Breadbox Media

Setting the Record Straight - How Women Lost Their Rights

The Catholic Church should get the lions share of the credit for raising woman’s status. Today’s women may still have have a way to go to recover status they held in the days of Eleanor Of Aquitaine. The Catholic Church was the insistent force that raised the status of women even in the early Christian era,. Some of those rights, such as the right own property, voting in assemblies, and to choose one’’s husband were gained rather quickly as soon as Catholics rose to ruling positions and the persecution of Catholics abated. What turned back the clock was the wrongly-praised Renaissance which re-instituted the Roman approach to law, unfortunately including the Patriarchal aspects.

Setting the Record Straight - A Feast Of Delicious Catholic Writing

Chuck Coughlin has just discovered two powerful French-Catholic writers. Listen to the devout and passionate words of two amazing writers; Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy these

Charles Péguy was  a beloved French writer.  After years of uneasy agnosticism, he became a believing but non-practicing Catholic. From then on Catholicism strongly influenced his works.

Paul Claudel’s writing combines cosmology and history, Bible and metaphysics, liturgy and the drama of human personality. His work has been acclaimed as the 'summa poetica' of a new Dante. He is often quoted by theologians in Europe such as von Balthasar and de Lubac. His writing combines cosmology and history, Bible and metaphysics, liturgy and the drama of human personality.

Charles Péguy

          Paul Claudel

Setting the Record Straight: Thanksgiving’s Surprising History

Over the river and through the wood, 

Trot fast, my dapple gray! 

Spring over the ground, 

Like a hunting hound, 

For this is Thanksgiving-Day. 

School children are taught that the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621 with the Pilgrims and Indians. There is little evidence that this feast took place as often described. Listen and find out to how our modern Thanksgiving Day was created.  

CRC P 217 Those Audacious Missionaries 11-18-15

Talk about The New Evangelization? Sure, but first we might try to fill the big boots of the audacious missionaries of Old Evangelization.They were superheroes. They were giants. Throughout history Catholic Missionaries have been daring, courageous, and just amazing. If they recklessly endangered their own lives it was in the dangerous quest of fulfilling Christ’s grand commission… to bring souls to rest in Him. 

                Saint Brendan The Navigator

Setting the Record Straight - Great Composers? Mostly Catholic!

Haydn was a daily communicant. Mozart was an ardent Catholic. Mahler converted from Judaism. Schubert, Saint-Saëns, and Beethoven were deeply Catholic. Listen to their music and you will hear how it reveals their faith. Gounod played organ at Notre Dame to accompany his tenor soloist, his fellow Catholic, the painter Pierre August Renoir as he sang Gounod’s famous “Panis Angelicus”. 

Want more? Vivaldi was a priest, he was called the “Red Priest”. Of course Palestrina and Hildegard von Bingen were Catholic, but even in virulently anti-Catholic Elizabethan England the greatest composers, like Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, were hidden Catholics. Much like the other high arts, all the world music we hear today bears the authentic birthmarks of its true parentage in the Catholic Church, for example in its use of harmony and our musical notation. 

Oh yes, even the errant bon-vivant Rossini was a believing Catholic.

Saint Cecilia

Setting the Record Straight - The Divine Persistence of the Catholic Reformation

At every moment of two millennia the Roman Catholic Church has increasingly conformed its path to Christ and His Way. The so-called Protestant Reformation reformed nothing, it established separated religious entities. However the Catholic “Counter-Reformation” was a true reformation in a long line of reformations.  This continuing project was a persistent grace-charged refinement of Catholic practice guided by the Holy Spirit. Listen to a few inspiring moments of this persistent reformation.

                        Las Lajas Cathedral

Setting the Record Straight - Giving Gratitude

Setting the Record Straight - Art Or Idol

Someone that sees idolatry in the reverence paid to Catholic Art has missed the profundity of the Incarnation. Listen to this description of the surprising importance of Catholic art. It is no accident that a prodigious cornucopia of magnificent art has poured forth from wherever the Roman Catholic culture was planted. Catholic Music is the foundation for world music of today. The inspiration of Catholic culture on the arts of painting, sculpture, drama, literature have no real equals. 

Setting the Record Straight - The Catholic Foundations Of Law

Listeners will be surprised to learn that catholic canon law is the foundation for modern international law. And that's not all.

Setting the Record Straight - Listening to Meditations

Listen to the meditative words of great Catholics from Nestorius to Oscar Wilde to Thomas Merton.

Setting the Record Straight - Catholics Get Busy as Rome Crumbles 11-4-15

What happened to everyone when Rome Fell? Catholics reached out and caught them, stopping the complete collapse of orderly and moderate life. Chaos was averted by the many gifts of the catholic Church to civilization; the Rules of Saint Benedict, the ordering and administration of the numerous new civil governments. 

Setting the Record Straight - Chivalry

Chivalry is often associated today with the practice of a gentleman holding a door open for a lady to enter before him.  However chivalry is actually about people with strength and power using whatever gifts they have acquired from nature or education to help those weaker than themselves. It is the complete antithesis of the survival of the fittest. Catholic chivalry is marked by formidable courage.  Catholic courage is not the same as oriental courage, which is a disdain of life, Catholic courage is a disdain of death; Catholic courage is a victory over death.

Setting the Record Straight: The First Global Network- The Catholic Church

The Internet. The European Union. The international Media. Networks of Academic Institutions. The global associations of Scientists and Academics.  The World Bank. The Multinational Corporations. International Law.

Listen to the backstory that reveals how all these entities were actually the conceptual descendants of the superbly organized Catholic Church

Setting the Record Straight - When Halloween Was Illegal And Catholics Saved It

A special Halloween program. The British and Puritans banned Halloween for years. What happened then? And a suggestion on how we could recover Halloween as a sacred holiday (Holy Day!). 

Setting the Record Straight - The 20th Century, the Century of Catholic Martyrs

In the 20th Century more Catholics were persecuted , tortured, and martyred than in any previous century. The willingness to of these people to die for their Catholic faith may inspire us to treasure our beloved Catholic Church, God’s gift to us. The last part of this program tells the story of the Jewish intellectual Edith Stein who became Sister Teresa Benedicta and, as a result,  died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Setting the Record Straight - Listen to Saint John

Saint John of the Cross writing in the 16th century  created prayer/poems that were unlike anything that anyone had written before him. He wrote out of pure imagination, evoking new world of sensation, feeling, memory and will. Much of the power of his poems is lost in translation, yet in this program you can listen to his commentaries on his writing and recover some sense of the power of his works. His fearless and almost erotic writing comes from the heart of Spanish culture, a passionate culture that many of English speakers might not easily understand.

Setting the Record Straight - Music from Catholicdom

Listen with Chuck Coughlin to some of his favorite catholic Music. Especially interesting is the new music he loves…for instance... like Arvo Pärt’s serene Magnificat. 

                    Arvo Pärt

Setting the Record Straight - Trying To Understand Islam vs Catholicism

A quick overview of the history of the conflicts between Islam and Christianity and especially Catholicism. 

                                  Mecca

Setting the Record Straight - The Gift of Catholic Music

Music evangelizes. And, believe it or not, Catholic Music provided the structural foundations of almost all the music you hear; from country, to various kinds of popular music, to the way folk music from around the world has evolved, to the great classical symphonies and operas. Listen to some gorgeous Catholic Music on this Setting The Record Straight.

Setting the Record Straight - The Devil’s Pleasure Palace

In the last few months a fascinating book " The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” by Michael Walsh has caused a stir. A group of German intellectuals called the Frankfurt School joined the faculty of our Ivy League universities between the World Wars. According to Walsh, these men were a prime cause of the ongoing collapse of our Graeco-Judeo-Christian Culture. Listen to key sections of the book on this program.