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The Moderate Catholic

The Moderate Catholic

Written by: Topics that deepen faith and inspire action.
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 The Moderate Catholic makes space for people who live out their Catholic identity in a way that engages yet transcends secular frameworks and political agendas with a focus on deepening one’s spirituality and commitment to social justice.

christinagebel.substack.comChristina Gebel Christianity Ministry & Evangelism Spirituality
Episodes
  • Episode 8: BONUS: Overcoming Acedia with Carly Caminiti

    Episode 8: BONUS: Overcoming Acedia with Carly Caminiti
    Feb 18 2026
    Christina: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode 8: Bonus: Overcoming Acedia with Carly Caminiti. So, we have a very special person here with us today to help us with this bonus episode of overcoming acedia, and it is my great pleasure to introduce Carly Caminiti, who is a certified executive coach, and Carly and I know each other because we overlapped for several years in Boston. We were part of the same parish. We even did some parish council years together and also share in common that we have both worked in the public health field.Clearly, we were meant to know [00:01:00] each other, hang out, and our Catholic faith was one of the gems of how we both came to know each other and also valued each other’s friendship. So, Carly, welcome.Carly Caminiti: Thank you. Happy to be here. And you forgot that we also have the same alma mater college, even though we didn’t know each other.Christina: Yes.Carly Caminiti: We probably passed each other down the hallways, down the sidewalks…Christina: Yes, yes, yes. I did forget that because. We didn’t know each other at the time, and we only made that realization, but we have the same beloved Jesuit University alma mater for our undergrad, soCarly Caminiti: Woo-hoo!Christina: The similarities are endless. So, Carly, thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule today to sit here and be with us. You and I have talked a little bit outside of this episode [00:02:00] about acedia and kind of what we’re trying to do and the topic that we’re gonna talk about today with you is so appropriate to overcoming Acedia.Before we get into that, I just want to ask you a little bit about how you’ve taken the work that you do as an executive coach and integrated faith and spirituality into that.Carly Caminiti: Honestly, it kind of integrates itself because when people have views about themselves or things about themselves that they wanna change, it almost certainly comes down to who they are and how they wanna be.So, if that person has any sort of spiritual life whatsoever, then it comes up and out during our sessions together. I don’t necessarily market myself as a Catholic executive coach per se, but I would say that it’s very, very interesting how many times it comes up with folks that I work with about how connected their faith is to how they feel about [00:03:00] themselves.It’s a very easy combination when you’re working with people who are trying to reach their goals, and then they are the ones who make the connection to God, to their faith, and to how they wanna live their lives.Christina: That’s, that’s incredible. And just hearing you speak I did have a curious question. Does it usually come up in a positive sense in terms of how they feel about themselves?Carly Caminiti: I would say that more often than not, it’s just people mention that they believe in God and/or they tell me what kind of faith that they have. Part of the things that we’re gonna talk about today are really how do does our faith relate to how we view ourselves, and how are we shaped by those views. And, how then, can we show up better in the world today based on exactly who we wanna be and what kind of example we wanna follow. So, yes and no.Christina: Beautiful. Beautiful.Carly Caminiti: And Christina, I wanna ask you if you could read a prayer that I [00:04:00] adapted that’s gonna sound familiar to you, because it’s adapted from the prayer of St. Francis. But, I would like just for you to read it and then kind of think about how it feels as you read it.Christina: Sure. I would love to. All right.Prayer of St. Francis (Adapted by Carly Caminiti)Make me a channel of your peace,Where there is self-hatred,Let me bring your love.Where there is self-injury,Your pardon, Lord.And where there’s self-doubt,True faith in you.Make me a channel of your peace.Where there is self-despair in life,Let me bring hope.Where there is darkness,Only light.Where there’s sadness,Ever joy.Make me a channel of your peace.It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.In giving of [00:05:00] ourselves that we receive,And in dying, that we’re born to eternal life.Oh, Master grant that I may never seek,So much to be consoled as to console,To be understood as to understand,To be loved as to love with all my soul.Wow.Carly Caminiti: So, clearly there were just a few adaptations by adding the word “self” in there. How did that land for you?Christina: It is incredible because I think it flowed so seamlessly that it was almost like it was meant to be there.Carly Caminiti: Mm.Christina: You know, I’ve never said this prayer and thought to myself, oh, when I say where there is hatred, that also includes self-hatred, where I say there’s [00:06:00] injury, self-injury, self-doubt…I’ve never thought of that, hearing the prayer prior to now, but it fits so easily ...
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    52 mins
  • Episode 7: BONUS: What happened to acedia?

    Episode 7: BONUS: What happened to acedia?
    Jan 22 2026
    Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is Episode Seven: What happened to Acedia?Welcome back. So, this is episode seven. It is a bonus episode because we have, as I mentioned in the last episode, formally concluded our study of acedia, but there will be some bonus episodes because if you like me, [and] resonated with this topic, you might want to learn more. In wanting to learn more, you might be wondering whatever happened to acedia. You know, this is not a word that is part of our everyday vernacular, much like some of the other seven deadly sins [00:01:00] are, if you choose to talk about that, or you just might be wondering, why has it taking me till now to learn about acedia? Why did I never come across this until later in life?And that was something that really piqued my interest because it took me a while to learn about Acedia. So, this episode is for those diehard acedia enthusiasts who have to know the quote ‘end of the story.’ And to do so, we will be going back to one of our primary texts, The Noonday Devil, by Jean Charles Nault, and around page 96, he starts to tell the story of how this all came to be.So, the story starts with actually a Franciscan Friar William Ham Ockham, who lived around [00:02:00] 1300 to 1350 AD. If you know anything about Franciscan Friars, there are obviously a lot of very good people. Although I will say Friar Ockham was not the best person in the story we’re about to tell because he actually helped to influence the idea of acedia kind of falling out of favor, but I’m sure he was a great dude otherwise. So, we’re gonna cut him some slack.So Franciscan Friar William Ockham sparked kind of a quote ‘revolution,’ if you will, because at the time, he was countering the theological understanding of freedom, which up until that point had primarily been articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. So Ockham [00:03:00] proposed a new concept of freedom, which essentially differed from Aquinas’s concept of freedom, and he called this new freedom concept, quote, the “liberty of indifference.” End quote.Jean Charles Nault describes this on page 96 as “human beings are totally indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil’ end quote, and I said human beings, because again, a lot of these things just refer to ‘man,’ and I prefer to make it more gender neutral. So indeterminate, totally indifferent with regard to good or evil.Actually, this is how we largely conceive of freedom today. We see freedom as the idea that you can [00:04:00] choose between two contrary things. You have that choice. However, at the time, this was a bit of a quote ‘revolution,’ to what was considered a classical understanding of freedom, and that view, that classical understanding Jean Charles Nault describes as quote, “Freedom is the ability that human beings have an ability belonging jointly to the intellect and will to perform virtuous actions, good actions, excellent actions, perfect actions when he or she wants, and as he or she wants. Humankind’s freedom is therefore the capacity to accomplish good acts easily, joyously and lastingly. This freedom is defined by the attraction [00:05:00] of the good.” Okay, so let’s unpack that a little bit.In this more classical understanding of freedom, prior to Ockham, mostly delineated by Aquinas, the idea is that we have the freedom to do good. Okay, and we are attracted to doing that good innately as human beings. How is it that we have that innately? Well, we believe that we are human beings with a soul, and we’re not simply animals who kind of just act on impulse and their basic needs. Right?But Ockham kind of deviated from all of this because he made freedom live in the moment prior [00:06:00] to our intellect and will. So, man or woman are no longer attracted to the good, as Aquinas had said. Instead, they kind of have a indifference to good and evil.Okay, so total indifference and it’s that time period before the intellect and will kick in. Ockham, being a Franciscan friar, being a religious person, was still somewhat concerned with people doing good things. Okay? He wasn’t like a relativist, let’s just say. But he believed there had to be some sort of an external element or something extrinsic, which points human beings to the good, and he described that as the law, and it points to [00:07:00] what the good action might be.Around that time, this was really kind of picking up steam and the idea that what is good is defined by obedience to the law. On page 97, Jean Charles Nault points out that eventually this leads to this concept of legalism, and legalism is quote, “The law alone is the criterion for good.”So, because this is externally motivated, human beings no longer have what Aquinas called, quote “natural inclinations.” And those natural inclinations were dependent upon really the ...
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    37 mins
  • Episode 6: Overcoming Acedia - Faithful Perseverance and Joy

    Episode 6: Overcoming Acedia - Faithful Perseverance and Joy
    Jan 3 2026
    Christina Gebel: Welcome to the Moderate Catholic, where we discuss topics that deepen faith and inspire action. I am your host, Christina Gebel, and this is episode six, Overcoming Acedia.Welcome. So, you might be thinking, finally, we have gotten to the point where we are actually sun-setting our discussion about acedia and talking about how to actually overcome it, and this whole time, just to recap, we’ve been discussing how acedia shows up for us, how it shows up in the world, [00:01:00] and how it’s mainly driven by the false spirit and the false spirit wanting to get us off track from doing the most good in the world and from living out our true calling.The way that we can push back against all the things that we’ve been talking about is by actually overcoming acedia. Before we begin. If you’re still a little bit fuzzy on what acedia is and you’ve been following along, just please know that’s okay, and it takes time, like I’ve said in previous episodes, to ingest all of this and wrap your mind around it.Maybe you understand it a little bit on the personal level and maybe not as much on the society level. That’s all okay. And for that reason, because it can be a difficult topic to grasp, I have a [00:02:00] special treat for you, and that is as a bonus to the conclusion of the acedia series on Moderate Catholic. I will be including an adaptation of the Ignatian examine, and when I say Examen, E-X-A-M-E-N.So, for those of you who are familiar, the Examen is a tool in Ignatian spirituality that many Jesuits do and encourage others to do every single day. It’s usually part of the Spiritual Exercises. It’s kind of like the culmination, if you will, of those Exercises. And it’s an inventory of your day where you look back to everything you did, people you saw what you read, watched, who you interacted with, and you pay special attention to how the Spirit is moving within you that day.And this is very [00:03:00] Ignatian because Ignatius believes that we can seek God and all of the ordinary experiences of life. So, by reviewing our day as a part of our daily prayer, we can actually see where God is at work. So, notice that I use the phrase that the Examen helps us understand where the Spirit is moving throughout the day. In the Examen that I’m gonna include as a bonus to this series, it’s also gonna help us understand where the false spirit might be moving, and in that sense, how acedia has shown up throughout our day. So, stay tuned. This will be a great bonus for all of you, and hopefully something that you can play for yourself as you’re reflecting in daily prayer.So, once you find the acedia in your life day to [00:04:00] day, you will likely want to overcome it, and that’s where the topic today comes in. So, I’m going to start the topic with a huge spoiler. If you overcome acedia, you will know that you’ve overcome it because there is a great gift awaiting you on the other side.So that’s the spoiler, and I’m even gonna tell you what that gift is. But first we’re gonna point back to Evagrius, our desert monk, our main dude who describes the feeling of overcoming acedia as a quote, “state of peace and an ineffable joy ensues in the soul after the struggle.” When I read that, I was like, well, I would like a state of peace and ineffable joy, so obviously it’s very attractive.I [00:05:00] did actually experience some of this once I simply named acedia. I talked about that in the earliest episodes - I believe episode two - where just knowing what was going on with me spiritually and being able to point to it was peace-giving for me. It brought me some relief. If just naming it can give you that positive emotion like it did for me, imagine what overcoming it could feel like.Today we’re gonna talk about that and we’ll use the same two texts that I’ve been referring to all along The Noonday Devil by Jean Charles Nault and Acedia and Me by Kathleen Norris. And because we’re nearing the end of this acedia series, you might be thinking, if you’ve hung around this long, I’d really like to learn more about this acedia thing, as I mentioned [00:06:00] earlier, I would recommend starting with Kathleen Norris’s book, Acedia and Me the New York Times bestseller, because it is a lot more accessibly written. But if you want a good theological itch and you’re kind of used to scratching theological itches, then I would say The Noonday Devil is another great option.Okay, so let’s dive in and start with where Jean Charles Nault takes us and the first remedy that he starts to talk about on page 85 is meditating on the Incarnation.So Incarnation, again, is God becoming human in Jesus Christ. He references Saint Thomas Aquinas a lot and [00:07:00] in becoming human, he talks about God actually built a bridge between the abyss of the divine and human nature and God, in that sense, through Jesus acted as a bridge maker. And actually that’s what the word ...
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    48 mins
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