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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Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan DOR with you.

Once again, welcome to the Catholic teacher daily podcast.

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

We try and do it every day.

At least that's the intent.

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

Why.

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

who keep falling into the very understandable trap of thinking that

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

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

There's fatigue, there's burnout.

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

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

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

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

Who love their Catholic faith.

They love the magisterium of the church.

They love.

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

martyrs down through the ages.

They love the holy sacraments.

You're not alone.

My friend.

You're not alone.

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

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

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All right.

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

I'm going to get topical.

I'm going to get relevant.

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

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

No.

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

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

of you would have seen it.

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

don't go and look it up.

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

don't know, what do you call them?

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

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

and did this song called unholy.

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

Uh, and the central motif, the artistic intent.

I was just utterly, radically, satanic.

I've used soar it.

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

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

And I was like, oh, wow.

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

out the window and was last seen.

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

bleakly blatantly satanic presentation.

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

of looking up the song lyrics.

And the song lyrics.

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

I could tell, it's kind of.

It's an attack on family and marriage.

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

the last kind of 150 years.

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

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

marriage and the family, because.

I think it was, was it Pius?

The something.

Um, the fed a must.

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

great battle was the battle against.

Marriage and family.

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

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

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

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

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

that I'm sure they do that too.

But, um, pay attention.

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

and human sexuality, right.

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

You know, I was thinking before.

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

Like the whole entertainment industry was very subtle.

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

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

You know, the kind of foundational philosophical engine.

That underpins at least culture in the developed world.

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

that, uh, guns don't kill people.

Ideas do.

You see.

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

social experiences are always the result of some kind of underlying

philosophy or thesis of reality.

Right.

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

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

We always tend to have some kind of underpinning belief

about the structure of reality.

Now hanging in there with me.

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

You've wandered.

You're flying off the reservation here.

Now stay with me.

Cause I'm going to land this plane.

It's simply.

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

impact of someone like Friedrich nature,

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

does not kill me, makes me stronger.

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

Think that's ridiculous.

You know, you can drink poison.

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

But, uh, niches philosophy.

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

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

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

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

written in graffiti, true story.

It was this graffiti.

And it said God is dead nature.

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

that they were being really edgy.

And, uh, the next thing.

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

God, his nature is dead.

God.

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

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

about the death of nature.

Right.

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

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

A whole bunch of stuff.

Now it was enormously influential.

Strangely.

It wasn't particularly influential in his own lifetime.

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

various European brothels.

Um, but his impact was utterly extraordinary.

Now here's the point?

Um, Here's ideas became very Darragh.

Good, very popular in, uh, European universities around

the turn of the 20th century.

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

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

Now when the Nazis came to power.

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

for Europe, a large, large percentage.

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

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

And they ended up many of them getting tenured positions.

In American university.

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

ideas of nihilism, the death of God.

Going beyond concepts of human morality.

Good and evil.

Then they shaped American universities and they had powerful impacts

upon the entertainment industry.

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

course into the fifties and beyond.

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

get Sam Smith at the Grammys,

It's not an isolated incident.

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

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

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

rip apart to tear apart the.

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

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

to, to diabolically destroy it.

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

teach audiences of teachers that.

Always remember that Satan cannot create.

All right.

He cannot create.

He can only mutate.

It's a really important distinction.

The power of creation, especially creation ex Nelia.

Leo creation from nothing.

Belongs to God alone.

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

us being made in the image of God.

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

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

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

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

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

necessarily form of human sexual union or.

Family union.

He mutates the existing one.

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

to win any kind of final battle.

Always make that point.

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

He knows that this is not possible, right.

He understands that and biblical history all the way through to

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

Do you understand that?

So that's the game.

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

and nihilism that underpins culture.

Is driven towards taking each individual soul away from God

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

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

God.

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

Is to simply say.

What is our role in this?

And why am I talking about Sam Smith?

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

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

so many different media access points.

Now, different formats of media that.

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

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

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

They're very familiar with it.

So.

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

that our young people are swimming in.

And so what do we do?

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

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

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

Is simply by telling a better story.

That's how you win a cultural.

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

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

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

Happy, exhilarated.

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

know, and you can see it, right.

You see the kind of the knee jerk.

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

Right.

Which is.

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

Which was, you know, this is horrible.

This is terrible.

We need to ban this.

This shouldn't be on TV.

It's not gonna happen.

Right.

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

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

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

but you get my point, right?

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

an enormous amount of effect.

Long-term.

What does have good effect is telling a better story.

What does have good effect is telling a better story.

Telling a more beautiful story.

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

See, what is the mother?

Teresa still resonate with people.

Why do people look at her lives?

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

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

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

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

us that we want to emulate here.

There's something.

Good here.

It's a moral good.

We gravitate towards it.

It's attractive to us or something.

That's profoundly beautiful.

So I think that the role of a Catholic teacher.

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

This is a moment to moment door to door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Made perfectly in the image of a perfect loving father.

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

Perverted confused.

So your classroom in many ways becomes a battleground.

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

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

could do any number of things I used to.

When I was teaching full time, I used to.

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

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

of that quote or a piece of poetry.

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

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

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

Smith, Mr.

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

I found out.

I felt a profound sense.

Uh, of the sublime transcendentals transforming my inner person more

and more into the image of Christ.

As I renew my mind.

They're not going to be saying that.

All right.

But we, we fight anyway.

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

Heroism sacrifice.

And that's what you're doing.

That's what you're doing.

So my friend.

Get back in there.

No your identity.

You're not there by accident.

You're not there by accident.

You've been placed there.

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

today, I've been placed here.

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

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

you in and go back in there.

And tell a better.

Story.

All right friends.

God bless you.

I hope this has been useful to you.

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My name's Jonathan Doyle.

This has been the Catholic teacher daily podcast.

And you and I are going to talk again.