Church Life Today

If you attend Mass regularly, maybe you’ve thought that your parish is a little less full than it had been before the pandemic. Or, maybe you’re someone who has noticed that you yourself haven’t been attending Sunday Mass quite as consistently as you did before. Some parish and diocesan leaders have some evidence about their own Mass attendance numbers to confirm the perceived drop in participation, but many of the rest have hunches or our own unscientific observations. Regardless, for everyone who notices and is concerned about the decrease in Mass attendance, the question of whether or not those who are not there will come back lingers.Thanks to a new report from Vinea Research, we now have survey data to support or challenge our assumptions, and to give us some reliable predictors about future Mass attendance, as well as church giving, faith in God, and prayer. My guest today is Hans Plate, founder and president of Vinea Research, which seeks to support the Church by helping it better understand those it serves through expert market research and insights. He joins me to discuss the findings of his team’s study on “The Impact of COVID-19 on U.S. Catholics.”Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In his apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, St. John Paul II wrote that a Catholic university or college is “a living institutional wtiness to Christ and his message, so vitally important in cultures marked by secularism.” He continues by saying that everything in these Catholic institutions should be conducted in harmony with the evangelizing mission of the Church, including offering an “education in a faith-context that forms men and women capable of rational and critical judgement and conscious of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” I wonder if you might agree that Catholic colleges and universities that seek to form young adults holistically and intentionally in this manner are perhaps more important today than they ever have been.My guest today carries the responsibility of helping provide just such a Christocentric formation in an intentional college culture. Dr. Joe Wurtz is Dean of Students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, where he also serves as Executive Director of the Gregorian Fellows. A graduate of Benedictine himself where he earned a BA in philosophy, he also holds a master’s degree in Higher Ed Administration from the University of Kansas, and a doctorate in Higher Ed Administration from George Washington University. As Dean of Students, he oversees programs and activities involving residence life, student development, intramural programs, student health services, counseling, student activities, and career development at Benedictine. He joins me to talk about the vision of student formation at a Catholic college in our day and age.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Christ did not rise from the dead so we could gorge ourselves on marshmallow Peeps. Gorging is an act of singular enjoyment, and it only takes a moment to look around our world to see how disastrous it is when people just fill themselves with what they want… besides, it would be just gross if all we wanted was to be stuffed with marshmallow Peeps. The true measure of Easter joy is the degree to which the disciples of the Risen Lord indulge in the good of others. The celebration of Easter is ordered to communion, so much so that Easter works centrifugally through Christ’s disciples: we move the joy outwards.Using Pope Francis’s beloved term, Easter is the season for “missionary disciples.” The heart of the mission is Christ, the source of the mission is his Resurrection, and the power of the mission is the Holy Spirit he imparts to us. With this mission, we, his disciples, bring him to others and work to unite all in him.This is a special episode of Church Life Today. Only very rarely do I create an episode without a guest, but when I do it is usually to offer a special seasonal episode like this one where I try offer a series of reflections that, I hope, are of some interest or use to you in your prayer, in your life, for your imagination. So today I want to spend this time with you asking, How do we embrace and live out the mission of Easter? The short answer: By heeding the Gospel and then exercising our own “missionary creativity” to become the disciples Christ frees us to be. And what I want is to offer is some in exploring this more fully by talking about four ways to fulfill our Easter mission––one way from each of the four Gospels.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

With the right kind of care, support, and attention, the last days and months of an aging loved one’s life can become a source of new life for those who draw near to them. My guest today witnesses to this splendid, glorious truth in her new book about accompanying her father through death into life.Noreen Madden McInnis is the director of liturgy and spirituality for the Diocese of San Diego and author of the book Keep at It, Riley! The title of the book is a saying passed down through generations of Noreen’s Irish Catholic family––the Maddens––who never quit in the face of challenges in life and never quit on each other. In her testimony of journeying with her father and her mother toward their deaths and, ultimately, into the love of God, that resolve and resilience is shown to be a profound commitment to the dignity and beauty of the aged, the infirm, and the dying. Noreen’s book is part of the Magenta series from New City Press, which is committed to healing the ills of polarization by uplifting visions that heal and unify, especially for and in the Church.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

When we, as Christians, engage in evangelization that seeks to transform our culture, what metaphor tends to inform our thoughts and actions?Frequently, we land on the metaphor of “war”––we are engaged in a “culture war.” Have we thought, though, about the implications of that metaphor, about what it might do to us and what it might do to “the other” in our eyes? If we do think about that, perhaps we see that this metaphor, which has been widely adopted, might in fact be at odds with a truly Christian vision of ourselves, of others, and of engagement with culture more broadly.Fr. Aaron Wassmen has been developing ideas about the inaptness of the “culture war” metaphor for the evangelizing mission of the Church and for Christian’s missionary activity. He spoke on this topic recently at a conference on Transforming Culture hosted by Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas. The title of his presentation made his conclusion pretty clear: “It’s Time to Bury the Culture War Metaphor.”Fr. Aaron is vicar general and director of formation of the Glenmary Home Missioners. Before serving in leadership in his community, he was pastor of Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Windsor, North Carolina.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

It’s your friends who break your heart.That’s the title of the article by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic. It is an incisive and enlightening piece that also made me laugh out loud. Friendship doesn’t get the kind of attention that other forms of relationship tend to get. It is not studied as much in psychology. It is not examined like family relationships for the sake of explaining the way someone is. It is not fretted over like romantic relationships or marriage. It is not obsessed over for the sake of maximizing productivity like the relationships in work culture. And yet, as Senior writes, “friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age. It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow in time.” So Jennifer Senior writes about friendship, but from an unexpected perspective: from their end, the dissolution of friendship.In addition to her work with The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior has written for the New York Times and New York Magazine, among other publications. She is also the author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

When you hold a position of authority in Catholic education and you believe that the #1 goal of Catholic schools is to evangelize, then that affects everything you do. It affects who you hire and why, what your priorities are, how you think about curriculum and culture, and what you value in the hard decisions you have to make in times of trial or crisis. You give an account of why the kind of education you provide matters by what you place as your #1 goal, not just in print or in theory, but in practice.My guest today is shaping one of the largest and oldest Catholic school systems in the United States with precisely that goal in mind. Thomas Carroll is Secretary of Education and Superintendent of Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Boston. A longtime leader in education and in community development, Mr. Carroll has been leading Catholic schools in Boston since 2019.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Do you or someone you know feel burned out by work? Have you questioned the place of work in your life, and how it balances with everything else? Do we work to live? Do we live to work? Do we reach for and sometimes touch value that is in our work and also somehow beyond our work? What is the meaning of work?Here’s another question: Can philosophy help us find meaning and purpose at work? That is a question that my guest has been asking, and he is helping college students and other people out there in the world to think about and investigate the meaning and the good of work.Paul Blaschko is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he now also serves as director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society within the College of Arts & Letters. Dr. Blaschko is deeply committed to matters of practical philosophy, and of doing philosophy in public, helping others to engage the world philosophically, as a way of life. In the past couple years, he developed and has been teaching a wildly successful course for undergraduate students on “The Working Life.” He is also now building a program focused on finding meaning in business through the liberal arts. Along with Meghan Sullivan, Dr. Blaschko is the author of The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. He joins me today to talk about what’s going on with work, how we think about and approach work, and what difference developing a personal philosophy of work would make.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Missionaries venture to sites unseen, to open up the Gospel in new ways. The hard to get to places are the special province of missionaries, who exercise both creativity and commitment to get where others have not thought to go. We might think of missionaries sailing across seas or hiking across mountains, but a missionary’s vision and aim can take on very different forms than those we see in movies. Sometimes, missionary work means recognizing the obstacles that impede access to the Gospel, or the Church’s tradition, or spiritually edifying resources that enrich people’s lives, and finding ways to lower those barriers to grant access where access was not previously granted.Such is the work and mission of the Xavier Society for the Blind, which came into existence over a century ago in response to a prayer that “God would inspire someone to take pity on the blind of the country for whom there was no Catholic book to be had.” The person who prayed that prayer became a co-founder of the society, and since then the Xavier Society for the Blind has been creating resources for blind and visually impaired persons, now most notably through braille reading materials and audio books.My guest today is the Executive Director of Xavier Society, Mr. Malachy Fallon. He joins me to talk about the mission of the society, the impact of its work, the model for evangelization that it provides, and the collaboration of a great many who help open up the treasures of the faith to those whose access might otherwise be obstructed.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Catholic schools extend and make present the life of Christ in his Church. Yes, Catholic education serves the students who are nurtured in its classrooms, but as we know the parents and families of those students are also often nurtured and even newly evangelized through the school. Catholic schools can be one of the most important ways in which the Church responds to the concrete needs and desires of a given community, and by doing so, draws people into intimacy and communion with Jesus Christ.Today I welcome to the show Dr. Matthew Vereecke, Superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Diocese of Dallas, who will share with us not only his vision for Catholic education, but also the way in which his growing and diverse diocese activates the Church’s evangelizing mission through its schools. Dr. Vereecke is in his seventh year as superintendent in Dallas, a role which he assumed after nearly a decade as a Catholic school director and as a principal.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.