An episode from Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast, too good not to share for Catholic Culture Podcast listeners!

Anthony D'Ambrosio directed, wrote, and produced the outstanding new film Triumph of the Heart about St. Maximilian Kolbe. In this inspiring interview, he discusses the difficult path he and his team charted to produce this independent film with a low budget, high artistic standards, and deep Catholic spirituality.

Film is an expensive medium. Since a high budget requires one to calculate mainstream appeal in order to make one's money back, a low budget can leave more room for artistic and spiritual integrity. Though the production faced many hardships, it was buoyed up by the hope that the project could break a new path for other Catholic filmmakers to follow.

Triumph of the Heart is available to screen at your parish, and will start streaming on its official website November 1.

Links

Show Triumph of the Heart at your parish https://www.triumphoftheheart.com/

Our review of Triumph of the Heart https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/triumph-heart-is-film-worthy-its-subject-st-maximilian-kolbe/

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

DONATE to keep this podcast going: https://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

Highlight clips from two episodes of the Catholic Culture Podcast and one episode of Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast – links to full episodes below.

83 The American Founding's Medieval Roots – Robert Reilly https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/ep-83-american-foundings-medieval-roots-robert-reilly/

85 Three-Fifths of Our Band Got Ordained - Luxury https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/85-three-fifths-our-band-got-ordained-luxury/

Are Heist Films Moral? The Lavender Hill Mob https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/lavender-hill-mob-1951/

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/

newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Dappled Things: The Quarterly of Ideas, Art, and Faith is celebrating its 20th anniversary. In its 20 years it has contributed to the beginning of a Catholic literary revival, nurturing the talents of many Catholic writers and visual artists. In recent years especially, many exciting new initiatives, presses, and magazines have branched off from Dappled Things. Bernardo Aparicio Garcia (founder and publisher) and Rhonda Ortiz (editor-in-chief) join the podcast to discuss Dappled Things's mission and various topics to do with Catholic fiction.

Links

Dappled Things https://www.dappledthings.org/

See the winners of the Sacred Heart Art Competition https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/winners-of-the-sacred-heart-art-competition

"The Off Season" by Ennis James Sheehan https://www.dappledthings.org/fiction/the-off-season

Rhonda Ortiz https://rhondaortiz.com/

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

One of the most important encyclicals we need to rediscover is Pope Leo XIII's Libertas (1888), on the true nature of human liberty. This encyclical explains what true liberty consists of, followed by a lengthy exposition of the Church's condemnation of liberalism, in the Enlightenment/classical sense rather than today's narrower use of the word. Most people who call themselves conservative now would, in certain ways, fall into the category of liberalism as defined by Leo.

Prophetically warning of the evil consequences of political liberalism, Leo also takes aim at various false liberties in which modern people take such pride: freedom of speech, writing, thought, and worship. In each of these instances, liberals fail to recognize that freedom is not the right to do and say what one wants, but to do justice and to speak truth. As starting as Leo's teaching may be to modern Catholics, his fundamental principle is the one that Pope St. John Paul II enunciated when he said that "freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought."

Pope Leo XIII: "Man, by a necessity of his nature, is wholly subject to the most faithful and ever-enduring power of God; and that, as a consequence, any liberty, except that which consists in submission to God and in subjection to His will, is unintelligible. To deny the existence of this authority in God, or to refuse to submit to it, means to act, not as a free man, but as one who treasonably abuses his liberty; and in such a disposition of mind the chief and deadly vice of liberalism essentially consists.

Thomas's article on Libertas: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/leo-xiiis-condemnation-liberalism/

Pope Leo XIII, Libertas https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=4885

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

A number of doctrinal ruptures occurred in Catholic life after Vatican II – not in the sense that the Church's magisterium contradicted its previous teachings, but that the vast majority of Catholics, even conservative ones, tend to get these topics wrong. One of the worst examples is how the Church's traditional teaching on the Jewish people has been forgotten, with many people under the false impression that Vatican II changed Catholic teaching.

Gideon Lazar, theologian and Jewish convert to Catholicism, joins the podcast to discuss some widely misunderstood and controversial points about the relationship between the Church and the Jews.

(The views Gideon expresses in this interview are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the St. Basil Institute, where he is institute coordinator.)

Links

Part 1 of Thomas's four-part essay, "The Church and the Jews: Beyond the Platitudes" https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/church-and-jews-1-beyond-platitudes/

Gideon Lazar on Substack (a good article to start with) https://gideonlazar.substack.com/p/rex-iudaeorum-st-john-the-evangelist

Gideon on X https://x.com/ByzCat

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

Elisabeth Nguyen Thi Thu Hong joins the podcast to tell the inspiring story of her older brother, Venerable Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, the heroic Vietnamese Cardinal who was imprisoned by the Communists for 13 years, 8 of those in solitary confinement. Thuan was descended from a line of Vietnamese martyrs, and his uncle was the devout Catholic President and Prime Minister of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, who himself was something of a martyr.

Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan: Man of Joy and Hope https://ignatius.com/cardinal-nguyen-van-thuan-cfntp/

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

My other interview with Jane: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/147-world-is-falling-away-jane-greer/

Get free PDF of New Questions, Old Answers: Catholic Morals and Natural Family Planning https://profide.io/nfp/

Article on the marital debt https://christianrenaissancemovement.com/2023/02/23/thoughts-on-the-marital-debt/

The way Natural Family Planning is commonly taught does not adequately reflect the Church's perennial teachings on the purpose of marital relations, on sexual asceticism, and the good of continence. To be sure, critics of NFP are wrong when they say it is the same as contraception. The Church has deemed it legitimate to use under certain circumstances. Yet its typical presentation in marriage prep programs and by popular Catholic speakers has ended up, in practice, encouraging couples toward habitual venial sin.

Discussions of NFP often end up in confusion because they fail to distinguish two separate moral issues: that of avoiding marital relations during fertile periods, and that of engaging in them specifically during infertile periods. As to the first issue, the Church has said we need sufficient reason to deliberately avoid procreating for a long period of time. But the second issue involves a moral doctrine that is virtually never heard of today: that there are particular ends which must be intended in any act of marital relations, and in particular, that it is a venial sin for married couples to have relations purely for pleasure (solam voluptatem, in Pope Innocent XI's phrase). The latter is the teaching of all Fathers and Doctors of the Church without exception.

Given this moral doctrine, and given the Church's (and St. Paul's) traditional encouragement of asceticism within marriage, the question arises: may married couples engage in recreational relations specifically while trying to avoid conception? Answering this question involves questions about the intrinsic ends of sexual intercourse, questions about what "purely for pleasure" even means, etc.

The stakes of the question are low in the sense that this would generally be a matter of venial sin, but high in the sense that it bears on our understanding of the very purpose of marriage and sex, and because habitual, deliberate venial sin is incompatible with a marriage's growth in holiness.

Moral theologian Eamonn Clark joins the podcast to discuss his groundbreaking book (the first on this topic since the 1940s), New Questions, Old Answers: Catholic Morals and Natural Family Planning. His conclusions occupy a middle ground between the extremely strict position of some great Catholic authorities of the past, and the laxity and sensualism presented by some well-regarded and well-meaning popular speakers today.

This discussion will be spiritually and perhaps emotionally challenging to many listeners, but I urge you to listen with an open heart, because even if you end up disagreeing with some of the specific conclusions, you will come away better informed about Church teaching, and equipped to consider for yourself how you can seek greater holiness in marriage. In particular, I highly recommend Eamonn's book to anyone who is involved in running marriage preparation programs.

Eamonn Clark is a licensed moral theologian of the Catholic Church – he has an STB and STL from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, where he is currently a lay doctoral student researching the social teaching of Pope Pius XI.

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters

This is the first in a series of episodes (accompanied by articles) surveying the most important encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. His third encyclical, Aeterni Patris (1879), on the restoration of Christian philosophy, famously called for a revival of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Links

Thomas's article on Aeterni Patris, "Leo XIII and the restoration of Christian philosophy" https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/leo-xiii-on-restoration-christian-philosophy/

Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html

The Great Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII: Volume Two – The Spiritual Letters https://clunymedia.com/products/the-great-encyclicals-of-pope-leo-xiii-volume-two-the-spiritual-letters

Russell Hittinger, On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law https://www.cuapress.org/9780813238234/on-the-dignity-of-society/

SUBSCRIBE to the Catholic Culture Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-catholic-culture-podcast/id1377089807

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

St. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century abbess, mystic, polymath, and Doctor of the Church, is best known to non-Catholics for something else – her music. We have more pieces of music by Hildegard than by any other medieval composer whose name we know. Her chants are beautiful, otherworldly, virtuosic and ahead of their time. Some of them were written for her morality play, the Ordo virtutum, which is also the first of its kind. Musicologist Margot Fassler joins the podcast to discuss what makes St. Hildegard's music so special.

This episode is a crossover with Way of the Fathers, where Dr. Jim Papandrea has done two episodes introducing St. Hildegard's life and writings. Make sure to listen to those for more context about St. Hildegard.

Links

Way of the Fathers episodes on St. Hildegard's life and works:

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/512-st-hildegard-bingen-multimedia-visionary/

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/513-st-hildegard-bingen-teutonic-prophetess/

St. Hildegard's letter to the Prelates of Mainz https://digfir-published.macmillanusa.com/mckay11eepages/mckay11eepages_ch9_4.html

Margot Fassler, Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard's Illuminated Scivias https://www.pennpress.org/9781512823073/cosmos-liturgy-and-the-arts-in-the-twelfth-century/

All music used with permission from Benjamin Bagby & Sequentia, who have recorded her complete works. The specific pieces in this episode can be found on the albums Ordo Virtutum, Symphoniae, and Voice of the Blood. https://www.sequentia.org/projects/hildegard.html

DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters