“A ‘new wineskin’ kind of Catholic”: FutureChurch convenes panel of young church reformers

On November 19, the church-reform organization FutureChurch convened “The Spirit Still Speaks: New Voices for Reform,” an online panel discussion featuring four young Catholics who are working to create a more faithful, just, and inclusive church rooted in the Spirit of the gospel.

The panel was facilitated by author and National Catholic Reporter editor Shannon K. Evans, who opened the event by asking each participant how they came to recognize a call to church reform in their own lives.

For Katie Gordon, who lives in community with the Benedictine Sisters of Erie (PA) and coordinates the Monasteries of the Heart movement, a formative moment was a conversation with Sr. Lucianne Siers, OP, a climate march in 2015. Gordon did not identify with a religious tradition at the time, and Sr. Lucianne allowed that she, too, sometimes experienced ambiguity in her faith.

Sr. Lucianne’s example showed Gordon that “you can hold uncertainty with faith” and led Gordon more deeply into her own vocation—what she described as “reimagining . . . the forms of community we can create” to “hold the whole of us,” including our doubts and longings.

Writer Maxwell Kuzma, a transgender man who advocates for LGBTQ inclusion in the church, identified the “central theme” of his spiritual journey as his transition.

“Transition didn’t take me away from Catholicism,” he explained, but rather allowed him to “fully embrace it.” The process helped him move from a more “detached, intellectual” conception of faith to one that felt “embodied and real in my life.”

At a meeting with Pope Francis in 2024, the Holy Father greeted Kuzma “with love in his eyes.” The moment “crystallized my sense of calling,” Kuzma said, and inspired him “to help build a church that welcomes everyone.”

Medene J.R. Presley recounted experiences of growing up in the Pentecostal tradition, where a certain “perspective of God” could limit outreach to others. He said that his roots in another tradition help him think about reform in a more “holistic” way.

Presley was received into the Catholic Church in 2018. He currently serves as a religious educator, campus minister, and community service director at a Catholic high school in Los Angeles.

During his studies at a seminary, Presley was one of two Black students in a thirty-member student group. He recounted a distressing experience where one of the white members openly denigrated a historically Black Catholic church after the group visited there.

Presley remembered thinking at the time: “There’s a need for reform here. There’s a need for reshaping” consciousness around issues of racial justice within the church “and I have a responsibility to be a change agent in that regard.”

Panelist Yunuen Trujillo, a lay minister, community organizer, and immigration attorney, was raised “culturally Catholic.” When she came out as gay in her teens, her mother brought her to the church “to find answers” about her identity.

Trujillo soon realized she had to discern three things: her orientation, her vocation, and how willing she was to belong to the church if her vocation involved her having a partner. She became a youth leader in the church, but found that a “discriminatory application” of doctrine got in the way of expressing her true identity.

Over time, she discerned a need to continue working in religious-formation circles while challenging instances of “exclusionary doctrine” and committing herself to LGBTQ ministry. She has subsequently assembled resources for others to do similar ministerial work.

Evans prompted each of the panelists to share more at length on an issue or theme of church reform to which they have a personal connection. Presley began by focusing on the need for the church to reach out to communities and people who have been hurt by the generational sin of racism.

“The church first has to repent of its sins,” he said. It can’t just “spiritualize” the issue, but must embark on the work of “genuine selflessness and consistent action.”

Presley addressed the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pastoral documents on racism, including Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979) and Open Wide Our Hearts (2018). The ethics in these documents need to carry “a feeling tone” he said, and cannot merely be “performative.”

Reminding the audience that “listening is prayer,” he asserted that “the church has to become a better listener” and cultivate an environment “where we can better understand one another.”

“The church has to be ready and committed to playing the long game,” he said. “Building relationships is the crucial piece for me.”

Trujillo looked to those who might feel excluded even within the “inclusive” spaces of the progressive wing of the church. She said this exclusion is often unintentional. It comes from the misguided idea that “God’s love is like a pie” and each individual and group must fight for its own separate piece.

“We need to do better at listening to each other,” she elaborated, by “understanding each other’s lived experiences.”

She continued, “We have to reform our church structures, we have to develop our doctrine, but we also have to reform this idea in our mind that we have to wait until the hierarchy makes changes. We have to start reforming our own hearts and our own spaces to be inclusive.”

“Our full liberation only comes when we are all liberated,” she added.

Evans asked Kuzma about his relationship to Catholicism and how he remained “soft enough to be open to the Spirit” during moments of personal discernment.

Kuzma explained how when he “discovered and named” his trans identity at 28, the “rigid checklist” of his fundamentalist Catholic upbringing began to fall apart. Other Catholics in his life were urging him not to trust his own experience. Yet in moments of silence, he was able to cede to the “steady, persistent pull of the Spirit”—a “contemplative discernment” that he characterized as “a kind of resting in God.”

“Grace wasn’t something that I had to earn by disappearing,” he said. Instead, it acquired a “spaciousness” that he could meet in his full humanity. He described his transition journey as being “filled with small miracles,” adding, “My body stopped being a site of conflict and became a place of revelation.”

Gordon concluded by offering her perspectives on new expressions of faith-based communities. She referred to herself as “a ‘new wineskin’ kind of Catholic” and said, “My call in this work is less about reform and more about reimagination.”

“I feel called to keep creating new wineskins,” or spaces for belonging and becoming, she said. She referenced a comment of Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, who once told her that “change is part of [the] identity” of monastic orders.

While there can be “resistance to change” in religious life, Gordon said this often comes from a sacred place of wanting to share a beloved tradition. Being open to change requires “a ritual of lament and grieving” for what is lost, lest new directions be perceived as threats.

“You have to recognize what is dying in order to move into new life,” she said. “If you don’t let go, then you’re not able to step into new life.” ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Today’s American Catholic.

Image: Alex Noriega / Unsplash