Rev. James Martin
speaker
109 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Rev. James Martin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Do you want to pray before we start? By all means. Yeah. So, loving God, we thank you for bringing us together. We ask you to help us to proclaim the gospel and open our lips that our mouth might declare your praise. Amen.
Yeah, and I think that's key to understanding who he was. He was a Jesuit for most of his life, a priest for just almost as long. And that's the first way that we Jesuits came to know him. Interestingly, he had something of a checkered relationship in the Jesuits because he was, by his own admission, he was rigid and authoritarian, he said. So when he was elected, not every Jesuit was happy.
In fact, in the conclave that elected Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, he was on the list. And interestingly, I was reading a piece in the Times that had a list of all the electors. And I said to a fellow Jesuit who was much older and who had worked in Rome, I said, who is this Jorge Mario Bergoglio? And this old Jesuit said he'd be terrible.
But, you know, he soon proved to be a real model Jesuit and was always very close to the Jesuits during his pontificate. And that's one of the ways I interacted with him and how I understood him. I think a lot of the stuff that he did could be mystifying to people, questions of discernment, freedom and difference. all Jesuit concepts. And so I think that's key to understanding who he was.
He was always a good Jesuit. When did you meet him for the first time? I met him for the first time after a mass at Casa Santa Marta, very briefly, and just shook his hand and he said, pray for me, reza por mi. And then really in earnest, in 2017, he appointed me as a consultor for the Dicastery for Communication, which is a very low-level appointment for the communications office.
And I was at a- Because of your expertise in podcasting and other- And when we were at the audience, I introduced myself, and he said, ah, I'd like to have an audience with you. And I said, oh, yo, tambien. And in September 2019, we had our first one-on-one meeting.
And it was really, I'll just be honest, it was really life-changing, just being with him, talking about these issues, and just feeling completely relaxed. He was very warm and friendly. One of the things I want to share with listeners and viewers is he was just a nice guy. He was just a nice guy, friendly, fun guy. And at the end of the meeting, I'd never spoken to a Pope before.
And at minute 25, it was a half hour meeting. I thought, oh my gosh, I've been talking the whole time about this one issue. Maybe he wants to talk about something else. So I said, Holy Father, what can I do for you? Meaning, you know, you want to talk about the American church or the Jesuits or something.
He said, you can continue this ministry in peace, which I found extremely encouraging and moving. And, you know, he didn't have to do that. And he didn't have to meet with me a couple of times. And we would exchange notes over email in his little kind of crabbed handwriting. How would you get those? Would you get those notes scanned via email? Yeah.
So I ended up getting the email address for his secretaries, which were different people at different times. And I would send him more formal notes, you know, like typed out and whatnot in Spanish or Italian, thanks to Google Translate. And they would send me back scanned PDFs of his handwritten note, which they would have to
transcribe or transliterate because it was like this tiny little handwriting. And then I would ask to have someone here to translate it. So that's how we communicate. That's how it works in the universal church. Yes. Yeah.
Well, yeah. And I mean, as you know, like Jesus, who taught with words and deeds, right? I mean, Jesus taught with gestures as well, not just words and teaching. Francis was very good at that. I remember that, you know, Ross, as you were saying that, that to me is the image that I'll take with me to my grave, which is him embracing that man with the skin condition.
You know, which called up Francis of Assisi embracing the man with leprosy, Jesus embracing people. You know, one of the great things was for me that it was natural. He wasn't doing it for show, right? Or I'm going to now do something that's going to impress people. This was who he was. He naturally reached out to people like that. But yeah, it made for good teaching moments, I would say.
And I agree. I think the visual is just as important as any encyclical that he did.
That's a great question. You know, interestingly, I would say that while those issues were in the forefront of a lot of our minds, I think for Francis they were secondary, the kind of hot-button issues. I mean, basically what he was trying to do, you know, in most of his homilies and his encyclicals and his apostolic pilgrimages to different places would just proclaim the gospel.
So most of his time he was just talking about Jesus, the resurrection, mercy, love. But I think it's a fair question. How far did he go? I think he went as far as he could, basically.
One of the things I learned when I was at the Synod, I was a delegate at the Synod, which is this worldwide gathering of Catholics, and we met in Rome in October 23 and 2024, was realizing how much he wanted church unity. And so some issues, women deacons, LGBTQ people, you know, all sorts of things.
You could see how much pushback there was from places like sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and, you know, even in the United States. And he said a couple of times, unity is more important than these conflicts, right? So I think he tried to open the door to the discussion about some of these issues without breaking the church, right?
I think, you know, one of the fundamental differences, I think, between Pope Francis and a lot of his critics, particularly in the church and sometimes even in the hierarchy... Sometimes even in the pages of the New York Times. Sometimes.
Was that he really spent time listening to people talk about their spiritual lives and had a real reverence for the activity of the Holy Spirit in the individual person's conscience. And so he really took that seriously. So... when he talked about discernment and listening to people and even in the synod and LGBTQ issues and in Amoris Laetitia, his apostolic exhortation on the family.
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