Скачать или смотреть The Moderate Catholic: Inaugural Episode

Welcome to the very first Podcast Episode of The Moderate Catholic!


Launching this has been a (good) itch in my side for quite a long time now, and it feels great to finally “scratch” the surface of podcasting.


I am including the transcript below for your listening/viewing ease.


Thank you for supporting me in this big step.


~ Christina


Episode 1 Transcript (includes links for further reading)


Hello, my name is Christina Gebel, and I am with the Moderate Catholic. This is our first episode of the Moderate Catholic, and I'm very happy that you're here. So today I would like to tell you a little bit more about myself, my background, what we hope to do here in our time, listening to the Moderate Catholic, and discussing the topics as well as what we're gonna focus on in the next episodes.


So, a little bit about me. I am a public health professional, specifically maternal and child health, and have been doing that [00:01:00] for about 11 years now. And in addition to that formal training, I have also been a doula for about 14 years now .


But that's actually not the expertise that I am bringing to this podcast at the outset.


I also have a deep love for spirituality and also my Catholic faith. So much so that I majored in theology and undergrad, and within theology, I focused a lot on ethics, particularly sexual ethics. And just developed a really deep love of the Catholic Church and many of the documents it's written, and I started to get more and more into social justice and particularly Catholic social teaching.


Some of the main figures out [00:02:00] there in Catholicism regarding social justice became heroes of mine, and I went on to try to live my life in a really intentional way.


So fast forward to today, which is a lot of years between today and undergrad, but I have remained in my Catholic faith, and one thing that has been a little bit of a challenge to me throughout these years post undergrad has been finding spaces where I can get together with like-minded Catholics and discuss not only my own thoughts and feelings, but also our faith and how it relates to the world that we're in. I noticed oftentimes that as I was moving from city to city and quote unquote [00:03:00] church shopping, which if you're not familiar with the phrase “church shopping,” it's when you go around to a bunch of parishes and try to figure out which one you feel most at home with, which resonates with a lot of your interest and values.


And granted, it's all Catholic, but for those who are Catholic and listening, you might know that some parishes have, let's say, a take on what to focus on within Catholicism. And so for me, the thing that was important to me in selecting a parish throughout these years since undergrad has been where can I find people that want to be in and of this world and also want to be Catholic and want to lead with compassion and social justice, and always putting vulnerable populations in mind whenever we're [00:04:00] making decisions that could affect them.


What I found is that, in every major city I've lived in so far, which is outside of where I grew up in Cincinnati…I've lived in St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, and now Durham. I found that, there are certainly just your run of the mill Catholic parishes with, let's say in aging population that aren't as active, but just go along, have Mass, have the sacraments, have a ladies' auxiliary function that sells, baked goods, a fish fry, all the good things that we remember, or at least I do from childhood.


But there's also some really traditional leaning parishes, and those seem to be. Very popular right now and growing in number. Those tend to be a [00:05:00] little more conservative. And also, there are parishes, which have more of a progressive, if you will, or a social justice leaning, and they might have a rainbow ministry for L-G-B-T-Q Catholics, they're not afraid to go there with the issues of the day, like immigration and so many of the hot button issues that actually we're experiencing right now in spades, they're not trying to shy away from the world or create an alternate world, or create a world as though it should be according to them. But more so a world as it should be according to the life and teaching and example of Jesus Christ.


And [in] those parishes, I feel good and at [00:06:00] home because there's a tension there, and it sounds odd in a way to say I feel good in a tension, but it kind of is, I think, where our faith lives. And that is in the tension of we have this 2000 plus year old religion, the Roman Catholic Church, and a lot has happened in 2000 years, and some of it looks familiar, some of it's slightly nuanced with different players and names and faces.


But a lot has happened, and we find ourselves as Catholics just continuing to wrestle and wrestle with taking the foundational values that Jesus laid out, again in his life example ministry and teachings, and trying to be in and of this world a...