In rural Venezuela, Mariela is helping students learn how to sew.

Thanks to support from Jesuit programs, her classroom has new sewing machines and materials

so that students leave with the experience they need to find quality employment.

Read Marieless story at American JesuitsInternational.org, backslash stories.

Hello and welcome to Jesuitical, a podcast from America Media for saints and sinners.

You can join us each week for honest conversations about the Catholic Church and our world today, sometimes over drinks. I'm Ashley McInliss, and I'm joined by Zach Davis. Good to be with you, Ashley. I'm curious. You finish an encyclical? Finally. It's a long one. 42,000 words. There have been longer. That's true. But I did. I tried reading it to it to my daughter, nine months old. That'll put her asleep, maybe. Yeah, encyclical is actually her first word. Oh, wow. At least that's how I interpreted it. But I'm really excited to finally, we had a great episode on the feed last week where Father Sam Sawyer, Colleen Dolly, and Jerry O'Connell were talking about the new encyclical, but we've got a couple thoughts I'm excited to get into on this. In addition to many other things on this week's edition of Jesuitical. Yeah, we have a great conversation this week with Mary Kate Pollan. She's the executive editor of the Good Newsroom. This is the digital news outlet of the Archdiocese of New York. So she has kind of a different role in the

Catholic media ecosystem. She's our neighbor here in New York, but is covering the local church

and trying to give, you know, the good news, which we try to do here at America, but can't always

devote our attention to just that aspect of the church. No, that's right. And also the Archdiocese of New York is in a moment of transition right now because Cardinal Timothy Dolan was here for a very long time. And now we have a new Archbishop, Archbishop Ronald Hicks. You and I are residents. We are actually, we worship in the Diocese of Brooklyn, but we work in the Archdiocese of New York. I think even most people don't even know that those are two separate diocese. Diocese Brooklyn, Queens, and then New York, which covers a whole other area. And we're very excited to have Mary Kate joining us here in studio, and we asked her what she might want to drink with us, and she suggested Guinness, which, of course, we love.

So we will be very excited to crack open a can of Guinness with her later.

But first, we have Signs of the Times, the part of our show, where we sift through the Catholic News of the week, so you don't have to.

What's our first story?

So big Vatican story that kind of hit a lot of people by surprise this morning on Tuesday,

June 2nd, Pope Leo appointed the president and COO of EWTN News as the new head of the Vatican Communications Department.

Yeah, her name is Maria Montserrat-Avarado, popularly known as Monci.

She's a Mexican-American laywoman, and she will be the first lay woman to

lead the dicastery for communication and the first woman to be the prefect for any Vatican

dicastery. There has been a woman religious to be the prefect of a decastory, but not a laywoman.

Yeah, so this will be, I mean, yeah, this is a big deal across the

board for a number of reasons. A couple more details first, before we get into the significance.

She replaces Paolo Rufini, who is the first layman to run that office and was appointed by Pope

Francis in 2018. According to our Vatican correspondent and colleague Gerard O'Connell,

...