The Catholic Culture Podcast

Timothy Flanders rejoins the podcast for a freewheeling conversation in which he and Thomas interview each other. Timothy talks about his upcoming book on Catholicism in Russia, and then Thomas gives his thoughts on the place of jazz in the Western music tradition, improvisation as an analogy to the moral life, and the fundamental problem with AI music: AI has no song in its heart.

Links

The Meaning of Catholic https://meaningofcath.substack.com/

Thomas's lecture on God's role in artistic inspiration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH5KBsOIz_Y

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Thomas Mirus's keynote address at the first annual conference of the Thomistic Artists Guild, on May 30 at the parish of St. Vitus in Los Angeles, CA.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH5KBsOIz_Y

Thomistic Artists Guild: https://thomisticartistsguild.org/

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Groundbreaking Catholic political thinker Andrew Willard Jones joins the podcast to discuss a brilliant lecture he recently gave at the New Polity Conference. St. Thomas Aquinas is often said (dismissively) to have gotten his view of woman from Aristotle's biology. But while he did accept some of Aristotle's biological errors, they disagree on something far more fundamental, namely their metaphysical interpretation of difference and inequality among human beings. A comparison between the Aristotelian view and the Christian/Thomistic view of inequality is profoundly instructive for how we see not only the difference between the sexes, but civil society and...

Ralph Martin returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, The Coming Judgment: Are We Ready? He and Thomas discuss the lack of a Scriptural worldview among many present-day Catholics, and the reluctance of many to believe in or preach what the Church has always believed hell, the urgent need for repentance, and the judgments of God.

Links

Ralph Martin, The Coming Judgment: Are We Ready? stpaulcenter.com/thecomingjudgment

Thomas Mirus, "Bring back 'negative spirituality'" https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/bring-back-negative-spirituality/

Eamonn Clark, "The Revenge of Amoris Laetitia" https://www...

Timothy Flanders joins the podcast to discuss Pope Leo XIII's two letters addressed to the Catholic Church in America.

Links 

Article summarizing Leo's writings on America https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/pope-leo-xiii-on-america-and-americanism/

 Leo XIII, Longinqua https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_06011895_longinqua.html

 Leo XIII, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo13/l13teste.htm

 Timothy Flanders at The Meaning of Catholic https://meaningofcath.substack.com/

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On May 30, Thomas is giving the keynote address at the first annual conference of the Thomistic Artists Guild at the parish of St. Vitus in Los Angeles, CA. Free to attend!

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/thomistic-artists-guild-2026-conference

Thomas Mirus, Nathan Douglas, and Andrew Petiprin gave this panel session at the 2024 Notre Dame Fall Conference, presented by the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. The theme of the conference was "Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination."

30 Years of the Vatican Film List – Catholic Cinema's Past and Future

Thomas Mirus (Catholic Culture) – The Vatican Film List: Introduction and Reflections

Nathan Douglas (Independent Scholar/Filmmaker) – The Filmmaker as Auteur

Andrew Petiprin (Spe Salvi Institute; Word on Fire Institute) – Europe for Everyone: Yesterday's Vatican Film List and Catholic Imagination Today

Ch...

Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P., joins the podcast to talk about his new book Training the Tongue and Growing Beyond Sins of Speech. He answers Thomas's questions about small talk, cheekiness, oversharing, the use of humor to avoid vulnerability, Millennial vs. Gen-Z irony, correcting others, and openness to pursuing truth.

 Training the Tongue and Growing Beyond Sins of Speech https://stpaulcenter.com/store/training-the-tongue-and-growing-beyond-sins-of-speech 

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This interview with Prof. Thomas Pink, originally published in 2020, is being republished as part of Thomas Mirus's ongoing series covering the major encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII.

Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, begins by noting that its discussion of religious liberty "has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society" and so "leaves untouched traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." This episode is about discovering what that traditional doctrine was and is. 

Our main source w...

Lives of the Popes on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lives-of-the-popes/id1885968422

Lives of the Popes on CatholicCulture.org: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/category/lives-of-popes-podcast/

The darkest, and perhaps most underrated, story J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote was the tale of Túrin Turambar, a great man of the First Age of Middle-Earth, whose life was ruined by the curse of Morgoth (Tolkien's Satan-figure) and by his own pride. The tale, which resembles a Greek tragedy, was given its longest and most satisfying version in the posthumously published book The Children of Hurin.

Aaron Irber, host of a podcast "about stories, myths, and Catholicism", joins Thomas to discuss this underappreciated work by Tolkien.

Aaron's podcast, I Might Believe in F...

Pope Leo XIII's 1884 encyclical Humanum Genus is the Church's most comprehensive explanation of why, ever since 1738, she has forbidden Catholics to become Freemasons. Reading the encyclical today, one has the thought that its continued relevance has less to do with the present-day activities of Masonic organizations, and more to do with the fact that Masonic ideas have already come to pervade Western society.

Thomas's article about Humanum Genus https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/pope-leo-xiii-against-freemasonry/

Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_18840420_humanum-genus.html

DO...

Actor, writer, and director David Henrie (Wizards of Waverly Place, How I Met Your Mother) joins the podcast to talk about his new EWTN travel series, Seeking Beauty with David Henrie - season 1 is a journey through Italy.

David and Thomas discuss what it is so many travelers still find so alluring about the heritage of Catholic Europe. They focus especially on Florence's Dominican convent of San Marco filled with masterpieces by Fra Angelico, how cities used to be built as dwelling places for men made in the image of God, and how David's show features Catholic...

Veteran Catholic journalist Phil Lawler recently retired as the editor of Catholic World News at CatholicCulture.org. Phil was the first lay editor of Boston's archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot, but negative experiences trying to do real journalism while financially dependent on the Church hierarchy prompted him to move on to a career in independent Catholic journalism, with stints as editor of Crisis, Catholic World Report, and finally founding Catholic World News, which in 1995 was the first English-language Catholic news service operating on the internet. In the early 2000s, CWN merged with Catholic Culture.

Phil joins the podcast...

Ida Friederieke Görres is little-known to English-speaking Catholics (except perhaps for her biography of St. Therese of Lisieux), but she was a major voice of the orthodox Catholic laity in mid-20th-century Germany, with Joseph Ratzinger giving her eulogy.

Jennifer Bryson has translated Görres's 1970 essay collection, Bread Grows in Winter, which is a response to the crisis in the Church immediately following Vatican II. Görres's beautiful and profound writing gives a sense of what it was like to live in those troubling times, and how we (perhaps especially the laity) should respond to the tro...

Thomas Mirus discusses Leo XIII's 1880 encyclical Arcanum, on Christian marriage. This was "the first formal and synoptic teaching on marriage since the Council of Trent" – a gap of four centuries. Arcanum is focused on what the Church has done to uplift and protect marriage throughout history. Leo argues at length that the state has no right to usurp the Church's governance of marriage.

LINKS 

Thomas's article on Arcanum https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/leo-xiii-on-what-marriage-owes-to-church/

Pope Leo XIII, Arcanum https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_10021880_arcanum.html

 ...

For the past century or more, the left has put a high value on moral provocation, deliberately transgressing what they see as society's hypocritical or puritanical moral norms, whether in religion, sexuality, or public decorum in general. Now the right, too, is getting in on the fun, performatively violating the speech norms held sacred by liberals - which is sometimes good, but sometimes itself violates traditional morality, not just leftist ideology.

Matthew Schmitz joins the podcast to discuss his First Things article "Taming the Tongue", about the psychology of edginess, the problem with widespread profanity, and the...

To Heaven's Rim is a new anthology of great Christian poetry translated from non-English languages, from the first 18 centuries of the Faith. Editor Burl Horniachek joins to discuss and read samples from poets from a variety of traditions, like St. Jacob of Serug (Syriac), St. Romanus the Melodist (Greek), an anonymous medieval Irish monk, the criminal Francois Villon (French), Michelangelo's friend Vittoria Colonna (Italian), and the Chinese Jesuit/painter/poet Wu Li.

To Heaven's Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry: Beginnings to 1800, in English Translation https://www.amazon.com/Heavens-Rim-Christian-Beginnings-Translation/dp/1666716820

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Paul Shrimpton assisted in the process of making St. John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Church. He joins the podcast to discuss his involvement in the process, and his new book from Word on Fire Academic, "The Most Dangerous Man in England": Newman and the Laity.

During his lifetime, Newman was a controversial figure within the Catholic Church in large part due to his views on the laity and his advocacy for their role in running Catholic schools. Shrimpton's book gives us a picture of Newman's view of the laity not only through his ideas, but...

Should mothers work outside the home? If you want an answer more solid than groundless internet opinion or conveniently vague appeals to personal discernment, this is the podcast for you.

Margaret McCarthy joins the Catholic Culture Podcast to discuss her essay on why anti-sex-discrimination law's treatment of the sexes as abstract interchangeable units hurts real women, real men, and real children (and real workplaces!). Then we dive into the neglected teachings of John Paul II and earlier popes on the objectively different relationships that men and women have to the home and to work outside the home.<...

Should mothers work outside the home? If you want an answer more solid than groundless internet opinion or conveniently vague appeals to personal discernment, this is the podcast for you.

Margaret McCarthy joins the Catholic Culture Podcast to discuss her essay on why anti-sex-discrimination law's treatment of the sexes as abstract interchangeable units hurts real women, real men, and real children (and real workplaces!). Then we dive into the neglected teachings of John Paul II and earlier popes on the objectively different relationships that men and women have to the home and to work outside the home.<...

Should mothers work outside the home? If you want an answer more solid than groundless internet opinion or conveniently vague appeals to personal discernment, this is the podcast for you.

Margaret McCarthy joins the Catholic Culture Podcast to discuss her essay on why anti-sex-discrimination law's treatment of the sexes as abstract interchangeable units hurts real women, real men, and real children (and real workplaces!). Then we dive into the neglected teachings of John Paul II and earlier popes on the objectively different relationships that men and women have to the home and to work outside the home.<...

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...

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/

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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...

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 s...

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 th...

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/

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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...

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...

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, wh...

We all know the secular world opposes the very idea of a person with same-sex attraction seeking any kind of therapy or spiritual counsel that might enable them to reach a state of healthy relations with the opposite sex. But what's odd is that many Catholics seem to have bought into this. Many assume that if someone is not currently attracted to the opposite sex, this is a static, lifelong condition and therefore they must be called to celibacy. But this view involves multiple misunderstandings – of the SSA experience, of anthropology, of the power of God's grace, and of th...

Fr. John Nepil, priest and mountaineer, joins the podcast to discuss his book To Heights and Unto Depths: Letters from the Colorado Trail. Topics discussed include:

To Heights and Unto Depths https://ignatius.com/to-heights-and-unto-depths-thudp/

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The standard textbook of theology in medieval universities was the Sentences by Peter Lombard (1095-1160), bishop of Paris. This collection systematically arranged the theological judgments of Scripture and the Church Fathers on various topics. For almost four centuries, those seeking higher credentials in theology had to study, teach, and comment on Lombard's Sentences. It was formative for the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure. Over time, the genre of commentaries on the Sentences became its own vehicle for new developments in theology. The Sentences was not replaced by Aquinas's Summa as a standard textbook until the 16th c...

A great spiritual master of our time, Fr. Donald Haggerty, joins the podcast to discuss his important new book, The Hour of Testing: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty. He offers profound reflections on the ongoing, and perhaps future, crisis within the Church, with an eye to arousing an appetite for the greater spiritual intensity God desires his faithful to live out in this time.

It is essential that we see that our Lord Himself is reliving His Passion in His Mystical Body, when the Church suffers betrayal and humiliation at a high i...

Mimetic desire, scapegoating: if you've been hearing these terms thrown around lately, it's because the French Catholic philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) is having a renaissance, with powerful people like J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel citing his influence on their thought. Trevor Cribben Merrill, producer of the new documentary Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard, joins the podcast to discuss Girard's principal ideas, and reflect on aspects of his thought which seem difficult to reconcile with Catholic doctrine.

Watch Things Hidden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-vB1HaBsog

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Ryan Hammill of the Ancient Language Institute joins Thomas for a practical discussion about how to learn Latin, as well as the central place of the classical languages (Latin and Greek) in classical Christian education, and the various schools of thought in today's classical Christian education movement.

Links

Thomas's article about learning Latin https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/dreamt-learning-latin-heres-how-youll-finally-do-it/

Ancient Language Institute https://ancientlanguage.com/

New Humanists Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-humanists/id1570296135

Jonathan Roberts, "Classical Schools Are Not Really Classical" https://ancientlanguage.com/classical-schools-not-classical/

The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, by the great English musicologist Christopher Page, covers the development of Christian liturgical music from its origins as an elaboration of the role of the lector to its flourishing in the monastic and cathedral singing schools of France, as Roman chant was spread across Europe. One of the most important developments was the gradual development of a system of notation in the late first millennium, culminating in Guido d'Arezzo's invention of the musical staff which allowed singers to learn melodies they had never heard before. Guido was motivated by...

A new biography of Ven. Fulton Sheen gives special attention to his high-profile converts, but reveals many other interesting facets of his life as well. Author Cheryl Hughes joins to discuss Sheen's at times shockingly direct evangelization methods, his outstanding television presence, his lifelong struggle with vanity and ambition, and the mistreatment he suffered from his rival, Cardinal Spellman.

Links

Cheryl C.D. Hughes, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: Convert Maker https://ignatius.com/archbishop-fulton-j-sheen-afsp/

Thomas's review of Cheryl's biography of St. Katharine Drexel https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/st-katharine-drexel-shows-how-spiritual-poverty-and-submission-to-providence-go-hand-in-hand/

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