Both Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell exerted enormous influence on the Catholic Church. How will they be remembered in the annals of Catholic history?   Join Paul Collins, a popular broadcaster and author from Australia, who will offer his keen insights into the legacies of two powerful churchmen who powerfully shaped the institution's policies for more than half a century.  

Biography

Born in Melbourne and now living in Canberra, Paul Collins is an historian, broadcaster, and writer. For many years he has worked in varying capacities in TV and radio with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He has also acted as a commentator on the BBC, PBS in the United States, NHK Japan, Danish and New Zealand TV, Sky TV News, as well as SBS and commercial TV and radio stations in Australia. He has written regularly for most of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines, as well as for print media in the UK, the United States, Germany and Austria.

He has a Master’s degree in theology (Th.M.) from Harvard University, and a Doctorate in Philosophy (Ph.D) in history from the Australian National University (ANU), and is a Fellow of Trinity College of Music, London. He has taught history and theology in Australia, US and Pacific countries and worked as a parish priest in Sydney and Hobart. He has wide experience in tertiary and adult education. Between 1986 and 1996 he was a producer-presenter in the ABC in radio and TV, and for three years he was Specialist Editor-Religion for the ABC.

In March 2001 he resigned from the active priestly ministry of the Catholic Church after thirty-three years service due to a doctrinal dispute with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith over his book Papal Power (1997).

He is the author of fourteen books including Mixed Blessings, God’s Earth, Papal Power, Burn: The Epic Story of Bushfire in Australia, Believers: Does the Catholic Church in Australia have a Future? and Judgment Day: The struggle for life on earth. The Birth of the West will be published in 2013.

While he is well known as a commentator on Catholicism and the papacy, he also has a strong interest in environmental and population issues. Nowadays he works as a freelance writer, speaker and broadcaster on environmental issues, social ethics, theology, history and media.

As part of our Women Witnesses for Racial Justice series, please join Dr. Nikki M. Taylor, Professor of History and Chair of the Department as she discusses her book Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (2016).

The focus of her story is Margaret Garner, an enslaved wife and mother who, along with her entire family, escaped from slavery in northern Kentucky in 1856. When their owners caught up with the Garner family, Margaret tried to kill all four of her children–and succeeded in killing one–rather than see them return to slavery. Using black feminist and interdisciplinary methodologies, this book retells this harrowing story from the perspective of Margaret Garner–a woman who could not read or write and left little of her own voice in the historical record. Ultimately, Driven Toward Madness examines why this fated act was the last best option for her as an enslaved mother.

Bio

Professor Taylor specializes in 19th century African American History. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and Duke University (MA, PhD, Certificate in Women’s Studies). Dr. Taylor has won several fellowships including Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson. She is also the Principal Investigator of two institutional grants, including the $5 million Mellon Just Futures grant (2021) and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Grant ($480k in 2017) Nikki M. Taylor is currently completing her 4th monograph, “‘Brooding Over Bloody Revenge:’ Enslaved Women, ‘Wild Justice’ and Lethal Resistance to Slavery.” The manuscript examines enslaved women who used lethal violence to resist slavery from the colonial to anteblelum eras, challenging all previous interpretations about the nature of their resistance.

Her first book, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community 1802-68 (2005) uses the backdrop of one of the nineteenth-century’s most racist American cities to chart the emergence of a very conscientious black community–a community of people who employed various tactics such as black nationalism, emigration, legislative agitation, political alliances, self-education, and even armed self-defense to carve out a space for themselves as free people living in the shadow of slavery.

Professor Taylor’s second book, America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (2013), is a political and intellectual biography of one of the foremost African American activists, intellectuals, orators, and politicians in the nineteenth-century–a man whose name once was spoken in the same breath as Frederick Douglass, Dr. McCune Smith, and John Mercer Langston. This book charts Clark’s journey from recommending that slaveholders be sent to “hospitable/ graves,” to advocating for a separate black nation, to forging alliances with German socialists and labor radicals, to adopting the conservative mantle of the Democratic Party.

Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (2016) is Dr. Taylor’s third monograph. This book is a biography of Margaret Garner, an enslaved wife and mother who, along with her entire family, escaped from slavery in northern Kentucky in 1856. When their owners caught up with the Garner family, Margaret tried to kill all four of her children–and succeeded in killing one–rather than see them return to slavery. Using black feminist and interdisciplinary methodologies, this book retells this harrowing story from the perspective of Margaret Garner–a woman who could not read or write and left little of her own voice in the historical record. Ultimately, Driven Toward Madness examines why this fated act was the last best option for her as an enslaved mother. Inspired by Garner’s story, Dr. Taylor’s current research is about enslaved women who used armed violence to resist slavery.

Authors Professor Joan Taylor and Professor Helen Bond will offer a look into the lives of Jesus’ female disciples based on their exciting new book, Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples (2022). While many of the women in Christian Scriptures have been dismissed, stereotyped, or misrepresented, Professor Taylor and Professor Bond present some of the latest findings and recover the stories of the women who have helped shape our faith.

Here is a brief excerpt from their book:

Not only are women not imagined as being part of Jesus’ mission, but the story of Christianity’s spread is also a masculine one. In the first century – so the story goes – the Christian message was taken to the lands around the Mediterranean by two great men: Peter and Paul. And later on, the message was reflected upon and transposed into creedal statements in the third and fourth centuries by the ‘Fathers’ of the Church. In popular memory, then, the history of earliest Christianity is decidedly male. But is this the full story?

Sometime in the late 50 ce, Paul wrote a letter to the church in Rome. This was one of the most important letters that Paul would ever write, setting out his beliefs and hoping that the church would welcome him when he came to visit. As he was still something of an unknown quantity among the Roman Christians, he finished his letter with a list of important people he knew there. Many of them worked with him. What’s fascinating about this list is that it’s the closest we have to a snapshot of the early church, a random collection of people who are listed simply because they were known to Paul. And the surprising thing is that, of the twenty-nine names in the chapter, eleven – more than one-third of them – are women. These women were clearly performing various roles in the church –deacons, benefactors/leaders or ‘apostles’ (envoys) – and others were running house churches. Most significant of all is the fact that the letter itself was delivered by a woman, Phoebe (Paul wrote to commend her to people who didn’t already know her, strongly implying that she had been sent from him with the letter). It’s very unlikely that Phoebe was just the postwoman; as a ‘deacon’ (minister) and benefactor/leader in her own right, she presumably read out and defended Paul’s lengthy missive. She was not just Paul’s deputy, but also an able teacher, envoy and negotiator.

Biographies

Professor Joan Taylor

Joan Taylor is Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London. She has authored numerous books and articles about Jesus and his world, notably The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (1997), Jesus and Brian: Studying the Historical Jesus via Monty Python’s Life of Brian (2015) and What did Jesus look like? (2018). She has studied questions of women and gender for many years, and has edited, with Ilaria Ramelli, Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Early Christianity (2021). She also works in radio, television and film, and co-presented, with Helen Bond, Jesus Female Disciples: The New Evidence (2018) for Channel Four. Together they have recently authored Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples (2022).

Professor Helen Bond, MTheol PhD FRSE

Helen K. Bond is Professor of Christian Origins and Head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the social and political history of Judaea under Roman rule, the historical Jesus, and the canonical gospels. She is the author of Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation (CUP, 1998), Caiaphas: High Priest and Friend of Rome? (Westminster John Knox, 2004), The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2012), Jesus: A Very Brief History (SPCK, 2017), The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Eerdmans, 2020), Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples (Hodder, 2022), and a number of shorter studies and articles. She has contributed to over 50 TV and radio documentaries, including acting as historical consultant to The Nativity (BBC, 2010) and co-presenter (with Joan Taylor) of Jesus’ Female Disciples (C4, 2018).

Join us as Professor Taylor and Professor Bond offer a look into the Early Church and the role women were playing in the development of the faith.

Join Dr. Phyllis Zagano as she talks about her latest book, Just Church: Catholic Social Teaching, Synodality, and Women.

Dr. Zagano writes, “Even though synodality is the buzzword of the day, the fact remains that members of the hierarchy are, or at least consider themselves, insulated from the opinions about Church from those members on the periphery—and the people most cut out of the conversation at the highest level are women. Perhaps not the women newly named to positions in the Roman Curia, nor the women chancellors, canon lawyers, or other professionals in diocesan chanceries, nor even the women theologians, journalists, and activists. However, these all are liable to be excluded.”

She further comments, “It is no secret that the tensions both inside and outside Vatican walls and chanceries around the world find two sides to the Catholic story—there is a split between those who follow the lead of Pope Francis and those who remain attached to Tridentine liturgies; between those who accept and those who do not accept the findings, the teachings, of the Second Vatican Council. Can these two sides be reconciled? Catholic Social Teaching is specific in its tenets, as is the concept of synodality as recovered by Vatican II. Where does the confluence of these two rivers of Church teaching and thought leave women? Does it include or exclude women, either historically or in the present? Women represent the largest cadre of the periphery that Francis calls the center. What entrée does the periphery have to decision-making? How can Catholic Social Teaching and the concept of synodality combine to bring justice to women in the Church?”

Biography

Dr. Zagano is Senior Research Associate-in-Residence and Adjunct Professor of Religion at Hofstra University. She joined Hofstra University in 2002. Her courses have included “Mysticism and the Spiritual Quest,” “Life, Death, and Immortality,” and “History of Irish Spirituality.”

Dr. Zagano holds a B.A. from Marymount College, Tarrytown, NY, the Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and three master’s degrees, in communications (Boston University), literature (Long Island University), and theology (St. John’s University).

Dr. Zagano is the author or editor of twenty-five books in religious studies, including Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate in the Catholic Church (Crossroad, 2000), winner of Catholic Press Association and College Theology Society Annual Book Awards, Women & Catholicism: Gender, Communion, and Authority (Macmillan, 2012), (Catholic Press Association Book Award) and Women: Icons of Christ (Paulist 2020) (Catholic Media Association Book Award).

Dr. Zagano’s recent books include Women Deacons: Past, Present, Future (with Gary Macy and William T. Ditewig) (Paulist Press, 2011), Women in Ministry: Emerging Questions on the Diaconate (Paulist Press, 2012), Mysticism and the Spiritual Quest (Paulist Press, 2013), Ordination of Women to the Diaconate in the Eastern Churches (translations of essays by Cipriano Vagaggini) (Liturgical Press, 2013.), Women Deacons? Essays with Answers (Liturgical Press, 2016), and Women Religious, Women Deacons: Questions and Answers (Paulist Press, 2022).

Her book for pre-teens, Elizabeth Visits the Abbey (Clear Faith Publishing, 2022) tells the story of a young girl who visits her aunt, an abbess, and learns of the history of women in the Church.

Her book, Just Church: Catholic Social Teaching, Synodality, and Women (Paulist Press) will appear in February 2023.

Her work has been variously translated into Bahasa Indonesian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, German Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Spanish translation of her best-selling book On Prayer: A Letter for My Godchild won a 2004 Catholic Press Association Book Award. She edited the Liturgical Press “Spirituality in History” anthologies: The Dominican Tradition (2006); The Benedictine Tradition (2007); The Ignatian Tradition (2009); and The Franciscan Tradition (2010). The Carmelite Tradition (2011).

Her visiting fellowships and professorships include Fulbright Senior Specialist, Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland (Spring, 2016), religious studies and spirituality; St. Leo University, Tampa, FL (Spring 2010), spirituality and the history of women in the church; Fulbright Fellow, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland (Spring 2009), women in the church; Yale Divinity School (Fall 2005), ecclesiology; Aquinas Chair of Catholic Studies St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, NY (Spring 2005), spirituality and contemporary Catholicism.

Dr. Zagano is a founding co-chair of the Roman Catholic Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion, and a member of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, the College Theology Society, and the Catholic Theological Society of America. She has held appointments at Fordham and Boston Universities, and worked as a researcher for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Her biographical listings include Who’s Who in America.

Her award-winning column is nationally syndicated by the Religion News Service and runs in the National Catholic Reporter and in other journals around the world. She has published hundreds of articles and reviews in popular and refereed journals, and for five years hosted a monthly talk show on the National Public Radio affiliate station, WBUR-FM. Her papers are collected at the Gannon Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois.

In 2012, she received the Catherine of Siena Distinguished Layperson Award from Voice of the Faithful. In 2014, she received the Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice from The Paulist Center, Boston.

On August 2, 2016, Pope Francis appointed her to the Papal Commission for the Study of Women in the Diaconate, which convened in Rome November 2016.

From time to time, she appears on television. This clip is from the Hallmark Channel’s “New Morning” program, and was shot at the 2006 Interchurch Center Conference on Women in the Church. Play video.

Professor Emily Clark will discuss the lives of Black Catholic women such as Venerable Henriette Delille in the context of late 18th century and early 19th century life in New Orleans, offering background on the many unique features of life in New Orleans.

The region’s development under French and Spanish rule brought the enslavement and transport of African people, Code Noir, color labels such as quadroon, the creolization of culture and religion, and how free women of color such as Henriette Delille, Juliette Gaudin, and Josephine Charles were able to found the second successful religious community of Black Catholic women, the Sisters of the Holy Family, in the United States.

Biography

Emily Clark is the Clement Chambers Benenson Professor in American Colonial History at Tulane University. She specializes in early American and Atlantic world history, with a focus on the French Atlantic. Her research interests include slavery, race, gender, religion and historical memory.

Research Interests

Early America and the Atlantic World, particularly the Francophone Atlantic, including Africa. I am especially interested in the ways that the history of places like Louisiana and the French Antilles can illuminate the development of racial, ethnic, and national identities in the wider Atlantic world and in other parts of colonial and early national America. Recent books include New Orleans, Louisiana, and Saint-Louis, Senegal: Mirror Cities in the Atlantic World, 1659–2000s, edited with Ibrahima Thioub and Cécile Vidal (2019) and The Strange History of the American Quadroon, which historicizes the figures of the quadroon and the “tragic mulatta,” their links with Haiti and New Orleans, and the role they have played in shaping national American memory and identity. Her teaching interests include Atlantic world history, early North America, America and the Caribbean in the Revolutionary Age, Louisiana and New Orleans, religion, gender, and the history of race and race relations. Also, archival skills and paleography and the development of web-based student projects. I especially enjoy introducing students at all levels to rich colonial and early national manuscript records housed in New Orleans archives and am a collaborator on ViaNolaVie https://www.vianolavie.org/ and New Orleans Historical https://neworleanshistorical.org/

Focusing on passages about women in the Bible and feminine imagery of God, Ashley Wilcox, a professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, will offer an overview of “The Women’s Lectionary” as she reimagines the liturgical calendar of preaching for one year.

Women are daughters, wives, and mothers. They are also strong leaders, evil queens, and wicked stepmothers. They are disciples, troublemakers, and prophetesses. Ashley Wilcox explores how the feminine descriptions of God in the Bible are similarly varied―how does it change our understanding if God is feminine wisdom, has wings, or is an angry mother bear?

Discover the good news of the lectionary with Professor Wilcox, perfect for every female clergyperson or anyone seeking to incorporate more insights from a female perspective into their preaching. From well-known figures like Miriam and Mary to lesser-known women like Huldah and Sapphira to feminine metaphors, this comprehensive resource features more than one hundred commentary essays with an Old Testament and New Testament passage for each Sunday of the year and special holy days in the calendar.

Professor Teresa Calpino of Loyolo University offers a fascinating look at The Acts of the Aspostles as she searches for the stories of the women who are named. Luke names a number of women in Acts who have been ignored too often in our faith history.

For instance, Tabitha (Acts 9:36–42) and Lydia (Acts 16:11–15) are mentioned only in praising the apostle associated with their story. As a result, stereotypical categorization has swept these important characters from their rightful place into relative obscurity. In fact, an examination of their stories set against the expectations of women in Greco-Roman antiquity reveals their unconventional situations. In particular, the representations of the “ideal woman” in the Greco-Roman world are at variance with the portraits of Tabitha and Lydia. Both women are portrayed as independent, support themselves financially, and are regarded as benefactresses in their own right. Of course, benefactions from women were commonplace among elite women of the dominant class, but neither Tabitha nor Lydia belong to such select families.

Biography

Dr. Calpino received her BS from Northwestern University in Communications. She received an MA in Biblical Languages and Literature in 2005 and her PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity in 2012 both from Loyola University Chicago. Her interests include Acts of the Apostles, Women and Gender, The Greco-Roman Social Context of early Christian literature, The Church Fathers, and Letter, Inscriptions and Artifacts of the early Christian world.

Dr. Calpino’s book Women, Work and Leadership in Acts was published in 2014 by Mohr-Siebeck. (WUNT II, 361; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014) She has also published articles in Biblical Review and Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi. Her book chapter, “Mary Magdalene in Modern Scholarship,” will be published in late 2014 in the scholarly anthology Maria Magdalena. She has also presented numerous papers at conferences on both the local and national level. She is a member of The Society of Biblical Literature, The Chicago Society of Biblical Research and The Catholic Biblical Association. She is currently the chair of the “Teaching the Bible” section for the Midwest Society of Biblical Literature.

Join us for our weekly Liturgy of the Word as we sing, pray, hear the readings proclaimed, and encounter Catholic women preaching.. Together, we listen to one another and share our faith journeys.  Spend time with us as we nourish one another in order to carry out the work of the Gospel in our church and world.  

NEW!  Too often the faith and experience of younger adult Catholics is overlooked.  "The Just Word" is one way to engage the voices of young adult theologians and activists as they enter into Scripture in light of their experience.  Be ready to be inspired!