culture | OC Catholic

EPISODE#257
OC CATHOLIC RADIO: THE CULTURAL CHALLENGE TO CATHOLICS

Each week, we bring you compelling conversation with church leaders and laity. Today, host Rick Howick welcomes back one of our favorite guests, Daryl Sequeira. Daryl is the former head of the theology department at Servite High School in Anaheim. He currently serves in Catholic education in the state of Arizona, where he resides with his family.

Today’s episode will be a discussion on where we are as a society in 2022. There are so many things going on in our culture today; and, a lot of these trends seem to be running contrary to Catholic faith and belief. On this podcast, Rick and Daryl provide us with a very thoughtful discussion on many of the issues that families are dealing with today.

Be sure to share this podcast!

Originally broadcast on 8/13/22

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EPISODE #296
EMPOWERED BY THE SPIRIT: NOT MY WILL LORD, BUT YOURS BE DONE

On this truly unique edition of Empowered by the Spirit, Deacon Steve Greco teams up with his good friend, Gil Alderete. Gil is the president of Catholic Men’s Fellowship of California; and, he hosts his own unique podcast entitled “Men of Faith.” Gil and Deacon Steve are also joined by the vice president of Catholic Men’s Fellowship, Francisco Munoz. Join us for a great conversation that is geared toward encouraging Catholic men.

Originally broadcast on 1/30/22

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EPISODE #290
EMPOWERED BY THE SPIRIT: OUR DIGITAL CULTURE – WITH GUEST SR. NANCY USSELMANN

On this podcast, Deacon Steve Greco welcomes back dear friend, Sr. Nancy Usselmann of the Pauline Sisters (based locally in Culver City).

They will be covering a variety of topics. Most notably, she will offer tips and best practices in navigating through our digital culture. We’ll also get to hear about the spectacular ‘virtual Christmas concert’ put on again this year by our favorite singing nuns.

This conversation is sure to inspire!

Originally broadcast on 11/14/21

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EPISODE#240
OC CATHOLIC RADIO: GUEST IS CHRISTOPHER WEST FROM THE THEOLOGY OF THE BODY INSTITUTE

Welcome to another episode of Orange County Catholic Radio, featuring host Rick Howick.

On this program, we are excited to welcome noted Catholic author, speaker and theologian, Christopher West. He founded the Theology of the Body Institute, based in Pennsylvania. He shares about a truly unique presentation that he brings to parishes all over the country. It’s called Made for More – Visions of the Promised Land, to be held at St. Angela Merici Parish in Brea. It’s an evening of visual beauty, live music, and reflection that will open your senses to the secret of God revealed in all of creation.

This is a fascinating conversation. Be sure to share this podcast with a friend!

Originally broadcast on 10/30/21

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EPISODE#44
CATHEDRAL SQUARE: THE SAMOAN COMMUNITY AT CHRIST CATHEDRAL

Welcome to another episode of Cathedral Square featuring host Fr. Christopher Smith.

On this episode, Fr. Christopher welcomes a two wonderful parishioners of Christ Cathedral. They are brother and sister; and, happen to be part of a thriving Samoan community at the parish. Their names are Kelemete and Maria Talavou.

Do yourself a favor and tune in. You’ll be inspired to SHARE this podcast!

Originally broadcast on 11/28/20

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EPISODE #49
TRENDING WITH CHRIS & TIMMERIE: WHAT IS SEX FOR?

What is sex for? Young people are having less sex than ever before, yet people are starving for relationship. People are confused by mixed messages about homosexuality and wonder what the Church’s teaching on homosexuality really is. How do we respond to our loved ones who believe and even live radically opposing views on sex? Let’s share the fullness of God’s message about salvific grace.

Join Timmerie Millington on Trending as she discusses the gay issue and how to effectively share the Catholic teaching on sexuality with charity. Together we’ll look at sexuality from a theological and Biblical viewpoint.

Originally broadcast on 7/1/18

EPISODE #47
TRENDING WITH CHRIS & TIMMERIE: PORN PLEASE?

75% of those who say religion is not important view porn as morally acceptable. What’s changed? A new Gallup poll reveals that the majority of Americans think porn is acceptable. On Trending this week, you’ll hear Chris Mueller and Timmerie Millington speak about how to overcome a pornography addiction, how parents can help one teacher’s plea for better discipline of children, and how Hungary’s Family Policy drastically boosted marriages and lowered abortion and divorce rates in just seven years.

Originally broadcast on 6/17/18

CULTURE CLASH

Opening our children’s eyes to the love of God and the mysteries of our Catholic faith keeps us parents plenty busy. We shuttle the family to Sunday Mass, send our kids to parochial schools and say our prayers before bed. Considering all of that, it seems sometimes that if we must add one more thing to our plates, our well-planned lives will fly into a tailspin.

Still, Catholic parents who want to teach their children about the world God has made for us will want to make sure their kids are inspired to later visit colorful art galleries, ponder the gilded contents of museums, listen to a sublime symphony or attend a graceful ballet performance.

Culture may be man-made, while religion is wholly associated with our Creator. Yet the world’s great religions include rituals and sermons, sacrifices and festivals, and other aspects of human culture in their practice. Often included are dancing, playing music and singing. 

Because God made us in His image and He loves beauty in all its forms, doesn’t it make sense that He wants to share it all with us?

“Philosophy includes four transcendentals: Truth, goodness, beauty and love,” says Katie Dawson, director of Faith Formation for the Diocese of Orange. “These four things deeply resonate in the human heart. When we look at things that we are attracted to, they are always some expression of one or a combination of these.

“Anything beautiful feeds our soul and helps us connect with the divine in some manner,” she continues. “However we can help our kids discover these four things to enrich their lives, the richer their life experience will be.”

As we try to provide our children with various experiences, it makes sense to scan cultural opportunities in our communities and put them on our busy calendars. Central Orange County’s Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, for instance, has traveling exhibitions from all over the world as well as a vast number of art and artifacts from Orange County’s history. The Norton Simon Museum in nearby Pasadena is on a small scale, perfect for little visitors. The Pacific Symphony, South Coast Repertory Theater and Segerstrom Center all provide performances appropriate for kids, including jazz musicians, dramatic and humorous plays, and visiting acrobats and ballet companies.

Bowers’ visiting exhibits can include the mummified kings of Egypt, temple murals from Buddhist China, or church relics from Europe. “These outings are great gifts we can share with children,” Dawson says. “The challenge is interrupting the hustle-bustle of our lives to expose to them firsthand, rather than in textbooks.”

Planning to attend an opera, stage play, classical music performance or ballet requires lots of warning, but experiential learning sticks with a child even more than straight-A studies. “All these opportunities are meant to help them broaden their understanding of our world and where we come from,” she notes. “Diverse cultures express themselves in numerous ways.”

At the same time, parents shouldn’t get too ambitious about exposing young children to the arts. “It’s important to pay attention to what the child responds to, and not overload them with experiences that are too sophisticated for their development stage,” Dawson warns. “Three-year-olds should not be attending the opera.”

With small children, cultural touchstones in the home resonate best. “We have picture books iconic in family life, like ‘Goodnight Moon’ and ‘I Love You Forever,’ that are appropriate at even the earliest ages,” she notes. “That’s when kids have their first encounter with art.”

As children get older, she says, parents can guide a museum visit by preparing their kids for what they will see. If a Van Gough self-portrait is on display, they can ask their children to look for the painting of the red-haired man, she suggests.

Short trips can later be longer so that kids have a good time with art, Dawson says. “It’s a taste of a beautiful experience at a level they can appreciate – a lot shorter than an adult’s – but they are spending time with art. Then, you go get ice cream.” 

CULTURE ALONE CANNOT BE BLAMED FOR DROP IN VOCATIONS, POPE SAYS

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — While there is a need to evangelize a culture that tells young people money equals success and commitments aren’t forever, stopping the “hemorrhage” of people leaving religious orders also requires changes from the orders themselves, Pope Francis said.

“Alongside much holiness — there is much holiness in consecrated life — there also are situations of counter-witness that make fidelity difficult,” the pope said Jan. 28 during a meeting with members of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life and representatives of religious orders.

The congregation was holding a plenary meeting focused on “fidelity and abandonment,” examining the factors that contribute to a lifelong commitment to religious vows or to leaving consecrated life.

According to the Vatican’s Central Statistics Office, from the end of 2004 to the end of 2014, the number of religious-order priests in the world declined by more than 2,500 to just under 135,000; the number of religious brothers dropped by 471 to just over 54,500; and the number of women religious fell by almost 85,000 — 11 percent — to about 683,000 religious.

Pope Francis, himself a Jesuit, said that in some cases it becomes clear over time that a person never truly had a vocation to religious life and it is right for that person to follow God’s call elsewhere. But many other factors can influence a decision to leave, he said, including situations within an order or community.

“Such situations are, among others: routine, tiredness, the burden of running institutions, internal divisions, the search for power — ‘climbers’ — a worldly way of governing the institute, a service of authority that sometimes becomes either authoritarianism or a ‘live and let live’” attitude.

Pope Francis told the group that obviously it is more difficult for young people to make a lifelong commitment to a vocation when they are living in a culture where everything is provisional or temporary, where people are encouraged to pursue their dreams but leave a “door open” in case it does not work out and where “self-realization” is measured by money and power, not by fidelity to the Gospel and Gospel values.

Still, he said, the world of young people is “rich and challenging — not negative, but complex.”

“We are not lacking young people who are very generous, who act in solidarity and are involved on a religious and social level, young people who seek a real spiritual life, young people who hunger for something different than what the world offers,” he said. “There are marvelous young people and there are many.”

But the young also include “many victims of the logic of worldliness, which can be summarized this way: searching for success at any cost, for easy money and easy pleasure,” Pope Francis said.

The response of the church must be to reach out and “to infect them with the joy of the Gospel and of belonging to Christ.”

The only way to attract young people to religious life and to help members stay, he said, is to “show the beauty of following Christ and radiate hope and joy.”

“When hope diminishes and there is no joy,” he said, “it’s an ugly thing.”

The community life of religious orders is essential, he said, and it must be nourished with community prayer, celebration of the Mass, reception of the sacrament of reconciliation, sincere dialogue among members, “fraternal correction, mercy toward the brother or sister who sins,” and shared responsibility.

Perseverance in religious life, as with any vocation, requires the encouragement and support of others, the pope said, “because when a brother or sister does not find support within the community, he or she will seek it elsewhere.”

“Many times great infidelities begin with little deviations or distractions,” he said. “In this case, it is important to make St. Paul’s exhortation our own: ‘Awake, o sleeper!’”

If a vocation is a “treasure,” Pope Francis said, then it must be handled with care, cultivated with prayer and strengthened with “a good theological and spiritual formation that defends it from the culture of the ephemeral and allows it to progress solid in the faith.”

Religious orders must make a commitment to training at least some of their members in the art of “accompaniment” and spiritual direction, he said.

“We can never insist enough on this need,” he said. “It is difficult to remain faithful walking alone or walking with the guidance of brothers and sisters who are not capable of attentive and patient listening or who have not had adequate experience in religious life.”

“All of us who are consecrated, whether young or not so young, need help appropriate to the human, spiritual and vocational moment we are living,” he said.

A spiritual director or guide “must not create dependency,” control or treat the other as a child, he said, but must help the person “discover the will of God and seek in everything to do that which is most pleasing to the Lord.”

Discernment, he said, “does not only mean choosing between good and evil, but between good and better, between what is good and what leads to identification with Christ.”

THE CULTURE PROJECT

Several years ago, a group of friends were talking about their questions and experiences with love. What started from a simple conversation between friends has become a full-blown, global movement about protecting integrity and restoring a human culture in love.

“We are all about restoring culture through the experience of virtue. We do that by going to schools, parishes and youth groups, speaking about sexual integrity and dignity of the human person, inviting our culture to become more fully alive in Christ,” shared Tom Costello, a Culture Project California team leader and missionary from New Jersey. “As a young adult community, we are also trying to be witnesses of that mission.”

The Culture Project International is a young, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that started in Pennsylvania in July 2014, and has since expanded to over 30 dioceses across US. Rooted in the teachings of St. John Paul II, the mission focuses on engaging today’s youth to seek purity and holiness in Christ.

In the past two years, the initiative has grown to include a formative mission program with a team of 30 missionaries, and has empowered over 60,000 students nationwide to believe in a culture of love.

“We hone in on the dignity that we have as men and women, and focus on the freedom of living out and reclaiming our sexual integrity,” said Catherine Kilmer, Expansion Officer with the Culture Project. Kilmer also bravely shared her story about being caught up in her high school hookup culture, and how the message of virtue changed her life.

“I remember the late nights, the sticky beer bottles, the morning-after regret…but most of all, I remember the feeling of use. I looked in the mirror one morning and I didn’t like who I saw,” Kilmer said. “But one day, a speaker came to my high school, and he spoke about chastity. The speech absolutely revolutionized the way I thought about myself, others, and how I saw my life. It opened my eyes to the wider Gospel message of Christ and human integrity. I thought about young men and women who, just like me, were settling for less than the best God has to offer. All it took was one speech.”

With today’s high abortion and divorce rates, normalized hookup culture, a porn industry that generates billions of dollars each year, and mixed messages about love and respect, society is up against a lot in the culture.

“There has never been a civilization in the history of the world where the majority of our teachers are relativists, promoting ideas that our moral standards are up to us to decide,” Kilmer noted. “But there is hope and a better way of life, and we are dedicated to uphold that better way.”

On May 5, The Culture Project hosted its first inaugural banquet and fundraising event on the West Coast, in Newport Beach, Calif. Over 80 benefactors, friends, and those interested in the project gathered on the Newport Marina to learn more and hear stories of mission.

Christina Barba, Culture Project founder and executive director, spoke about the project’s purpose and the search for identity in today’s youth.

“Our mission is to simply remind people of who they are and what they are made for, focusing on their inherent dignity, value, and worth,” Barba, whose work has been honored by Our Sunday Visitor and the Students for Life of America, shared. “Every human person is made out of love, created for love. We at the Culture Project believe in love. We believe in the human consent, that love is a total gift of one self, and that authentic friendships are real. We believe that it is possible for two people to make a commitment of love to each other, and to have a faithful, lifelong marriage…and even a happy one, at that! In this day and age, we believe that it is possible.”

Over the past year, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez and the archdiocese invited the leadership team, including five missionaries and the national committee, to come to Southern California and spread the Culture Project’s message throughout the region.

“It really started from the ground up, going from parish to parish and door to door. We always had the vision to go beyond the East Coast, beyond Philadelphia,” said Uta Trogele, president of the Culture Project’s California committee. “The diocese really loved the idea. I was traveling a lot and involved for over 10 years in the pro-life movement, and I really feel for the young people. I don’t want them to live the wrong lifestyle; I want them to believe in God and in themselves.”

Outreach missionary Josh Kilmer agreed, “Our whole mission is to tell men and women who they are in the eyes of God. Knowing our identity, we can further convict ourselves of our identity in Christ.”

Costello also talked making a full-time commitment with the Culture Project. “A lot of people think becoming a missionary is taking a year off, but it is really a stepping stone. You have to face yourself and who you are as a person, and our work is an extension of that. We get trained in theology of the body and other certifications, but we also learn how to speak well and do that effectively, and it’s a full commitment to helping young people but also growing as an individual.”

Today, missionaries with the Culture Project travel across the diocese, networking and speaking to Catholic schools, youth and young adult groups about ideals of chastity, modesty, and pure love. In its first year on the West Coast, the initiative has reached out to 83 different parishes, presented to 258 groups, and has changed the narrative on culture to over 8,700 students.

Focusing on personal encounter, faith formation, and living in community, the Culture Project is rooted in prayer and having a deep relationship with God.

“Our work is to be missionaries of encounter,” Costello shared. “Our culture can be restored through the individual encounter, meeting people where they are at.”

“When we go into these schools and remind students of their worth and dignity, how does that not bring joy to your heart?” asked another missionary, Maryrose Richards.

Kerry Ann Caswell from St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Irvine applauded the initiative. “The Culture Project touches my heart. As a parent, no matter how cute I dress, I can’t talk to today’s high schoolers about chastity or natural family planning, or to celebrate the way God made their bodies. They won’t buy into the message if we’re not relatable. They need more young people to encourage them to do more than follow the crowd. The more than this is talked about, the more habits and perspectives can really be changed.”

“It’s nice to meet a group of people who share the same desire to promote living to our full potential, who aspire to something higher than what society wants to uphold,” said Ngozi Genevieve Nwosisi, a parishioner of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Irvine.

Barba also thanked the local Orange County and Los Angeles dioceses for their generous support in making the Culture Project a reality on the West Coast.

“We have a wonderful community to support building a sustainable presence here. Our core belief is community,” she said. “We aim to engage and restore the culture in love, particularly the youth, with the hope that just one talk—even just 60 minutes—can change the course of their lives.”

To learn more about the Culture Project, please visit www.restoreculture.com.

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