From The Crusades To The Holocaust: Why History and Love Stories Matter

Religion, violence, anti-semitism, and the fate of the Catholic Church. All subject as contemporary as today’s headlines. To often we see these headlines and think about these issues in the moment, in the now. Yet to really understand any of these issues, begs for a deeper understanding of history.

And what better way to get that history, then in the storytelling of a great novel. That’s what James Carroll has been helping us with for years. Teaching us, while he entertains us.

James Carroll is a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University and a columnist for The Boston Globe. He is the author of ten novels and seven works of nonfiction. He is a winner of the National Book Award, the best selling author of Constantine’s Sword and his latest work is The Cloister

My conversation with James Carroll:

A spotlight on child abuse at the Horace Mann School

No matter how many times we hear the stories of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church, it’s hard to grasp that such things could go on, that they could go on for so long and that so many could be involved as both perpetrators and in the cover up.

Perhaps it's that people didn't want to believe. Like the story told by a victim in the new movie SPOTLIGHT. It the story of a mother, who, even after her son tells her of his abuse, still, out of respect, puts out cookies for the priest when he visits.

In business, or in any institution, it's hard to change culture. As Peter Drucker, has said of business, “culture eats strategy for lunch.”

What we’ve seen in the Catholic Church is a layering of cultures. The culture of the perpetrators, and the culture of secrecy of those that covered it up, combined with the broader culture that encouraged a respect for authority. Together they were a toxic combination

They certainly were at the Horace Mann school in New York, back in the 60’s and 70’s.   The story of Horace Mann was revealed by Amos Kamil in a scorching New York times Magazine story in June of 2012. Now he tell the full measure of that story in Great Is the Truth: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Quest for Justice at the Horace Mann School.

My conversation with Amos Kamil:

Gary Wills on The Future of the Catholic Church

If there is a single point of cognitive dissonance in our world today, it revolves around change. We love change. We think we like to embrace the new, and yet we fear change. We hang on to a the past, forgetting that the past, that feels oh so comfortable, is but a floating endpoint of much previous change.

So to the Catholic Church. For the Church, constant change has been one of its most basic things. Most everything catholics think about dogma and doctrine in the church today, was once revolutionary.

Clearly Pope Francis understands this, with his admonition that grace must overtake laws. That’s what distinguished historian Garry Wills writes about in The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis

My conversation with Gary Wills:

The Vatican: One Year After Francis

Winston Churchill one refereed to the former Soviet Union as an enigma, wrapped in "a riddle, surrounded by mystery." Much the same might be said about the Vatican. A large bureaucracy, competing political interests, the potential and reality of scandal and cover up.

John Thavis, has spent almost 30 years covering the Vatican. He walked the hallowed halls, was one of the "boys on the bus" on the Papal plane and understands both the human and spiritual side of this seemingly monolithic and often flawed institution.

Now free of daily reporting, he allows himself to look back in The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities, and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church.

My conversation with John Thavis:

A cancer on the Church..that didn't have to happen

Just recently we heard about tens of millions of dollars in cash being laundered in the Vatican. Clearly the Vatican and the Catholic Church are still imperial institutions, very much disconnected from the real world. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the almost twenty year history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

We often think about these stories on a very human, very tragic case by case basis. But from thirty thousand feet, the numbers are staggering. 500+ priests sent to prison, over 3 billion paid in settlements, single priests that have abused more than 200 individual children and these are just a few of the statistics.

How did this happen? How did horror and human degradation become so institutionalized, covered up and almost accepted from the Pope on down?

This is the story that Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Michael D’Antonio tells in his new book Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.

My conversation with Michael D'Antonio:

"Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." RIP

The New York Times in their obituary called him a "Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold." Andrew Greeley was all of these. “A Roman Catholic priest and writer whose outpouring of sociological research, contemporary theology, sexually frank novels and newspaper columns challenged reigning assumptions about American Catholicism.”

He was a true maverick who was willing take on all sides in any debate. He was not a fan of what the institutional Catholic Church had become, but was just as harsh on what he saw as "secular intellectuals."

I had the chance to speak with him, just once, back in 1999 on the publication of the second volume of his memoirs Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest. So much of what he said thirteen years ago still has relevance, and yet he was so wrong about the pace of progress in the Vatican, and in Latin America.

 Here is that conversation.

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