Editor’s note: “The Spiritual Life with Fr. James Martin, S.J.,” is a new podcast from America Media that focuses on how people experience God in their prayer and their daily lives. Launched on June 17, 2025, the show combines practical wisdom with deep reflections from spiritual masters like Joyce Rupp and Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, and well-known seekers such as Stephen Colbert and Whoopi Goldberg—all tracing the mystery of God’s activity in their own lives. To accompany each episode, Father Martin will reflect on the experience and offer practical advice on a few spiritual themes. You can listen to all episodes of “The Spiritual Life” here.
Columns like this one, written by Father Martin, will accompany each episode. After this first column, they will be available exclusively to subscribers. Click here to explore all subscription options from America magazine.
Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., is the perfect person to lead off our new podcast, “The Spiritual Life ” Initially, I had come to know him mainly by reputation and through his always beautifully written, always insightful and always provocative essays on the spiritual life. But it wasn’t until my time at the Synod of Bishops that I came to know him as a friend.
Amazingly, it was during the synod’s second session, in October of last year, that we all learned that Pope Francis would, a few months hence, make him a cardinal. I told him that I could definitely see that coming (after all, he was one of two retreat directors for the synod), but he sincerely said he was shocked. Now he has, as they say in the Vatican, a “red hat,” which made him eligible to vote for Pope Leo XIV in the recent conclave. It was a joy to see a friend become a cardinal and to know that he had a hand in the election of Leo.
Friendship, in fact, is one of the themes of our conversation in the podcast, just as friendship was one of the themes of his retreat talks to the synod delegates in 2023 and 2024. As Cardinal Radcliffe points out, it’s an underappreciated aspect of the spiritual life. It was became a theme for the delegates during the synod, thanks to Cardinal Radcliffe’s meditations: “Affective collegiality,” he said, quoting St. John Paul II, “precedes effective collegiality.” In other words, if you’re going to talk to anyone about difficult matters—about any matters really—it’s important to do so first as friends.
There are so many facets to our conversation in the podcast that I want to highlight. Cardinal Radcliffe speaks about vulnerability and honest questioning as a way to seek commonality among our differences (surely something we all need today); he reflects on how the “particularity” of other people reveals the love of God in a “concrete” way; and he discusses how he initially struggled with silence in prayer but later came to see it as a blessing. “The silence at the beginning of creation,” he says in a powerful image, “is full of potential.”
But I want to highlight one part of this conversation in particular that moved me, which was a theme he used during the synod. Now, let me say that as a Jesuit for 40 years, and a priest for 25, I feel like I’ve heard every possible interpretation and reflection on familiar Gospel passages. But when Cardinal Radcliffe used the image of a fishing net used by St. Peter to explain friendships, it blew me away. He pointed out that the nets have both “bonds” and “spaces,” which help the net hold so many fish. Too many bonds and there would be no space for the next to expand. Too many spaces and the fish wouldn’t stay inside.
“You’ve got to really become bound up with each other in friendship,” he told me, “but you also have to leave a space. You can’t devour the other person. You can’t gobble them up.”
That changed how I looked not only at friendship, but also, the church. In any event, I know you’ll enjoy this beautiful conversation with one of the great spiritual masters of our time.
