Almost Good Catholics

Christine Wohar talks about Finding Frassati: And Following His Path to Holiness (EWTN, 2021), her book about Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati. The book is a biography, hagiography, and delightful conversation about the participation of the Communion of Saints in our lives and how can join hands with them in our daily lives. Like many of us, Bl. Pier Giorgio was a normal guy with a comfortable life, and he did normal fun things available to him a young wealthy, Italian a hundred years ago, like mountain climbing, Alpine skiing, studying at university, and playing pool with his friends. But he also showed extreme love for the Eucharist, care for the poor, evangelization, and chastity—so, normal, and yet extraordinary.

Not only was Bl. Pier Giorgio’s body free from corruption when it was exhumed 75 years after his death, but he also has a couple of astounding miraculous healing attributed to him through his intercession. Christine Wohar talks to me about this remarkable figure in the church and how we can follow in his footsteps.

Other Almost Good Catholics episodes that we referred to in this interview:

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Dorcas Oyelade and Kailea Barté, two young women, still teenagers, organized a Christian club in a public at John Swett High School in Crockett, Northern California, where I am a teacher. The students worked with a Protestant NGO, Decision Point, which supported them even as they insisted on their First Amendment rights when there was opposition. The club has been an impressive success with many students joining them at lunch time, become interested in the Christian faith, and in some cases starting to go with them to church.

• Decision Point website and YouTube channel.

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John Michael Talbot is a tremendously successful musician and writer; he is also the founder of a monastery—the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion Hermitage in Arkansas—where he is Minister General today. He started as a Methodist and a country rock musician in the seventies and the story of his journey is amazing, from the encounter with Jesus he had at seventeen to the intense mystical experiences that he had later in life during an illness that brought him into closer communion with Our Lord.

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Professor David Bonagura, theologian and Latinist, has translated and edited seven of St. Jerome’s letters dealing with death and mourning. This doctor of the church consoles his friends in first centuries of Christendom, describing death as sleep, and dying as our journey back home to God. And though the Mediterranean is big and fourth-century travel was slow, we see that the Christian community is surprisingly close. The letters also reveal some of the material history and mentalities of daily life which allow us a priceless glimpse across the centuries.

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Michael John Cusick argues that our addictions and disordered sexual desires are really a misdirected effort to reach God and live in connection with Him. How can this be? The crude simulation is but at poor substitute for the real thing, for the Truth. Yet in this fallen world, sinners repeatedly fall into the snares. “I do not understand my own actions,”—Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans—"For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” But like the prodigal son in the pigpen, we cannot but lift our eyes from the mud and think about the loving Father waiting for us at home.

Michael John Cusick, author, counselor, host of the wonderful podcast, Restoring the Soul, talks about what he has learned about addiction, disorder, mercy, and freedom, in his book Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle and also on this episode of Almost Good Catholics.

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

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Temeko Ricardson grew up in the Protestant American tradition; she was a “GPK” (grand-pastor-kid) from a family of church leaders. She has been thinking about Christianity and social issues—failure to include God’s people into His Church, fractured families, homelessness—and how to weave out society together and spread the Gospel. She’s an entrepreneur, consultant, philanthropist, and filmmaker. Today we talk about her work and the content she had been making to “ensure people understand the greatness of having Christ at the center of their lives through entertaining content.”

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There have been Christians in the Holy Land for two thousand years; “we are the first church,” says Father Firas Abedrabbo who is from Bethlehem and works in Ramallah. He studied law in France and speaks excellent English and spoke with me about his experience as a priest in Palestine (the West Bank) during the Gaza War. We talk politics and history, but we also talk about how people in the middle of a war can see God’s love and His participation in our daily lives, even (or perhaps especially) in our darkest hours.

I am grateful for Josh Del Colle of South Dakota for this episode suggestion and for arranging the introduction.

Almost Good Catholics episodes with Father Piotr Żelazko in Jerusalem:

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For Christians, the central event in history and in universe is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. This killing of God (or deicide) is so mysterious and terrible that it’s hard to even approach: what kind of a God would choose to be tortured and murdered by his rebellious creatures? Pastor Brian Zahnd’s poetic theology of the Cross (in The Wood between the Worlds) takes a kaleidoscopic approach, which turns this way and that, until that terrible cross reflects the light of God that dazzles with coruscating beauty.

Related Almost Good Catholics episodes:

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Colin Rahill dropped out of law school to become a Catholic writer; he just finished his first book, Castor & Pollux (Emerald Books, 2023), which is about the troubles facing Gen Z: the idolatrous snares of social media, health cults, self-manifesting, neopaganism, a kaleidoscope of prescription drugs, and pornified AI digital realities (to name a few). It’s also about his journey as an artist and, above all, his path to the Catholic Church. But it’s not a book about social angst, the domain of older faultfinders; it’s a novel and a youthful one. It’s an allegorical—sometimes satirical—adventure story that leads the prodigal protagonist home to God.

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Lifelong alcoholic Joe McGivney drank himself into brain damage and permanent disability. The day after being placed into the assisted care he would need for rest of his life, he sprang back to full recovery, restored health—it was a medical impossibility—for which he credits the intercession of Blessed Father Michael McGivney, his distant relative and the founder of the Knights of Columbus in the nineteenth-century Catholic charitable brotherhood and who is now being considered for canonization on the basis of the recorded intercessory miracles like the one Joe experience two years ago.

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