The Catholic Culture Podcast

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BatWN05pP1I Catholic geneticist Daniel Toma is the author of Vestige of Eden, Image of Eternity: Common Experience, the Hierarchy of Being, and Modern Science . He joins the podcast to discuss what natural science, including the fossil record, can teach us about the hierarchy of being and the liturgical structure of all creation, with deified man as rational head...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4Uv7MvEHixg The Hillbilly Thomists, a bluegrass group entirely composed of Dominican friars, have just released their second album, Living for the Other Side . Percussionist Fr. Joseph Hagan, who happens to be a priest at Thomas's parish, joins the show to talk about the new album, the connections between bluegrass and the Apocalypse, and music as an expression o...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zkfJ-gSMdUg Today's Catholic culture is marked by a profound and settled religious indifferentism. Among many Catholics, to say what the Church has always taught—that Jesus Christ is the one way to salvation—is considered offensive, or at best, rash. In certain countries, the bishops' conferences have practically made a policy against seeking converts from other...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3Czyd0XSEso The alarmists were right: ideas that were only a few years ago complacently dismissed as the perennial agitation of a few campus loonies are now pervasive in the corporate world, mass media and pop culture. Critical race theory, transgender ideology, the obsessive search for oppressive power relations in every aspect of life and every feature of langu...

All music by Thomas Tallis used with permission of the artists and labels listed below. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/i-oMO9qqzKA As a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) composed sacred music for four successive English monarchs, starting with Henry VIII and ending with Elizabeth. Those were turbulent times in England, especially for a church musician. Those were turbule...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z5jrU3JYnv0 In his Five Great Odes , the great French Catholic poet Paul Claudel (1868-1955) offers a cosmic vision in which man, in his contemplative and poetic capacity, stands as mediator between God and all creation. Man, in the image of God and even more in the headship of Christ, names all creatures, unites them in his heart, speaks for them and offers them...

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/H1_78eLjaB8 The trials of St. Anthony the Great (251-356 AD), as described in St. Athanasius's Life and the medieval Golden Legend , have been a favorite subject of Western artists since the Middle Ages. Anthony, a desert monk, was frequently assaulted by Satan, who when he could not win by normal temptations, sent his demons in the form of wild beas...

Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom, Humanis Dignitatae , begins by noting that its discussion of religious liberty "has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society" and so "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." This episode is about discovering what that traditional doct...

In addition to being the host of Catholic Culture's Way of the Fathers podcast and the author of dozens of books on the early Church, Mike Aquilina is a poet who has written songs performed by the likes of Dion, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen. Mike joins the show to discuss his collaboration with legendary singer Dion, early Christian beliefs about Mary, and other topics in early Church history...

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8zPXC9KscGs The debate over Christopher Columbus's legacy tends to go back and forth from cartoonish demonization to glossing over the man's real faults. Robert Royal, in his book Columbus and the Crisis of the West , does neither of those things, instead giving a nuanced picture of Columbus's motives, worldview, faults and achievements. The book goes beyond Colu...

Watch on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ve9oqQpCrI Jeremy McLellan is a Catholic stand-up comedian who, strangely, is huge is Pakistan. He joins the show to discuss the woke takeover of comedy, the nihilistic dogmas of many comedians, the relationship between comedy and suffering, and the ethics of the word "retarded". Thomas describes his past experience doing open mics and Jeremy gives...

The Catholic Culture Podcast is now in video! Subscribe to our YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBwqvyZyc2bpzI-kOYhwrkw While the Catholic Church has condemned Marxism, Communism and socialism from their beginning, an alarming number of those calling themselves Catholic display a sympathy for these ideas: think of America magazine's 2019 essay on "The Catholic Case of Communism"....

There are many strange stories in rock history. But Luxury is surely the only band in which three out of five members ended up becoming Orthodox priests. Combining a hard-edged instrumental texture with sweet, melodious vocals and literary lyrics, Luxury has continued to record and perform sporadically since their beginning in the mid-1990s Christian punk scene. They have retained a loyal followin...

Catholic theologian Douglas Farrow and Lutheran political scholar Andrew Busch join the show to discuss their recent essays on the coronavirus lockdown, and assess the reasons and prospects for civil disobedience. In "The Health-First Heresy," Farrow examines the responses of Catholic and other Christian leaders to the state's orders to cease corporate worship. Whatever concessions the Church may...

While the left continues crudely to paint America's founding as a mere expression of white supremacy, certain thinkers on the right have been making their own attack on American principles. They argue that America's founding principles are fundamentally a product of an Enlightenment liberalism incompatible with natural law and faith. They find in the Constitution seeds of moral relativism, leading...

This episode revisits some great moments from past Catholic Culture Podcast episodes: 18 - Acedia, the Forgotten Capital Sin - R.J. Snell https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-18-acedia-forgotten-capital-sin-rj-snell/ 19 - Understanding the Church's Abuse Crisis - Fr. Roger Landry https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-19-understanding-churchs-abuse-crisis-fr-roger-landry/...

In this episode originally from Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast, Thomas asks attorney and scholar Louis Karlin whether Robert Bolt's play and film A Man for All Seasons  accurately depict St. Thomas More's views on the rights of conscience, and his motives for martyrdom. More's involvement in the prosecution of heretics is also examined: even if More was a martyr of conscience, is it accurate...

Something a little different: this is the audio from a video on the DeClue's Views YouTube channel, which I am republishing here because I want to give these men a wider audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeQenCC8iQo Description: In a recent video,Taylor Marshall presented what he considers to be errors in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. This video by Richard DeClue and Chris P...

The Catholic Church in America has largely lost its distinctive flavor and with it, its ability either to retain the faithful or to evangelize the infidel. The problem precedes Vatican II: in the Tridentine 1950s, many Catholics, eager for mainstream respectability, had already adopted a bourgeois spirituality. In his first book, The Prodigal Church: Restoring Catholic Tradition in an Age of Decep...

From 1981 to 1993, Jane Greer edited Plains Poetry Journal , publishing poets who were reviving the traditional tools of "rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, painstaking attention to diction" which had been abandoned in favor of free verse. (These poets included names you will be familiar with from the Catholic scene today, such as Anthony Esolen and Mike Aquilina.) Then, as they say, life happ...

Modernity treats the human body pretty much as a machine for the production of pleasure. It is tuned up, fueled, and oiled for peak performance, and then when it is no longer of use, it is burnt and disposed of in a maximally efficient manner. Paradoxically, the denial of a soul which persists after bodily death has led us to deny the body itself as fundamental to human identity. The allegedly sou...

This is the second half of an interview with G.C. Dilsaver on his book  The Three Marks of Manhood: How to be Priest, Prophet and King of Your Family . Dr. Dilsaver discusses how the Christian husband and father must wield three staves: the scepter of authority, the crosier of co-episcopacy, and the cross of redemption. This last is most important, as the Christian patriarch's mandate is to lead i...

There is a great need for Catholics to acknowledge the timeless Biblical and Magisterial teachings about the headship of fathers over their families. Yet St. Paul's simultaneous call for husbands to love their wives as Christ loves the Church - that is, to the point of death - is sometimes treated as an addendum when in fact it is the very essence of Christian patriarchy. In his 2010 book The Thre...

After much popular demand, Thomas pays tribute to legendary Catholic sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe, who passed away last year. Though not known to the general public, Wolfe is a sci-fi author's sci-fi author—a number of his contemporaries considered him not only the best in the genre, but in American fiction at the time (Ursula Le Guin said "Wolfe is our Melville"). Among today's writers, one of his bi...

Catholic actor Jonathan Roumie plays Jesus in The Chosen , the first multi-season TV series about the life of our Lord. He joins the podcast to discuss his approach to playing the God-Man, the spiritual impact of the series, its groundbreaking approach to funding and distribution—and his devotion to the Divine Mercy. Contents [1:10] The unique production, financing and distribution of The Chosen [...