The Big Tent Christmas stocking

At Sevenhill in South Australia’s Clare Valley, Julie Thorpe joins Jesuit priest Fr Brendan Kelly to uncover a remarkable journey from revolutionary Europe to the Australian frontier. Marking 175 years since the mission began, they explore the spirituality of its Austrian founders, their encounters with the Ngadjuri people, and the creative adaptation captured in Fr Alois Kranewitter’s enduring words: patience, courage and hope.

As the institutions that once held the world order together falter, can a transatlantic pope bridge the gulf between competing global visions? Historian Massimo Faggioli speaks with Geraldine Doogue about whether the Vatican is 'the last international' that can offer an alternative voice on democracy, technology and human dignity. But how much can the leader of a global church realistically carry without becoming, as Massimo warns, a spent force?

What happens when a woman’s vocation collides with centuries of Church tradition? Geraldine Doogue and Julie Thorpe speak with award-winning Belgian filmmaker Marie Mandy about The Forbidden Call: Women Priests, her documentary following women who have defied the Vatican’s ban on ordination, and those still pressing for change from within. With Pope Francis and now Pope Leo appointing more women to senior Vatican positions, and leading cardinals imagining the possibility of women priests, how might women's visibility at the altar reshape the Catholic Church's future?

For decades, The Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan has written about politics and faith as a veteran observer of the United States and author of three books on Christianity. He joins Geraldine Doogue to discuss the crisis of meaning among young men in particular and warns that Christianity in the US is increasingly being pulled into ideological contests in ways that distort its central message. Drawing on the insights of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, cited in Pope Leo’s encyclical, Sheridan argues that societies stripped of meaning become vulnerable to fear and extremism, on all sides. So how can churches provide a credible alternative to nihilism?

While the world looks to Pope Leo for moral authority, he's looking to the cardinals for moral support. Br Mark O'Connor has been in Rome as the cardinals met against a backdrop of escalating conflicts and Leo's interventions on the limits of war. He tells Julie Thorpe that Leo's message to the cardinals sets a clear direction for a synodal church in continuity with Francis' papacy. Leo's first encyclical and his recent visit to Spain – where his appeal to Europe's complex past and focus on migrants came to the fore – reveal a pope finding his voice amid pressure from both the geopolitical stage and the church's internal critics.