Culture Crash and the Church

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Andrew Breitbart famously noted that politics is downstream from culture — meaning that culture informs society's political shifts, at least that's how it's been in the West for a while now.

We've been seeing this in our entertainment media with the gradual shift towards the glorification of evil and the overturning of the family.

At one time, people went to a movie theater and saw on the marquis: The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. In fact, that was in 1952.

By then, people had already flocked to theaters nine years before that to watch The Song of Bernadette, a film that won four Oscars, was nominated in eight other categories and won three Golden Globe awards. Filmmakers were not shy about putting overtly Catholic messages in their movies and exactly nobody was offended by them — imagine that.

The cinema was such an important cultural phenomenon that, in 1955, Pope Pius XII wrote an apostolic exhortation to filmmakers discussing "the ideal film." While he agreed it's not wrong for filmmakers to show the actions of evil men or the repercussions of evil on an individual or society, it's wrong to glorify the evil, or even worse, present it as good. We see this on a daily basis on television and in the movies we consume.

But this leftward march toward Marxism in the media is a further expansion on Breitbart's theme: that culture is downstream from the Church. We've been seeing for over 50 years, a Church — the people within it, including priests and bishops — succumbing to a culture going closer and closer to Marxist ideals with little to no fight against it.

Since the 1960s, when Pope John XXIII "open[ed] the windows and let in the fresh air" into the Church, things have not been the same. There has been untold millions of people who have lost their souls due to the Church capitulating to the demands of the world, not the other way around as it's supposed to be.

But despite the growing darkness of the twilight of Western civilization, some lights still shine even in the film industry.

There's been a resurgence of Catholic films, starting with the blockbuster Passion of the Christ, and overtly Catholic films are again finding an audience along with a bevy of Protestant-based films.

One of the newer Catholic films to hit theaters this year was Paul, Apostle of Christ, and it muses a plausible account of the last days of St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, and the struggle of a Roman Christian community trying to deal with the very real moment-to-moment threat of being arrested and killed in unspeakably violent ways.

To learn more about the excellent film about the life of St. Paul and his disciple, Timothy, watch Mic'd Up—St. Paul: Apostle of Christ.

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