EP 346 Joe Wilson on Pope Leo's Favorite Flicks & Zena Hitz Talks The Catherine Project

Conversations with Consequences

00:00 /

Episode Description

This week Ashley McGuire welcomes back film critic and writer, Joe Wilson, co-creator of the 100 Catholic Movies Substack, as they dive into Pope Leo’s newly released list of favorite movies. From It’s A Wonderful Life and The Sound of Music to Life Is Beautiful and Ordinary People, Joe unpacks the common threads running through these very different pictures – themes like the beauty of a life well lived and the saving role of family. Joe reveals how film can play an important role in forming young minds and hearts, especially during the holiday season.

We also talk with Zena Hitz about the mission of the Catherine Project – an open education endeavor – and what she reveals as the many ‘hidden pleasures of an intellectual life.’ A tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis and founder of the Catherine Project, Zena shares how during COVID lockdowns she combined her love of great books and digital tools to create a free global community where people of all walks of life could discuss the classic texts, and why cultivating a rich inner life is available to everyone.

Our TCA chaplain Msgr. Roger Landry joins the show from Rome, where on pilgrimage he’s just viewed the Room of the Immaculate Conception in the Vatican Museums, and explains what it means for our own Advent journey as we strive to become holy and immaculate in God’s sight.

Catch the show every Saturday at 7amET/5pmET on EWTN radio!

Bios

Joe Wilson is a Catholic writer, film critic, and co-creator of 100 Catholic Movies – a weekly Substack newsletter highlighting films that illuminate themes of truth, beauty, and goodness. He is a graduate of Christendom College, a former teacher, and a prominent writer and public voice on movies that matter to Catholic families, often working through Reconquista Media.

Zena Hitz is an author and tutor for St. John ‘s College in Annapolis, Maryland where she teaches the Great Books program. She is the founder of the Catherine Project, a non-profit initiative that offers free reading and discussion of classic texts to students around the world. She is the author of the books Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life and A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life. She is a graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge University, and Princeton University. Zena writes and speaks widely on the value of “ordinary people” cultivating an intellectual life.

Monsignor Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he served as Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN in New York. In 2024, he was appointed National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA by Pope Francis. He writes for numerous publications, speaks on radio and TV, and served as executive editor for the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. He is the author of the book, Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Closer to God, and leads pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, and other sacred destinations. He was an on-site commentator for EWTN’s coverage of the 2013 papal conclave that elected Pope Francis. He is national chaplain for Catholic Voices USA and New York Chaplain for the Leonine Forum. Father Landry traversed the 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage in 2024, which coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood.

The following transcript is machine generated.

Episode 346 Transcript

Ashley	Welcome to conversations with consequences. Now on EWTN radio. I'm your host, Ashley McGuire, and we are joined by our friend Joe Wilson, who we've spoken with before about a topic that I really love, which is movies. And it's a perfect time to be talking about movies because of the Pope just released his favorite movies. And so everyone's kind of talking about the Pope, the movies. So. And, Joe has compiled alongside with Cameron de la Flor, a list of, what they call the official list of 100 movies that every Catholic should see. So, Joe, welcome back to the show.
Joe Wilson	Thank you for having me, Ashley.
Ashley	Great. Well, so let's jump right in. And let's talk about the Pope's list. What was your reaction to that? I know mine was surprised by how short it was. But also, I had one of my absolute all time favorite movies on there that I thought was a little bit of surprise, which is Life is Beautiful. But I'd love to hear your reaction first.
Joe Wilson	Yeah. My first reaction was the Pope has excellent taste. Three of the four movies are on our list of 100 movies Every Catholic Should see. So that was that was kind of a nice surprise and a good feeling for us that, yes, we we got it. His is four movies are It's a Wonderful Life, The Sound of Music, Life is Beautiful and Ordinary People, and I think the four of them taken together. At first it seems like kind of a diverse group of films. You've got a classic from the 40s, you've got a musical, an Italian film about the Holocaust, and then ordinary people as kind of this very small family drama set in the Pope's hometown, Chicago. Which one of the things we were joking about at, at our blog was we were wondering if The Blues Brothers was going to be on this, this list or not. But there was not, but, the four of them seemed pretty disparate. But actually, when you look at them a little bit more closely in the themes, there's a couple of things that really stick out that I think are really indicative of Leo's taste in story, and also how he kind of sees the church. And it's it's really great. So the two things that stuck out to me were the beauty of a life well-lived and the importance of family. It's a Wonderful Life is all about those two things, right? You've got this guy, Jimmy Stewart's character, George Bailey, who sort of sees the material success of his life kind of crumble in front of him, and he despairs about that. But he is shown by an angelic visitor. That really is. His life has been incredibly well lived, and it's impacted every member of his community. The Sound of Music shows the difference that for all life, Maria can bring into this family by by bringing this kind of joy and happiness and virtue, into this family that's, that's really been marked by grief. Life is beautiful as the main character in that. I forget Guido. Guido is his name. And he just brings also this kind of, sort of holy joy and virtue into the life of his family, even under really terrible circumstances. I mean, he's he's a Jew living in fascist Italy and ultimately gets deported to a concentration camp. And then ordinary people kind of shows sort of the lack of that, how there's this family that's sort of been skating by living very materialistically, sort of self-centered lives, and this tragedy happens that forces them to kind of overcome that and to to bring that virtue back into the center of their lives and to work together as a as a family and a community, and strive for something greater than themselves, and ordinary people. Actually, I had not seen before. Pope Leo recommended I watched it that that same day, and it was really, really awesome.
Ashley	Well, that's so interesting because I, I'm the same. I had not seen or even heard of ordinary People, and I was a big Robert Redford fan when I was a girl. So I was like, I got to watch this. Haven't gotten to it yet, but it's top of my list. But I had a I wrote a piece for our Substack about his movies, and one of the themes that you mentioned, exactly the one that I drew out, which was family, the the centripetal force of the family. I mean, really, it's the family is the protagonist as led by, a heroic man, heroic father figure. And I was like, you know, the Pope himself is a father. And, you know, I thought it was interesting that you have captain Von Trapp, who's this very cosmopolitan, wealthy man. But then you have the other two male protagonist, George Bailey and Guido, and there. And the word that came to my mind was ordinary people. Yes.
Joe Wilson	So I was like, yes.
Ashley	Are you fine with us? You're both. You. No, but they're ordinary men who end up becoming very heroic figures to their families, to their communities. And I just I was really taken by, by that list. So I had kind of similar reactions. Well, let's talk about your list, because, I went back to it and I was reminded that I got to keep working through your list. But tell us how you got the the idea to make this list and what was the science to it?
Joe Wilson	Yeah. So the science to it. There's not much science to it, to be honest, but we'll get to that. So this list kind of came together. We had a group of friends at Christendom College where which is where most of us went to college. And as we graduated and kind of moved to okay, we kept talking about film, over email, over text, over chat groups. And this idea came up that there's not a book of like a book of 100 movies every Catholic should see. There's there's several other books that are out there in the more secular world for different genres. There's a really famous one called 1001 Movies You Should See Before You Die, and we were saying, there should be one of these for for Catholics. I was in grad school at the time. My friend Sam was still working at and, he was the Rome coordinator at Christendom for a while. So he, he was very busy. I was very busy. All of our friends are busy. And as a grad student, I kind of knew how much work a book takes. And so I suggested to Sam, hey, instead of like, trying to sit down and write this book and, you know, it'll take a couple of years and we'll get really excited about it at first and then kind of drop off. I said, what if instead of doing a book, what if we did a Substack blog? And what if we did just one a week? That one post a week is pretty achievable, I think. And that will build up this sort of list, and then we could publish it as a book, or we can leave it as a blog however we want to do it. And that's that's kind of how it started. And that was nearly three years ago now that we, we started and at first it was just sort of something for us and our friends. We started, other people founded, it started kind of taken off. And we're, we're really proud of where we we went with it. But the funny thing is, we didn't start with a list of hundred movies that we were then working through. We started with we probably had 25 or 30 that we knew had to be on there, but then we opened it up to our friends and we said, hey, if you think there's a movie that Catholics should really see if you've got a good take on one of these movies, pitch it to us, give us, an article, will read it. And if we think it does fit the mission of the blog, well, we'll we'll post it. And so that's why the list is not ranked. So if you look at it, it might look ranked at the at first because, a man for All Seasons is the first movie we started with. But as you go through, you kind of see, okay, passion of the Christ is way down the list. Ben-Hur is number 100. There's there's different things. And we we tried to time it. So passion of the Christ released on Good Friday one year, for example, we did It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas time. So there's not a ranking to it. It's just sort of as we were moving through the list, as people were giving us ideas and pitching articles, we picked it up. We published them. We got through the the 100 and, we didn't miss a week in the first hundred, which we're, we're really proud of as well. And it accomplished exactly what we wanted it to, which is we got through the whole 100 movies. We got a really great review and sort of deep dive into each movie. And we actually finished it. And we're, we're very proud of that. Now, we're, we're a third of the way through our second hundred, so we're still going strong.
Ashley	Well, it's a great service because as a mom to five kids, including a teen tween, you know, and older elementary finding quality movies to watch. I mean, we try to do a family movie night every Friday night, and we, very quickly exhausted what we felt were when we first started doing this, you know, kid movies that were clean and not woke. So then we started turning to old classics like Sound of Music. And interestingly, one night my husband, you mentioned Ben Hirsch, suggested the movie Ben Hur, and I said, are you nuts? You think our kids are going to sit through a four hour movie and it they were rapt. And that has that started to transform the way we approached watching movies. And we have found and I it's funny, I went to look at your Substack when I was pulling back up the list, and I noticed you did a review of Zootopia, too, and we just took our kids to see that in the movie. I agree with you, you know, and and didn't capture their attention in the same way that another movie that I had since watched from your list that we hadn't the last time you and I spoke, which was Cinderella man, again, a movie that you think this is too heavy for an eight year old boy. It's a depression era movie about, a boxer and oh my goodness, for kids. We watched it, I think a few weeks later they said, can we watch it again? So, you know, talk a little bit about what your thoughts are on that. And, and kids and kind of like our entertainment culture and what our expectations should be of, of children and movies.
Joe Wilson	Yeah. That's something that I'm really passionate about. Right out of college I was a teacher. And so I think about that a lot about how, how to convey some of these really deep things to kids. What is appropriate for a kid at what age, and things like that. And it's something that we did think about when constructing the list. Now, a couple of movies did squeak by that I would not suggest for family Movie night necessarily. But most of them, we did try to make sure this is something that if a Catholic family came across this list, was looking for something they could pick something off of here. And for the most part, it's going to be something that the whole family can enjoy. And I found when working with kids, especially with tweens and teens, they can often handle sort of thematically more than you give them credit for. So like with Cinderella man, for example, the the way that that family is going through some struggles because of poverty, because of whatever else, it's a movie that I saw as, I think as a teenager, and I loved it. It's something that these kids, they can pick out more than you think of thematically. Now, obviously you don't want to throw, ultraviolence in front of your kids. You don't want to get too deep into more sexual topics, but themes like this often we don't quite realize what our kids are ready for. And if you put something great in front of them, something that you know is clean, but might be a little a little deeper. Often they'll pick up on it and they'll, they'll love it. And the stuff that they don't get just kind of goes over their head. And they stick with the the good storytelling, the beautiful imagery. Cinderella man is a boxing movie. And so an eight year old boy, even if he's not getting all the the stuff about what the depression is doing to this family, he's going to enjoy the, the fight scenes, you know, and there are, kid characters in that one to kind of relate to as well. You think about something like It's a Wonderful Life, which a lot of families watch around Christmas time. Going back to the popes favorites. That's got a lot of really heavy stuff in it. There's a lot going on in that movie that you just don't pick up on when you're a kid and you're watching it for the first time. The Sound of Music, you've got the great music, the the kids and this, this family coming together and singing. They pull pranks on each other. There's a lot of joy there. But also there's kind of a darker undertone with the the approach of Nazi ism. And so I really do think I'm proud of our list. And I think that for the most part, I would say probably nine out of ten of our movies, you can put them on for family movie night. They're going to be great. They're going to be clean. And the kids are going to be engaged. And some of the other nine out of ten, the reason the kids won't like them is because it's a foreign film or something. They won't quite get get as, as engaged with that. But, there's really only one that I can think of that kind of slipped through. That's maybe a little bit too violent. But other than that, off the top of my head, I think all of our films, they're they're great for exactly that sort of thing.
Ashley	You're so right. And I was remembering when I saw Life Is Beautiful on the popes list, that I was 13 when that movie came out. I actually went up and checked the year because that was the first. I loved that movie. So much that I went and took my own money and went down to blockbuster and bought it. I didn't rent it. I bought it after I'd seen it because I was like, I'm going to watch this movie. It's so funny now. I couldn't even watch it if I wanted to. In that format, I have to buy it again. But this 13 and it just, you know, I was able to process and think about and I think that movie is a good introductory Holocaust movie for younger audiences, because it's not so disturbing and graphic as, as others. But, one of the movies that we watch with our kids, to your point about what kids are ready for, was, another long movie after we watched Ben-Hur and we're like, let's try another long movie. We watched Fiddler on the roof. And, that was the first time we ever had to have a conversation with the kids about antisemitism because they were confused. They were like, why don't these people why don't the Russians like the Jews? And we kind of had an introductory conversation about that. And then one week later, October 7th happened, you know, and it was on the front page of the newspaper, and my kids were able to gosh, I get emotional. Yeah. It helped them to understand.
Joe Wilson	Yeah.
Ashley	On a less heavy note, let's talk about Christmas because It's a Wonderful Life is, a regular. It's we have a few that a few movies, many of which are on your list, that are annual movies in our family. That's one of them. But what are some of your. Even if they're not on this list, what are you know, maybe your top five, holiday picks?
Joe Wilson	Top five? Let me think. That's hard because I think I love Christmas films. Christmas is my favorite holiday. Growing up, that was kind of the big time, both for family but also for church. I was in our church choir, and we did a lot of Christmas carols before, before midnight mass. And so that was a big part growing up. And Christmas movies were always a part of that. It's a Wonderful Life, definitely up towards the top there. You really can't beat it. For really diving into the true meaning of Christmas. There's a lot of Christmas movies out there that go into the more commercial aspect of it. And I don't think that that's necessarily always problematic. I like giving gifts. I like receiving gifts at Christmas. But It's a Wonderful Life gets back to that true meaning, which is looking at imitating Christ. My post for the It's a Wonderful Life on 100 movies goes into that about how George Bailey is a Christ figure. He, he suffers for his family. He suffers for his community and is always sort of pushing for that. So that's one that I always love watching around Christmas time. Another big one for my family was White Christmas, with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. Another musical, just something that we always really enjoyed as a family, getting together and seeing, and one that, my, my wife's family also is a classic there. So that was something that we really enjoyed bonding over. There is there are a lot of adaptations of Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol. My favorite one was done in 1984. Stars George C Scott. And that one really kind of also encapsulates kind of the meaning of that book, the meaning of Christmas, how it's not sort of something that you can buy, something that, is purely material, but that it's a time for reflection, a time for going out of yourself and being generous, being charitable, being Mary. Because, of course, we have a reason to be Mary now that Christ is born. Let me think. That's that's three, the Charlie Brown Christmas special always kind of rolls around. That's a short one, but literally, explicitly Christian that one, something that you wouldn't see on on television these days from a cartoon. You know, Linus reads the gospel story, and that's what kind of lifts Charlie Brown out of this, this kind of seasonal depression that's brought on by by all that consumerism. It wrestles very explicitly with that. And again, it's something that, it's a kids cartoon, and yet it's wrestling with these very deep adult emotions, things that we're, we're dealing with as we grow up. Christmas is very simple as a kid, but as an adult, you start seeing kind of this different tension. And so that's something that that special does really well, I think. And finally, the miracle on 34th Street. I'll go with that one. That's one that really. It takes Santa Claus is kind of the center of that. That story. And it digs deep and it finds Saint Nicholas under Santa Claus. And there's a particularly great scene in the the 1947 version where, the real Santa Claus, Kris Kringle is acting as a mall Santa, and he's talking to all these kids. He's bringing joy to these kids. And there's this one kid who's in line, who is from the Netherlands, I think. I think she's a refugee from from the destruction of World War two. And the adult that's with the. The kid says she's not going to to understand what's going on here. She doesn't speak English. But she saw you, and she really wanted to come meet you. And Kris Kringle starts talking to her in Perfect Dutch, and he sings this, this sinter Claus song with her, from her own culture. And it was this sort of moment of magic where this kind, loving embodiment of Saint Nicholas is reaching across and making these sorts of Christmas miracles for someone who who was not expecting to to meet Santa Claus that day, you know, and I really though those five, I want to say they're all fairly old, actually, now that I see now that I, I think back on it, but, those are some of my, my personal favorites. I think Pope Leo actually has a list of Christmas movies he recommended to like 10 or 15 years ago, back when he was, Father Prevost. I'll have to look that up and send it to you.
Ashley	That 1947 miracle on 34th Street was another like when will I learned my lesson? Because I was like, the kids are going to want to watch a 1947 movie. Let's watch the new one. I've heard people say the new one is is actually a pretty good adaptation. But again, they loved the old one. So there was one movie that caught my attention, a bit of a surprise, and yet not in some ways, which is The Godfather mean? I'm married to, Italian, and we probably watched The Godfather 3 or 4 times a year, usually because it's just, it's just always on. Like, if you go through the channels long enough, the Godfather is on, and there's never anything good on. But, you know, coming on the holidays, it feel like it's always on at Thanksgiving, it's always on at Christmas. I could see people being like, this is a horrible movie. And that may be the one that slipped through that. You said, you know, because of the violence. But, and yet I can see thematically why. So tell me, tell us why that one made it on the list.
Joe Wilson	Yeah. That is one where it's sort of a controversy in Catholic circles that as you kind of say, there's people who say, oh, that's a horrible movie. It's terrible. It's some who say, no, this is actually a really deeply Catholic movie in some ways. And it was made by Francis Ford Coppola, who's raised Catholic, sort of sort of lapsed Catholic, but always keeps that that culture in that mindset with him as he as he makes his films. And the great thing about The Godfather is it's one of these stories where you see how how vice can actually corrupt and ruin a good person. So Michael Corleone, he kind of starts out as this young, kind of optimistic person. He wants to get out of the Mafia, out of the family business. Right? He's he's.
Ashley	My family. That's not me. Okay.
Joe Wilson	Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's what he's trying to say. But due to different loyalties, different vices and even a really good impulse, which is to stand up for his family to be part of his family, to, to to protect them and to help them. He gets drawn into vicious action and ultimately kind of breaks down into he becomes the Godfather character, and you have that wonderful and awful juxtaposition of the the baptism scene where he's there. He is literally doing he is participating in the sacrament. He is becoming the godfather, for his nephew, while at the same time he's ordered all these, these hits on some of his rivals. And ultimately, if I remember correctly, he ends up killing the father, the the natural father of his godson. It's kind of this, this interesting look at what vice can do to a person. Even through good intentions. Noble thoughts, noble actions. And it's a good warning for all of us to kind of look at that and to see always interrogate your actions, even even beyond your motivations. The ends justify the means. Look at that. Because you might be walking down a bad path without, without knowing it. But then on top of that, there's even some some nobility and some things to admire about these mobsters. Right. Don Corleone, he's got these lines that he won't cross, right? He he won't go into to drug dealing because he knows it will destroy his community. He sees himself even though he is a criminal, a very violent man. As someone who is a protector, sort of shield over both his family and the wider kind of Italian community, in his city. And so there are there is nobility there. There is things to admire as well as a darkness that you've got to see. Okay. These two things can coexist, nobility and vice. You can admire someone who is vicious, but you have to look at that and you have to see, okay, that vices eventually going to to take the nobility down. These people all end up dying violently. They all get brought down, they all get pushed out, betrayed, backstabbed. And it's that very vice, that tragic flaw that's in them that always ends up bringing them down. And so I think that, it functions very similarly to some older classic, like Greek tragedies where you have a noble character who has a flaw of vice, and that vice is what brings them down. And on top of that, it's it's just a really great piece of storytelling, well-told, beautifully shot. That's something that we always tried to privilege in our list as well. Is we're not looking for stories that just have a good message. There's lots of stories that have good messages that, frankly, aren't very good. They just the, the filmmaking doesn't hold up. And so when we see a movie that has this sort of care in it, in the story, but also the care in the presentation, that's what we're looking for for the list and I think The Godfather really hits both of those.
Ashley	Well, I feel like I could keep talking to you about this all day. I didn't even get to science fiction, which is my favorite genre, so we'll have to have you back. But where can our listeners go to find your list and your commentary on on films and anything else you're doing?
Joe Wilson	So our main place is on Substack. You can go to 100 Catholic movies.substack.com. That's 100 Catholic movies that substack.com. You will find our list. We have an ongoing list of movies we recommend every week. We also do reviews of new movies. We have a weekly watches section if you want to support us financially, where we just give sort of quick reviews, they can be either positive or negative for different things we've watched that week. We also have a YouTube channel. You can find us there under Reconquista Media. We haven't been active recently, but we're hoping to ramp that up again soon. And those those are really kind of the the two main places you can find us. So but the main place is the Substack 100 Catholic movies. That's substack.com.
Ashley	Joe Wilson, thanks so much for joining us today. We'll talk to you again soon.
Joe Wilson	Thank you. God bless.
Betsy	Welcome back to conversations with consequences, where I am joined by Monsignor Roger Landry, who is going to talk to us today about the upcoming feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th. Welcome, Monsignor.
Msgr Landry	Great to be with you, Betsy. I'm here in Rome. It's late at night as we're recording this. And yesterday, I had the chance to go on a private tour of the Vatican Museums. And before we got to the Raphael Rooms in the Sistine Chapel, we were able to go to the beautiful room of the Immaculate Conception, where there's a whole mural on the wall depicting Pius the ninth, blessed Pius the ninth, Solemn Declaration of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th, 1854. That is one of the most beautiful images of Our Lady I've ever seen depicted. And it was a great preparation for what we in the United States are going to be celebrating next Monday. Our patron will feast because our nation has been consecrated to Our Lady under the title of the Immaculate Conception, so that we can become like her, holy and immaculate in God's sight.
Betsy	There's a lot of confusion sometimes where people don't really understand what the Immaculate Conception is. Do you want to clear that up? For anybody who's still unclear?
Msgr Landry	So many people think the Immaculate Conception refers to Jesus's virginal conception in the womb of his mother, Mary. What it actually refers to is Mary's Immaculate Conception in the womb of her mother Saint. And one of the sources of that confusion is because whenever we celebrate the Immaculate Conception, the gospel is of the Annunciation, where the Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary and says, more or less will you become the mother of the eternal Son of God? And she says, let it be done to me according to your word. And so a lot of people would think that Jesus's conception was, of course, sinless because it was virginal. There was no sin involved. There was no even sex involved in this case at all, whether virtuous or vicious. So people generally draw that conclusion. But the real reason why the gospel of the nation is chosen for the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is because of one word right at the beginning, when the Archangel Gabriel appears and greets Mary, he says in Greek, which is the language we have from Saint Luke, Kyra K character. Many rejoice, Kyra. You know, it's just the basic thing. Oh, graced one much more than Hallow or Hail, but rejoice and then character a many is a one word, powder keg of an expression, which means you who have been filled with grace. And so the the early doctors of the church, the fathers, the saints, when they looked at that word, what does it mean to be full of grace. It means to be full of God. And if you're truly full of God, is there any space for sin? And they said in her case, no. So we've got a little biblical evidence there for Mary's immaculate conception against anybody who wouldn't say that it's biblical. It's not, demonstration that would eliminate any questions, but it's very suggestive that to be filled with God means there's no space for the prevention of sin in this case, not to mention the negation of sin. And so it's almost as if the archangel Gabriel was calling Mary, as she called herself, and Lord, when she defined herself to Saint Bernadette, as you see, the Immaculate Conception, or in her local patois, Ayuso Immaculate Conception, you I am the Immaculate Conception. Those last two words. Saint Bernadette had no idea what they meant, and when she went to express them to her pastor, he said, what do you say? She said, and do you have any idea what those words mean? No. And that was a great sign of the authenticity that she wasn't seeing a ghost, but that she was actually seeing Our Lady. And so the early stage of the church always asked why the Immaculate Conception, why was Mary free from original sin? And they gave two reasons of fitting this. The first reason is so that she would be totally free from sin, to be able to give a wholehearted yes to God. When the Archangel Gabriel made the proposal that all of heaven had been waiting to be announced and received. And the second reason is so that no sin would touch Jesus in the womb, that he would, not have the same privilege, like he would not miss the same privilege. His mother had to be conceived without sin, or have any sin touch, that he would in fact be gestated in a sinless, holy and immaculate womb. And so those were the two reasons of fitting this. But for us, we honor Mary under that title. But then also the second reading on the solemnity. Immaculate conception is always taken from Saint Paul talking about the great graces of the Lord, especially grace at baptism, so that we could be holy and immaculate in God's sight. We're not conceived immaculately, but we do through the sacrament of baptism, through the opportunities of the prayer and the sacraments of Confession and Holy Eucharist, confirmation, marriage, Holy orders, the anointing, you name it, able to keep God fully within us. We are able to live without being dominated by sin, or even caving in to some of those temptations by God's help. And so, Mary, as Pope Benedict said in 2008 when he went to Lourdes, the Virgin without sin prays for us sinners that we might become without sin to. So that's what we celebrate this upcoming Monday.
Betsy	Monsignor, it's a great way to begin advent each year, to have this feast so close to, the beginning of the new liturgical year.
Msgr Landry	I agree, and the Immaculate Conception was really God the Father's advent. He knew ahead of time what was coming. And so he prepared. About 14 years before the Archangel Gabriel came to the Blessed Virgin and made her immaculate. So that she would be able to become the whole hearted, free, sinless mother of the eternal Son of God. And so when we celebrate the Immaculate Conception, we celebrate advent from the perspective of heaven.
Betsy	Thank you so much for joining us, my senior, and we hope you have a blessed rest of your pilgrimage.
Msgr Landry	God bless you, Betsy.
Betsy	We like to take a moment to thank all of our loyal listeners, who tune in each week to conversations with consequences. As you all know, the Catholic Association is everywhere. We were on TV to cover the conclave and the election of the new Pope. We're in print. We're online and we're on social media. We've just launched a new Substack to expand our media presence and offer more great content from a Catholic perspective. We're on X, and now we're on Substack for Catholic Conversations with TCA. Welcome to conversations with consequences here on EWTN radio. I'm your host, Betty Fentress, and today we are very fortunate to be joined by an exceptional teacher and writer, Zena Hitz, who is a tutor at Saint John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, as well as the founder and president of the Catherine Project. She is the author of A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, published by Cambridge University Press, and Lost in Thought The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life, published by Princeton University Press. Welcome, Zena.
Zena Hitz	It's great to be here, Betsy.
Betsy	So, as you know, you're a passionate defender of the intellectual life for its own sake, which is so beautifully articulated and lost in thought. Now you've taken that passion out of the physical classroom and offered it for free to virtual students. It's named after two Catholic women, both named Catherine. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Zena Hitz	Sure. The Catherine Project is named after Catherine of Alexandria, who, is a martyr of the early church and the patroness of philosophers. It's also named after Catherine Doherty, the founders and spiritual writer who, in the 1940s, started the first lending library in Canada, National Lending Library. So she collected books in donation, and she sent them out all over the country, even to the widest. You can, you know, extremely simple way. Books and postage were donated. People wrote her letters. They asked for books. And she said that those are the two Catherine's.
Betsy	So tell us how you actually decided to come to the idea that this needed to be done?
Zena Hitz	Well, it was 2020 and two things were going on. One was, the Covid epidemic and the lockdown. And I, like most teachers, was, caught in, emergency online teaching on zoom, which I hated. Like all teachers did. And all students universally hated emergency online teaching. And, I was just thinking as hard as I could about how if if I was stuck on this zoom for the rest of my life, what would be the mode of teaching? It would work. And I thought, oh, well, you know, it might work if you had a sort of Oxford tutorial system. So people when it would go away and read so they're not online all the time. They'd go away and read books. They might write papers and they come back and they talk to you, or they meet in small groups and discuss whatever they've read, whatever they've been thinking about. So I had that thought on one side the same time. My my book lesson that came out in May of 2020. And it's a defense of intellectual life as something which everyone wants and desires, which is just as a part of a fulfilling human life. And, all these people who, I had imagined were out there, who really loved the liberal arts and loved reading and loved thinking, started to come out in the woodwork and contact me. So, so I would get emails. I still get them sometimes. I'm a full time caregiver and, I've always tried to live the life of the mind wherever I could, but I of course, I can't go to graduate school and I never finished college. So can you help me find a way to really develop myself as an intellectual? So they would ask a question like that, or I'm a stay at home mom, or I'm a delivery driver. And so I, I, I felt like I wanted to have something to say to them, like something I because I knew that the answer was not just pick up a book, because most of the books that are really exciting, informative are really. But for most of us to difficult to be on their own. You need support. You need the friendship of others. You need community. So somewhere in the middle of all that, I thought, oh, I know what I can do. I'll, I had another dream that was even older, which was to, offer serious education with no strings attached for free. I tried in Baltimore, actually, when in person, years and years and years ago when I was teaching there, I started a summer reading group, that was open to anybody, and it didn't really work. I had just some grad local grad students and some friends, and I could never find. I couldn't figure out how to find the people that were out there who might. When I do something like that. So suddenly all came together and I could see what would work, which would be to get some use. My Twitter account, which was popular at that time, to reach the readers of my book. And to use my academic network to find some volunteers, former students, professors I knew who are willing to volunteer. And we set up at the beginning just, five groups in 45 students. So that was how it began in the fall of 2020.
Betsy	Because it's really grown. And the statistics that I have are that you offer it over 700 courses at 4500 readers and in over 50 countries, and that might need to be updated. I don't know how accurate that is.
Zena Hitz	I'm not sure myself how accurate is the number that I know right now is that we have currently about 1500 people in. So that's at one time. So that to me is kind of the measure that is most striking because that's it's like the yeah, the size of a small liberal arts college. They're scattered all over the world.
Betsy	And I do see your Twitter messages. I know one of them. And that was during Covid was who wants to read either or on Saturday evenings, a little like a guide after your pizza?
Zena Hitz	Yes, that was the thing we called the Kirkwood explosion because I sent up that little tweet. We had 45 readers and about people reached out to me. They all wanted to read Cricket Guard on Saturday nights, so that then I had to find more volunteers to take care of those readers. And then the reading groups, part of the Catherine Project really took off. So we have two kinds of offerings. One used to be called tutorials. It's now called our core program, and that offers a kind of curriculum for people to work through. If they're if they're beginners and they just want a little bit of training in the life of the mind. And then the reading groups are open ended, they're peer led. And and there's a huge variety of, books and topics that they have. So we have this more informal thing that just after the guide thing, just exploded. And then for the past two years, we've been building our core program.
Betsy	But you have ancient Greek.
Zena Hitz	Yes, you have Latin. Yes, we can. We those fill up so fast, you wouldn't believe it. So has universities all over the country are closing classics? Fragments? Classics is one of the most endangered fields in the whole country. I don't know why they're doing it, because every time we put up a class in ancient Greek or Latin, in the original, whether it's a reading class or an intro class, we get more applicants than we could possibly handle.
Betsy	So tell us about how do you find the tutors besides your academic friends? Are there people that are not in academia that lead reading groups? And how does that all get coordinated? Xena.
Zena Hitz	So the two parts of the program have different kinds of leaders. So the the reading group leaders are not necessarily academics. Many of them work in regular jobs in the world. There are people who do have some experience with classes that are led by conversation. So we do vet our leaders carefully. We want to make sure that every group is, has a serious level of conversation. So these aren't like book clubs. They're we want them to be more, more of a you involve more use of your mind. So we want to talk about the text. We want to dig in deep. We want to think about fundamental questions. And so to do that, we need leaders who are aware of the kind of thing that, that we're looking for. So those people, at this point, many are coming through the project itself. So they they join a group, they read with us for one course, two courses, a couple of years, and then they volunteer to lead a course themselves. Other people are people who are recommended to us or people who are current leaders recommend to us, or my former students or people who we know through our various networks. So we those that's how that network is built. The the core leaders are mostly academics or former academics. The most of people have either a PhD or an Ma or they're Abd and those we find in a similar way. So by recommendation, through people that we know and trust that we can be sure that, part of the difficulty of a zoom institution is that we can't, it's hard for us to see what's going on in all the rooms. So and if you're managing 1200 people, you're not going to hit 1500 people. You're not going to know exactly. So we we want to be careful about who's running the groups. So we use recommendations usually and and referrals. That's how we, that's how we found the people we have so far.
Betsy	When I was on your website, I was seeing Sophocles and Aristotle and Ptolemy and Galileo, and then I thought, wow, if this is all really ancient, and then I looked in there was Wendell Berry.
Zena Hitz	And yes.
Betsy	So that was the most recent writer I could find and a lot of amazing people in between. So the next question I wanted to ask is, how do you decide what books are going to be taught?
Zena Hitz	Well, actually not directly involved in that process any more. I can say my, my director, who is who was actually just in town, I wish we could to talk to him, but, Jordan Poynter is the person who makes that call. And I can say that our main interest is in books that are called great books. I use a lowercase g a, lowercase b, and the way I understand what a great book is, is a book that is a teacher. So a book that can teach readers at every level. So someone who is new to life of the mind can pick up a great book and learn from it. Someone who has a PhD and has been studying for decades can pick up a great book and learn something from it with that person who's a beginner. So the great books are what make the the classroom the the conversation collaborative because people are learning at every level and these books are sufficiently rich and sufficiently deep that you can never exhaust them. They're always going to overwhelm your capacity to understand. They're always going to keep giving. No matter how many times you go to them. So, how how Jordan himself makes a call between something that he doesn't want and something that he does. I'm not sure how he uses his discernment. But that's the basic principle of a great book.
Betsy	You wrote the Great Books movement that, for a time shaped American intellectual culture, began among working people in workmen's institutes where people toiled with their hands. People who toil with their hands sought to develop themselves of human beings with rich inner lives. And that's so interesting, because I think we feel that to read all these books that are on your list is sort of the province of elite education, and so is this an effort on your part to also have a diverse group of people in your classroom who aren't just all 18 to 22 year olds from a very narrow sector and maybe from a common economic sector?
Zena Hitz	Well, part of, you know, I loved I teach at Saint John's. That's my main day job, and I love teaching there. And we get wonderful students. And there's nothing like I want to say this because the four year colleges come under a lot of flak. But recently it's a wonderful experience for young people. Is it they they get a kind of formation that they can't get any other way. But that said, the truth is that the great books are often wasted on the young because they require to really get into their debts. You have to see that they're real. They're about real people, real human experiences, and you can't see that until you've had some experiences yourself. So, I know that when I was a student at Saint John's, I thought that all of these books were very intellectual. I didn't understand how deeply connected they were with, the life of ordinary human beings. So one of the things that's lost in the four year that you go off to college, and that's when you do your learning and then you forget about it, is you lose that these books as a source of wisdom, as a source of enduring insight into your life. So, as far as the working class movement, which I've always found to be very inspiring since I first learned about them a number of years ago. I think the capstone project is really picking up, trying to pick up that tradition, which really culminate. It's it's part of the DNA of the American Great Books programs at Saint John's and the University of Chicago and Columbia and places like that. Because in the early 20th century, there was it's kind of a culmination of this movement, on working class people to self educate and to it's also the time when mass market paperbacks being produced, lots of translations of classics from every language. There's a huge and it's also the time of, the growth of mass literacy, 19th century and early 20th century. So you get this massive explosion of interest in these things, which had been really the province of a very few people. And, that flourishes in the early middle 20th century. And then it kind of starts to die around the advent of television, I think, and then of course, in the age of the smartphone, it gets really, sort of marginal. So, yeah, I wanted to, to reawaken that sense that, learning is something that enriches every life, it enriches people from all walks of life, and it can be a way of forming community and and building connections between people of different ages and people from different social classes. So Catherine project is definitely that's what we would like to do. And that's what we've, we've more or less succeeded in doing so far.
Betsy	So I wanted to ask you a couple more questions before we close. You wrote when we cultivate an inner life, we set aside concerns for social ease or advancement. We forget, if only temporarily. The anxious press of necessities, inwardness and withdrawal can have spatial manifestations. So what is the difference between withdrawal from the world to to do this inner life of reading and escape from the world where people say, oh, I'm going to go to the beach and I'm going to read Escape Fiction.
Zena Hitz	Yeah, that's such a wonderful question. I think that escape is a kind of distraction and sometimes we need it. It's not something that I'm that I think should be, you know, taken out of your life. Sometimes we just need to sit down and watch a dumb comedy on TV or read a mystery novel or romance novel, but it's different than, really cultivating an inner life and coffee in your lives is, you know, you you, you set aside not just, things that are painful or difficult or uncomfortable, which are the things that you want to be distracted from, but things which are not really the most important things in life. So money, status, power, especially the world of competition, the world where you're winning or you're losing or you're gaining points or losing points, we need to withdraw from that world, and we need to build an inner life that because that's part of what tells us where our real dignity lies. It lies in things which are inward, not which things are competitive. So we're we're developing habits of mind. We're we're we're finding insights. We're we're growing in wisdom. We're thinking about things. We're understanding what it means to be a human being and the nature of nature. And we're thinking about God and whatever else it is that we're thinking about in, in the life of the mind. And that makes us bigger, richer people and more able ultimately to connect with others. So and my view with from is really for the sake of engagement, for the sake of connection. But it does. We do need to withdraw because we need to be our own people. We need to have inner lives in order to really connect with others.
Betsy	Do you have a story of maybe kind of a most unusual student who who came across to join a class, maybe somebody was, you know, in their 80s or 90s or somebody who had never had a lot of formal education to those people.
Zena Hitz	They do. I just heard a story yesterday from one of our one of our leaders. I was here yesterday about a woman who came to one of our groups who had been sort of pressured by her friends because she it's not finished high school, is not going to college and just needs a different direction in her life. And, it's a few weeks in and she's reading. We have, in our introductory sequence two selections from Ptolemy, who's a geocentric astronomer of Alexandria in the third century BCE. But not not what you would normally call your most approachable, you know, down to earth book. So she's reading this and she says, you know, I'm asking myself questions, that I've never asked before. And, I'm realizing that you could live your life asking questions like this and thinking about them. So that's one story of a person who had no experience and who really started to find something. We get many stories like that, and they're they're not always from people that are. Ignorant of the life of the mind. Sometimes they're people who have had it and lost it. One of the things that surprised me about Catherine Project at the beginning is I had always wanted it for people to be primarily for people who had no other access to the life of the mind. But people started coming very early on who were grad students or even professors at major universities. And my first instinct was, no, you can't come. This is for people who've never had the opportunity. You've got your own community. And then I started to realize how little intellectual community there is in our institutions. And so we welcome those people. And they've also found a lot of meaning, and they found a way of recovering their vocations as teachers or as scholars. So it's so wonderful. I'm so grateful, that we've, we've been able to draw the people who have come to us.
Betsy	Last question. Who do you turn to when you just want to read something that makes your heart sing? Do you have a top five.
Zena Hitz	A top five? When I when I read something that makes my heart sing, I have different types of reading for different kinds of, desire. So I, I love to read, Catherine Doherty or Carol House lander for spiritual reading.
Betsy	Wonderful.
Zena Hitz	I love the scriptures. I always have, especially in the Hebrew Bible. I am a philosopher by training, and so I have a real heart for both Plato and for Augustan dialogs and Plato. Augustine's confessions and I read a fair amount of poetry also, I like poetry.
Betsy	Thank you so much for joining us. Gina gets to learn more about Xena, visit Xena Hits Dot net, and to learn more about the Katherine Project, visit Katherine Project that will.