While there were prayer apps, apologetics resources and “theology nerd” podcasts, “we didn’t see a Catholic podcast that was more outward looking,” said McKinless, an executive editor at America Media.
“We wanted to create a space where there could be conversations about topics in the Church that are contested in the modern world and to not be afraid of bringing on people who weren’t 100% certain in their faith or 100% in the Church or were struggling with questions of Catholic teaching and their relationship to God and what it means to be a Catholic in the world today,” McKinless said.
Zac Davis and Ashley McKinless, co-hosts of the podcast Jesuitical from America Media, are pictured with Sebastian Gomes, the show’s producer, March 15. Davis is an associate editor and director for audience engagement and analytics at America. McKinless and Gomes are executive editors at America. (CNS| Keara Hanlon, courtesy America Media)
Building a space of encounter with a diversity of viewpoints, not simply Catholic ones, is a point of pride for McKinless these past five years. “We’ve made it a point to talk to Muslims, Jewish people, atheists, spiritual seekers,” she said. That’s a unique contribution to Catholic media, she added.
Another factor that contributed to Jesuitical’s initial success was narrowly defining its target audience.
Listeners could be young people who had recently graduated or finished a year of service work. Perhaps they had been involved in campus ministry, theology or youth group and are now living in a new city, where they are struggling to fit into parish life or Catholic life and “don’t feel like they have an outlet to talk about these things,” Davis said.
“We wanted to create a space to invite people in where we weren’t assuming that they didn’t know anything about the Church or that they had questions about the Church,” he told CNS. But “they just wanted to hang out and learn some new things, talk about spirituality in an inviting way. I think we’ve hit that market,” he said.
Today, the podcast has reached beyond that audience and attracts older listeners who want to know what young people “actually think” outside of formal Church settings, added Davis, who is an associate editor and director for audience engagement and analytics at America Media.
For listeners, no matter their age, the draw to the podcast is the Ignatian spirituality the show strives to cultivate.
The last segment in the podcast, called “As One Friend Speaks to Another,” is the faith-sharing part in the show where the co-hosts talk about where they’ve found God during the week.
“I’ve heard Jesuits come up and tell us, ‘You guys are modeling Ignatian spirituality in an entirely new way,’ which is great to hear because Ashley and I will be the first to admit we’re not experts in it. We’re not Jesuits. We’ve not done the Spiritual Exercises (of St. Ignatius Loyola). We are just trying to use this tradition in a modern, contemporary context,” Davis said.
Apart from their faith-sharing segment, Davis and McKinless said they way they select guests and examine news brings a Jesuit perspective to the show.
“Keeping our eyes wide open, reviewing (the news) the way the Examen reviews every day the lights and the shadows and trying to take that same approach to how you look at Catholic news is something we keep in mind,” Davis said.
Their innate curiosity about the world informs how they choose what news to cover and whom to interview.
“There’s really not a corner of the Church or culture or politics that we don’t think there’s a way in for us for and a way for us to find God working through God’s people in those spaces,” McKinless said.
Embracing Ignatian spirituality also means meeting people where they are. “We’re not going to wait until someone’s 100% on board with everything the Church teaches before we’re going to be willing to talk to them and have that encounter,” she added.
For Davis, one of the best parts about Jesuitical is the community that’s formed online through their Facebook group. “They’re people who are kindred spirits who found each other and help each other” and interact without any prodding, he said.
Podcasts are uniquely suited to building virtual community, McKinless said. And the two wanted to deepen that through a Facebook group, which now has more than 4,800 members. “It’s a very organic community. It runs itself and people are respective and constructive and charitable,” McKinless said.
Davis believes that the U.S. Church is experiencing an “upheaval of what Catholic life looks like.” While the focus in the past has been on the parish, young Catholics today are looking outside of the parish to find community.
“To be able to play a small part as we’re figuring it out in real time has meant a lot to me,” Davis said.
Jesuitical also has a group of 165 Patreon supporters, listeners who pay a minimum of $5 monthly to access exclusive episodes, private posts from the co-hosts, access to virtual reading groups and other benefits.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, McKinless and Davis hosted a Zoom reading group over four weeks discussing Pope Francis’ encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” for their
Patreon community, and hope to do more reading groups in the future.
Throughout the five years of the podcast, the show has gone through a few transitions. One of the founding co-hosts, Olga Segura, now works for National Catholic Reporter, and the show has a new producer, Sebastian Gomes, who also is an executive editor at America.
The changes have “forced us to keep the show fresh and ever-evolving” because “it is such a group effort that each personality does really shape the podcast,” McKinless said.
McKinless, 31, and Davis, 29, also are aware that their tagline is “young, hip and lay.”
“We’re getting less young and maybe less hip, so we’re thinking about what the next five years could look like when we’re solidly in our 30s,” McKinless said.
Both co-hosts are eager to get back on the road and resume live shows after two years of travel restrictions due to the pandemic.
And McKinless mentioned another hope for the next five years: Interview more U.S. bishops.
Jesuitical hosts have talked to Bishop Frank J. Caggiano of Bridgeport, Conn.; Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert E. Barron; and Seattle Auxiliary Bishop Eusebio Elizondo.
The goal is to “bring bishops down to earth for people” and “give bishops the opportunity to show their full humanity” to the Church, while modeling what a listening Church can be by having conversations with them, McKinless said.
Davis and McKinless shared advice for other Catholic journalists who want to build an online community: Pay attention to emerging forms media forms, narrowly define your audience, and consider the type of space you’re creating.
If young people “think it’s going to be a place of judgment, they don’t need anymore of that. They want places where they’re safe to ask questions, they’re safe to disagree, where they feel like their concerns are being heard,” McKinless said.
— Anna Capizzi Galvez, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis often warns about the dangers of gossip, likening tattlers to terrorists who “drop a bomb with their tongue” and “destroy the reputation of others.”
But hearsay and slander also pose a problem in the world of art and once led to the destruction of an extremely rare composition in the Apostolic Palace by the Renaissance master Bernardino di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio.
During a lecture Feb. 15 in Rome, Francesco Buranelli, president of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of the Holy See and former director of the Vatican Museums, presented a picture of what can happen when fierce family rivalries, a Counter-Reformation “cancel culture” and 500 years of “fake news” find the perfect target in a problematic pope.
Corruption, nepotism, having mistresses and fathering children were unfortunately common in the lives of several popes during the Renaissance as the temporal role and powers of the papacy grew.
However, it was the papacy of Pope Alexander VI, the infamous Rodrigo Borgia, that became synonymous with the abuses of the time.
One successor was so disgusted by his predecessor’s reputation, he abandoned the brand-new Borgia Apartments, decorated between 1492 and 1494 by Pintoricchio, and moved into a different suite of rooms spruced up by Raphael.
The Spanish Borgia family was a focal point of hostility in Rome, and “it’s easy to imagine how many stories that were true, partially true, falsely interpreted and pure fantasy” were fabricated and rehashed by their enemies and reformers, Buranelli said.
One particular story was that Pintoricchio used the pope’s young and beautiful mistress, Giulia Farnese, as the model for Our Lady in a scene painted over a door in the pope’s bedroom of the Borgia Apartments. The 16th-century Italian artist and historian, Giorgio Vasari, immortalized the rumor in his 1568 edition of the “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects,” saying the scene also featured the face of Pope Alexander, “who is adoring the Madonna.”
Buranelli said this claim also brought “long-lasting and obvious embarrassment” to the Farnese family, whose ascent to power was due to Giulia’s forcibly arranged relationship with the powerful Cardinal Borgia.
Responding to the Protestant Reformation, Pope Pius V brought his churchwide cleanup efforts to the Vatican’s art collection, too, sending countless pieces that seemed “too pagan” into exile, Buranelli said.
They even risked losing the Vatican Museums’ prized ancient sculpture of Laocoön, he said; but thanks to “the intelligence and farsightedness” of many cardinals, many pieces were saved by hiding them behind paneled niches or by “clothing” naked forms.
Pope Alexander VII, who sought to rehabilitate his papal namesake with his election in 1655, decided the “scandalous” scene in the Borgia Apartments had to go. But he saved two large, detached fragments depicting the “Head of Our Lady” and “The Baby Jesus of the Hands,” and sent them off to the art collection of his family, the Chigi.
In 1940, three descendents of the Chigi family visited a home in Mantua where the owner showed them a 17th-century painting of a pope kneeling before baby Jesus and Mary. The Chigi relatives immediately recognized the resemblances between the Our Lady and Christ Child in the painting and the fragments in their collection.
The painting solved several mysteries: It was an accurate copy of Pintoricchio’s long-gone wall fresco disparaged by Vasari, and it explained the original context of these disjointed fragments.
In an unexpected twist, the painting in Mantua had been secretly commissioned in 1612 by a rival family of the Farnese to taunt them, Buranelli said.
This tool of ridicule ended up being the only accurate documentation of the complete fresco’s existence and composition.
However, 21st-century experts still had a hard time proving or disproving the legend that the Our Lady was modeled after Giulia Farnese, since no official portraits of the noblewoman existed, Buranelli said.
Primary written sources, however, described Giulia as having a round face, black eyes and dark coloring – features that do not match the narrow face and fair features Pintoricchio chose for this and his other depictions of Our Lady, making the legend “absolutely preposterous,” he said.
Unfortunately, Buranelli said, 500 years of fuss over a presumed scandal meant most of the art world missed the real rarity portrayed in the original fresco.
Traditional portraits show popes or patrons kneeling in adoration before the baby Jesus. But he said this is the only work he knows about that shows someone other than Mary or her mother, Anne, touching the Christ Child.
“It is an extremely rare iconography that I have never found” elsewhere, he said. The only remotely similar example he was aware of, he said, was the ninth-century mosaic Pintoricchio certainly saw in Rome’s Church of St. Cecilia; it shows Pope Paschal I kneeling and caressing Mary’s foot.
Buranelli said he believes Pintoricchio was showing with this “very important detail” of touch that one could have “a tangible relationship” with God after following “the story of humanity’s salvation” mapped out in the rooms’ frescoed images.
The journey of faith leads to this image of a loving Mary with Jesus, who holds the “cross-bearing orb” of His dominion over the earth and imparts His blessing, he said.
The kneeling, newly elected Pope Alexander VI has one hand over his heart and the other holding the child’s foot to symbolize becoming the universal vicar of the Church, accepting the Petrine ministry and recognizing the divine origin of the papacy, he said.
This reading, Buranelli said, should “definitively sweep away” the many “more prosaic interpretations” and myths “that led to the destruction of a work that today we can only piece together with the few fragments left.”
A “little breeze of calumny” meant to malign an artist, Giulia and a pope, he said, ended up making a piece of precious art pay “a steep price.”
— Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service