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The Grammy Awards, Satanism And The Catholic Teacher
Episode 79th February 2023 • The Catholic Teacher Podcast • Jonathan Doyle
00:00:00 00:15:23

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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.

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Transcripts

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Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan DOR with you.

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Once again, welcome to the Catholic teacher daily podcast.

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It wasn't hard to choose the title for this podcast really was it.

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We try and do it every day.

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At least that's the intent.

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And this year 2023, we are going to be very committed to that process.

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Why.

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Because there are so many awesome Catholic teachers, just like you,

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who keep falling into the very understandable trap of thinking that

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you're a bit alone, that nobody sees what you do that you're not sure.

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If it's all worth it because it's challenging.

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There's fatigue, there's burnout.

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There's so many things happening in the modern teaching profession itself.

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Let alone the many challenges within Catholic education, but the good

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news today, my friend is you are not alone listening with you today on

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this podcast, our Catholic teachers, just like you all around the world.

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Who love their Catholic faith.

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They love the magisterium of the church.

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They love.

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The witness of the great men and women, the saints and

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martyrs down through the ages.

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They love the holy sacraments.

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You're not alone.

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My friend.

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You're not alone.

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There's lots of people like you and me out there who are just really keen to

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grow in faith and commitment to Christ and to help young people do the same.

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Now, did I do the housekeeping, please make sure you've subscribed.

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Hit that subscribe button.

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And there will be a bunch of links and the here we've.

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Yeah.

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If you're on the podcast app, you should see a bunch of links to take

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you through, to go and grab a free access pass to the going deeper

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Catholic teacher formation program.

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It's a amazing program.

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I think we give you 10 free weeks of weekly video from me and from Karen,

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uh, about Catholic education to go check that out, but at the very least,

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please make sure you subscribed.

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And I would love if you could share this on your social media, share this podcast

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with other great Catholic teachers.

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All right.

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Friends' time going out on the limb, I'm going to do something I don't normally do.

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I'm going to get topical.

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I'm going to get relevant.

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Some of you got into, well, what does that mean?

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Does that mean that the rest of the time you're irrelevant?

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No.

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I want to talk about the Grammys, the Grammy awards, or on two nights ago.

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And, uh, you know, we try not to date the podcast, but many

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of you would have seen it.

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And if you're listening to this in the future, um, please

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don't go and look it up.

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But it's the, it's the pivotal moment, of course, with the, uh, I

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don't know, what do you call them?

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You call them an artist, a musician, because I'm not sure those things

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are actually happening, but, uh, Sam Smith went out there

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and did this song called unholy.

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It's tells you about all you need to know.

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Uh, and the central motif, the artistic intent.

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I was just utterly, radically, satanic.

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I've used soar it.

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I, I, you know, I don't watch free-to-air TV ever.

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But, uh, I jumped on YouTube just to catch a sense of it.

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And I was like, oh, wow.

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Whatever pretends it's subtlety Hollywood still had, has gone screaming

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out the window and was last seen.

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Heading west into the sunset friends, because it was like the most, uh,

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bleakly blatantly satanic presentation.

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And, uh, and interestingly, then I went and made the double mistake

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of looking up the song lyrics.

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And the song lyrics.

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Again, lacking in all originality there, basically, from what

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I could tell, it's kind of.

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It's an attack on family and marriage.

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Which you have to understand is Satan's must apply over

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the last kind of 150 years.

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Uh, it's kind of the reason why Karen and I did a second.

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Master's at the, uh, typical Institute for studies on

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marriage and the family, because.

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I think it was, was it Pius?

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The something.

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Um, the fed a must.

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The secrets, there was the sense that there was going to be the last

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great battle was the battle against.

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Marriage and family.

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So the lyrics of that song were very much like, you know, the,

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the father is off doing terrible things behind everyone's back and.

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And, um, you know, it's no coincidence that, that, you know,

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that is the focus, you know, of all the things they could sing about.

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They could sing about drug use or all sorts of other things

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that I'm sure they do that too.

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But, um, pay attention.

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When you notice that the relentless focus is on marriage, family,

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and human sexuality, right.

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Um, that's how the game is being played at the moment now.

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You know, I was thinking before.

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You know, for many years, Hollywood is very subtle, right?

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Like the whole entertainment industry was very subtle.

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And it's interesting to, to have some understanding of how that engine works.

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In my, in my master's second master's program, I really looked at.

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You know, the kind of foundational philosophical engine.

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That underpins at least culture in the developed world.

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So I try to teach people in seminars that, you know, I used to say

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that, uh, guns don't kill people.

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Ideas do.

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You see.

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You know, things like war and conflict and all sorts of other negative pans,

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social experiences are always the result of some kind of underlying

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philosophy or thesis of reality.

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Right.

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So people just don't tend to wake up one day and go let's form an army and

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let's go and kill all these people in another country for no reason.

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We always tend to have some kind of underpinning belief

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about the structure of reality.

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Now hanging in there with me.

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If you're thinking, Jonathan, where are you going?

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You've wandered.

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You're flying off the reservation here.

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Now stay with me.

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Cause I'm going to land this plane.

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It's simply.

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The big thing I learned in that master's program was that if you look at the

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impact of someone like Friedrich nature,

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Uh, who sadly, most people only know from the inaccurate quote, whatever

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does not kill me, makes me stronger.

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Often that's the one people quote, but I've done.

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Think that's ridiculous.

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You know, you can drink poison.

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It may not kill you, but it sure as heck ain't gonna make you stronger.

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But, uh, niches philosophy.

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So, you know, nature was kind of, you know, famously said,

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You know, God is dead and we have killed him.

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But I used to tell a joke when I was an undergrad at university,

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um, I used to study on this desk in a library and somebody had

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written in graffiti, true story.

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It was this graffiti.

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And it said God is dead nature.

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So you could tell some, you know, some undergrad had written that, thinking

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that they were being really edgy.

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And, uh, the next thing.

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Was, uh, someone would come along underneath it and written

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God, his nature is dead.

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God.

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Now I used to say to audiences, we know one of those statements is true, right?

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That we could debate the death of God, but there's no debate

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about the death of nature.

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Right.

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So what I want to tell you is that nature's philosophies such

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as the trends, valuation of all values going beyond good and evil.

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A whole bunch of stuff.

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Now it was enormously influential.

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Strangely.

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It wasn't particularly influential in his own lifetime.

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He died of, uh, of syphilis, uh, after traveling through

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various European brothels.

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Um, but his impact was utterly extraordinary.

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Now here's the point?

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Um, Here's ideas became very Darragh.

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Good, very popular in, uh, European universities around

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the turn of the 20th century.

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The European intellectual class leading from around, you know, from

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1900 up towards new, through the 1920s was heavily, heavily Nietzschean.

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Now when the Nazis came to power.

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And then finally, when it was obvious that they were going to have significant plans

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for Europe, a large, large percentage.

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Of connected, you know, relatively wealthy European intellectuals left.

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Europe fled fleeing Europe and ended up on the west coast of the United States.

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And they ended up many of them getting tenured positions.

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In American university.

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So my point here is that you can track the impact influence of Nietzschean

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ideas of nihilism, the death of God.

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Going beyond concepts of human morality.

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Good and evil.

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Then they shaped American universities and they had powerful impacts

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upon the entertainment industry.

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You know, definitely in the 1920s and thirties, and then on, through of

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course into the fifties and beyond.

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So, what I'm getting at here is that this kind of, when you

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get Sam Smith at the Grammys,

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It's not an isolated incident.

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It's part of a process that's been going on for a very long time.

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And it's a process of, I would say, as diabolical.

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Of course in the Greek Greek dyad baleen, which means to

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rip apart to tear apart the.

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You know, the synthesis, the, the synthesis of faith and body and

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union and human life and truth and beauty and goodness to rip it apart

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to, to diabolically destroy it.

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And, and based unrelated to that, of course, is I always

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teach audiences of teachers that.

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Always remember that Satan cannot create.

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All right.

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He cannot create.

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He can only mutate.

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It's a really important distinction.

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The power of creation, especially creation ex Nelia.

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Leo creation from nothing.

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Belongs to God alone.

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One of the beautiful things about being made in the Margo day, each of

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us being made in the image of God.

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Is, we are in Latin participates Korea, tourists, which means co-creators.

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Participators in God's creative act in cosmological history, which means what.

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Which means that we literally cooperate with God in the creative act.

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But Satan cannot create isn't that a fascinating distinction.

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He can only mutate, so he doesn't create a better or more appealing

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necessarily form of human sexual union or.

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Family union.

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He mutates the existing one.

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And also remember that with Satan, the point of his activity is not

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to win any kind of final battle.

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Always make that point.

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He's not trying to win any kind of final battle.

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He knows that this is not possible, right.

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He understands that and biblical history all the way through to

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revelation the triumph of the lamb, the feast of the lamb.

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Shows that the enemy will be, or has been defeated.

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Uh, And in temporal time, but will be defeated in cosmological time.

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So what all Satan can do between now and the final battle is simply

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to steal as many souls as possible from the hands of the loving father.

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Right.

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Do you understand that?

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So that's the game.

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All of the perversion, all of the distraction and all of the hopelessness

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and nihilism that underpins culture.

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Is driven towards taking each individual soul away from God

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collapsing, souls into despair or depravity or moral compromise or sin.

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So that they're separated in heart or body or mind from the creator.

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God.

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So all of this, my friends, 10 minutes and eight seconds to get to this point.

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Is to simply say.

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What is our role in this?

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And why am I talking about Sam Smith?

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I'm talking about him because so many of your students probably saw some of it.

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The good news is that mainstream media is kind of being cannibalized at the

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so many different media access points.

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Now, different formats of media that.

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You know, the big networks, the big platforms don't tend to have as much reach

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as they once did, but let's agree that many of our students would have seen.

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Um, the Sam Smith at the Grammy's, or they would have seen something like it before.

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They're very familiar with it.

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So.

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I want you to be aware of this mill year of this environment, that there,

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that our young people are swimming in.

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And so what do we do?

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Well, I come back to the simple proposition that if you want to

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win a culture war, You don't win it necessarily by beating your enemies

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or forcing people to do or believe something or how you want a culture war.

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Is simply by telling a better story.

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That's how you win a cultural.

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So Sam Smith gets up there and says, Hey, the path to happiness is a

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sexual depravity and a, and demonic, actualization and normalizing Satanism.

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And if you follow this path, you'll be famous.

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Happy, exhilarated.

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So, what we have to do is not really waste any time going, you

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know, and you can see it, right.

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You see the kind of the knee jerk.

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Uh, reaction, you know, which has been there for many years, understandably.

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Right.

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Which is.

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You know, I guess it's the old moral majority response, right?

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Which was, you know, this is horrible.

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This is terrible.

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We need to ban this.

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This shouldn't be on TV.

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It's not gonna happen.

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Right.

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Because if you take it off TV, it's just gonna manifest somewhere else.

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Uh, I'm not saying there should be no.

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Controls over what's shown in, in, in the wide public channels,

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but you get my point, right?

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Like, you know, Banning books doesn't tend to basically have

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an enormous amount of effect.

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Long-term.

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What does have good effect is telling a better story.

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What does have good effect is telling a better story.

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Telling a more beautiful story.

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A Catholic story is a story about truth, about beauty and about goodness.

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See, what is the mother?

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Teresa still resonate with people.

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Why do people look at her lives?

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You know, some people would, you know, maybe would pick someone

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like a Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther king, who, of course someone

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listeners would know also had their own backstories and compromises to.

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But we point to these people and we say, oh, there's something in

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us that we want to emulate here.

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There's something.

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Good here.

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It's a moral good.

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We gravitate towards it.

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It's attractive to us or something.

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That's profoundly beautiful.

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So I think that the role of a Catholic teacher.

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Is you, do you understand my good friend that you own a battle?

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This is a moment to moment door to door.

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You know, hand-to-hand combat against a diabolical enemy.

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That's what's actually happening in Catholic education.

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What do you think is Satan's plan for each student?

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What do think his plan is it's not for their flourishing.

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It's not that they would encounter more truth, beauty and goodness.

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It's not that they would know that they are.

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Made perfectly in the image of a perfect loving father.

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He doesn't want them to know that he wants them to stress.

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Perverted confused.

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So your classroom in many ways becomes a battleground.

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How so well it's, you can do so much the music that you might play, the films that

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you might select to watch and to discuss the literature and books you discuss, you

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could do any number of things I used to.

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When I was teaching full time, I used to.

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You know, start lessons with a famous quote from a brilliant man or woman

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of history and just, you know, three or four minutes unpack the meaning

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of that quote or a piece of poetry.

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Or some music in the background or times of stillness and silence in the chapel.

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Now every time you do these, you will not notice a result.

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Your students will rarely come up to you and say, well, you know, Mrs.

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Smith, Mr.

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Jones, that was, there was the best lesson ever.

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I found out.

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I felt a profound sense.

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Uh, of the sublime transcendentals transforming my inner person more

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and more into the image of Christ.

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As I renew my mind.

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They're not going to be saying that.

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All right.

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But we, we fight anyway.

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And we fight anyway because all the great battles require commitment time.

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Heroism sacrifice.

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And that's what you're doing.

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That's what you're doing.

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So my friend.

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Get back in there.

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No your identity.

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You're not there by accident.

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You're not there by accident.

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You've been placed there.

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I have been placed in front of this microphone today in this studio

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today, I've been placed here.

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So I'm going to be faithful to this moment until God changes this moment.

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And you need to be faithful to the moment that he's placed

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you in and go back in there.

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And tell a better.

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Story.

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All right friends.

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God bless you.

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I hope this has been useful to you.

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Please make sure you subscribe.

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Share this with some friends.

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Go check out those links.

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My name's Jonathan Doyle.

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This has been the Catholic teacher daily podcast.

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And you and I are going to talk again.

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