Avoiding Babylon

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“Can we please be normal?” That’s the line we start from, because the Israel conversation rarely stays normal for long. We take a careful look at Michael Knowles’ comments and the broader conservative Catholic media instinct to treat the modern State of Israel as a purely political alliance, detached from theology. We don’t buy that split. When people invoke Scripture, prophecy, covenant language, or “God’s promises,” they are already doing theology, even if they call it foreign policy.

We’re joined by Catholic State (Justin) and American Reform to sort out the terms that constantly get blurred: Israel as a people, Israel as a land, and Israel as a modern nation-state. From there we dig into Romans 9–11, what Saint Paul actually means by “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable,” and why Catholic fulfillment theology doesn’t fit comfortably with Christian Zionism or dispensationalism. We also discuss Vatican II language that’s often cited in online debates, plus earlier Catholic sources that shape how many traditional Catholics think about covenant, promise, and continuity.

The conversation turns to a newer pro-Israel Catholic advocacy effort asking the Pope to clarify whether the founding and endurance of the State of Israel should be read as a sign of providence. We explain why that question isn’t neutral, why “right to exist” can smuggle in theology, and how Catholics can reject sensationalism while still refusing a forced, two-option script. If you want a more precise, historically grounded way to think about Catholic teaching on Israel, the Holy Land, and political theology, this one will challenge you.

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She was alone, spiraling, and ready to end her life. Then a single thought cut through everything: “What if the pain doesn’t end here?” That question didn’t just stop Nancy, it started a chain of events she still can’t explain away: five days of praying the Rosary, an unmistakable push to go see a priest, and the terrifying walk into a Catholic church where she felt like she didn’t belong.

We talk with Nancy about the real backstory leading up to that moment: childhood trauma, secrecy, same-sex attraction, family upheaval, and years of addiction that moved from “normal” partying to isolation, overdoses, psychiatric holds, and repeated rehab cycles. She shares how the culture’s identity scripts can feel like relief at first, whether it is coming out or experimenting with gender transition, and why that “freedom” often collapses into deeper confusion when the underlying wounds stay untouched.

Then we dig into the bigger questions her story raises for anyone trying to live and speak the faith clearly today: What is identity, and is it built from desires or received from God? Why does language like “gay Catholic” create a conflict of frameworks? How do we tell the truth about confession and Communion without turning it into a pride project? Along the way we get practical about healing, shame, conscience, and why the sacraments are not a side detail but the center of recovery and conversion.

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You’ve probably heard the Saint Michael Prayer. The part most people miss is that its origin story is bound up with a Pope who believed the Church was facing more than bad politics, and he answered with something sharper than commentary: Immortali Dei, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical on how a nation should be ordered, what authority is, and why the state cannot pretend God is irrelevant without slowly hollowing itself out.

We walk through Leo’s core framework: two real powers established by God, the spiritual authority of the Church and the temporal authority of the state. That distinction is not a call for theocracy, but it is a direct challenge to the modern “religiously neutral” state. From natural law to public education to marriage, Leo argues that law and culture always point somewhere, and when they stop pointing toward truth, they don’t become neutral, they drift toward chaos. Along the way we dig into the thesis hypothesis approach, the idea that there’s an ideal political order, and there are also prudent concessions Catholics may accept when the ideal is impossible without greater harm.

That sets up the tension a lot of Catholics still feel today: Immortali Dei’s “error has no rights” versus Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae and the modern language of religious liberty. We lay out why this debate keeps splitting the Catholic world, and we test it against real life examples, including a clip of JD Vance explaining how he weighs papal criticism against his duties in civil office. If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t have the words to explain what went wrong in the modern West, Leo XIII gives you a vocabulary worth recovering.

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Something feels different lately: the same news cycle, the same platforms, but a heavier sense of pressure, anger, and exhaustion. We start with a last-minute scramble when Rob can’t make it, and Mike Pantile jumps in on short notice, then we get right into what’s behind the growing fatigue. From immigration anxiety to online outrage addiction, we talk about why so many people feel like the temperature is rising and nobody can agree on what’s real anymore.

We dig into the Carmelo Anthony and Austin Metcalf case as a brutal example of how one event can produce two completely different moral stories depending on what your feed serves you. We react to viral clips, talk through the gap between courtroom reality and social media narratives, and ask what happens when algorithms reward the most divisive voices. The bigger issue isn’t just politics, it’s a crisis of trust, a crisis of community, and a culture trained to treat rage as a lifestyle.

From there we zoom out to Belfast unrest and the temptation toward decentralized “solutions” when institutions won’t act. We wrestle with the Catholic and Christian perspective on borders, responsibility, and the weaponization of empathy, plus what it looks like to build real resilience without giving in to despair. We land on a practical question many families are asking: do we retreat from the city and rebuild local life, or is that giving up?

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Get 10% off an amazing Black Monk Rosary by going to https://www.blackmonkrosaries.com/?ref=AVOIDINGBABYLON and using code AVOIDINGBABYLON at checkout!
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For 146 years, pope after pope warns Catholics about a secret society and almost nobody listens. So Leo XIII does something different: he frames the whole problem as a war between two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, and then names the modern structure he thinks finally gives the “city of man” real organization. That document is Humanum Genus, and we dig into what Leo actually argues, why he goes theological instead of just issuing another ban, and how his critique of naturalism and religious indifferentism maps onto the modern secular state.

We also slow down and do the unglamorous work: what is real history in Freemasonry’s development from medieval guilds to Enlightenment-era speculative lodges, and what is just romantic myth. We talk higher-degree esoteric influences, why the “all religions are equal” claim is not neutral, and why Leo ties these ideas to education, public life, and the replacement of Christian civilization with a functionally atheist public order.

Joshua Charles joins us to connect Humanum Genus to Monsignor George Dillon’s The War of Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization, a book Leo XIII endorsed and helped circulate. We unpack Charles’s “sola natura” summary, the Catholic claim that grace perfects nature, and why a society trained to violate conscience becomes easier to steer. Then, because we’re us, the conversation spills into current events, media narratives, and a late-show pivot through the Carmelo Anthony verdict and JD Vance explaining his conversion to Catholicism.

Subscribe for the rest of the encyclical series, share this with a friend who thinks “religion is private,” and leave a review if you want more deep dives like this. Where do you see the City of Man pressing hardest right now?
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Get 10% off an amazing Black Monk Rosary by going to https://www.blackmonkrosaries.com/?ref=AVOIDINGBABYLON and using code AVOIDINGBABYLON at checkout!
Check out our sponsor, Nic Nac, at www.nicnac.com and use code "AB25%" for 25% off of your first order!
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