Bonus: See the podcast player at the bottom of this page for the special Twitter Spaces session I recorded)
People talk a lot about telling the truth. It’s all over the culture, and especially the Internet. Everyone in the Catholic world is talking a big game about “the truth, the truth, the truth” but I doubt most of them know the first thing about it (I can see it as I watch them tell lies with facts all the time). To most, “the Truth” is just a factually accurate statement. What a severe and precarious limitation of what “Truth” really is!
When we say “the truth” we’re usually talking about a manifestation of what “Truth” actually is. But Truth is much more than that. It’s nothing less than the life force of all reality. And while a factually accurate statement is a truth, it’s possible that a statement can report facts while not conveying Truth. They do this in the media all the time, including in Catholic media. By disordering facts, withholding or diminishing extenuating facts, or by conditioning your reception of the facts, the media can report what is factual without telling you what is so.
Why should we care? Because our ability to discern Truth is what separates man from the animals—and the devil very much wants us acting more like animals than like persons made in the image of God. If our capacity for discerning Truth can be disabled, we begin behaving like animals who act on impulse and, in our case, emotions, instead of being guided by reason. We become puppets, or, worse, zombies. Every problem we see in the modern world and in the Church results from the increasing disability of modern man to discern Truth, even as some know what “the Truth” is.
God is the Eternal Truth. He is Truth itself. And so Truth is deep and complex. All reality proceeds from it, by it, and because of it. It’s like the most beautiful symphony that man could ever hear, yet could never be capable of composing. But we try to “compose” Truth all the time! And that is exactly the problem, and why this podcast episode is important.
This episode will go LIVE on Sunday, February 4th at (or around) 2PM. I’ll be taking live call-ins at the bottom of the episode. I hope to see you there. I broadcast live to X and YouTube, and on my website at Catholicadventuer.com/live
Here are a couple of primers for you. I’ll be leaning on the philosophies of Sts. Augustine and Aquinas when I deliver my own thoughts and ideas:
