The Brian Holdsworth Podcast

I often see comments from people who have just found my channel that is some approximation of, "How can you defend the Catholic Church?" And the implied, or sometimes explicit, accusation that accompanies this question often betrays a misunderstanding of what "The Catholic Church" is. So, in this video, I offer some insights into how to make distinctions between the institution, its members, and the Church as it truly is by pointing out that we tend to make these distinctions in other areas of life and community (such as the education system). Next, I spend some time discussing the many prejudices that I brought to my understanding of the Catholic Church which have slowly unraveled as I have devoted time to learning about the Church's history. Events like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the supposed persecutions of scientists, aren't nearly what I was taught they were, if not outright fabrications relying on outdated historical narratives composed by Protestants or other rivals of the Catholic Church.

We are living in a time in the Church when social justice seems to be at the forefront of everyone's mind, and I think this is largely the result of the emphasis of Pope Francis who has made talking about the needs of the poor a priority. But one thing that is true of a crisis is that it will test the sincerity of certain beliefs and how committed people are to them, especially if it starts to cost them something and I would say recent events did just that. And it makes me wonder that for the people who talk about social justice the most, do they actually understand what the Church even teaches about social justice and even if they do, are they sincere when they rehearse those concepts in conversations that will portray them as those most committed to the needs of the poor? Whenever you explore Catholic social teaching, you will inevitably collide with the concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity and many respectable commentators and instructors on the subject will point out that if you ever want to evaluate and compare some system or fabric of society for its compatibility with Catholic social teaching, you should look to see if they get these two things right.

We are told that the Synodal Way is going to be a time for listening in the Church. If that's sincere, then this is my attempt to penetrate into that conversation with what I think needs to be a the top of our hierarchy of priorities, as a Church. If we intend to renew the Church, if we intend to see it flourish, and if we intend to enable the mission of the Church, evangelization, then we have to offer what only the Church can - a mystical, transcendent encounter with God. Instead, we keep getting distracted by a desire to offer a natural, down to earth, worldly-minded message and culture. It's self-defeating and, when I was a convert, it was a bit turn-off. And as much as we may not want to hear it, the Tridentine Latin Mass is the kind of thing that does offer that encounter. So what can we do now, to reform ourselves to be more capable of embracing the mysteries of our faith then trying to brush them under the rug for fear that they will repel naturalist sensibilities?

This is my conversation with Dr. Anthony Esolen in which we discuss what it means to get a liberal arts education and how it produces liberty (freedom) in its pupils. We cover topics including utilitarianism, leisure, culture, university, humanities, freedom/liberty, and more.

The word Rigid or rigidity has become something of a buzzword and specifically a hammer to use, indiscriminately against orthodox or traditional Catholics who want to hold fast to the teachings of the Church, without compromise. I've heard pastors and bishops using it a lot these days and what I find interesting is that this term doesn't appear among lists of sins in scripture or in tradition. When St. Paul enumerates who will not inherit the kingdom of Heaven in 1 Corinthians, the rigid don't appear there. When we think of the 7 deadly sins, it doesn't appear there either, so it raises the question, is this something new or. The first thing to notice about it is that the word rigid, is a metaphorical word. It doesn't describe a literal trait that someone could have, unless you're talking about diseases like Parkinson's… but I doubt that's what clerics mean when they are accusing people of being rigid. Now, the thing about metaphorical language is that it is drawn from objects which are not human and is therefore, imprecise when it is applied to us… which means, it needs a lot of clarification when it is used. It needs to be related back to traits that are, literally, human traits. This is the thing about metaphorical language. It can help expand our understanding of something literal, by providing references and associations to other things that we might already be familiar with. Because, as Catholics, grounded in the knowledge of scripture and revelation, as well as the great wisdom of the tradition of reason which gave us virtue ethics, we have a fairly comprehensive list of qualities that we can be confident are precise and accurate in defining good qualities, what we might call virtues, and bad qualities, what we might call vices. If we want to use metaphorical words like Rigid to expand or enhance our understanding of a literal vice or virtue, then it can be a welcome rhetorical device as long as it's accurately applied in a way that brings clarity rather than ambiguity and confusion. Unfortunately, when I've heard this term used by Catholic leaders, it often appears divorced from the kind of clarity that I think is necessary. It's tossed out in vague allusions which can be seized on by anyone who wants to use it to condemn people they don't like. So, I think we need to be more precise with this term by clarifying what literal vices or sins we are associating it with or stop using it altogether because of how easily it can be associated with qualities that are not only not sins, but virtues, in fact. As a side note, notice that the definition of virtue is, a stable disposition to good. The catechism substitutes stable for firm but whichever word you use, it means unfaltering.

In this episode I discuss the recent dust up over a bishop in Florida sending a letter that forbade "ad orientum" posture at mass while another of his priests got caught committing some serious liturgical abuses that went unnaddressed by him. I spend some extra time talking about the practical and rational reasons ad orientem makes more sense.

A conversation between Jonathan Pageau and Brian Holdsworth in which we discuss faith and reason, classical vs. modern thought, how and why we shifted away from metaphysics, scientism, empiricism, symbols, patterns, culture, customs, liturgy, and more.

Support the channel by joining the Reinforcements at https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com As many of you know, if you've followed this channel long enough, I'm a big admirer of CS Lewis and even employ some of his argumentation in my videos. This in spite of the fact that even though his Catholic friend J.R.R. Tolkien was instrumental in his conversion to theism and then Christianity, he never converted all the way to the Catholic Church. He instead, embraced a kind of high Church Anglicanism. Lewis was famous for trying to build bridges along the fault lines of Christian denominations by promoting what he called Mere Christianity, or what was essential and mostly agreed upon by the main denominations – you could call this credal Christianity because it promotes the fundamentals of the ancient creeds which we almost all agree on. This is probably why Lewis wasn't in the habit of criticizing any Christian church or tradition, but he is supposed to have compared the Catholic Church to an overwhelming jungle where people can get lost and distracted before they ever get to the fundamentals of mere Christianity. And, I, in the course of my own conversion to Catholicism have found it hard not to sympathize with that criticism. Catholic thought and beliefs are so substantial that it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees. For example, I've met Catholics who could tell you all about the apparitions of Medjugorje but don't know what the phrase "consubstantial with the Father" in the Nicene Creed means. I've met Catholics who know all about the life of St. Juan Diego, but can't name the 12 apostles. So maybe Lewis has a point. But instead of describing it as a jungle, I might amend the comparison to be a library – a massive library. Because, if we're talking about the Church's intellectual tradition, her teachings, and even her dogmas, you actually do have something like a library of content. But the challenge with a library, is that it's easy to get distracted with the stuff you want to read as opposed to the stuff you should read.

We live in the age of information, but as any reasonable person can appreciate, most of the information that is available to us, is pollution and noise. Most of it does not educate or illuminate our minds. Plenty of it is misleading. This is a consequence of unflinching admiration for technological advance. It blinds us to important ethical questions like, "Should we do this?" And since we've refused to ask those questions, we now find ourselves in the age of fake news and having to try to fight back against it. But instead of revisiting those important ethical questions that we've neglected, we've decided to technologize a new solution to fix the old: enter fact checking! But the phenomenon of fact-checking has introduced more problems of its own. The authority that it brings is too tempting and intoxicating to not breach its own requirements and now we find ourselves getting censored for conclusions that cannot be easily called into question because... you cannot fact check an argument. That requires counter-arguments, but that isn't fact-checking, yet the self-appointed fact-checkers aren't willing to admit that what they're doing is argumentation because they're too used to the unquestioned authority that fact-checking has brought them.

If you've ever seen videos of street corners in the late 19th or early 20th century, if you have a soul, you may notice how beauty is exemplified in so much of what is captured there; from the architecture, to the carriages, to the dress of the people. And, if you have a brain, it may have left you wondering, what changed? What happened to our culture that caused us to go from sensibilities that would inspire men to aim at a vision of masculinity like this to something more like this? The first reason for the shift in our cultural sensibilities that I'd want to highlight is that as the influence of the Church and Christianity has waned over the years, we've been more easily persuaded to believe that external appearances do not convey anything necessary about internal realities. We say things like, don't judge a book by its cover. By that, we mean, there is some internal value that you can't see when judging an object or a person by their external appearance. Whereas Christianity has, predominantly, insisted that human beings are body-soul composites and that the material world expresses the spiritual reality of God's creation. All of which is to say, the external does tell us something about the internal or incorporeal. Just as a person's words tell us something about the content of their thoughts, so too, does our appearance, tell others something about our mind and our soul. For example, St. Francis de Sales said, "External cleanliness is a sort of indication of inward good order." But as we've slowly embraced this dualistic idea that external and internal are distinct and irrelevant to each other, we've, in theory, become more accepting of unconventional appearances.

It's that time of year again, when Christians of various stripes complain about the war on Christmas and if it isn't Christmas it's some other effort to marginalize or erase Christianity from the public sphere. By a war on Christmas, they mean the watering down of the festival of Christmas in order to turn it into some secularized silhouette of its former self. For example, the vernacular authoritarians will complain that it's offensive to non-Christians to use the word Christmas, so we have to substitute it with some vacuous alternative like "happy holidays" which is amusingly ironic because holiday means holy day which should give you some indication of the origin of the concept of a holiday… it comes from the Catholic Church scattering days of celebration throughout the Gregorian calendar, which the Church invented. All of which is to say, if you want to fully vandalize the Christian cultural heritage to make it appear like it never existed, there's more work to be done. And when some Christians complain about such cultural appropriation, they are met with ridicule from non-Christians as well as some Christians who claim that this is not worth getting upset about and that if you truly think you're being persecuted, go learn about REAL persecutions and martyrdoms and if your current marginalization doesn't compare, then stop being such a mollycoddle. This kind of response is a bit absurd, though, if you compare it to other possible scenarios where this might apply. Imagine if someone broke into your house and stole something of value to you and when you called the police for help, they said something like, "you know there are people who have been murdered recently. Unless what has happened to you is that bad, you shouldn't be complaining to us." It's a reprehensible assessment of a victim's experience that insists that unless they have suffered the worst out of anyone, then their suffering, to whatever degree it is measured, doesn't matter. Which is insane. But I'd add, that Christians have good reason to have an elevated sensitivity to this kind of thing because it doesn't take much for a subtle current of animosity towards Christians to turn into something far more insidious and terrifying.

This is my conversation with Mark Mallett (https://www.markmallett.com) in which we discuss the Catholic tradition concerning the apocalypse, eschatology, mysticism, prophecy, and if he thinks we're living the end times today.

In the beginning of the movie, Fiddler on the Roof, they break out into a song about Tradition where the main character admits that some of the things they do, they don't understand. They do them for "Tradition"! That's the great chorus they sing out. And in many ways, that story is about the collision of Tradition with new and emerging, "progressive" ideas of the modern world. But from that opening chorus, it's easy to conclude that tradition is something we blindly adhere to without employing our reason or critical thinking. It's the lazy reliance on a way of life without ever challenging yourself to think for yourself or progress to something better than your ancestry would allow. It's a mark of fear and ignorance rather than courage and enlightenment. And there may be some truth to that. There are some traditions that we inherit that you could say we blindly follow simply because they are traditions. But does that make the alternative more prudent or discerning? Well, let's take some time to consider why traditions exist at all. Tradition is what happens when ideas, practices, beliefs, and culture are passed down from one generation to the other. And why exactly do we invest all the effort it takes to transfer these goods from one generation to the next? It's so that our descendants won't have to unnecessarily solve every problem that has already been solved. If we made discoveries and acquired knowledge and customs that have a clear benefit to us, if we truly love our fellow man, which includes our descendants, then any good society would want to save them the trouble of having to go through all the sacrifices, danger, and difficulties that we had to in order to overcome our adversities. If we've already mapped out certain landmarks of the human experience, it would be cruel and evil to withhold the knowledge contained in discoveries from future generations. As I spoke about in a previous video, this is the whole reason we have education, to transmit knowledge and culture which means the work of education is inherently a process of a living tradition. And a lot of people seemed to misunderstand what I was saying in the past about that. This isn't to say that there is no room for innovation or authentic progress – there is, but the only way you get progress is by starting where your ancestors left off. You first have to inherit what they have to offer, become intimately familiar with it, and then build on from that point.

I just had the pleasure of listening to Matt Fradd's podcast on why you shoud get rid of your smart phone and was so excited by what he had to say, that I had to join in and add some of my own thoughts to his. Support the channel by visiting https://brianholdsworth.ca Matt's original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTJu-...

This is my interview with Barrie Schwortz rom the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association which runs www.shroud.com. We talk about how Barrie became a member of the first team of scientific researchers to examine the shroud, what their research discovered, and how it changed his life.

When Bram Stoker's Dracula was first published, it featured themes of death, seduction, temptation, and eternal life, and something about the arrangement of those themes, produced a story that was horrifying to its Victorian audience. But vampire stories, mostly in movie form today, don't have the same effect. When people today think of the scariest movies they can, very rarely will a vampire movie feature among them. Vampires of contemporary story telling are just as often portrayed as our friends as they are our adversaries and the worst thing they can do to you is kill you which is no worse than any other human adversary. They're no worse than serial killers, which is bad enough, but it doesn't produce the kind of uncanny terror that other concepts can in us. So why is it that vampire stories, especially the original vampire story, have lost their ability to terrify us the way they once did? What about us has changed so dramatically that this story no longer produces the terror and dread it once did?

My family and I recently went on a few hikes in the Rocky Mountains and there was one particular hike that was such a spectacle, in every direction you turned, that I was reminded of an anecdote that CS Lewis introduces in his book, the Abolition of Man, which, by the way, I believe is one of the most important modern books I've ever read. He treats a scenario in which two people are observing the same waterfall and in which two people could have different responses to that encounter. You could say something like, "It is majestic, it is beautiful, it is sublime." Or, you could say, I am experiencing sublime feelings, I am in awe. And the difference between these two reactions, can reveal to us the very heart of human evil. Take any obvious example of evil that we can point to and you will find the same common denominator among them all – the same erroneous pattern of thinking and the behaviour that proceeds from it, is at the root of all evil.

If you're like me, you may have felt like the whole world, including the Church, has gone insane and you're exhausted from standing your ground in opposition to it all. In this video I describe a recent experience of contemplating a way that I could surrender the fight, especially the fight for traditional Catholicism and where that time of prayer led me. Support the channel by visiting https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

Joseph Pearce's enthusiasm for the Catholic faith, and some of the great writers who incarnate it for us, is contagious. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak early on in my faith journey and I have no doubt that he helped plant those seeds much deeper so that they would persevere. It was a joy to speak with him about great authors such as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton. We discussed literature, culture, art, and the liturgy.

A conversation between Timothy Gordon and Brian Holdsworth. We discuss the risks of "celebrity and popularity" as Catholic pundits and whether that can motivate our behaviour and the type of content that we produce. We also spend some time exploring faith and reason and how and why reason is so important in order to make the necessary distinctions that so many people in the age of social media, don't seem to be able to make - for the good of the Catholic Church and society.

For the past century or so, there have been two competing views about sex that have raged at each other in the hopes of winning the acquiescence of the people through sermons, editorials, research, and even political legislation. They can basically be summarized like this. One believes that sex, like most things, brings with it an intrinsic moral dimension which means that sex can be partaken in conformity to what is good or in rebellion against that good in the form of evil or perversion. According to this belief, since sexual behaviour requires moral consideration, we as moral agents, must govern our appetite and behaviour accordingly. This means that whatever we do, we have to do what is right, we have to make good and right choices and actions. – let's call this the traditional view. The other view claims that there is no moral dimension to sex or if there is, it's far less pronounced than the traditional view would have us believe. Sex is just like any other leisure activity that we might choose to engage in and it's unreasonable to expect people to moderate their behaviour because that will only exacerbate our sexual appetites and it's unrealistic anyways. This view encourages us to explore and liberate our sexuality and taste all the fruits and experiences that it has to offer. So, to ensure that we can engage in as much sexual activity as we might want, we've developed technology to mitigate the negative consequences. We can call this position, the liberal position. And we see these two positions clash in a very revelatory way whenever there is a health emergency or an outbreak of sexual transmitted infections. The tradition side will say, if people would just commit to having only one sexual partner for life, then these outbreaks would never occur. And that's true. But the liberal contingency will reply that this is far too lofty a solution and it will never work, so the best we can hope for is to continue to encourage promiscuity while promoting a reliance on technology to mitigate these adverse consequences. Well, I think there are ways that we can demonstrate that sex is a profoundly moral act of the will and how we engage in it will ALWAYS have significant moral consequences. Unlike the liberal advocates, I think it's abundantly obvious that sex is very different from a range of leisure activities that we might want to compare it to.

Support the channel by joining the Reinforcements at https://brianholdsworth.ca. Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com I would say, the reason to save sex for marriage is similar to the reason that we have locks on our car doors or the front doors of our homes. The reason we have locks on our doors is because we can't trust strangers to respect our dignity and the effects of our hard work. Now, don't jump ahead, I'm not saying that sex is a property or a commodity. I haven't gone that far with the analogy. It's merely that you can't trust strangers to respect and protect your well-being. And that's not because all strangers are untrustworthy, but it is because enough strangers are, that you need to protect yourself and your privacy because they will attempt to use that access and that knowledge that serve their interests, often at the expense of your interests. So, you defend yourself against that kind of risk by locking your doors and governing who has that kind of intimate access to you and your home. Not everyone is welcome to enter your house. Only those who have earned a measure of trust are welcome inside. Think about why we wear and have always worn clothing. We often assume that there is a natural utility as the reason, like to protect ourselves from the elements. But in truth, as far back as we have records for, we have examples of people wearing clothing for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting themselves from the elements. There was always some form of decorum or ornamentation as a feature in human clothing. On the question of decorum, an obvious motivation is: privacy. We aren't just protecting ourselves from the cold, but from exposure to other people. When we wear clothes, we are protecting ourselves from the crude and possibly even vulgar assessments of people who have not demonstrated to us that they can be trusted to protect that intimate knowledge the way we protect it ourselves. In other words, they haven't proven that they love us. Because that's what love is: it's a willingness to do for a person as they would do for themselves. To love someone is, in part, to protect their interests to the same degree that they would protect their own interests. When a person only has a superficial knowledge of us, they do not know us intimately and therefore, they do not care for us as much as intimacy requires. And from that, a principle should announce itself to us which is that we should only give intimate knowledge of ourselves and our privacy, including our physical form, to those who have demonstrated a deep concern for our wellbeing and who will care for that knowledge the way we do ourselves.

I know it's easy to villainize those who have not received their vaccines yet which makes it even easier to disregard the infringement of their rights by vaccine passports and mandates. You might be thinking that they deserve it because they're putting everyone at risk. And I've read quite a few articles in the media about who these people are and why they are hesitant and the explanations demonstrate that whoever is writing these articles has done very little research into the real reasons why people are hesitant. It usually gets chalked up to the conclusion that they are anti-vaxxers across the board or that they have bought into crazy conspiracy theories. The truth is, I know a lot of people who have not been vaccinated and while some may be stretching their logic a bit, most don't fit those characterizations. So what are the real reasons why they hesitate? Will mandatory or coercive campaigns be effective in increasing vaccinations and even if they are effective, do the ends justify the means?