In this first episode of In Conversation With, Mary Margaret Olohan sits down with former US Senator Rick Santorum to discuss the changing face of Catholicism in American public life. Santorum traces the shift from the social gospel Catholicism of the Democratic northeast to a more doctrinally confident faith that has increasingly found its home on the political right, pointing to the composition of the Supreme Court and the growing number of Catholic Republican governors as signs of a movement that may only be gathering pace.

The conversation ranges across some of the most contested territory in American culture. Santorum addresses allegations of anti-Semitism within parts of the conservative movement, condemning them plainly while offering a broader diagnosis: what he calls a modern-day Gnosticism, fed by conspiracy thinking and a willingness to blame others for cultural decline. He also revisits his early warnings about the redefinition of marriage and the sexual revolution, predictions he made in his 2005 book It Takes a Family that he argues have since been borne out.

Santorum speaks candidly about his own family life: seven children, years of homeschooling across two homes, and what it meant to be openly, countercultural Catholic while serving in the Senate. He reflects on why he believes authenticity, not political calculation, was the key to his unlikely electoral success in Pennsylvania.

The episode closes on more personal ground. Santorum describes the death of his infant son in 1996 and the rekindling of faith that followed, a period that led, almost unexpectedly, to his becoming the Senate's leading voice against partial-birth abortion. It is a conversation that moves between politics, family, and the question of what it means to live a publicly Catholic life.