Making It Easier to be Good: Emma Coley and Matthew Igoe

February 28, 2020

Emma Coley and Matthew Igoe both majored in religion at Princeton University, where they were active in Catholic life on campus. In this conversation, the friends discuss how they approach questions of theology, justice, and reform as the next generation of laypeople in the Church.

This story was produced by David Dault at Sandburg Media, LLC.

This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.

Matthew Igoe: Coming into Princeton, I was very certain that I wanted my faith to be at the center, and so I got connected with the Catholic community on campus very quickly. I'm currently the president of the Ministry Team. Its benefits, I think have been very formative for my experience here, especially like the daily Mass community and the kind of intellectual conversations as well that spring up around the faith.

Emma Coley: I think for me, I came to Princeton coming out of 13 years of Catholic education so I was very much raised Catholic. I went to Mass most Sundays, big Irish Catholic family. I think it was a really hard decision for me. I went to a Jesuit high school and have been deeply informed by the Jesuit tradition. I knew that was something that was important to me because of the way it approaches ideas of who God is and where God is, and really combines that with a love of people and trying to think about justice. I think, for me, coming to Princeton and not going to Jesuit university was in part a choice to leave a world that I was really comfortable with.

Matthew Igoe: We're both religion majors and our theses are both related to Catholic topics, mine on the more theological side. Yours, I think more related to the Church's teachings on social justice and how we're supposed to put that into practice, which I think is very reflective of us. But I also think that we both understand the value of each of those approaches, how they're in a profound unity with each other. I hadn't realized that until now. Of course, now that we're at the end of the road here at Princeton, there's this question of the next step.

Emma Coley: But I think about this a lot as a woman in the Church and thinking about how does my voice have authority or any sort of, how is it listened to? That I'm the straight white woman in the Catholic Church, and I struggle with that. I struggle with how to present myself in such a way that feels true to me, but also is in conformity enough to make my descent heard as coming from a place of love of the Church and from within and not from without. I just think about how much more learning could happen if we could strip some of that away. If there wasn't this sense of, I say this, my authority is gone. Or if I say this, my legitimacy is gone. I wonder, like I said, how that feels for other people in the Church, especially people who are more marginalized by the Church's standards, whether that's for gender and sexuality or also just because where they live, whether it's because of people's racial backgrounds, racial identities, socioeconomic backgrounds.

I just wish there could be more openness. I wish I could not have that type of fear or consideration that I do have. I want that for other people, too.

Matthew Igoe: We can look at the problems and we can become very disheartened. But I think of a saint like Catherine of Sienna, this woman who is at once radically, I would say, almost reverent of the hierarchy of the Church, but yet at the same time, calling the people who populate those offices to manifest in their own lives, that which they profess or the place that they hold.

I think that's my model, how I think about this is as a lay person in the Church, trying to cultivate a great love for the pope, the bishops, the priests, as like my fathers in the faith. But then through my witness or through my effort to live the Gospel, to be a sign, to try to be a sign, at least, of what the Church is in her core, that as a baptized soul, I'm like a little microcosm of the Church and the beauty and the perfection of the Church, I pray, can become manifest in me and manifest in all of us. That God's kingdom will come. It will come when Jesus comes in glory, but that a little piece of it will come now through my life. I think that's the hope.

Emma Coley: I talk a lot about the Catholic Worker Movement, was started in the 1930s by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in New York. Peter Maurin always said his mission was to make a world in which is easier for people to be good. That always felt right to me. It's a way of saying I value the things like aspects of personal morality and codes of conduct and ethics that are personal, but also recognizing how that relates to political structure, social structures, and economic structures. So I think I've always carried that with me and I think that's where I find great hope.