Fr. Thomas J. Reese is a Jesuit priest and currently a senior analyst for Religion News Service. He has previously been a columnist at the National Catholic Reporter as well as an associate editor and editor in chief at America magazine.
Fr. Tom entered the Jesuits in 1962 and was ordained in 1974. He was educated at St. Louis University, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and at the University of California Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in political science. He was a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center from 1985 to 1998 and 2006 to 2013. While at Woodstock, he wrote his trilogy on the organization and politics of the church: Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church, A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.
In 2014, Fr. Tom was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission that reviews the facts and circumstances of religious freedom violations and makes policy recommendations to the president, the secretary of state, and Congress. He was reappointed to another two-year term in May 2016, and he was elected to a one-year term as chair of the commission in June 2016.
In this episode, we speak with Fr. Tom about the origins of his vocation as both a Jesuit and a journalist, his take on the state of Catholic media today, and the historical roots of political polarization we see within the church and society. Fr. Tom also shares his impressions of Pope Leo XIV’s first year, reflects on the perennial question of how the US church should relate to the public square, and offers the practice he feels is essential for “tomorrow’s American Catholic.”
