Catholics Across the Aisle

Catholics Across the Aisle is the podcast of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, and that fact defines it. The reasoning comes from the conference itself, and its executive director, Michael Sheedy, conducts the interviews. A standard introduction names the program and gives Sheedy's title. Then the time goes to the guest. Those guests work close to the issues. Christy Arnold, who handles social concerns and respect life for the conference, joins Sheedy to talk about immigration, which he sets up as both a question of broad principle and a Florida story. They go through the services Catholic organizations provide, including legal help, refugee resettlement, and assistance for trafficking victims who are not U.S. citizens. That work is described as Catholic teaching in practice, a way of making God's love visible and affirming dignity. Unaccompanied children apprehended at the border come up too. Sheedy closes on a newly passed state law that is now being challenged. The death penalty episode is built around a story. Maria DeLiberato, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, describes the day a decision came down: her office erupted so loudly that her boss thought there had been a car accident in the parking lot, and prison phone rules meant the news could not reach a man named Clemente until the next day. Her larger point is simple. The men on death row, she says, are more than the worst thing they have ever done. Healthcare gets its turn with Loraine Brown, chief mission integration officer at Ascension Florida and Gulf Coast. Sheedy asks how seeing patients as unions of body, mind and spirit plays out in their care. She admits it is hard to measure, then points to spiritual care researchers at the national level who are studying the difference that care makes in clinical outcomes. Father Tim Cusick, a priest of the Diocese of St. Augustine and academic dean at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, is the guest for a two-part interview on gender ideology. He explains that the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual described gender identity disorder until 2013. He later links what is called rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls to social media and a generation growing up on screens. Part 2 asks listeners to hear Part 1 first. There is also an episode titled Vote No on Amendment 4 with Sara Johnson, whose title makes its position clear. What a listener gets is a bishops' conference reasoning in its own terms, tied to Florida legislation, named organizations and named people. Start with the immigration episode, where principle and Florida specifics sit side by side.