The SEEK Podcast
Welcome to the SEEK Podcast – we're so glad you’re here. This podcast is a place of community, collaboration, and inspiration, created to invite and encourage you deeper into a relationship with Jesus. Join these podcasters and many others as we encounter Jesus at SEEK25, Jan 1st-5th. For more information and to register, visit seek.focus.org.
The SEEK Podcast
Unveiling 'Triumph of the Heart': The Beatidudes x SEEK
Join us for a vibrant episode of the SEEK Podcast, recorded live from the Max Studios stage in Salt Lake City, featuring the dynamic trio from the Beatitudes podcast—Jeff Schiefelbein, Nick Bezner, and Paul Kolker. This episode dives deep into the intersection of humor and serious faith discussions, with a special appearance by Anthony D’Ambrosio, who shares the compelling story behind his latest film project, “Triumph of the Heart.” The film chronicles the heroic sacrifice of St. Maximilian Kolbe during World War II and its impact on cultural identity and resilience within the Church.
Explore how storytelling and artistic expression play pivotal roles in evangelization and cultural renewal. The conversation also sheds light on the personal journeys of those involved, revealing how personal trials can lead to profound insights about faith, suffering, and the human spirit. This episode is a testament to the power of community and humor in facing life’s challenges, encouraging listeners to find hope and meaning in the legacy of figures like Kolbe and the potential for a modern renaissance in the Church through creativity and faith.
Welcome to the Seek 25 podcast, featuring some of our favorite podcasters recorded live at the Max Studios podcast stage during Seek 25 in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 2:The.
Speaker 3:Beatitudes. Oh yeah, Beatitudes, here we go. Crank it up there, Kyle. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Beatitudes. This is a podcast and a movement for Christian men and, it turns out, for women too, walking through authentic fraternity on their way to eternity with Christ. We are so happy to have a live audience. This is only the second time we've done this third actually at a conference but we're going to involve you later. But first let me introduce you to the crew. My name is Jeff Shufflebine. I'm one of the Beatitudes. I'm joined by Nick Besner. I love roller coasters. You love roller coasters, I do. You're in for one.
Speaker 4:Just a fact.
Speaker 3:And I got Paul Kolker on my left and I like short walks on the beach, and we are truth, goodness and beauty. No Sounds about right.
Speaker 2:That's fair.
Speaker 3:Hey, if you've ever seen the Beatitudes, or if you haven't, let me explain something to you. We have been using humor as an access point for conversations that are truly about the things that matter in our life, our walk with Christ, the struggles that we have, the joys, the triumphs, the trials. And in a minute we're going to be hearing from one of our awesome guests. He's a returning guest for us, but first I just want to let you know that how many in here, real quick, have ever heard or seen the Beatitudes before? Just quick show of hands or you can just clap or yell Okay, we got a couple good ones in here. Yeah, all right, you're in for what you said a roller coaster of humor and holiness. What would you say? Homer-ness, holer-ness, what about you, paul?
Speaker 4:Loveliness.
Speaker 3:Anthony, what is this? What is this show?
Speaker 5:It's Catholic. Whose Line Is it Anyways?
Speaker 3:Catholic. Whose Line Is it? Anyways, there is some improv. Hey, and before we get into knowing Anthony, you came here today to the Beatitudes and we are going to include you in today's show. So, if you don't know this, paul Kolker is actually a trained professional improv comedian. That's correct, and we're going to include you in this show through an improv exercise at the end. But, paul, you want to explain this?
Speaker 4:to him yeah, so the way this is going to work is we're going to be having slips of paper going around, and so if you have pens on you, great, I think we also have some extra pens and all that but we need you to write down phrases or sentences. These can be words of wisdom, favorite movie quotes, things that you would see on decorations that your mom hangs in the kitchen. I'm just like the deepest, most powerful, impactful phrases Live, laugh. Love might be an example, right, but just don't use that one, because we always get that one.
Speaker 4:But yeah, so if you'll fill those out, we'll have somebody coming around collecting those slips and then we're going to use those later in the show. We're going to continue with the rest of the show as y'all are doing that, but feel free. I believe we've got Jake over here with the blue hat on backwards. We've got John Heinen over here. He's got the nice man. Look at that. He's dressed to kill, that's right.
Speaker 3:And then we got Sophie right here too. Sophie's helping Thank you All right, good, well, listen on the Beatitudes. We always do this show live and we're lucky enough to have Anthony D'Ambrosio here. We actually go way back. Who here has heard of the D'Ambrosios Woo? Somebody?
Speaker 4:jumping up.
Speaker 6:Jumping for joy. What's?
Speaker 4:up. Yeah, we got a couple people. That's awesome, Love this.
Speaker 3:All right, we're going to share a little bit of a story of Anthony's background, but there is a movie, a feature-length film, coming out this year 2025, called Triumph of the Heart, and it's all about Maximilian Kolbe and the nine other men that entered into the starvation chamber when Kolbe replaced another prisoner to go to their death and pass through it, and Anthony is the writer and director. He's also our friend and a mentor to the Beatitudes A mentor. Well, you wore your Beatitudes blue and white today. This is incredible. Welcome to the show, anthony D'Ambrosio.
Speaker 5:Thanks for coming back Just to show fans who here is named Colby or has Colby as a confirmation.
Speaker 6:saint Say woo All right, all right all right, yeah right down front.
Speaker 3:We met somebody earlier who has a first-class relic of Maximilian Kolbe. I'm going to assume that people have some knowledge, but let's take a step back. Who's Maximilian Kolbe first?
Speaker 5:Maximilian Kolbe was basically the World War II Bishop Baron and he was a media star and executive. He started the first Catholic big media conglomerate in Poland, had millions of subscribers to his magazine. But he's really known now for saving the life of another man in Auschwitz, stepping forward and giving his life so that another man who had a family could go free, and he after that lived for 14 days without food or water, giving testament through song and poetry and prayer to the goodness of God in the midst of Auschwitz.
Speaker 3:So you've been doing this project for a couple years, but this isn't your first dive into the creative world. Anthony and his brother years ago started a movement called the Catholic Creatives. Can you just take us back to who's little Anthony that would be now leading the charge on this feature-length film about Colby Like? Where did you come from?
Speaker 5:So I went to a seminary, at St John Vianney Seminary in Minnesota, and I left that with a philosophy degree and knew that God was calling me to something else.
Speaker 5:And as one does if you graduate seminary with a philosophy degree, I face-planted into the adult world with no idea what I was going to do. So I did youth ministry, and during youth ministry you realized that we needed stories that could be told of our saints, that would show the heroism of our Catholic culture, and that there was just not enough of that in the world. And I saw that one of the big problems was that our faith doesn't really do a great job of sponsoring, promulgating creativity and artistry. We're very great at talking about truth and we're very good at outreach, but we're not very good at promoting those, you know, people who are a little bit off the beaten path, who do a little bit wonkiness and who are artists that can tell the truth and goodness of our faith through beauty, through stories. And so I started something called Catholic Creatives and that's how I got to know you guys.
Speaker 5:Did you know, paul before that.
Speaker 3:Did you know Paul growing up?
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, we actually went to a youth group together at St Ann's in Texas.
Speaker 5:And then we went to seminary together.
Speaker 4:That's right. We were in seminary at the same time for a couple years there discerning. At the same time, I think I was in the chapel praying and you were dressing up like a pirate, I think.
Speaker 5:That did happen multiple times. I did have the security of the school get called on me once for running around with PVC noodles and we were having ninja battles, ninja battles, yeah, and they confiscated our pool noodles and said that we were bearing weapons illegally on campus. So you were praying and I was getting into trouble illegally on campus. So you were praying and I was getting into trouble.
Speaker 3:Wait, do you have any stories about Paul? I know Paul prayed, but Paul did some other stuff too.
Speaker 5:Come on, Well, we called him the Punisher because he made very bad puns. Still doing that.
Speaker 4:Yep, yep, big fan of puns the. Punisher, yes, the Punisher indeed.
Speaker 3:Okay, so you used to be one of us. We're all from DFW, we all go to the same parish. You used to be local to us and you left us to go to the great state of Colorado.
Speaker 5:Denver, colorado, baby, we got any Denverites out there? We have a few. Yeah, I mean it's Focus headquarters. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know you guys are here.
Speaker 4:All 15 of y'all came here. That's great.
Speaker 3:Wow, we got 16 from Dallas. So, no, we. This project, though, didn't start as a feature length film. Let's go back to what was happening. That ended up being that Colby was going to take over your life, and you would be so ingrained with Colby. Where did this come from, so?
Speaker 5:I guess, to get very real, I had a faith crisis while I was doing youth ministry. I had a girlfriend that I felt like God had told me that I was going to get married to. I was giving my life to ministry and I came down with an illness that was very hard to diagnose and during that time one of the things that it caused was chronic insomnia, so I could only sleep for about 20 minutes to an hour a night and that created this incredible, I guess, suffering in my life and I couldn't hold on to my job. I couldn't do all of the things that I thought that God was calling me to. I ended up having to end the relationship because I couldn't move forward into marriage with this woman that I love deeply.
Speaker 5:And in the midst of that grief I lost my faith, in the midst of that, because I couldn't see how a good God could allow something like that bad to happen without any real reason to it, and I was gravitating towards this really deep sort of angst and anger against God.
Speaker 5:And in the midst of that I started to have these dreams about St Maximilian Kolbe and I began to realize that Kolbe entered into the suffering of these nine other men.
Speaker 5:There was nine other men in this starvation bunker that we don't really talk about very often and we talk often about the way that he saved this life of another man who was able to go free and survive Auschwitz. But there were nine other men who were starving to death with the saint and he had to talk with them and be with them in the midst of their grief and their suffering and in some ways I felt like I was one of those men. I was cast into this darkness and this cell of suffering that I couldn't get out of and I didn't know if I would ever be healed. And the conversations that I began to have with Colby in this sort of like deep place of suffering and of like sleeplessness. That became the grounds for making a short film about St Maximilian Colby that was told from the perspective of one of these nine other men who is a POW in the camp and who had a love, who was at home and was trying to get back to and who ultimately died with Colby.
Speaker 3:What was the intent of this short film, Like what was that used for? I actually don't even know what was happening with this thing.
Speaker 5:Yeah, so part of that was that the Diocese of Dallas had hired my company.
Speaker 5:I started a marketing firm later on and they hired our company to help them put forward an event that was like a South by Southwest outreach to young adults in Dallas who were not Catholic, and we were talking a lot about the idea that a lot of people were leaving the faith, not necessarily because of the big questions of wokeness that were coming out around then the big like hot and button political topics, but a lot of them were leaving because they felt like they couldn't ask life's biggest questions in the context of church.
Speaker 5:And so we brought forward this whole event that was about asking the biggest, most difficult questions of life, of grief, of grief of doubt, of suffering, and we used that short film as a way to start the conversations there. We showed it in a theater in downtown Dallas and it was like this atomic bomb of spiritual grace went off and all of these people were going to confession, that were distanced from the church. They were coming back, they were having these open conversations that they never thought they could have of sufferings, of people in their lives that had committed suicide, people who had died in their family or gone to prison, things that they would never have talked about before, that we're able to share because of this film, and so we knew that we needed to make something that was even bigger, to share Colby's story with the world.
Speaker 4:Well, and I think you had said with Catholic creatives to kind of jump back to that stage. You wanted to start a new renaissance because that's what the church had helped foster way back when. Right, I mean, that was kind of the goal is that art can evangelize.
Speaker 5:I think that one of the biggest problems that we have right now in the church is that we've lost the culture war and we've been trying to fight it on the terms of the culture through like argumentation and through politics. And really, when we were the strongest, when we're most ourselves, is when we were being sacramental. Like our personality as the church, our inheritance is sacraments, and that means communicating grace through symbol. The symbol that creates the expression of the grace that it signifies, and our art, our beauty, is a part of the way that we do that. Our cathedrals and our art has always been the thing that has made us the most ourselves, and we are the most ourselves when we were doing that. And I think that if we were able to create an artistic culture inside of the faith, we would find ourselves ramping back up into the limelight of culture again if we did that. So that's what the new renaissance is all about. Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3:Here's a question. So you're talking about these nine other men. What do we know about those men? Did we know about their lives and the details of their backgrounds? Were they all Jews that had been put into the consecration camp Like? What's the deal with these men?
Speaker 5:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So this is something that a lot of people don't know is that at the time, auschwitz, in the very beginning of the war, it was founded to destroy the identity of the Polish culture.
Speaker 5:Polish culture is, as many of you guys know, very Catholic and very, very nationalistic.
Speaker 5:They're a country that's been conquered over and over and over and over again, and their resilience as a culture has been the way that they've held on to the cross.
Speaker 5:And so the way that they were trying to destroy the culture of Poland was by bringing in clergy and the leaders in the church and the leaders in Poland that were political leaders who were also connected to the church, to basically dehumanize them. Their goal was to completely rip the humanity away from them, even as they died, not just to kill them and exterminate them, but to do so in the way that showed them that they had no humanity to begin with, and the goal was to therefore subjugate Poland as a sort of slave state or vassal state of Germany. And so they brought in people like Maximilian Kolbe, who were people who could lead, who were people who had followings, and they brought them all together and basically did everything that they could to make them kill themselves, turn on each other, etc. And so Kolbe's story in stepping forward to save the life of another man, it was not just to save this one man's life, but to remind everyone in Poland that they could not be destroyed, that their identity as humans, as Catholics, could not be destroyed by the oppressors that were coming to take them over.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I remember less than two years ago we hung out with you in Denver up there for some event and you let us know about that short film. I had never seen it before. Then I'm gonna turn to Nick for a second. Nick, do you remember the first time you watched the Proof of Concept Like? Talk to us about what you experienced then and how that helped to catapult where we are now, 24 months later.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that's right. So saw the short film and then Anthony's like hey, I have a script. I was like let's read it. This is amazing. You know, you go through the story and I think it's so interesting. Your is not suffering or that life is supposed to be easy, but it really is. We have that cross. And what does that cross look like? And what I experienced reading the script was how it would apply to anybody who watched the film. Right, you can relate in a way, because no matter where you're at in your life, in your journey, you've got a cross right Rich, poor, you know any demographic. You're going to have some way that this relates and speaks to you, and I thought that was the power of the story.
Speaker 5:Yeah, it's one thing that I think that we, our greatest artists, have always had a lot of darkness in their art, which is kind of interesting, but like you think about Caravaggio and some of the greatest pieces of work that we've seen, it's like all darkness and then this, like brilliant light highlighting the person of the gospel.
Speaker 5:You see this in the great depiction of the prodigal son coming home and embracing the father, and these sorts of art that were made.
Speaker 5:At that point we, as Catholics, we were looking at the darkness and seeing how the light of Christ could shine through it. In our film, one of the things that I really wanted to show is that all of these men who were in the cell with Colby, these were people who were just like us, who had lives, who had families at home, they had dreams, they had whole stories that brought them to that point that got cut short in the most brutal, terrifying and horrible way that you could imagine, and God sent somebody like Maximilian Kolbe, a saint, to be with them in the midst of their suffering, and for me, it makes me like tear up every time that I think about it, knowing that they were not alone in the suffering that they went through. It's also a testament to the fact that we are not alone in our own darknesses, and that it gives us the chance to be able to share about those things and testify to God's goodness in the midst of our suffering.
Speaker 6:Well, and that's the other thing, like the darkness, I think, sometimes can scare people away. This is an intense film, right? This is not. We know how this ends, right? It's not. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but it is a very joyful ending and I think that's the thing. It's like the triumph of the heart, right, right yeah.
Speaker 3:So you know, I gotta tell you what happened next. And there's a great faithfulness, but all creatives have this like I'm just gonna make this up, but almost like a fraud, complex, like is anybody gonna like this? And so we watched thing. By the way, paul's voice was in the very first one as one of the Germans coming in and that's right, roughing up the yeah.
Speaker 4:I said I'd like to participate in this film and you were like how?
Speaker 3:about as a.
Speaker 2:German soldier. Thanks for that.
Speaker 4:Appreciate it. That's a clip.
Speaker 3:So then, uh, what was so wild is we said, can we help with this? We literally wrote an email to 50 people, held a couple events with friends in town and next thing, you know, whoops, you had all the money you needed to jump on an airplane and fly to Poland one way. Yeah, what happened next man?
Speaker 5:Well. So it's really interesting because we needed enough money to buy a house, but without any real like here's what that's going to do. We had a movie and we had a movie idea, we had a script and we were like, hey, we need half a house, we need a whole house, we need like $400,000 to be able to get out there and do this. And, uh, all of you guys helped us to raise that. Uh, it came so much faster than I thought that it would come and all of a sudden I was like, oh wow, oh my gosh, this is commitment.
Speaker 5:So we had enough to get out there. We bought one-way tickets to Poland because we knew that we needed to make the movie in Kowli's hometown and we had to find actors and we had to find locations, we had to find costumes all of these things to be able to create a film. And in the midst of that we had these big shoots where we had to recreate Auschwitz. Hundreds of people that were in town for these days and we had a freak snow. That happened. It was the middle of September it's not a time that it snows normally in Poland. We were like what's the worst that could possibly happen? And it would be that snow would come down during those two days.
Speaker 3:Wait real quick. That snow would come down during those two days. Wait real quick. You've never heard a grown man cry on the phone like Anthony when the snow was coming.
Speaker 5:Oh, come on, jeff, it was a few tears. I had onions that I was chopping while we were talking.
Speaker 4:That's what it was. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 5:But yeah, basically, as the snow happened, it meant that we needed to raise another $50,000 in order to reschedule hundreds of people close down the city streets. All of that that we had to do in order to be able to reshoot this couple of days. And there were lots of other things that happened like that that we needed God's intervention directly to get through, and you guys were big helps to me as I was facing the you know, I guess, the cliff that I was like, standing on, looking down, like there's no way that I can pull this off and, as one does, god always brings people into your life that can help you, kind of encourage you through it. And Jeff made a couple of phone calls and was like I got you the money, let's make this happen.
Speaker 4:It's incredible.
Speaker 3:Do you know? I think about this film because the story of these men you have these firsthand accounts of what people could hear from the cells or the janitor coming in. There was a camaraderie formed, there was a fraternity formed. They were in this together instead of turning on one another. But my question is this you were not filming in easy conditions, you didn't have the luxury of a Hollywood lot, you didn't have a lot of things. What was it like for the crew, for the actors, for the locals, to experience the making of this?
Speaker 5:I mean, you think about what a movie has to do. It's trying to recreate these moments of real life, and the closer you can get to the reality, the more real it seems. And God in some way, I think, always creates a space when you're trying to give your life to him as an artist. He makes you relive the thing that he wants you to learn through the course of making the thing, and for us, that meant we didn't have enough money in order to do any of what we were trying to do. I had people who looked at the script and they were like you need at least $2 million to do this, and we were trying to do it for 400,000. And what that meant for us was that we were living in hostels where it was just literally there was not even a kitchen. We had 100 people packed into a room where all we had were cots, like no sofas, one bathroom, and we've got 100 people in this place and all of us were in some way living joyfully in the midst of all of that poverty and we were learning what Colby had to learn.
Speaker 5:You know he was a missionary that was very accustomed to suffering. He went to Japan Like think about this Speaking Polish, which is one of the hardest languages ever in the history of the world to learn. It's got like 10 consonants in it per sound. So you think about, like what is the sound that C-Z-H-S-P make when you're reading a letter? Like it's amazing? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5:Then you go this guy is like I'm going to go to Japan, which is the second hardest language to learn, and I'm going to translate my Polish newspaper without Google Translate into Japanese, and I'm going to do that with no money and like three other Franciscan friars in one of the most hostile environments to Christianity that the world knows. And so he knew what it was like to be on mission with other people suffering with him, and that's what we got to learn. We were, we had to literally the actors had to starve to death together. We had to be on an Auschwitz starvation, less than 1,000 calories per day diet in order to get down slim enough to be believable. So we would do that, even I would do the diet with them.
Speaker 5:We had to shave all of the hair off of our heads and kind of enter into that sort of militaristic, dehumanized, like our personalities all blending together kind of sense. We were in a prison that was damp and dark, that had no AC, for October, november, acting out these incredibly terrifying, difficult scenes together all day, every day, and so you would think it would create this incredibly intense, heavy culture, but it was the opposite. At the end of the day, after we just are coming back and we don't even have enough money for dinner and we're just eating soup. And we're coming back home just like singing Disney songs and like having the best time of our lives.
Speaker 4:So that's what it was like. People think, oh, you're making a movie, so that's so glamorous right Luxury Hollywood lifestyle yeah.
Speaker 5:We got the trailer where we got you know, all the fun stuff and, like snacks, gotta go to makeup. We could not afford any of that. Literally we were. We were across the street from a mall and this old person that had no power and we had to run one extension cable all the way across the parking lot to plug in and we couldn't have the light and the heat. We had a little space heater that was like that's the one heater we have, so like any time that we finished a scene and said cut, we had to like unplug the light and plug the space heater back in and get blankets over the guys so that people would like not get sick. So that's, those are the conditions we were working in, it's like method acting turned into method producing.
Speaker 5:We're just going to raise, just enough money to keep you alive.
Speaker 5:Yeah, but these are the sort of sacrifices you know that you have to make if you want to do something for the Lord. That is like absolutely unique. That's never been done before. That's completely off the beaten path. I think God wants you to be like without enough to be able to prove that he's the one behind it. That's just. You see the story of God's work throughout the Old Testament. It's always the little guy that doesn't have enough that God uses to turn the tables on. You know the culture.
Speaker 4:Yeah, david and Goliath, or I mean, or in my weakness, he is made strong.
Speaker 5:Right yeah absolutely. Story of Gideon.
Speaker 3:you know your first film ever to make of long form, and you decided to do it in Poland. Yeah, what have you learned or been surprised like? What are the surprises, good and bad, that have come to you over this last 24 months? I would say?
Speaker 5:that one of the biggest surprises is just that when you have a dream and you have something on your heart that God is giving to you, god will give you the resources that you need, no matter how impossible it is, if you step forward in faith. And that, to me, has been the biggest surprise. I think you know how kind of small my brain was when I was first thinking about the film. I was like can we do this for maybe like $250,000 in Dallas, we can find a little thing that we can. It's like God kept on stretching the dream over and over and over and over again, because I was still immature in my faith, where I couldn't dream as big as God was dreaming, and I think that that has been the biggest lesson that God has taught me.
Speaker 4:Walk on the water. Yeah, get out of the boat.
Speaker 5:See with the eyes of the Lord. There's a lot more abundance in his camp than there is in mine, and I just have to be able to look at the world around me through the eyes of the kingdom and not through my own eyes.
Speaker 3:Anthony, is it fair to say, like what you went through physically and then your spiritual crisis and then finding Colby and locking into the Colby story. It's kind of two-part question here. Number one how much of this movie is actually about your walk with Colby? When I think about being one of the nine in that cell? And I would also then say, how much do you see that Colby took that leap of faith that you took over and over with printing presses and moves and new communities?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question. Like every saint, you hear their story and that story is almost always a snapshot of their life, like the ending snapshot. That's, like you know, the harvesting of their life. But before that, there's all of these moments in silence and the secret of God bringing that person forward just one little step in faith. And my story is very much tied to the story that I'm telling, like God saved me, the same way that Colby saved these other men through the working of, through this story, through bringing me into this story and showing me what it looks like to suffer well, and I would say that my life is, at this stage, is so deeply formed by it that it feels like God. Colby met me in my cell and I have therefore been ministered to by him, and I'm now giving out of what Colby gave me, like I was discipled in some way by him.
Speaker 3:I got to tell you this is getting heavy, so I would like to lighten it up with a little game. Let's do it.
Speaker 6:The game is called Blessed are the Jokemakers, for they shall inherit the 102 points. It's a big one, 102 points. How?
Speaker 3:does this work, Paul?
Speaker 4:The way this is going to work is we've got a character card and a card from the Catholic card game and we're going to answer the prompt on the Catholic card game as this character. So we have to just try to make this work. In the moment we're going to come up with it and the character we have to become Wait wait, so real quick, each one of us is going to go. Oh yeah, we're going to each do our own version.
Speaker 3:But, anthony, are you playing or are?
Speaker 5:you going to judge? Oh, I'm so into it. Yeah, I'm playing.
Speaker 3:We actually need y'all at which is that how they say it? A show of applause.
Speaker 6:A round of applause.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a show of your hands how who won. So we'll go through this and literally this is improv. We don't know what's coming out next, so go for it.
Speaker 4:So, as a person who is stuck in the decade of your choice, the topic of the next papal encyclical is you can't think this long.
Speaker 3:You got to dive in. Here's mine. All right, stop Substantiate and listen.
Speaker 2:I got nothing. I got nothing.
Speaker 4:I'm going eyesight's baby. I would say, stuck in the 60s, that you know it'd be Fides et Ratio. I think it really dives into both the faith and the reason. And when you put those two together.
Speaker 3:It's kind of mind-blowing, bro. Bro, what Latin did you just use?
Speaker 4:Faith and reason. It's actual Latin, bro.
Speaker 2:Bro In a very distant future. The most recent encyclical is ad hominem about whether or not zombies are men and whether or not they should be protected under sacramental law.
Speaker 6:Oh hey, welcome to the juice joint. You know, the next papal in cyclical is going to be about whether everybody should be carrying a tommy gun all right, real quick show of hands.
Speaker 4:Skip me, paul yeah, I got fives of applause, anthony nothing got some nick.
Speaker 2:Nick takes it. Nick takes it 102 points.
Speaker 3:Congratulations Tune in to the Beatitudes. Every Monday for the Blessed are the Jokemakers and on Friday we have our bonus shows. Anthony, I have a question. We know that the younger generations, between the smartphones and the social media and the crazy things going on in the world, that there is a level of anxiety, there's a level of frustration, is a level of anxiety. There's a level of frustration, a level of depression. You've been to some of those dark places. I'd ask you right now, just to talk to the people that are here and the people that are going to listen to this, what's your advice after having gone through? I know all of us have a dark day, but you went through some dark nights. Talk to us about what is your advice to folks when they face this.
Speaker 5:One of the things that I found to be most difficult was how hard it was for other people to understand what I was going through, the isolation that comes from not being able to fully explain how difficult of a grief it is, and people were coming to me all the time trying to make everything make sense.
Speaker 5:You know, maybe God is trying to teach you this lesson, or, you know, god is going to make something beautiful out of this, and that sort of thing was always like nails on a chalkboard for me as a Catholic, and in the midst of my doubt, as I was trying to sort of express the anger that I had with God, I was becoming distant from my own family because I couldn't fully express how different of a life I was living compared to the life that they were on, and I think that what I needed to do and the best advice that was given to me was just to like let go of my resentment and listen to the voice of love that was inside of me. That was ultimately God's voice, but I had so many layers of like anger against what was going, against what God was saying to me and against what other people were saying to me, that I couldn't listen to that voice of love that was inside. That was God's voice, witnessing my suffering and having compassion for me.
Speaker 5:So I would just say that like let go of the resentment and listen to the voice of love that's inside of you.
Speaker 3:Man, what if you're on the other side of this? You know your buddy or your friend or your even coworkers going through something? What you got a lot of people that gave you advice that was making it go deeper and worse. What would you say to any of us that are here trying to walk with a friend?
Speaker 5:Being with someone in silence is way more powerful than trying to make it make sense. And I think that the worst instinct that we have is, when we're confronted with the sort of suffering that other people have, that feels like it's senseless. There's almost like a defensiveness that we have against it that we want to somehow reconcile it and try to make sense of it. Like there's gotta be a reason why. And if you try to bring that energy into the conversation, it's going to ultimately fall flat, because a lot of suffering doesn't. God doesn't give that to people intentionally Like God brings us into places of suffering and he uses it, but he doesn't cause it. He doesn't like as a chess player. Chess player like here's the suffering that I'm going to give to this person. That's going to be their grief and their cross to carry and if we try to bring that to it, it's going to really be, I think, ultimately senseless to that person and drive them further away from God. Because I think all of us know deep down a good God would not do that. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So yeah, so what you're saying is just being there with the person versus trying to define or label or categorize or solve the situation.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah, we try to help and like, let me fix that for you. And it's like no, sometimes you just need to listen, Let me change how you're thinking about this.
Speaker 5:It's like no, just like. Hold them, let them be, you know, in doubt, let them be angry with God and just be with them in the midst of that, and that's really what this movie shows Colby doing for the nine other men.
Speaker 3:Man. It's funny. I was thinking about if somebody's in this struggle. My anecdote is do you want to go see a movie with me? Because?
Speaker 2:this is a great one.
Speaker 3:Now, when are people going to be able to see this in theaters?
Speaker 5:It will be in theaters in September or October we haven't nailed down the date yet exactly but before that, if you want to help us, we are doing screenings, hopefully in the top 50 cities. That will be places where we want to release the movie. So if you want to make sure the movie comes to your city, reach out to me. You can find us on wwwtriumphoftheheartcom, you can find us on Instagram at triumphoftheheart, and you can basically put your name forward to be somebody that helps us bring the movie to your city.
Speaker 3:Thanks for putting those W's in the website. I'm Gen X and we don't know how that works without the W's, so thank you for it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, yeah, slash right, thanks.
Speaker 3:Well, listen you guys. You contributed something that we're gonna have a little bit of fun with, and uh, we've got our.
Speaker 4:We've got our notes.
Speaker 3:Yeah so, ladies and gentlemen, the man in this coat who just handed stop for a second, stay up here. This is john heinen, also known as the catholic gentleman, and today he is a courier. Service for your suggestions, john. Thank, thank you so much. John can be found on podcasts and things everywhere.
Speaker 4:I always feel underdressed when he's around.
Speaker 3:Well, he's a gentleman.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we're just a bunch of dudes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but you know, the Catholic Gentleman is actually a singular brand, it's M-A-N right. Yeah, we're dudes, we're in community. All right, I'm not going to look at these. We're going to start passing these out, but don't look at them just yet. This is for the game in a minute. I'll kind of separate these out for you. Anthony, what is your favorite thing about the Beatitudes?
Speaker 5:I love the humor. I think that you guys are bringing something really unique to the Catholic podcasting world and I love that everything that you guys do is like this very masculine kind of like bros talking together and Don't look at him Making sure that everything is lighthearted and fun.
Speaker 3:Well, this show hasn't been funny yet, yeah.
Speaker 4:We've been talking about death and depression and. But the triumph, the triumph, the triumph of the heart, that's right.
Speaker 3:This is a near occasion of comedy. Yeah, okay, okay. The Triumph of the Heart. That's right, this is a near occasion of comedy. Yeah, okay, okay. So Paul's going to set the scene for us Now. Listen, paul does this as a professional.
Speaker 4:So don't judge us judge him.
Speaker 4:Thank you, jeff, for that. All right, so what's going to happen here is we're flashing forward now. So it's September or October later this year when we're actually at the premiere of Triumph of the Heart. We're all on the red carpet, we're going to be interviewing Anthony there, all right. So flash forward with us, but we have to fit your sayings into what we are asking him and what we're reflecting on about the movie, and we're going to try to make it make sense. So it's going to be a beautiful mess.
Speaker 3:We'll figure it out. The scene starts as we're exiting the limo, having gotten an awesome opportunity to ride there with Anthony.
Speaker 4:Anthony, I'm just so proud of you, man, Like I can't believe you have gotten to this point. You did it, you brought yourself here, and all you had to do was, on a daily basis, remind yourself suck it up, buttercup. That's right. That's right, suck it up buttercup every day.
Speaker 5:That's what I say.
Speaker 3:When you would call me from Poland, you were like but Jeff, I know what you're going to say, so I'll just say it for you. Suck it up, buttercup. Yeah, you were crying profusely.
Speaker 5:I mean, this was Colby's. My favorite quote from Colby was suck it up, buttercup Well it's a translation from Polish.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's funny, because my favorite quote from any saint was actually I don't even remember the saint, but it's this one that I have on my bathroom mirror. It says don't ask for answers, don't ask. What does this say?
Speaker 4:And this is where Jeff's dyslexia kicks in.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that was my favorite quote from that saint too. That unnamed saint and unnamed quote, that was my favorite quote from that saint too, that unnamed saint and unnamed quote.
Speaker 3:Just don't ask for answers, it's not going to do you any good.
Speaker 6:It's not going to happen, for sure. Yeah, but it was funny yeah.
Speaker 5:I mean, I remember being on the phone with you, jeff, and the thing that you said to me that was like perhaps the most impactful thing that got me through the dark night of the soul was they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom.
Speaker 3:And look what happened from there.
Speaker 4:It's the triumph of the brave heart Right.
Speaker 6:Perfect, and that's how we got to the red carpet. You know, I've always heard insiders in Hollywood. They would just like hey, when you get to the red carpet, make sure that you speak softly and carry a big stick.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:And that way the reporters have to lean in. Yeah, that's right. You want to draw them into your message and the big stick to me when I saw you get to the red carpet. It's that big stick you're using as a cane, and so I think that's perfect for you, that's right, dressing as a dapper dandy walking around with a tux.
Speaker 3:It's funny, though, because you know Nick was doing all this spreadsheet work. He helped her create the pro forma and all the financials behind the film. And I would look over his shoulder and I'd say, nick, what are you doing? And he'd say, jeff, this is really high end stuff. Just remember fake it till you make it.
Speaker 4:I was like which is kind of what you do.
Speaker 3:And then I took over and I wrote a couple of Excel functions. That's great. We lost a lot of money that day.
Speaker 6:They didn't work.
Speaker 4:But that's okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Well, you know, I love that. There was that scene in the movie that nobody saw coming, I mean, and the whole theme of it was really centered around the words a faint heart never won a fair lady.
Speaker 5:Right, you know the deep romance that was happening in the movie. You know it's probably the most heartbreaking part of the whole story. And in the movie, you know it's probably the most heartbreaking part of the whole story and I think that you know one of the things that I was really meditating on when I was writing that part was that Cameron Cue se duerme, se lo lleva la corriente.
Speaker 3:Yes absolutely.
Speaker 4:Spanish is a pretty common language in.
Speaker 6:Poland, in Poland, yeah, I've heard that. I've never been, but I've heard that's, yeah, very common, very common.
Speaker 4:No, that's incredible.
Speaker 2:That's incredible.
Speaker 4:I think that roughly translates to Irish dancing yeah.
Speaker 3:No, I mean you think about the way, because he wouldn't just say it. He started singing it to us and you had those mariachis in Poland. Right it? He started singing it to us and you had those mariachis in Poland, and then they did Irish dancing. I mean it was like a whole melting pot Multicultural.
Speaker 5:That is really what Pope Francis was writing about when he said that on Wednesdays we wear pink.
Speaker 6:On Wednesdays we wear pink.
Speaker 4:Well, that's when he has the Wednesday audiences, and so that's appropriate, especially on Gaudete Sunday.
Speaker 6:Or Gaudete Wednesday maybe.
Speaker 3:Anthony, I actually was able to make a couple of phone calls and I got a couple of the biggest media outlets to come here and they said this is a Catholic film. Like we don't do. This, this is for you guys and you Christian guys. What can you tell us that could possibly change our minds? And I said, look, ma'am, I should warn you, I have the authority to make a citizen's arrest. And they were like so you arrested them? Well, yeah, they were like no we got it.
Speaker 3:We didn't even know you understood those rules.
Speaker 6:Yeah, I mean they all came. I'm just glad we got to watch the director's cut. That just reminds me of that deleted scene where Colby was like I feel the need, the need for speed he wanted to get to the 14 days faster, Faster speed this up.
Speaker 4:That's a dark joke. That's what it was. It's a dark joke.
Speaker 3:Well, I know to kind of wrap this up, paul had a couple yeah it was.
Speaker 4:I saw the early headlines for what the reviews are going to say. I mean, they're going to publish them tomorrow and try to promote the show. Gosh, you're an insider. Yeah no, I get around and I hear some things and what they said was the headline is going to be somebody with serial killer handwriting here. Oh wait, here we go. Why did the striped shirt guy do burpees before the show?
Speaker 3:They are asking that everywhere that couldn't be a more specific and honest headline.
Speaker 4:I mean specifically for you as well, I feel like that was really personally targeted.
Speaker 3:It was in fact hey but actually that was on the conservative side. I looked on the other side.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, what did they say?
Speaker 3:Why is Gamora? I mean, that's a great question why is Gamora a?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a great question. Why is Gamora a thing?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think the answer to that we all know is this Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa house.
Speaker 3:Oh man, I did not see that coming, that the media would pick up on that, because it was like an undertone. It's so subtle so subtle the entire thing Right? Well, goodness, I feel like we're in a state of something right now, and that's probably where we're going to call it a day. Listen, everybody, you can go to www. H-t-t-p-s Period yeah.
Speaker 5:I also have a challenge for everybody, that's here.
Speaker 2:Oh, let's hear the challenge Okay.
Speaker 5:So one of the things that we're doing, maximilian Colby. He was able to sacrifice a lot. He was able to live for 14 days without food or water, and so just to give everybody a little bit of a taste of his aesthetic life, we are doing a plank challenge where you can plank. We get four people, guys or girls, to get together and plank for as long as you can, and the winners will get to be picked up in a limo for a VIP screening of the movie, not tomorrow, but the next day, and they're over there. So any place that you see these striped shirts and this little cutout with Maximilian Kolbe, you can get your plank in.
Speaker 3:Look it's the producer. Yeah, Hi, Cecilia, Hi.
Speaker 5:Cecilia. You can get your plank in, and if you plank for long enough, then we will get to share the movie with you guys.
Speaker 3:I thought this was just a cool shirt you had. She has the same shirt. Yeah, you got a whole uniform. Oh, my goodness, what do we have to do to get a shirt Planks?
Speaker 5:That will also be. That's a next step up from the plants. That's a burpee challenge, Burpee challenge.
Speaker 4:Love it.
Speaker 3:All right, Listen, you can check out.
Speaker 6:I never got through the website Triumphoftheheartcom.
Speaker 3:That's the website. You can go there, hey and also for being an awesome guest. I sat on a pair of socks. These are yours, they're the new.
Speaker 2:St.
Speaker 4:Michael the Archangel socks for you, my friend, by Sockreligious, here we go. St Michael the Archangel, all right, be out of dudes every.
Speaker 3:Monday and Friday. Thank you to Mac Studios, to Kyle Hyman, his whole crew. We love you guys. Hey, listen, we are going to see you at the premiere of Triumph of the Heart and for the rest of you, we will.
Speaker 6:See you in the Eucharist God bless you.
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