years we had settled in North Carolina and we were really in a place where we felt stable as adults. We had a home and well before we had hoped for a family, it was fine that we weren’t, ‘cause maybe we weren’t totally prepared, but now we felt we were in a place where we really were ready to be moving forward with that and it wasn’t happening and we were ready to investigate the next steps are there things that we can be doing to make it happen. So, we went to a fertility specialist and did some workup. And for women out there that have been through this, that piece has its own emotional journey. I think for me, I went through HSG ultrasound. It’s a very vulnerable experience, and I feel [00:06:00] comfortable sharing that here because I know for other women, this is also a point at which a reality you’re afraid of can become very real. And for me, while I was in the ultrasound, I just, I knew based on what was happening with the people around us and the healthcare professionals, that there definitely was a challenge. It didn’t even feel right for me while it was happening. And I was like, okay, this is this is a reality. And I think I had that nagging feeling for a long time, but it was in that moment on the table, and I started to sob during that experience and Patrick was right there, and I could see it in his eyes that he could see the pain. For me, I’ll say it was grief. There was a lot of grief in that moment. And then it completed. We didn’t talk about results. And Patrick and I just went to lunch together in Chapel Hill, and he just created space for me to be grieving and listened and received that. And I will always [00:07:00] be grateful to him that through this whole process, he has had his own things to process, but has always let me have my space and listened and been patient and asked first what it was and I needed what I needed in those moments and what was it that I felt comfortable with or was hoping to do next. In a relationship, that has given me lots of peace and made it, I think, a much easier, hard journey than it could have been. When we got the results, we had a great physician who is an expert in his field. But he started talking about IVF and for me, it has just been a gut feeling for me that was not a route that I wanted to take. And in that conversation I had said that, and he immediately said, is this a [00:08:00] religious thing? Because it doesn’t need to be. And I really bristled at that. Because for me it was a faith piece. It wasn’t [that] my religion has this rule. It wasn’t about I can’t do this as a Catholic. For me it was, I spiritually, feel, my gifts need to be used in a different way and our resources and how I want to move forward, I want to put in a different direction. So it was a negative experience for me in that moment. And again, Patrick, let me lead in how we moved forward from that, which was a wonderful gift. And maybe I should give him some space now that he offered all of that to me in those moments. But that was the point at which the conversation about moving forward with adoption [00:09:00] or foster care became very real, and we had to start making decisions about what that journey forward would look like. Christina Gebel: Yeah, Patrick, before you jump in on your reaction to that, I just wanna first thank you, Heather, for your vulnerability and sharing that, and for folks who know me personally, I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said. Just being on the fertility journey myself with my spouse, and also opting to not do IVF, not simply because it’s a rule, but just because it wasn’t for me, and having a supportive partner in that is just everything on that journey. Patrick, I’d love to hear what all that was like for you from your perspective. Not only accompanying, but witnessing everything that was happening and for me at least, in a very bodily way, [00:10:00] it’s happening to one spouse. But in your case, what was going on in your mind and in your faith conversation? Patrick Curran: Yeah. Thank you for that, Christina. There’s a number of things there that I’ve want to maybe touch on, and I appreciate you recognizing as a spouse, as a partner as someone who tries to live as a faithful person, I believe that God calls us to honor other people, right? And particularly in a Christian marriage, there’s a way of doing that. I think it’s very easy for the husband, for the male partner to be lost in that conversation. And to say I’m doing all this for my wife, or I’m like Christ calls us to sacrifice yourself for your bride. And I think it’s important that we not overlook the fact that men come to their marriages with dreams and ideas and [00:11:00] what all that is. So, maybe I can share a little bit of that. Going all the way back, as Heather mentioned, we had talked about this when we were dating and just the one little piece of color I would add there is that we both had at least in conversation, talked about wanting to have a big family. And, Christina, you know me well, you know that I love things that are big and chaotic. Yes, I can take things that are small and make them large very quickly. And I have 19 first cousins, and I love each of them in strange and unique ways, and always had dreamed that we would have a large family. And, in my own discernment process of my life and my career, that was a big component. I love the idea of big fam

    Episode 10: Fostering & Adoption through a Faith-Filled Lens

  8. Mar 24

    Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community

    Christina Gebel: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community with Others. So welcome, everyone. This is our inaugural episode of Season Two on the Moderate Catholic. We have wrapped up Season One, and we are now moving on to Season Two. And I teased the topic a little bit earlier, but it is radical family, and the topic, radical family, is about families making bold choices to live out their faith. And I’m so excited to kick off this season with four very dear friends of mine whom I met at a stage in my life and continue to be inspired by. And they’re going to talk to us today about what it means to live in intentional community with others. So, with [00:01:00] that, let’s get right down to it. My dear friend Jonathan will introduce himself and his wife, and then we’ll pass it to Carla. Jonathan Wittig: Good morning. Thanks for having us here. I’m Jonathan, and this is my wife, Lisa. And we have three children: Caroline, who’s 11, Ben, who’s nine, and Katherine, who’s seven. We were longtime Chicagoans and are now new residents in Minnesota in the past couple of years. So, I’m excited to be here today. Carla Lents: Hello. Thanks, Christina. We are Ryan and Carla; we actually grew up together in Indiana and then moved to Chicago and have lived here for over 20 years. We have two sons, Caleb, who is 15, and Micah, who’s 10. Yeah, really excited to be here and talk about this. Christina Gebel: I am really excited to have you here. So, the reason that I know these folks, these awesome folks, is through a program that I continue to hold near and dear to my heart, which is Amate House program in Chicago. It’s a [00:02:00] faith-based service program where folks who graduate college can decide to dedicate a year or more as a fellow in service at a job in Chicago. And I was blessed to do that between the years 2007–2009, and that’s how I got to know Lisa as one of my house coordinators and eventually Ryan came on as program staff. I’m really glad that our faith connected us in this way, and what a better launching pad to discuss the topic of living in community. So, the first thing we’re gonna talk about is just how y’all came together. How did you get to know each other? What time period in your life? What were you doing? Enlighten us into how this all came to be. Lisa Wittig: Yeah. So, as Christina mentioned, I was working at Amate House back in 2007 when she was a fellow with the program. I had recently graduated from the program myself as a volunteer. That’s actually where Jonathan and I met. We both volunteered [00:03:00] together for a year, and I was working at Amate House. And then a few years into that, there was a staff transition. Ryan actually came on staff and started working at Amate House. We were in the same role, working with the program, supporting the volunteers. Ryan quickly became a good friend, and Jonathan and I met Carla and hung out with Ryan and Carla a few times. And at one point, Ryan came to me, and he had this crazy idea. Would you be interested in living in intentional community again? Certainly, a unique situation because we were married, and Ryan, I believe at that time, you had Caleb, who was a baby. And so just thinking about that idea, I was like, oh my gosh, you’re crazy. I wasn’t completely opposed to it, but I was like, you know who you should talk to? Jonathan has actually mentioned this before in our relationship to me as something he is interested in, and he’s also the dreamer and the doer in our relationship, and I am like the planner and executor, so I was like, Ryan, you need to connect with Jonathan. You two need to talk because I don’t think I’m the one to carry this dream to fruition, but it sounds exciting. Ryan Lents: Maybe I can pick up from there. I would say, for me, I think part of the curiosity of this was that a big part of our role at Amate House, Lisa and I, was being these house coordinators, and so it’s a very unique role. It’s like being a campus minister and an RA, although we didn’t live with the fellows. But we were a primary point of contact for them and would do things like office hours, community nights, retreats. So, we really accompanied them throughout their experience, and I would say vicariously lived through their experience of community, all the ups and downs. And it made it very rewarding and very challenging, and as Lisa mentioned, we had transitioned from a life stage of being right out of college where we had lived in community. I had not done Amate House as a fellow. I had been at a different program called Nazareth Farm in West Virginia, and that was a deeply formative time in my life. And I would also say I was pretty immature. There were a lot of things I needed to learn about life and about living with other people and about just how to grow up, and community was so deeply shaping in that way. I came to really realize how much I had missed it by being in this role where I was walking with people that were experiencing those ups and downs. Initially, I thought this is just something that you do when you’re not tethered to marriage and children and mortgages and things, but then I interrupted that presumption and said, what would it look like to actually go on this type of journey? And to think about this stage of life. And so that was the launching point of some conversations with Jonathan. We became fast friends, bonded around a lot of things that we had common interests around, but I think that idea of saying, hey, what would it look like for us to discern together and to think about how we could live out our faiths and our commitments as husbands, as wives, as friends in this unique stage of life as we’re starting family where there are a lot of just really big pressures and challenges and difficulties. It’s hard to live in the modern world. There can be a lot of really unhealthy messages that we get about individualism and doing things on our own. I got those messages really loud as a twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old. And those messages are just as powerful when you’re twenty-eight, twenty-nine, especially as you’re thinking about some of the real adult things that come on at that stage of life. I think we found a lot of common challenges and ideas that really started to make this thing seem like it could be real. Jonathan Wittig: Yeah. Just adding on to that, when I was in college, I was involved with a lot of intentionality within the campus ministry department at my university. And so, my roommates and I would try to live out community together in our own ways, even counting the toilet paper squares to see how much of stewardship we were living out on a day-to-day basis. A little crazy. But my year of Amate House was a challenging year where our sense of community was difficult. The service in the community was wonderful. Amate as a whole was wonderful, but I had a very [00:07:00] challenging year. But the concept of community living—I believed in it strongly. My simple explanation is Jesus lived in community. He was with these other guys, and they just went around together. And I’m sure that some of the disciples were frustrating to live with on a day-to-day basis. But they found the goodness in it. And they probably rose higher from the challenges that they faced on a day-to-day basis. And that’s how I hold community living, even when we chose to do it, or even in college or in Amate House, like there were a lot of hard days. But I think that those, like, you learned patience, and you learned kindness, and you learned self-reflection. And you hopefully are growing and not just so self-involved all the time. And I share that perspective with Ryan. I think that’s one of the many challenges we face right now in our common societies, that we’re all kind of self-involved in. But yeah, that made me want to continue to live this beyond this ate volunteer year because it makes total sense. I wanted to be able to have that community as we raise our kids. And there’s more to that, but I’ll share that [00:08:00] later. Christina Gebel: Yeah, so I really love what you all have been saying, and Ryan, I was like, you and I did Amate House. I can relate to thinking like this is something you do in your mid-twenties, and then you do other things and include other people and even little people and bills and all that stuff. And as we were talking, I’m realizing that we were kicking around this phrase “intentional community,” and the five of us have an idea of what that is, but to anybody new to the concept, maybe just a few reflections from you all on how you would define that. We use this phrase, “intentional community,” in conversation, but what is it? And in this pre-decision period of making the bold choice, how were you thinking about that? What kind of values were coming up for you? Ryan Lents: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that phrase, “intentional,” is really important because I think with so many things in life, we can have a lot of hopes and dreams for things. But for me, the piece about intentional is, what are the routinized kind of ongoing daily practices that reflect a commitment? And I think the same is true in marriage. It’s like you could talk about intentional marriage. Just because you make a commitment on one day doesn’t mean that on day 1725, that it’s gonna be as easy. It takes an intentional effort and commitment to say, yes, today I will love my spouse and animate those commitments that we made on the day that we exchanged rings. I think the same is true in community. Our experience was one of a lot of active discernment where we would do a good job of framing big questions that we were living into with our lives. We didn’t just say yes one day and then cut a check

    Episode 9: Living in Intentional Community
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Ratings & Reviews

4.8
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice. christinagebel.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Topics that deepen faith and inspire action.
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Christina Gebel
  • Show Website
    The Moderate Catholic