It seems that the progressive modern entertainment industry has lost any pretence of subtlety. Their recent Bacchanalian orgy of self-referential hedonism does, however, provide some important points for consideration for the orthodox Catholic teacher. In today’s episode I help you understand the deeper roots that drive culture in the 21st century and how you can help each young person discover a more compelling and attractive story for their lives.
Book a coaching call with me right now – For Principal’s and Leaders in Catholic Education
https://calendly.com/jonathandoyle/30-minute-discovery-call
Grab your free access to my awesome resource for Catholic teachers right here:
https://cf.onecatholicteacher.com/oct-opt-in
Find out about booking Jonathan to come and speak at your school or event
https://cf.onecatholicteacher.com/catholic-speaking
Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan DOR with you.
Speaker:Once again, welcome to the Catholic teacher daily podcast.
Speaker:It wasn't hard to choose the title for this podcast really was it.
Speaker:We try and do it every day.
Speaker:At least that's the intent.
Speaker:And this year 2023, we are going to be very committed to that process.
Speaker:Why.
Speaker:Because there are so many awesome Catholic teachers, just like you,
Speaker:who keep falling into the very understandable trap of thinking that
Speaker:you're a bit alone, that nobody sees what you do that you're not sure.
Speaker:If it's all worth it because it's challenging.
Speaker:There's fatigue, there's burnout.
Speaker:There's so many things happening in the modern teaching profession itself.
Speaker:Let alone the many challenges within Catholic education, but the good
Speaker:news today, my friend is you are not alone listening with you today on
Speaker:this podcast, our Catholic teachers, just like you all around the world.
Speaker:Who love their Catholic faith.
Speaker:They love the magisterium of the church.
Speaker:They love.
Speaker:The witness of the great men and women, the saints and
Speaker:martyrs down through the ages.
Speaker:They love the holy sacraments.
Speaker:You're not alone.
Speaker:My friend.
Speaker:You're not alone.
Speaker:There's lots of people like you and me out there who are just really keen to
Speaker:grow in faith and commitment to Christ and to help young people do the same.
Speaker:Now, did I do the housekeeping, please make sure you've subscribed.
Speaker:Hit that subscribe button.
Speaker:And there will be a bunch of links and the here we've.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:If you're on the podcast app, you should see a bunch of links to take
Speaker:you through, to go and grab a free access pass to the going deeper
Speaker:Catholic teacher formation program.
Speaker:It's a amazing program.
Speaker:I think we give you 10 free weeks of weekly video from me and from Karen,
Speaker:uh, about Catholic education to go check that out, but at the very least,
Speaker:please make sure you subscribed.
Speaker:And I would love if you could share this on your social media, share this podcast
Speaker:with other great Catholic teachers.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Friends' time going out on the limb, I'm going to do something I don't normally do.
Speaker:I'm going to get topical.
Speaker:I'm going to get relevant.
Speaker:Some of you got into, well, what does that mean?
Speaker:Does that mean that the rest of the time you're irrelevant?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:I want to talk about the Grammys, the Grammy awards, or on two nights ago.
Speaker:And, uh, you know, we try not to date the podcast, but many
Speaker:of you would have seen it.
Speaker:And if you're listening to this in the future, um, please
Speaker:don't go and look it up.
Speaker:But it's the, it's the pivotal moment, of course, with the, uh, I
Speaker:don't know, what do you call them?
Speaker:You call them an artist, a musician, because I'm not sure those things
Speaker:are actually happening, but, uh, Sam Smith went out there
Speaker:and did this song called unholy.
Speaker:It's tells you about all you need to know.
Speaker:Uh, and the central motif, the artistic intent.
Speaker:I was just utterly, radically, satanic.
Speaker:I've used soar it.
Speaker:I, I, you know, I don't watch free-to-air TV ever.
Speaker:But, uh, I jumped on YouTube just to catch a sense of it.
Speaker:And I was like, oh, wow.
Speaker:Whatever pretends it's subtlety Hollywood still had, has gone screaming
Speaker:out the window and was last seen.
Speaker:Heading west into the sunset friends, because it was like the most, uh,
Speaker:bleakly blatantly satanic presentation.
Speaker:And, uh, and interestingly, then I went and made the double mistake
Speaker:of looking up the song lyrics.
Speaker:And the song lyrics.
Speaker:Again, lacking in all originality there, basically, from what
Speaker:I could tell, it's kind of.
Speaker:It's an attack on family and marriage.
Speaker:Which you have to understand is Satan's must apply over
Speaker:the last kind of 150 years.
Speaker:Uh, it's kind of the reason why Karen and I did a second.
Speaker:Master's at the, uh, typical Institute for studies on
Speaker:marriage and the family, because.
Speaker:I think it was, was it Pius?
Speaker:The something.
Speaker:Um, the fed a must.
Speaker:The secrets, there was the sense that there was going to be the last
Speaker:great battle was the battle against.
Speaker:Marriage and family.
Speaker:So the lyrics of that song were very much like, you know, the,
Speaker:the father is off doing terrible things behind everyone's back and.
Speaker:And, um, you know, it's no coincidence that, that, you know,
Speaker:that is the focus, you know, of all the things they could sing about.
Speaker:They could sing about drug use or all sorts of other things
Speaker:that I'm sure they do that too.
Speaker:But, um, pay attention.
Speaker:When you notice that the relentless focus is on marriage, family,
Speaker:and human sexuality, right.
Speaker:Um, that's how the game is being played at the moment now.
Speaker:You know, I was thinking before.
Speaker:You know, for many years, Hollywood is very subtle, right?
Speaker:Like the whole entertainment industry was very subtle.
Speaker:And it's interesting to, to have some understanding of how that engine works.
Speaker:In my, in my master's second master's program, I really looked at.
Speaker:You know, the kind of foundational philosophical engine.
Speaker:That underpins at least culture in the developed world.
Speaker:So I try to teach people in seminars that, you know, I used to say
Speaker:that, uh, guns don't kill people.
Speaker:Ideas do.
Speaker:You see.
Speaker:You know, things like war and conflict and all sorts of other negative pans,
Speaker:social experiences are always the result of some kind of underlying
Speaker:philosophy or thesis of reality.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So people just don't tend to wake up one day and go let's form an army and
Speaker:let's go and kill all these people in another country for no reason.
Speaker:We always tend to have some kind of underpinning belief
Speaker:about the structure of reality.
Speaker:Now hanging in there with me.
Speaker:If you're thinking, Jonathan, where are you going?
Speaker:You've wandered.
Speaker:You're flying off the reservation here.
Speaker:Now stay with me.
Speaker:Cause I'm going to land this plane.
Speaker:It's simply.
Speaker:The big thing I learned in that master's program was that if you look at the
Speaker:impact of someone like Friedrich nature,
Speaker:Uh, who sadly, most people only know from the inaccurate quote, whatever
Speaker:does not kill me, makes me stronger.
Speaker:Often that's the one people quote, but I've done.
Speaker:Think that's ridiculous.
Speaker:You know, you can drink poison.
Speaker:It may not kill you, but it sure as heck ain't gonna make you stronger.
Speaker:But, uh, niches philosophy.
Speaker:So, you know, nature was kind of, you know, famously said,
Speaker:You know, God is dead and we have killed him.
Speaker:But I used to tell a joke when I was an undergrad at university,
Speaker:um, I used to study on this desk in a library and somebody had
Speaker:written in graffiti, true story.
Speaker:It was this graffiti.
Speaker:And it said God is dead nature.
Speaker:So you could tell some, you know, some undergrad had written that, thinking
Speaker:that they were being really edgy.
Speaker:And, uh, the next thing.
Speaker:Was, uh, someone would come along underneath it and written
Speaker:God, his nature is dead.
Speaker:God.
Speaker:Now I used to say to audiences, we know one of those statements is true, right?
Speaker:That we could debate the death of God, but there's no debate
Speaker:about the death of nature.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So what I want to tell you is that nature's philosophies such
Speaker:as the trends, valuation of all values going beyond good and evil.
Speaker:A whole bunch of stuff.
Speaker:Now it was enormously influential.
Speaker:Strangely.
Speaker:It wasn't particularly influential in his own lifetime.
Speaker:He died of, uh, of syphilis, uh, after traveling through
Speaker:various European brothels.
Speaker:Um, but his impact was utterly extraordinary.
Speaker:Now here's the point?
Speaker:Um, Here's ideas became very Darragh.
Speaker:Good, very popular in, uh, European universities around
Speaker:the turn of the 20th century.
Speaker:The European intellectual class leading from around, you know, from
Speaker:1900 up towards new, through the 1920s was heavily, heavily Nietzschean.
Speaker:Now when the Nazis came to power.
Speaker:And then finally, when it was obvious that they were going to have significant plans
Speaker:for Europe, a large, large percentage.
Speaker:Of connected, you know, relatively wealthy European intellectuals left.
Speaker:Europe fled fleeing Europe and ended up on the west coast of the United States.
Speaker:And they ended up many of them getting tenured positions.
Speaker:In American university.
Speaker:So my point here is that you can track the impact influence of Nietzschean
Speaker:ideas of nihilism, the death of God.
Speaker:Going beyond concepts of human morality.
Speaker:Good and evil.
Speaker:Then they shaped American universities and they had powerful impacts
Speaker:upon the entertainment industry.
Speaker:You know, definitely in the 1920s and thirties, and then on, through of
Speaker:course into the fifties and beyond.
Speaker:So, what I'm getting at here is that this kind of, when you
Speaker:get Sam Smith at the Grammys,
Speaker:It's not an isolated incident.
Speaker:It's part of a process that's been going on for a very long time.
Speaker:And it's a process of, I would say, as diabolical.
Speaker:Of course in the Greek Greek dyad baleen, which means to
Speaker:rip apart to tear apart the.
Speaker:You know, the synthesis, the, the synthesis of faith and body and
Speaker:union and human life and truth and beauty and goodness to rip it apart
Speaker:to, to diabolically destroy it.
Speaker:And, and based unrelated to that, of course, is I always
Speaker:teach audiences of teachers that.
Speaker:Always remember that Satan cannot create.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:He cannot create.
Speaker:He can only mutate.
Speaker:It's a really important distinction.
Speaker:The power of creation, especially creation ex Nelia.
Speaker:Leo creation from nothing.
Speaker:Belongs to God alone.
Speaker:One of the beautiful things about being made in the Margo day, each of
Speaker:us being made in the image of God.
Speaker:Is, we are in Latin participates Korea, tourists, which means co-creators.
Speaker:Participators in God's creative act in cosmological history, which means what.
Speaker:Which means that we literally cooperate with God in the creative act.
Speaker:But Satan cannot create isn't that a fascinating distinction.
Speaker:He can only mutate, so he doesn't create a better or more appealing
Speaker:necessarily form of human sexual union or.
Speaker:Family union.
Speaker:He mutates the existing one.
Speaker:And also remember that with Satan, the point of his activity is not
Speaker:to win any kind of final battle.
Speaker:Always make that point.
Speaker:He's not trying to win any kind of final battle.
Speaker:He knows that this is not possible, right.
Speaker:He understands that and biblical history all the way through to
Speaker:revelation the triumph of the lamb, the feast of the lamb.
Speaker:Shows that the enemy will be, or has been defeated.
Speaker:Uh, And in temporal time, but will be defeated in cosmological time.
Speaker:So what all Satan can do between now and the final battle is simply
Speaker:to steal as many souls as possible from the hands of the loving father.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Do you understand that?
Speaker:So that's the game.
Speaker:All of the perversion, all of the distraction and all of the hopelessness
Speaker:and nihilism that underpins culture.
Speaker:Is driven towards taking each individual soul away from God
Speaker:collapsing, souls into despair or depravity or moral compromise or sin.
Speaker:So that they're separated in heart or body or mind from the creator.
Speaker:God.
Speaker:So all of this, my friends, 10 minutes and eight seconds to get to this point.
Speaker:Is to simply say.
Speaker:What is our role in this?
Speaker:And why am I talking about Sam Smith?
Speaker:I'm talking about him because so many of your students probably saw some of it.
Speaker:The good news is that mainstream media is kind of being cannibalized at the
Speaker:so many different media access points.
Speaker:Now, different formats of media that.
Speaker:You know, the big networks, the big platforms don't tend to have as much reach
Speaker:as they once did, but let's agree that many of our students would have seen.
Speaker:Um, the Sam Smith at the Grammy's, or they would have seen something like it before.
Speaker:They're very familiar with it.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:I want you to be aware of this mill year of this environment, that there,
Speaker:that our young people are swimming in.
Speaker:And so what do we do?
Speaker:Well, I come back to the simple proposition that if you want to
Speaker:win a culture war, You don't win it necessarily by beating your enemies
Speaker:or forcing people to do or believe something or how you want a culture war.
Speaker:Is simply by telling a better story.
Speaker:That's how you win a cultural.
Speaker:So Sam Smith gets up there and says, Hey, the path to happiness is a
Speaker:sexual depravity and a, and demonic, actualization and normalizing Satanism.
Speaker:And if you follow this path, you'll be famous.
Speaker:Happy, exhilarated.
Speaker:So, what we have to do is not really waste any time going, you
Speaker:know, and you can see it, right.
Speaker:You see the kind of the knee jerk.
Speaker:Uh, reaction, you know, which has been there for many years, understandably.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Which is.
Speaker:You know, I guess it's the old moral majority response, right?
Speaker:Which was, you know, this is horrible.
Speaker:This is terrible.
Speaker:We need to ban this.
Speaker:This shouldn't be on TV.
Speaker:It's not gonna happen.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Because if you take it off TV, it's just gonna manifest somewhere else.
Speaker:Uh, I'm not saying there should be no.
Speaker:Controls over what's shown in, in, in the wide public channels,
Speaker:but you get my point, right?
Speaker:Like, you know, Banning books doesn't tend to basically have
Speaker:an enormous amount of effect.
Speaker:Long-term.
Speaker:What does have good effect is telling a better story.
Speaker:What does have good effect is telling a better story.
Speaker:Telling a more beautiful story.
Speaker:A Catholic story is a story about truth, about beauty and about goodness.
Speaker:See, what is the mother?
Speaker:Teresa still resonate with people.
Speaker:Why do people look at her lives?
Speaker:You know, some people would, you know, maybe would pick someone
Speaker:like a Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther king, who, of course someone
Speaker:listeners would know also had their own backstories and compromises to.
Speaker:But we point to these people and we say, oh, there's something in
Speaker:us that we want to emulate here.
Speaker:There's something.
Speaker:Good here.
Speaker:It's a moral good.
Speaker:We gravitate towards it.
Speaker:It's attractive to us or something.
Speaker:That's profoundly beautiful.
Speaker:So I think that the role of a Catholic teacher.
Speaker:Is you, do you understand my good friend that you own a battle?
Speaker:This is a moment to moment door to door.
Speaker:You know, hand-to-hand combat against a diabolical enemy.
Speaker:That's what's actually happening in Catholic education.
Speaker:What do you think is Satan's plan for each student?
Speaker:What do think his plan is it's not for their flourishing.
Speaker:It's not that they would encounter more truth, beauty and goodness.
Speaker:It's not that they would know that they are.
Speaker:Made perfectly in the image of a perfect loving father.
Speaker:He doesn't want them to know that he wants them to stress.
Speaker:Perverted confused.
Speaker:So your classroom in many ways becomes a battleground.
Speaker:How so well it's, you can do so much the music that you might play, the films that
Speaker:you might select to watch and to discuss the literature and books you discuss, you
Speaker:could do any number of things I used to.
Speaker:When I was teaching full time, I used to.
Speaker:You know, start lessons with a famous quote from a brilliant man or woman
Speaker:of history and just, you know, three or four minutes unpack the meaning
Speaker:of that quote or a piece of poetry.
Speaker:Or some music in the background or times of stillness and silence in the chapel.
Speaker:Now every time you do these, you will not notice a result.
Speaker:Your students will rarely come up to you and say, well, you know, Mrs.
Speaker:Smith, Mr.
Speaker:Jones, that was, there was the best lesson ever.
Speaker:I found out.
Speaker:I felt a profound sense.
Speaker:Uh, of the sublime transcendentals transforming my inner person more
Speaker:and more into the image of Christ.
Speaker:As I renew my mind.
Speaker:They're not going to be saying that.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:But we, we fight anyway.
Speaker:And we fight anyway because all the great battles require commitment time.
Speaker:Heroism sacrifice.
Speaker:And that's what you're doing.
Speaker:That's what you're doing.
Speaker:So my friend.
Speaker:Get back in there.
Speaker:No your identity.
Speaker:You're not there by accident.
Speaker:You're not there by accident.
Speaker:You've been placed there.
Speaker:I have been placed in front of this microphone today in this studio
Speaker:today, I've been placed here.
Speaker:So I'm going to be faithful to this moment until God changes this moment.
Speaker:And you need to be faithful to the moment that he's placed
Speaker:you in and go back in there.
Speaker:And tell a better.
Speaker:Story.
Speaker:All right friends.
Speaker:God bless you.
Speaker:I hope this has been useful to you.
Speaker:Please make sure you subscribe.
Speaker:Share this with some friends.
Speaker:Go check out those links.
Speaker:My name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been the Catholic teacher daily podcast.
Speaker:And you and I are going to talk again.
Recent Comments