Columnist, editor and nonfiction author
Born in Tehran and based in New York, Sohrab Ahmari, 37, is co-founder of the online political magazine Compact, a former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, and former op-ed editor of the New York Post. He is an outspoken critic and has argued that politics and public discourse should be a forum of “war and enmity”, with culturally conservative values being imposed on society. Ahmari is a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald which published the first account of his journey from atheism to Roman Catholicism in 2016. He is the author of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts, a spiritual memoir, From Fire, by Water and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.
Editor, Crux
John L Allen Jr, 57, is founder and editor of the Roman Catholic–oriented news site Crux. Allen also serves as a senior Vatican analyst for CNN, and has featured in coverage of the conclaves of 2005 and 2013. He is the author of 12 books about the Catholic Church and has written two biographies of Pope Benedict XVI.
Author, broadcaster and EWTN host
Raymond Arroyo, 51 and a resident of New Orleans, is the news director and lead anchor of EWTN News, a division of the Eternal Word Television Network. He is also the creator and host of the programme The World Over Live and author of the Will Wilder series for young readers. Arroyo is a producer of the bestselling, all-star audio Bible, The Word of Promise.
Chairman, NBC Sports Group
New York native Pete Bevacqua is a corporate, media and sports executive. Since 2020, he has served as chairman of NBC Sports Group. Bevacqua formerly held the role of president of NBC Sports Group and before that spent six years as the CEO of the PGA of America. Pete promotes Catholic morality within sport and is a board member of RISE, an alliance of sports organisations that promotes racial equality.
Harvard professor and columnist, The Atlantic
Arthur Brooks, 58, is a professor at Harvard as well as a successful author, public speaker and a columnist at The Atlantic. He focuses on the science of human happiness, stating that his mission is “lifting others up and bringing them together”. He has given over 1,400 speeches during his career and has interviewed high-profile figures such as Oprah, the Dalai Lama and Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama.
Writer, The Atlantic
Elizabeth Bruenig, 31, is a rising star of US journalism and a native of Texas. She has been described as a “Catholic, socialist, family-focused thinker”. She currently works as an opinion writer for The Atlantic. She previously worked for the New York Times and as an editor for the Washington Post. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2019. As a Marshall Scholar, she studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, earning a master of philosophy degree in Christian theology.
Executive director, Catholic Media Association
Robert DeFrancesco, who resides in Phoenix, is the executive director of Catholic Media Association. He is a mission-driven membership association leader and communications professional with two decades of leadership and media experience. The Catholic Media Association was established in 1911 and advocates for the value, effectiveness and identity of member publishers and organisations, journalists and media professionals throughout North America.
TV host
Stephen Doocy, 65, is an American television host, political commentator and author. He is an anchor of Fox & Friends on the Fox News channel. Doocy has earned TV reporting and writing awards from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists and 11 Emmy awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He is married to Kathy Doocy, a former model and TV sports reporter, and is a Roman Catholic who serves as a lector in his church.
Columnist, New York Times
Ross Douthat, 42, is an American political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist. He lives with his family in Connecticut. He was previously a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of topics, including the state of Christianity in America and “sustainable decadence” in contemporary society. As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family, to Catholicism. Douthat is also a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His seven books include The Deep Places, in which he revealed he suffers from chronic Lyme disease, and To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.
Catholic podcaster
Matt Fradd, who lives in Ohio, is the creator and host of the Pints With Aquinas podcast and Love People Use Things which are listened to by tens of thousands of people every month. He is the author and co-author of several books including, Does God Exist? A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas and The Porn Myth: Exposing the Reality Behind the Fantasy of Pornography.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Bryan Gruley, 64, studied at the University of Notre Dame where he majored in American Studies and graduated in 1979. He retired in 2020 after 41 years in journalism, including stints at the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Detroit News. He is the author of five award-winning novels set in his home state of Michigan. He was schooled in Detroit, at Detroit Catholic Central.
Philanthropist and editor
Anne Hearst, 67, is an American socialite, philanthropist and publishing heiress. Hearst is also a contributing editor of Town & Country. She is one of the five daughters of Randolph Apperson Hearst, former president of the San Francisco Examiner. She is the granddaughter of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Her mother was a devout Catholic and she is a sister to Patti Hearst who was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She is married to the novelist Jay McInerney, of Catholic Irish heritage.
Catholic media broadcaster
After his conversion to the Catholic faith, Trent Horn earned master’s degrees in the fields of theology, philosophy and bioethics. He serves as a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, where he specialises in teaching Catholics to persuasively engage those who disagree with them. Trent models that approach each week on the radio programme Catholic Answers Live and his own podcast The Counsel of Trent.
Conservative television host
Laura Ingraham, 59 and a convert to Roman Catholicism, is an American conservative television host. She has been the host of The Ingraham Angle on Fox News since October 2017, and is the editor-in-chief of LifeZette. She formerly worked as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration before earning a JD degree and working as a judicial clerk in New York and then for US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. She is an active philanthropist and often donates the proceeds from her website to several causes.
Writer, founder and editor, The New Criterion
Roger Kimball, 69, is an art critic and conservative social commentator. He is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the publisher of Encounter Books. Kimball has authored many books, most significantly Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, for which he gained notoriety. He serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute and is chairman of the William F Buckley Jr Program.
Host, The Michael Knowles Show
Michael Knowles hosts The Michael Knowles Show on the Daily Wire and The Book Club on PragerU. He also co-hosts Verdict with Ted Cruz. His writing has appeared in numerous outlets including the Daily Wire and Fox News. He appears regularly as a political analyst on TV news programmes. In 2020, Knowles was named a Lincoln Fellow by the Claremont Institute. He was raised a Catholic but fell away until he was at Yale University where he experienced a reconversion to the Church.
Senior fellow, the National Review Institute
Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute where she heads up the Center for Religion, Culture, and Civil Society. She is also editor-at-large of National Review magazine and speaks on faith in public life, virtue and prayer, often interviewing public figures such as Cardinal Dolan at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in New York.
Catholic YouTube commentator
Taylor Marshall, 44, is an American Catholic YouTube commentator with almost 400,000 subscribers. He is the author of multiple books, including the 2019 self-published Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within. After studying at Westminster Theological Seminary and Nashotah House, Marshall was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church. In 2006, he and his wife Joy converted to Catholicism.
Former White House speechwriting director
William McGurn, 63, is a leading Conservative political and cultural commentator with the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, who writes on Catholic affairs. He has voiced concerns over Pope Francis’s progressive agenda, especially in remarks relating to same-sex marriage, contraception and abortion. McGurn has said it is dispiriting when “the faithful have to explain away a pope’s words by saying he didn’t mean them” and that “the pope has invited much of the confusion himself”.
McGurn was chief speechwriter for President George W Bush from June 2006 until February 2008. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1981 and later from Boston University. He joined News Corporation in 2009 after Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007, becoming speechwriter for Murdoch and News Corp. He has been editorial page editor of the New York Post and in 2015 rejoined the Wall Street Journal where he now writes the “Main Street” column and is an executive. McGurn and his wife, Julie Hoffman, live in New Jersey. When they lived in Hong Kong they adopted three daughters from China.
Vatican commentator
Diane Montagna is a Vatican journalist based in Rome. She contributes to the Catholic Herald and is the co-author of Father Gerald Murray’s bestselling memoir and spiritual guide Calming the Storm: Navigating the Church in a Time of Crisis. She has been a Vatican correspondent since 2014 and has worked as a translator for L’Osservatore Romano as well as Bishop Schneider’s book The Catholic Mass. She is a regular Vatican commentator for international TV networks.
Founder and editor-in-chief, Inside the Vatican
Robert Moynihan, 86, is a journalist and seasoned Vatican analyst who is the founder and editor-in-chief of Inside the Vatican magazine. He is a world-renowned commentator on Catholic issues and has appeared on news outlets such as Fox News, CNN, ABC and EWTN. He is the author of several books on issues facing the Church today, including The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI: Let God’s Light Shine Forth, Pray for Me: The Life and Spiritual Vision of Pope Francis, First Pope from the Americas, and Finding Vigano: The Man Behind the Testimony that Shook the Church and the World.
Journalist and former White House speechwriter
Peggy Noonan, 72, is a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal and contributor to NBC News and ABC News. She was a primary speechwriter and special sssistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986. Five of Noonan’s books have been New York Times bestsellers. She was also nominated for an Emmy award for her work on America: A Tribute to Heroes. She is a practising Roman Catholic and lives in New York City where she attends St Thomas More Church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Journalist and TV host
Bill O’Reilly, 73, is a political commentator, journalist and TV host. He hosts the podcast No Spin News. Prior to joining Fox he served as a reporter for several local news stations in the US as well as ABC News and CBS News. O’Reilly was raised in a Catholic family and attended Chaminade Catholic High School in Mineola, New York. He and his wife were married at St Brigid Parish in Westbury, New York.
Editor, First Things
Russell Ronald Reno III, 63, is the editor of First Things magazine. He was formerly a professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University. A theological and political conservative, Reno was not originally Catholic, having been baptised into the Episcopal Church and growing up as a member of the Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore. However in 2004 he was received into the Catholic Church.
Author and president, Faith & Reason Institute
Robert Royal is an influential broadcaster and conservative commentator who is president of the Faith & Reason Institute based in Washington DC. A former Fulbright Scholar, he is editor-in-chief of the The Catholic Thing site which he founded with Michael Novak. He is also the St John Henry Newman Visiting Chair in Catholic Studies at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, NH.
Editor-in-chief. Crisis Magazine
Eric Sammons is the executive director of Crisis Publications and the editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. He is the author of several books including Deadly Indifference, The Old Evangelization and Holiness for Everyone. He has contributed several essays and articles to publications such as OnePeterFive, The Federalist, and CatholicVote. He is a board member of the Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima. He considers himself a “traditional Catholic”.
Journalist and author
Maria Shriver, 66, is a former First Lady of California, and the founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement. She was married to former governor of California and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom she divorced in 2021. Shriver earned two Emmys for her role in developing The Alzheimer’s Project, called a “television show with a conscience”. She is a practising Catholic.
Journalist
Washington DC resident Andrew Sullivan, 59, is a British-American author, editor and blogger. Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of the New Republic and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, the Daily Dish, in 2000 and eventually moved to platforms including Time, The Atlantic and The Daily Beast, and finally to an independent subscription-based format. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York and his newsletter, the “Weekly Dish”, was launched in July 2020. Sullivan is a Catholic and has attributed his notorious conservatism to this background.
Founder, ClaritasU and senior publishing director, Word on Fire Ministries
Brandon Vogt, from Orlando, founded ClaritasU and is the senior publishing director for Bishop Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. He is also the founder of Chesterton Academy of Orlando, a classical high school rooted in the Catholic faith. He has served as a consultant for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Evangelisation and Catechesis and on the board of the Society of GK Chesterton. He has authored 11 books including Why I am Catholic (And You Should Be Too) and Return: How to Draw Your Child Back to the Faith. He has been featured on news outlets and publications including Fox News, CBS, EWTN, NPR and National Review.
Chairman and CEO, EWTN
Michael P Warsaw is the chairman and CEO of EWTN and publisher of the National Catholic Register. He joined EWTN in 1991, became president in 2000 and assumed the role of CEO in 2009. After the network’s acquisition of the National Catholic Register in 2011, he became publisher of the magazine. In 2013, he was named chairman of EWTN. He serves on the board of directors for the Napa Institute and on the board of trustees for the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He is a member of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. In 2017, Pope Francis named Warsaw as consultor to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications.
Senior vice president, NBCUniversal Media
With over 25 years of experience in marketing and sales across the media, entertainment and technology industries, Christina Glorioso is passionate about supporting the less fortunate and has mentored hundreds of early- and mid-career professionals from Notre Dame, her alma mater, and around the industry. She currently serves on the Dean’s Business Advisory Council of the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and as co-chair of the Media and Entertainment Leadership Committee for the Film, Theatre and Television major. In these roles she advises on curriculum and connecting alumni to more fully support the student population.
She has previously served on the National Alumni Association Board and the Monogram Club board of directors. She is a native of Rockville Centre, NY and has four sons who are receiving a Catholic education at St Agnes Cathedral School.
She has connected both schools by sponsoring the annual Notre Dame Bread of Life Food Drive at St Agnes, encouraging young students to support the less fortunate in their community. At Notre Dame she was a former Fighting Irish student athletic manager and a “Double Domer” who received an undergraduate degree in finance and computer applications in 1995 and her MBA four years later.
She now oversees productivity and transformation as the head of the Center of Excellence at NBCUniversal Ad Sales. Prior to NBC, she has held various executive roles at various sports, media and gaming companies.
She is an influential philanthropist, mentor and role model to many Notre Dame graduates wanting to enter the entertainment world. Christina Glorioso
Senior vice president, NBCUniversal Media
With over 25 years of experience in marketing and sales across the media, entertainment and technology industries, Christina Glorioso is passionate about supporting the less fortunate and has mentored hundreds of early- and mid-career professionals from Notre Dame, her alma mater, and around the industry. She currently serves on the Dean’s Business Advisory Council of the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, and as co-chair of the Media and Entertainment Leadership Committee for the Film, Theatre and Television major. In these roles she advises on curriculum and connecting alumni to more fully support the student population.
She has previously served on the National Alumni Association Board and the Monogram Club board of directors. She is a native of Rockville Centre, NY and has four sons who are receiving a Catholic education at St Agnes Cathedral School.
She has connected both schools by sponsoring the annual Notre Dame Bread of Life Food Drive at St Agnes, encouraging young students to support the less fortunate in their community. At Notre Dame she was a former Fighting Irish student athletic manager and a “Double Domer” who received an undergraduate degree in finance and computer applications in 1995 and her MBA four years later.
She now oversees productivity and transformation as the head of the Center of Excellence at NBCUniversal Ad Sales. Prior to NBC, she has held various executive roles at various sports, media and gaming companies.
She is an influential philanthropist, mentor and role model to many Notre Dame graduates wanting to enter the entertainment world.
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