BH: What is it like being a Jewish woman working for the Catholic channel? How has it affected your own perceptions of religion and faith?<\/i><\/p>\n
RG: I certainly follow my own faith and spirituality, but I\u2019m not Catholic. I didn\u2019t grow up Catholic and I might not identify with a lot of the Catholic traditions and things like that but I certainly have respect for it and have grown to have more respect for it in the last year-and-a-half with just knowledge of it, learning about it. I began with this event on a professional level as a radio producer, and that was my attachment to it. But, especially with the timing of it, with his visit being over Passover, I\u2019m what they call a \u201choliday Jew\u201d [laughs] meaning I go to Synagogue and I celebrate holidays, but I don\u2019t observe Shabbat every Friday and I don\u2019t follow kosher laws and I don\u2019t go to Synagogue regularly. But with the pope coming during Passover\u2026even I had a little bit of a grudge against working over Passover at the beginning of all of this.<\/p>\n
BH: Really?<\/i><\/p>\n
RG: Yeah, sure. It was my holiday and while, yes, I work at a Catholic Channel, it\u2019s often difficult for me to give up a Jewish holiday. But it\u2019s what I do; it\u2019s my job. So I was doing it. But when I watched the event on TV where the pope visited the Synagogue on Shabbat, on Friday night, I felt like I was caught up in part of it. I thought that was great. I listened to his remarks afterwards and then even after Shabbat and getting home later that night at eleven-thirty at night, he went into his residence where he was staying with the Secret Service, passing through all these people who were standing on the street just to get a glimpse of him, and rather than going off to bed, he told the Secret Service, \u2018No, no. I want to go back outside and shake the hands of all of these people.\u2019 And I just thought that was really cool. I thought he\u2019s really become human to a lot of people here. Calling someone \u2018The Vicar of Christ\u2019 is a pretty big pedestal to put someone on and we might not have looked at him as such a human being as he has now shown himself. He really is a warm person who stood up in Synagogue on Friday night and said \u2018shalom\u2019 and \u2018Happy Pesach\u2019 on behalf of the Catholic Church. I thought that was a really incredible move. Sundown at the youth rally on Saturday was the start of Pesach\u2014the beginning of Passover\u2014it was really cool for me to watch the sun go down at the rally and I felt like I was sort of celebrating Passover with the Pope. So it really turned the whole event for me.<\/p>\n
BH: It\u2019s funny you mention that because one of the more moving parts of the trip to me was watching his visit to the Synagogue on television. After the Pope left the Synagogue, the camera lingered inside and I saw these little grandkids running up to their grandfathers or fathers at the Synagogue and jumping in their arms, really excited that the Pope had visited them. I found it very moving that these kids from a different faith tradition were so excited that the Pope had come.<\/i><\/p>\n
RG: Yeah, I saw a clip afterwards of two Bar Mitzvah-aged boys standing outside the Synagogue and they got a chance to shake his hand. And they were so excited; you could just tell they were beaming with excitement. It\u2019s funny because on “The Busted Halo Show” we\u2019ve been asking people for weeks, \u2018if you had the opportunity to meet the Pope, what would you say?\u2019 And they asked the younger of the two boys \u2018well what did you say to him?\u2019 And this young boy said, \u2018I said to him, \u201cshalom\u201d and he said \u201cshalom\u201d back!\u2019; you know, the kid was just so excited! I was just really moved by that; I was like, that\u2019s just great. He was reaching out and touching hands not just of the youth of the Catholic faith, but also that of the Jewish faith. And I thought that was great, especially at Passover. What greater time to bring that unity together? Passover is a time of talking about freedom, and I think that that\u2019s really his message too, is freedom from a lot of things. For him to go share a Shabbat service at a Synagogue with a Holocaust-survivor rabbi; I feel like that speaks volumes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Check out more at the link<\/a>. Very cool stuff, very cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What’s it like for someone who is not Catholic to be covering the Vicar of Christ for the media? Busted Halo’s radio show is produced by Robyn Gould, and she describes her experience working in the Catholic media and covering the most Catholic event of the year: BH: What is it like being a Jewish…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Prior to that, Deacon Greg worked for 26 years as a writer and producer for CBS News, where he contributed to \"The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric,\" \"60 Minutes II,\" \"48 Hours,\" (Emmy Award, Writers Guild of America Award) and \"Sunday Morning.\" He was co-writer for the acclaimed documentary \"9\/11,\" hosted by Robert DeNiro. (Emmy Award, Christopher Award, Peabody Award, Writers Guild of America Award.) His radio essays were featured in the bestselling book \"Deadlines and Datelines\" by Dan Rather. He's also a two-time winner of the Catholic Press Association Award. Other places you may find him: AMERICA, U.S. CATHOLIC, CATHOLIC DIGEST, REALITY (Redemptorist Communications) and THE BROOKLYN TABLET. He also contributes homiletic reflections to the parish resource CONNECT!, published by Liturgical Publications. In November 2009, he began serving a three-year term as a consultant to the Communications Committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Deacon Greg grew up in Maryland (Go Terps!) but he and his wife today live in the beautiful borough of Queens, New York. You can contact Deacon Greg at dcngreg@gmail.com.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/author\/gkandra"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/deaconsbench\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}