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.
As soon as former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg agreed to be interviewed for “The Spiritual Life,” I knew what my first question would be: “Can you tell us about your father?” For Jesuits, one of the most interesting things about this talented public servant was not only his public profession of his Christian faith, but also his “Jesuit background.” (His father was a former Jesuit from Malta.)
But our open, honest and wide-ranging conversation touches on much more than the Jesuit antecedents of “Secretary Pete” (formerly known to admirers as “Mayor Pete”). Buttigieg reveals himself to be a committed Christian, for whom the spiritual journey has been as important as any political or professional journey. His journey began early on, in his teens and college years, as he found that fulfillment couldn’t simply be an intellectual pursuit.
“Maybe there was more room for God because the things around me weren’t quite adding up enough,” he told me. “Many of the most important questions in life couldn’t be solved by being smart.”
Much of Buttigieg’s journey has been a search for “wholeness.” His spirituality relies on his having integrated himself as both a Christian and a gay man, an integration that more fully enables him to live out his faith in a public way:
There are two things I’m really sure about. One is that God loves me. And another is that I’m gay…. There was this thing I knew I could grab hold of that was just bigger and deeper than what the world would think.
Buttigieg is also blunt about his desire to resist the co-opting of God by partisan forces: “I wasn’t so much trying to enlist God into my political party as to assert that God doesn’t belong to an American political party, or any political movement. That’s not how it works.”
It’s a reminder that no one party, or political candidate, fully encapsulates the Christian worldview.
For me, the most striking comment came toward the end of our interview, when he reflected on how his own fatherhood (he and his husband Chasten have two children) invited him to meditate more deeply on something Trinitarian: the Father’s love for the Son. Seeing his son hurt his finger prompted him to wonder more deeply about the Father’s emotions when Jesus was suffering on the Cross.
“It just took over my entire psyche…. The central story of the New Testament involves the grisly execution of the son of God.… It just makes it so much more searing and visceral now that I've got kids,” Buttigieg said.
When Secretary Pete said yes to our interview, I was ready to hear from an articulate Christian. I don’t think I was ready to hear about the Trinity. But that’s what happens when a believer opens up to speak about his or her faith. The God of surprises often takes over.
