The most played episodes among Podcast App listeners.

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   Number 1: Cardinal Sarah and the Crisis in Bioethics

   By Sister Renée Mirkes, OSF Cardinal Robert Sarah's address this summer to the European Parliament identifies a foundational problem in contemporary bioethical discourse: the widening gap between language and reality. Words that once conveyed stable meanings – "healthcare," "rights," "dignity" – are increasingly deployed with ideological elasticity. Sarah warns this linguistic instability constitutes a "crisis of the logos or of reason," a breakdown in the relationship between words and the realities they signify. Language ceases to correspond to reality; reason loses its footing, and moral judgment becomes vulnerable to sentiment, ideology or political coercion. Sarah's thesis rests on three philosophical principles deeply rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition. First, language must correspond to reality. For Sarah, language is not a neutral tool but an instrument of truth. Words are meant to reveal reality, not obscure it. Once medical discourse employs euphemisms or ambiguous terminology, it becomes difficult to identify the moral nature of medical actions. When terms such as "healthcare," "choice," or "medical aid in dying" conceal the underlying reality of direct killing or murder, the loss of linguistic clarity spawns a loss of moral clarity. Second, reason is the basis of ethical judgment. Sarah's critique presupposes a classical and Christian understanding of reason as the faculty capable of discerning truth. In turn, ethical judgment is directly dependent on reason's ability to apprehend the nature of the human person and the goods proper to human flourishing. Rather than rational inquiry into human goods, many bioethical debates today become mere contests of sentiment or political power. Third, human dignity is objective and intrinsic. Sarah insists human dignity does not depend on "autonomy," utility, or political consensus. It flows from the nature of the human person as an imago Dei, a being created in God's image. The consequences of ignoring these principles are particularly acute in bioethics, where, as Sarah argues, the stakes involve human life, embodiment, and dignity. For this reason, Sarah's lectio evaluates coherently four major bioethical issues: abortion, in vitro fertilization, transgender ideology, and physician-assisted suicide. In each case, he demonstrates how linguistic distortion functions as a precondition for moral confusion and policy error. Referring to abortion as "health," for example, is a linguistic manipulation that conceals the elimination of life. Sarah cites American, European, and international policy documents where "sexual and reproductive health" is routinely used to include abortion. He argues this egregious "reversal of the logos" reframes the deliberate termination of a human life as a form of healthcare, conditions human dignity on maternal choice, and treats the unborn baby as an object whose existence depends on external approval. Sarah insists the linguistic distortion of "health," "choice," and "rights" normalizes abortion by embedding it within the language of medicine and the Constitution. But if abortion is described as "healthcare," the unborn child becomes a pathology, the moral reality of direct killing is obscured, and reason is subordinate to political expediency. Within this conceptual framework, warns Sarah, it becomes difficult – if not impossible – to recognize the gravity of the act of abortion. Sarah also contends that the language of "reproductive rights" justifies in vitro fertilization, embryo cryopreservation, selective reduction, and embryo disposal. While the term "rights" is employed to frame the baby and its laboratory production as entitlements, it clandestinely obscures the moral implications of creating and destroying human beings at their embryonic stage. And when IVF is framed as a "right," the child becomes a product of technique rather than the fruit of a unitive act of marital love. The genesis of a new human being is relocated from...

   September 04, 2026·8min
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   Number 2: 'Third-Party' Punishment is Not Catholic

   By Casey Chalk Earlier this year a meta-analysis in Advances in Psychological Science found a correlation between having a heightened sense of self-righteousness and what is called "third-party punishment," meaning punishing someone for a perceived infraction, even when you are not the victim of that infraction. An earlier study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people are eager to express outrage and punish wrongdoers even when there is no identifiable personal benefit, because moralistic behavior signals our moral character to others. Worrying contemporary factors aggravate this phenomenon. We live in a culture that diminishes the role of sin and personal culpability while amplifying our sense of self. Social media encourages the creation of curated versions of ourselves that foreground our "best version of ourselves" while concealing our vices or shortcomings. We inhabit a deracinated, atomized society in which we know and are known by few people, but, ironically, are beholden to an obsession with celebrity – not only actual celebrities, but the cult of celebrity, where we aspire to be celebrated through "likes" and "shares." Much of this digital culture primes us for both virtue signaling and participation in "cancel culture." It's alarming, not only because of the likelihood of unjustly ruining reputations and careers, but because of what this paradigm does to the souls of those who participate in it. We don't know these online people, and are rarely privy to sufficient context to effectively evaluate them. Yet we caustically comment on the public, viral misdeeds of others – parenting decisions, relationship choices, appearance, or social etiquette. How could such behavior not do bad things to our souls? The Church offers a different way of understanding correction, a truly Christian ethic based on a proper anthropology, an understanding of human weakness, of repentance, forgiveness, and redemption that enables us to overcome errors. It does good, both for the one being corrected, as well as the one correcting. At Sunday Mass earlier this month, we read: "If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone." (Matthew 18:15) This is a method of correction that is discreet, respectful, and premised on the existence of a relationship, someone we know, with whom there exists a degree of trust and social currency. That correction, in turn, is not a way of burnishing our own moral credentials, but a desire for metanoia and the strengthening of personal bonds. We admonish the wayward because we love them and desire their good. Another component of the Christian conception of correction is the prudential evaluation of circumstances. Is the person we perceive to be in the wrong capable of receiving correction? If not, attempting to do so may very well retard that person's ability to receive correction later. Even if we think someone capable of listening to us, we may be rebuffed, and must prudently judge whether the error is so egregious as to be raised in a broader setting, which could very well also provoke evils worse than the first one. Perhaps, the offense is simply worth patiently suffering and praying over. It's dissatisfying but often the best option, because many wrongs, though censurable, risk causing far more harm if they are publicly exposed. The sacrament of penance provides another proper forum for confrontation and repentance, because all Catholics are expected to regularly examine their consciences according to an objective standard of justice, and confess sins to a priest offering absolution in persona Christi. Many Catholics do not avail themselves of this incomparable gift. But those who do, even those stubbornly resistant to perceiving their own sins, enter into a framework where they are humbly willing to be instructed and strengthened by sacramental grace. I knew a laywoman serving in a variety of authority roles in the Church who became incen...

   September 14, 2026·7min
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   Number 3: Devolution a la Mode

   By Anthony Esolen In the pilot episode of the old television show The Waltons, the six Walton children have gathered outdoors in the cold and the snow, where a lady from a religious charity is handing out Christmas presents to the littler ones. The presents have been donated by people better off than almost anybody in their mountain village. She gives a present in exchange for a Bible verse. Mary Ellen, the oldest of the Walton girls, knows a lot of verses, not because she is pious, but because Mrs. Walton makes her memorize them when she has misbehaved or talked back to her elders, which is often. She's the one to go to when you need a verse. "That's too long!" says one of the local boys. "Give me a shorter one." "Jesus wept," says Mary Ellen. That earns the boy a gift, and a look of pious ecstasy from the charitable lady. But things are not all well. When the smallest Walton, Elizabeth, about five years old, opens her present, it's a porcelain baby doll with a crack and a large hole in the face. "She's dead!" the little girl cries in horror and dismay. We are to feel the shame of it, and indignation, that someone would donate a dead baby doll for the poor. Not from malice, but from sheer thoughtlessness. Fifty years later, the feminist claptrap called Barbie opens with a group of little girls playing with their baby dolls, when a goddess-like Barbie shows up, stylish and gigantic and as feminine as a mannequin in a couturier's shop. Then, to Richard Strauss's fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra, one of the girls, in awe, smashes her doll's head on a rock, and another throws hers up in the air, spinning in space, just like the bone one of the apes has tossed in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It becomes the sign: BARBIE. So our "evolution" is from little girls playing with baby dolls, as the narrator tells us, to Barbie – or, as I'd put it, from something warm, natural, self-giving, and productive, to something cold, unnatural, self-worshiping, and sterile. Sure, I know, it's a joke. We're not to take it seriously. So goes the bait-and-switch. Yet somehow, I cannot see the humor in a dead baby. "Did you hear the one about the dead baby flying in the air?" said nobody at a bar, ever. The odd thing about it, what the film's makers somehow managed to miss, is that without babies there is no evolution. That is the Darwinian imperative. In mammals, the mother must suckle the babies, and the longer the period of immaturity, the greater the dependence of the offspring on the parents. Without a strong maternal instinct, mammals do not survive. We need not accept Darwin's account of the origin of species in order to admit this much. It is the inexorable logic of survival. You must play your cards most wisely to beat the house. Toss away your aces, and you die. Not immediately; but the house, Nature, has all the time in the world, and you do not. Only the spiritually exhausted Western world would make a joke about little girls smashing their baby dolls. But the joke is on the West. We are contracepting and aborting ourselves to death. Nor are we healthy apart from those obvious evils, since we have sown confusion in our children and suspicion and recrimination between the sexes, supposing even that we humble ourselves to acknowledge that there are two sexes. And only two. The dealer looks at your winnings and shrugs. The pile will dwindle to nothing. It must. "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing," says the aged Moses to the people. "Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." (Deuteronomy 30:19) The terms are not ours, but God's. Man can no more create a moral law than he can summon a grain of sand into existence from nothing, or invent and impose a new law of gravitation. And the people of Israel would have the choice of death right before them as they entered Canaan. Worship of the Canaanite god Moloch, accompanied by child-sacrifice as a quid pro quo, turns the public square int...

   September 13, 2026·7min
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   Number 4: A Century of Catholic Education

   By James P. MacGuire In 1896, Episcopal clergyman John Byron Diman founded St. George's School in Newport, R.I. It became one of the so-called Saint Grottlesex schools, that name being a portmanteau of St. George's, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Groton, and Middlesex: Protestant prep schools that fairly defined the Gilded Age But then the Rev. Diman had a change of heart. He converted to Catholicism and joined the Benedictine Order at nearby Portsmouth Priory, a community founded from Fort Augustus in Scotland. As now Father Hugh Diman, O.S.B., and ever the energetic educator, he founded Portsmouth School on the priory grounds in 1926. (Hugh was his name "taken in religion.") In his original prospectus, Fr. Diman noted that the Portsmouth school would be the first Benedictine school in the United States belonging to the English Congregation and cited such characteristics of Benedictine education as: a general appreciation of scholarship, thoroughness in work and a belief in broad and liberal education as opposed to narrow specialization….Religion enters into the warp and woof of the School's daily life. The chapel for the religious community and the School is the same. Students may enter or leave it at will. Thus, while religion is not thrust upon them, the daily spectacle of the Mass, the occasional presence of sung Vespers or some other part of the Office, the sight of the quiet and ordered routine of the Community often reach the mind and soul of even the most light-hearted looker on, where calculated effort would generally fail. English boys' preparatory schools such as Ampleforth College and Downside School served as its models, and, like Portsmouth Abbey, both are co-educational today. Eighteen students enrolled in the school's first year. Among them was Christopher Wyatt, brother of actress Jane, whose mother's name, Euphemia van Rensselaer Waddington Wyatt, was the longest in the Social Register. The school's enrollment doubled in the second year, and by the early 1930s "Father Diman's School" had a national reputation, six forms, and students from across the country. By 1939, the school could count 118 graduates since its first Commencement in 1931. Of these, thirty had gone to Harvard, nineteen to Yale, thirteen to Georgetown, and eight to Princeton. Father Hugh died after a second heart attack in March of 1948. Alumni of all his three schools attended the Pontifical Requiem Mass for his soul in the Priory chapel. Headmasters served as pallbearers, a fitting tribute to an extraordinary educator and priest. In more recent years, the now Portsmouth Abbey School has undergone changes of development and crisis. Most of the present campus was designed by the Italian-American architect Pietro Belluschi in a modernist redwood-and-fieldstone motif; the octagonal church at its centerpiece modeled after the Justinian Revival church of San Vitale in Ravenna, and often referred to by architectural historians as a "mid-twentieth-century masterpiece." But Portsmouth Abbey has experienced the shock of several faculty sex abuse cases and consecutive abbots who resigned for troubling personal lapses. But under the Headmastership of Matthew Walter and his dynamic wife Paula, Portsmouth Abbey School is entering what St. John Henry Newman would call a "Second Spring," with record applications, a much-strengthened faculty, and ever-improving college placement. Along the way, Portsmouth has known some wonderful characters. Librarian Brother Basil Cunningham, for instance, a leading tournament bridge competitor who could recite entire genealogies of European royal families but had such a deathly fear of lightning that he would summon a cab from Newport eight miles away to drive him during a storm the two hundred yards from the library to the monastery. Or the polymath eccentric genius Dom Andrew Jenks, who seemed never to sleep, seldom showered, computed the school's entire daily class schedule in his head, and produced day-old pancakes from...

   September 12, 2026·7min
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   Number 5: The Sorrows of Young Zoomers

   By Auguste Meyrat With many members of the Gen Z cohort (b. 1997-2012) coming of age and entering public life, it behooves older generations to understand them better. I can recall the many essays, books, and movies examining my own generation, the millennials (b. 1981-1996), as well as those assessing Generation X (b. 1965 -1980) before that. While they were not always accurate or entirely enlightening, they helped ease tensions between generations. Unfortunately, with Gen Z, the differences may be so vast and deep that understanding them will prove more difficult. So much of their formative experience is unprecedented. Not only have they grown up with smartphones, high-speed Internet, and now AI, but they have also experienced a number of widespread social disruptions, including the Covid lockdowns. Altogether, this makes their integration into adult life especially challenging – and I say this as a teacher who has worked closely with Zoomers for decades. As my friend and fellow teacher-writer Jeremy Adams explains in his book Hollowed Out (which I reviewed here), much about Gen Z is a paradox. On the outside, they have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips (theoretically: many will not even be aware of what today's date, 9/11, signifies). And they enjoy countless amenities. On the inside, many of them still feel empty and resentful. In response, Adams calls for a nation-wide intervention to help these youths discover the blessings of American democracy and Western wisdom. While this solution makes sense to older generations, Zoomers would likely scoff at the very idea. As Joey Oliver makes clear in his new book American History Z: Gen Z's Journey to the Far Right, the situation for Zoomers has deteriorated well beyond Adams's modest proposal. A Zoomer himself, Oliver gives a detailed account of how these ostensibly privileged people have grown up to despise their cultural patrimony and embrace radicalism. The account is hard to read at times, but sheds light on a host of blind spots that everyone who hopes to improve the outlook of today's young adults should understand. Far from growing up in an idyllic culture of stability, respectability, and technological advancement, Oliver and his peers witnessed firsthand the great crumbling of every narrative that had earlier defined the West. Race, immigration, feminism, free speech, economic opportunity, public health, American history, or democracy – all these subjects were reopened and recast despite inherent contradictions, corrupt leadership, and online polarization in Zoomer circles. This was not all bad. Secular leftist narratives tend to target Oliver's own demographic – white conservative males – making them a scapegoat for all the world's ills. For decades, the great majority of institutions had thoughtlessly reinforced this toxic messaging while simultaneously lamenting the sudden rise in political and cultural polarization in American life. But other voices arose to challenge these narratives and restore a degree of sanity to public discourse, bravely running through the gauntlet of censors and cancellers. While some of these advocates held steadfast in their positions, many were either silenced or pressured to recant, leaving much of their Zoomer audience to fend for themselves. This collective abandonment of Zoomers makes up the darkest aspects of Oliver's story. Yes, secular leftism (popularly known as "woke culture") was slowed down by countervailing forces, but it has not gone away. The conflict between right and left simply became more intense as political violence became common and public discourse degenerated into hate-filled propaganda. The revival of democratic virtues that Adams recommended in his book was replaced with partisan tribalism. In the end, Oliver loses faith in the whole American project. All the people he followed have let him down, making him a cynic before even reaching age 30. What's even more striking is his overwhelming scorn fo...

   September 11, 2026·7min
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