The Big Tent

Following threats of legal action, and restrictions on his freedom of movement and expression, the Italian-born, US-resident scholar of church history and politics Massimo Faggioli has landed in Ireland to take up his new post at Trinity College Dublin's Loyola Institute. So how will a US-born pope respond to what Massimo describes in American Catholicism as 'an army of zombie ideas that we thought were dead'?

Recommendations:

Antonio Spadaro, 'Trump & the Grand Theatre of the World,' in Commonweal Massimo Faggioli's latest Commonweal piece, 'Continent at a Crossroads? Europe and the rise of right-wing Catholicism' Geraldine...

How does the Church stay mission-centred in a machine-centred world? That question preoccupies Kim Daniels, Director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, who is also the coordinator of the Synod study group tasked by Pope Francis to report on how the Church is meeting people online.

'It's about more than just using tools,' Kim tells Geraldine, 'it's about being present and building relationships in the digital environment.'

It's a message she's taking back to the new pope, Leo XIV, as he drafts his first social encyclical...

Lana Turvey-Collins joins Geraldine Doogue in The Big Tent to share her story from facilitating Australia's Plenary Council to launching formation.org.au – a new national platform to support and connect leaders in formation across Catholic ministries. 'The more time we take to sit, be still and slowly listen to one another's story and share of your own story, the more connected we are and the more opportunity we have to experience what I dream about is God,' she tells Geraldine.

Learn more about formation.org.au Catch up on another new leadership program, Catholic Leadership Foundation, fe...

'The Amazon is bleeding, ecologically, culturally and spiritually. And still from within this pain, hope emerges.'

Mauricio López Oropeza, a prominent lay leader from Latin America, joined Geraldine Doogue for this year's 40th anniversary of the Hélder Câmara lecture series to reflect on how the Amazonian experience is reshaping global Catholicism. Bringing the voices from the peripheries to the centre isn't easy, as the Amazon synod showed, but can catholicity become the 'vaccine' against divisions in the Church and the world?

Thanks to Br Mark O'Connor FMS, the Diocese of Parramatta and...

In this first episode of The Big Tent, Geraldine Doogue speaks with outgoing Brisbane archbishop Mark Coleridge, about the surprise election of Pope Leo, the legacy of Pope Francis, and how the Church can offer a countercultural narrative amid polarisation and hopelessness in today's world. 'The only thing the God of the Bible is good at doing,' he tells Geraldine, 'is what seems impossible.'

Episode links:

Mark Coleridge's podcast series, The Navel of the Earth: Jerusalem in Time, Theology, and Imagination David Neuhaus's article in The Tablet, 'What is "hope" right now?' Launch...

We have a new Pope. Does a new era beckon for the Catholic Church in Australia and the world? Join Geraldine Doogue and an inter-generational cast in The Big Tent, hosting an honest, contemporary search that aims, in the prophet Isaiah's words, to 'enlarge the space of your tent'. Welcome!