Abbey Delk

WHEELING – A podcast presentation telling the story of the Catholic Church’s efforts to oppose the Vietnam War has been nominated for a Peabody Award, and Wheeling Park High School graduate Abbey Delk is among those on the team that created it.

Delk – a 2018 WPHS alumnus – now lives in Brooklyn, and she works for the former Wonder Media Network podcast company that was acquired by ACAST last year.

During the transition, she and her team began work on “Divine Intervention.” Hosted by Brendan Hughes, the 10-part audio documentary details how left-leaning Catholics in the 1960s began to unite and take actions opposing the Vietnam War.

Delk explained the story was a personal one for Hughes, who had been working on it in various media forms since 1999. He initially intended it as a screenplay, but the team at Wonder Media helped him turn it into an episodic podcast.

“The story was passed down through his family,” she said. “The Catholic community in Boston centered around a church on the Boston Common where his father was a priest.”

Hughes’ father and mother would eventually meet at the church, fall in love, marry and start a family – but not before being involved in an activist movement that transformed the Catholic Church.

“It was about balancing a story about the Vietnam War with love and civil disobedience,” said Delk who, as a producer on the project, worked in writing and research. “And it was about figuring out as a small team how to tell the story so that it was still fun to listen to – and still the listener was not getting an information dump.”

Peabody Awards honor excellence in electronic media including television, radio and podcasts. They are presented to works exemplifying “stories that matter,” and the award ceremony is set for May 31.

Delk began working at Wonder Media shortly after graduating from Fordham University in 2022. She previously had been an intern for Wonder Media, and had also been an intern at The Intelligencer and Wheeling News-Register.

Her first work at Wonder Media was for the women’s history podcast “Womanica.”

“I loved working on that,” she said. “I enjoyed the research and writing of the episodes.”

Her next projects were for another podcast, “White Picket Fence,” which centered on women and gender politics.

As she was working on “Divine Intervention,” Delk also joined the team doing post-production on Martha Stewart’s podcasts.

No, she has not yet met Stewart.

“I suspect I will, but I’ve only been with her show for four months,” Delk said. “I listen to a lot of her conversations. She is definitely a character.”

Delk said the “Divine Intervention” presentation was “the most challenging and the most time-intensive” project on which she has worked. Hughes had collected about 40 hours of interviews over the years while wanting to bring the work together.

“The Vietnam War was not something the church leadership was speaking out against,” she explained. “They seemed to be sympathetic to the effort, and even outwardly supportive.”

But in the early 1960s, post Vatican II, the Catholic Church was going through changes, Delk continued.

“Latin mass was no longer mandatory,” she said. “There was a shift from a priest having total authority. There was a spirit of change.

“Then there was the civil rights movement. Women were getting more autonomy, and President John F. Kennedy was getting elected. A rift between younger and older Catholics was the result. Young Catholics were burning their draft cards, and there was civil obedience to keep people from being sent over to Vietnam.”

Delk acknowledged her job was “fun.”

“If a young person is interested in storytelling, it is great to have this job. But the jobs are becoming further and farther between,” she said. “It’s not an easy way to make a living.

“But being realistic…ultimately, you can do the work yourself. It’s easier than ever to get a microphone and just start telling stories. Go get a microphone. Don’t wait for a job title and start doing it,” Delk added.