Hello father senior. Hello. Hi, this is Christopher. Very nice to speak. So to speak, yes. So to speak, right?

You know, you you came, Michael Gilligan was one of the people who highly recommended that we interview you for this. Yes, I'm hearing a little bit of an echo, which may be the volume on your headphones. I wonder if I'm hearing a little bit back to us.

Okay, all right. We'll try to turn it down here. Should I turn down mine? Is that good? Is that better? Let me see. Let me. Yes, I think the echo is gone. And how about you? I heard you talking about cook. Well, I'm hearing a little bit of an echo, but maybe when I back off from the mic, it's okay. Yeah, it's gone.

Why don't you tell me something like what you've had for lunch today? Let's see. I had a ham. We ask all these questions. Sandwich. I was at a meeting. It was a, you know, a committee meeting. So that's what they serve ham and cheese sandwich on French bread. Are you hearing an echo now? Do you sound all right to yourself? I sound all right. Yeah, no, I don't hear any echo. Okay. So I want to tell you that I'm a bit daunted by the

by this by the scope of what we have to discuss. The idea is that we want to create a program for the time around Pope Benedict's visit to the United States. But I don't, I don't want to just, I don't want this to be a conversation about the Pope, but about what's happening in the Catholic Church, the state of the Catholic Church in the United States.

And I'm interested in your perspective being someone who is inside an important institution of the Catholic Church. And I'm also assuming that some of what you see as challenging and important is not necessarily what the headlines would suggest.

But you know, and so I want to dig at that a bit. And but I also want to ask you some of the questions that I think non Catholic observers would want to things that they would want to understand. It may seem quite simple about what's up with this and why is this important and why is it difficult.

So I kind of want to walk this line of having a sophisticated conversation in terms of what you see and then ask you some some simpler questions about how things look on the outside of that makes sense.

And there's too much to talk about, obviously. So we will just take this where it leads us. I have a bunch of notes here. And I think there's some obvious conversation points. Mitch, are we all right?

We are just going to confirm that Sarah has left the room.

Oh, I can leave if you want.

Oh, you're in the same room together. Okay. That's fine as long as, as long as you're quiet.

I don't mind Sarah being here.

We just didn't want the door to open and close. All right. Well, let's get going. And I'd like to start just by hearing a little bit about your history. Did you grow up Catholic?

Yes, I was born and raised a Catholic.

And you are a priest of the Passionist Religious Congregation. That's right.

Tell me about that about this order.

Well, the Passionists are, they're an international order about 4,000 members founded in Italy in the beginning of the 18th century.

And we live in community and our work is mainly preaching work. We have a lot of retreat houses, for example, in this country.

Or they would go into parishes and have like special retreats or renewals for parishes.

I'm in education, but that's not our normal type of work that we do as a community.

I'm there just because this is the place where we send our own candidates.

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