Tim Ryland, editor of Catholic Answers Magazine helps us close 2020 with a reflection on the state of journalism. Specifically, given the parlous state of journalism, how can anyone know the truth about what the heck is going on?
Cy:
I don’t know how to know the truth about anything anymore. Tim Ryland from Catholic Answers Magazine helps me next.
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. And when it comes to certain things, it’s easy to know the truth. If it’s in the Bible, I believe it. For example, I believe what the church teaches, but I don’t know the truth about a whole lot of other stuff. And part of why I don’t know the truth about it is because the more journalism I read, the more disagreement I encounter, and I’m not just talking about opinion journalism, I’m talking about journalism that’s supposed to be just objective journalism, it doesn’t agree.
And so, how am I supposed to know, how am I supposed to sort through that and find the truth? I think this was particularly difficult this year, in the year of COVID, in the year of the election, in the year of so many crises, it was very hard often to feel certain that you had come to the truth, no matter how much journalism, as a matter of fact, it got worse, the more journalism you exposed yourself to. So we decided let’s have Tim Ryland, he’s a lifelong journalist and the editor of Catholic Answers Magazine. Let’s have him in and we’ll talk about, how do we find the truth amidst all of this confusing journalism?
Tim Ryland, editor of Catholic Answers Magazine, thank you for being with us first of all, I appreciate you being here.
Tim:
Always enjoy it.
Cy:
You’ve been alive for hundreds and hundreds of years and a journalist for almost all of them, is that right?
Tim:
Half of them.
Cy:
You’ve been a journalist for half of your years?
Tim:
Half of my hundreds of years.
Cy:
Half of your hundreds of years, okay.
Tim:
Actually, no, I’m in my early 60s and I’ve been a journalist for-
Cy:
About half a century.
Tim:
… a little bit more than… Well-
Cy:
I’m sorry.
Tim:
… let’s say three decades.
Cy:
I thought you started when you were 11. All right, first of all, the sad news of 2020, if you had to add it all up and say what really hurts this year, Eddie Van Halen died.
Tim:
That did hurt.
Cy:
That hurt. No more of the crazy chords, and although maybe he’s like Prince, maybe he’s got a vault of hidden material that’ll come out over the next 20 years.
Tim:
Well, I have seen a lot more videos of him in his incredible talent, obviously they were around, but people don’t want to see him until he’s gone, but cool, what a talented guy.
Cy:
Okay, so enough about Eddie Van Halen. I want to give you a list of things that I don’t know the truth about, and I want to confess to you that I don’t know the truth about them.
Tim:
All right.
Cy:
That I don’t like admitting this because when you admit you don’t know the truth, then people say on both sides… When you hear some of these you’re going to know what I’m talking about, people will go, “Well, you should know the truth because the science says X clearly,” or “You shouldn’t know the truth because freedom” or whatever. But I don’t know the truth about these things, and the reason I don’t know the truth is that I follow the news, and it seems to me sometimes that the more you follow the news, the less you know-
Tim:
The less you know.
Cy:
… what’s true. And so, I do know the truth about Eddie Van Halen, God rest his soul, but, all right, I don’t know the truth about global warming. I don’t know the truth about the vaccines that we’ve got coming out. I don’t even know the basic truth, I can’t figure out what the relationship to the use of aborted fetal cells is. I don’t know the truth about how bad COVID 19 is. I can’t figure out exactly how bad it is. I don’t know the truth about the election, I don’t know the truth about election fraud, I don’t know the truth about Russia.
Tim:
You got to stop.
Cy:
Okay, I’ll stop right there, but do you see what I’m saying?
Tim:
Yeah.
Cy:
Especially with the global warming one, if you go, “I don’t know the truth about global warming,” then you get scolded because you’re supposed to know the truth, because if you cared about science you would know the truth, but the truth is, I don’t know the truth.
Tim:
Cy you’re so far behind things that you’re still saying global warming.
Cy:
I’m sorry, climate change. I beg your pardon.
Tim:
There you go.
Cy:
Sorry [crosstalk 00:04:04].
Tim:
Because when there’s counter evidence, hey, it’s cold this year or this winter. It’s like, okay, well, climate change, not warming, change.
Cy:
But I think there’s two things. One, I do feel like I am pretty good, not great at this, but I feel like at 56 years old, I’m pretty good at resisting the temptation to be certain of things. Remember the whole O.J Simpson thing?
Tim:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Cy:
And people would say, what about O.J Simpson? And I would have an opinion about O.J Simpson until one day I realized, I don’t know O.J Simpson, I don’t know any of these people. I literally know nothing about this, except what the people on CNN say, and that is as close to knowing nothing as you can get, because that would require trust and I don’t have trust in TV news people. So help me out, I don’t know the truth. I feel like if I would join a team, if I would be on this team, then there’s the truth team over here, and then there’s this truth team over here, and that everybody’s really certain in those teams, but I can’t bring myself to join a team, so I don’t know what’s true.
Tim:
Well, we’re on the Catholic Answers team, and so we at least have the comfort of knowing the truth about our faith with certainty.
Cy:
That’s funny because I do feel utterly certain about that. Jesus is the Lord. That’s funny, there’s things that are very, very certain, very certain. I know the sacraments are true, and they’re real, and they have power and that’s okay.
Tim:
So that’s a nice place to be able, at least to start. Now, as far as what we call reality, as far as the news cycle, et cetera, even then news coming out of the Vatican, that’s where it’s hard to know the truth. And you mentioned your age and your inability to be sure that you know the truth. I really do think that there’s a proportional, something at work there. The younger you are, the more you certain you are that you know the truth. I think the older you get the wiser you get and realize that it’s really hard to pin down the truth as pilot asked, what is truth? And it’s hard to come by.
Cy:
Truth is what corresponds to what’s real, and if it doesn’t correspond to what’s real, it’s not true. So I do think there is a truth because I believe in reality. And I think that you can’t be a Christian and be just somebody who believes that the mind creates the world or something like that, you can’t. Because you have to believe that there’s a real world and that there are statements and states of mind that correspond to that real world and statements and states of mind that don’t correspond to that. One of those is called truth, one of those is called falsehood.
Here’s another thing, I guess there’s other things I do know the truth about, for example, I know that I’m male and I know that my state of mind matches reality on that. Some actress says she’s an actor now, and then CNN says she’s an actor now. I know those people at CNN are idiots, because the truth is she’s not an actor now.
Tim:
Well, you can’t you can’t even call her she anymore.
Cy:
I do feel sensitive about the person that you had to be sensitive to what that person… But I’m not in the presence of that person now.
Tim:
That’s right.
Cy:
And so, if someone says to me, “My name is Bob,” I say, “Hi, Bob, how are you doing?” It’s not my job to tell you what your name is, but if CNN knows that a public figure who used to be an Olympic athlete as a man, and now says to me, “Well, no, that person is a woman,” I know that CNN is full of baloney. And not only that, it makes me think, “Well, if CNN will say that about that person, why should I believe anything they say about global warming?” You see my dilemma?
Tim:
That’s a good point. It’s a good point. Yes, I do. Although I think one is we have biological certainty of a fact, whereas-
Cy:
I meant to say climate change.
Tim:
See, I was going to let you get away with that one. But I do think it’s difficult, and I think we need to be wary of… And most things in the news, including Catholic news, there’s usually two sides as we call them, and I think we have to be careful about being on one side or the other with certainty. You and I had talked a little earlier about something, what I call triangulation. In other words, if you are of a conservative bent, let’s say, and you get your news from conservative outlets, at some point, I feel like, and I do this personally, you have to look at the other side, you have to tune into the other side, just to see what they’re saying or not saying. The truth in my experience, usually lies somewhere in the middle of the extremes that you encounter.
Cy:
And not necessarily in the exact middle.
Tim:
No, not at all.
Cy:
Because then it would be easy to know the [crosstalk 00:09:39] often, much closer to one side than the other, but it is somewhere in the middle of the extremes you’ve been presented. What I was hoping as a journalist, you would come here and say is, “Go to this website, they tell you the truth about [inaudible 00:09:53].”
Tim:
Catholic.com.
Cy:
Well, okay, other than catholic.com. Also, one of the things that I have to remind people of is Catholic Answers Live, the radio program. We’re actually not a news show. So they’ll say, “Well, why don’t you have this person on and ask them about this?” And it’s some Cardinal, and it’s some news [inaudible 00:10:15] but we’re not a news show, “Well, you should be.” Well, the thing is we’re not.
Tim:
We take a lot of heat for not being a news show or being a news apostolate, that’s not what we do.
Cy:
And I think part of why we’re a really good radio program, for example, is our material is really easy in a certain sense, like is Jesus the Lord or not? Yeah, he is. We talk about things that got settled in the year 83 or in the year 30 or something. We don’t talk about things very much that are unsettled today like global warming. “Well, you should do a show on global warming,” but we’re not a news show, we don’t do news, that’s just not what we do. And maybe because we just don’t want to do the hard work of it. I don’t want to have to figure it all out.
Tim:
Well, I think that people, if they trust us as many people do, we want to know the truth. So if we hear the truth about the Catholic faith, we want to know the truth about climate change as well.
Cy:
That’s right, there you go.
Tim:
You know what I mean?
Cy:
Yeah, I do want to know the truth.
Tim:
We trust you, can’t you discern the truth for us on these other issues as well.
Cy:
And often you just can’t. My gut at this point after a generation of reporting on climate change, I was trying to remember which one I was just to say, is it’s not as big a risk as it’s presented to us by major institutions, but it’s probably not nothing either, it’s probably something going on.
Tim:
I’m with you right there. There’s been something going on for millennia. We do go up and down in terms of the temperature of the earth [crosstalk 00:12:03] we’ve had ice ages and we’ve had heat ages et cetera. So personally, I think it’s hubris for us to think that we’re going to destroy the earth in a generation or something like that. I don’t think we have that much power. We have to be good stewards, our faith teaches us that. But beyond that, to the point where you’re hurting people’s livelihoods and economies, and I don’t want to get political here, but you have to try to discern what’s the best course, and it’s usually not a radical course one way or the other.
Cy:
Isn’t that true? Sometimes a radical course, like if the Messiah comes to you and says follow me, a radical course is called for, but in general, no, it’s not called for. And the other thing about… Because this is a good one to talk about, it’s very hard to get at the truth of climate change. In my town, Oceanside, there’s a weather station at the Harbor. So it’s been there for 100 years or something and any weather station in the United States, you can just go online and get the entire record. So I got the entire record for my local weather station because I wanted to see what climate change had done in my town of Oceanside and we’re right on the ocean, so temperatures are pretty constant next to an ocean.
And over the course of the 100 years, the variation in temperature was, as far as I could tell, I’m not a mathematician or a statistician, zero. You can’t see. And so, you say this to the [inaudible 00:13:38] it’s not likely you would see it. So that means that I have to trust a mega science industry. If I can’t look at the climate record in my town and see it… As a matter of fact, I can look at the climate record and not see it, then that means this is not a simple problem that I can see, you’re asking me to trust large institutions.
And I have to be brutally honest with you about this, Tim, the United Nations and universities who I don’t trust, who I habitually don’t trust because they habitually do… And media outlets, that’s the other one. So I am in the habit of not trusting these people. I’m sorry, that’s a tall order. I’m not saying that global warming is not happening, I’m saying, I don’t know the truth and you’re telling me the only way that I can know the truth is to trust you. And I’m saying to you, I don’t trust you. So now I’m stuck, what do I do?
Tim:
Boy, isn’t that where we are?
Cy:
But that seems the case about almost everything?
Tim:
Well then sometimes I think you have to start looking at a secondary level of news or reality. I read reports over the years of university scientists coming out and saying, if you do a study that refutes climate change, your funding dries up, you are ostracized, you lose your job. I’ve never seen someone saying the opposite, I forced-
Cy:
I said climate change was extreme and they ran me out of the university. No, that never happens. I see what you’re saying.
Tim:
So there’s something going on there as well. There’s some type of seems like stifling influence if you don’t go along with a certain way of looking at things. And I think that’s dangerous, whether it’s politics or science, and I think it happens in both areas a lot.
Cy:
Well, and the other thing about media is it’s built for hysteria. And do you remember in the early 1990s, all the reporting on child molestation in elementary schools and these hidden memories, these kids are-
Tim:
Oh, sure. We had a real famous case here in San Diego.
Cy:
And people went to prison based on, these are scientists, we have to trust them, what these psychiatrist said. And then a few years later, it comes out none of this stuff happened. These people went to prison as child molesters, people who were just nice people running preschools, because people like Anderson Cooper and all the other, the people who are frankly panicky people, they’re dramatic personalities that are running the media outlets and it pays to be a dramatic personality, that’s why they get these big jobs.
Tim:
I have to remember also they thrive on controversy and panic because that’s what drives ratings and that’s what makes the money.
Cy:
But having lived through that and having lived through a million other things like overpopulation, which never happened and the [inaudible 00:16:51] problem, which never happened, there’s also a resistance to just believe in these people in general like, “We’ve played this game before, I don’t feel like playing this time.” But maybe that happens in the time you don’t play, that’s the one. But if even one person would say, “Look, I’m sorry about the way we reported the child molesting thing, but this is different,” I’d go, “Okay, well, that’s a serious person, at least,’ we can reflect back on that.
Tim:
Well, that’s why I think if we’re prayerful and joyful in our faith, we just have to take everything with a grain of salt and know that the foundational beliefs that we have, that the church is divinely guided by the Holy Spirit, that she will be here until the end of time, then everything else becomes secondary. I don’t want to downplay the importance of politics, or climate change, or anything like that, or even we hear disturbing stories about things that happen if within the church itself. It’s like, you know what? We have the ultimate belief that the church will not fail us.
So whatever is happening now, and we shouldn’t be complacent about it, we should try to sift our way through whatever confusion gets sewn, but we have the promise of Jesus Christ that our faith is a rock and it will never fail. So sometimes I have to go back to that when I get upset-
Cy:
Oh, definitely.
Tim:
… and I’m looking at the horrible things that are going on in the world, it’s like every generation I think has probably thought we’re living in the worst times in history. So that’s another wonderful thing about our faith, is the peace that it can give us if we really joyfully believe what we practice or what we say we believe.
Cy:
But then we got to do things like vote, where you’re like, “I’d like t know the truth.” In some ways, I feel like my voting life has been made easy over the last, I think it’s been about 30 years now since I realized I absolutely had to vote pro-life, where I realized no more compromise. I’ve always been a pro-life person, but there was a moment where I went, “Oh man, this is the most important thing when I vote.” And so, it’s been super easy since then. It’s been so easy to vote because there’s almost always just one person who’s being portrayed as a nut. They’re always portrayed as either liars or nuts, the pro-life people. I go, “Well, that’s my liar and my nuts.” I don’t care how you portray him, that person’s pro-life, I’m voting for him.
Tim:
See, even within the Catholic church we’ve had confusion with the whole seamless garment idea that there are-
Cy:
That’s the point.
Tim:
… things that are tantamount, they’re on the same level, social issues that’s on the same level as abortion, which is just not the case. So you have good Catholics being confused like, well, gosh, this guy’s for all of these wonderful social programs, and taking care of the poor, and everything like that, and even though he’s pro-abortion or pro-choice as they prefer to be called, there’s not inequality there, you can’t-
Cy:
What I’m saying, because I totally agree with you, and I’m ashamed of how old I was when I finally came to that realization, you should figure that out when you catch your first vote and I didn’t. But part of what I’m saying to you is I think we’re off the hook as Catholic voters. If we’re really truly pro-life from having to parse things that we really should, as mature people be parsing. I never have to worry about, I never go, “Well, what is my policy on education?” And I actually think education is a major thing because we’ve completely screwed it up over the last 100 years in [crosstalk 00:20:57]. And we’ve corrupted children, so they can’t tell what’s true an what’s false anymore. But I never have to get to the level because it’s always like, there’s only one guy I can write for. Do you see what I’m saying?
Tim:
I absolutely do.
Cy:
There’s still a million things that need to be worked out that I never really work out because I’ve got a guy. I’ve got one pro-life guy. In California, it’s often you don’t even get one pro.
Tim:
That’s right.
Cy:
You get a half pro-life. If I close one eye and look at him sideways, he looks pro-life, but I think we’re out of the habit of being good citizens for that reason.
Tim:
That’s a really good point, because I have the same ease in voting as you do, and I never really analyzed it, but may we get to the point one day where we have to start parsing it. You know what I mean?
Cy:
Yeah, because we have two pro-life candidates or two pro-life parties.
Tim:
Or we come to our senses and Roe v. Wade has been overturned.
Cy:
Oh, please God, that that day will come. It does feel like we made progress on that front this year.
Tim:
It seems like we haven’t lasted several years probably.
Cy:
Now, am I just being duped about that? Because I felt like we made progress during the Reagan administration, and then we got the Casey decision, which is… You’ve got Dred Scott and you’ve got Casey, Korematsu probably. The worst decisions ever made, Casey’s up there, and we got that from Reagan judges. Am I being lied to here, or do you think these judges will do what… I voted thinking we have to have, not just pro-life, but judges who won’t do just dumb stuff like Roe vs Wade.
Tim:
It seems like we have a court now that will follow the constitution and not be coming up with rights that are not in the constitution itself. It’s hard to tell though, it’s very difficult to tell, to be honest. Our chief justice looked like the most solid constitutional guy possible and he doesn’t seem to be that, and now he’s there for the rest of his life.
Cy:
See, I still trust him, I think he’s going to come through for us on a lot of stuff.
Tim:
That would be awesome.
Cy:
I think he’s going to [inaudible 00:23:10].
Tim:
I think we have made some progress and I don’t think we’re going to take a quantum step backwards just because of the composition of the court. Don’t know that Roe v. Wade will be overturned anytime soon, but I don’t think judicially, that we’re going to have any decisions that are going to corrode as far as we’ve, seems like we pulled back. And it’s a states’ rights thing as far as I’m concerned.
And a lot of states have started to come to their senses in terms of their legislation and recognizing that, no, it’s not okay to kill a baby. And it’s a weird thing, we have the closer it gets being born, somehow it seems that our objections strengthen, but at least that’s okay. If you don’t believe in life at conception, you have to say that’s a good thing. If the man on the street says you shouldn’t kill a baby in the third trimester, but maybe in the first, at least he says in the third trimester you shouldn’t. Because we have too many politicians that say, let’s wait until the baby’s born.
Cy:
Oh, I know.
Tim:
And then decide, which just shows you-
Cy:
How sick we are.
Tim:
… how sick our society is.
Cy:
And a lot of times now, and this is part of why I wanted to talk with you about, there’s this claim that we’re in a post-truth… I’m going to just lay it out for you again. I realized I’m maybe revealing more about myself than I’m usually comfortable revealing, but I’m just going to lay it because you’re Tim Ryland and I’m going to do it.
Tim:
[inaudible 00:00:24:35].
Cy:
There’s all these people who are saying now, well, we’re in a post-truth world because of the Trump presidency, that Trump just doesn’t care about the truth, he’s never cared about the truth. And I roll my eyes at that because I think no, the post-truth stuff started the day The New York Times celebrated the Roe v. Wade decision. As soon as they refuse to… When we started lying about a human being, that’s when you created Trump, whatever else you might think of him. And I’m not defending him as a paragon of virtue or honesty. He didn’t invent this post-truth thing, that thing was invented the day of the Roe vs Wade decision, that’s where I come from.
Tim:
Well, I can’t argue with that. I think it probably even goes earlier than that. I don’t know if you know The New York Times denied didn’t cover the Holocaust.
Cy:
That’s a good point. And then Walter Duranti, he won a Pulitzer Prize for lying for Stalin, and they still haven’t given the Pulitzer Prize back, they still have it, they’ve never rejected it. When they go, “The New York Times, the winner of 163 Pulitzer Prize,” make it 162, because that one of them we know there’s 6 million people died, starved to death by Stalin and [inaudible 00:25:52] lied about it.
Tim:
So you see that the press-
Cy:
That’s a good point.
Tim:
… hasn’t been reliable in terms of ferreting out the truth for a very long time. But I certainly within our generation, I think you’re right, I think 1973 was the beginning of it. And actually, I personally think the vituperative that just the visceral hatred of Trump that you see so widespread, even among Catholics, et cetera, is part of this sickness we have as a society where emotions rule.
Cy:
Oh, definitely.
Tim:
Emotions rule more than logic does. People just hate him and I’ve heard them say, “I don’t care what he says, I hate him. I don’t care who else we have to elect, it’s not Trump.” I really feel like there’s a sense in the country like, “I don’t care if the elections are fraud, Trump’s gone.” Honestly, I think some honest Democrats say, “It doesn’t matter to me.”
Cy:
There is that, we’ve become that.
Tim:
I think we have, I really do.
Cy:
Well, I’m not letting you leave without getting to this next point then, because we’ve become that extreme in all of our news reporting, but it’s affecting reporting and the way we talk about life within the Catholic church as well. So you have incredible disparity. Like if I want to say, “Well, what’s the news, what’s Catholic news?” If I go to National Catholic Register and National Catholic Reporter, I have two completely different planets that I’m on. If I go to Crux Now, or I go over to Taylor Marshall, I’m on two different planets. So I have that problem of what is the truth.
Tim:
It’s a very difficult thing. I certainly don’t have an answer for it, but I would give the same advice I do with secular presses, is do go to both sites. Do read both sides if you have went or been to another, you need to know what the other so-called side thinks about it or believes about it.
Cy:
And I would tend to be one of these people who are very negative about the National Catholic Reporter, because I don’t think you shouldn’t go shade on the things that they negotiate on. Look, there’s some settled issues in the Catholic church, stop unsettling them. All right, if you go back to 1995 to today, there’s probably no Catholic newspaper that’s done better reporting on the sex abuse crisis. They got it right before anybody else [crosstalk 00:28:28] so God bless them.
Tim:
I was going to say they have gotten it right on a lot of things. And one of their best reporters that went off and started Crux, John Allen, he’s of a certain bent, but I think he’s an honest reporter. And so, they have done good work.
Cy:
Well, that’s the thing, is I consciously blocked out National Catholic Reporter’s, sex abuse reporting in the ’90s because I thought those are those crazy people. I shouldn’t have blocked it out, I should have listened to what they were saying.
Tim:
I was part of a small, independent Catholic newspaper here in the ’90s that was on stuff like that pretty early, and our local bishop at the time… You were probably aware of that at some point.
Cy:
I got there in ’96 to working for the bishop.
Tim:
You people might not know that Cy was the editor of our local Catholic newspaper here back 25 years or so ago.
Cy:
But probably for both of us maybe some things are clearer than they were at that time.
Tim:
Yes, absolutely.
Cy:
And I’m not thrilled with everything I did and said.
Tim:
Well, I’m not either. But I had an editor who was very personally, he had something in his family that made him aware of the abuse situation. We did cover it locally and we weren’t always 100% accurate because the Bishop said, don’t talk to these people [crosstalk 00:29:54] so we had to do the best reporting that we could. But it’s true, I think history, obviously time gives you a perspective. It’s like, no, they weren’t crazy, they were on it. There was evil there that no one wanted to see or admit, and it’s not liberal and it’s not conservative, it’s evil.
Cy:
And if you won’t read in a cosmopolitan way, willing to listen to what other people have to say, without losing the core of who you are. Look, when the National Catholic Reporter says that this moral issue is up for debate, when I know as a Catholic, it’s not up for debate, they’re not going to change my mind on that, but I listened to what they say. I finally feel like I’m in my mid 50s at the point where I have to listen, because I have the experience now of having not listened and I was dead wrong.
Tim:
It’s a very good point. So we do have our sources that we trust and that’s just normal human experience. We all know what sources that we can generally trust, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t educate ourselves as to what other sources are saying.
Cy:
Amen. All right, I like it. Thanks for coming in and talking about 2020. You want to talk about Eddie van Halen hailing anymore, or anything else?
Tim:
I don’t know the truth about Eddie Van Halen, to be honest.
Cy:
I don’t either know.
Tim:
He might’ve been an alien.
Cy:
He seemed like it sometimes. All right, well, you’re very fine. Does it bother you when I tease you? Because we have a teasing relationship.
Tim:
Do I look bothered?
Cy:
No, you don’t look bothered, but you’re also somewhat enigmatic. You have that quality of, I’m not sure what’s going on inside Ryland.
Tim:
I love your teasing.
Cy:
All right.
Tim:
I wish you tease me more.
Cy:
Well, I loved both September, October issues this year. The first September, October issue and the second September, October issues. Can you see what I’m doing?
Tim:
Folks, he’s never, ever going to let this one go because I think he was a journalist at one point and-
Cy:
Oh, man, I spelled pre-strong on the cover of the diocesan newspaper once in a headline.
Tim:
It’s always a headline.
Cy:
[crosstalk 00:32:02] I might tease you, but it comes from a lot of hurt that I’ve done [crosstalk 00:32:08] I’m still living the trauma.
Tim:
Okay, well, I’m willing to be the dumpster for you hurt.
Cy:
Catholicanswersmagazine.com. You should go there, you should become a subscriber. It’s one of the finest magazines in the world, and it is definitely the finest magazine of Catholic apologetics on the entire planet, catholicanswersmagazine.com. Thanks Tim Ryan.
Tim:
Thanks for having me.
Cy:
Don’t roll your eyes when I’m bragging by the magazine.
Tim:
Thank you Cy.
Cy:
All right, I never thought we would do a focus episode where we were praising National Catholic Reporter. I didn’t know that that was going to happen, but it’s just happened spontaneously, but they did do really good reporting and they still do on all kinds of things. But the key thing is, it’s not that we’re trying to endorse this or that a website, or this or that media outlet. There are frankly, some media outlets that are better than others. On the average day, be brutally honest with you. I’m much more likely to trust what I find at the Catholic News Agency or National Catholic Register than what I’m going to find at the National Catholic Reporter. That’s my habit, that’s my experience of going to those places. But we have to listen to one another.
Listening is the key. You can’t come to the truth without listening sometimes to those who disagree with you violently, listening gets us there, where nothing else will. Still, it’s tough though. You got to become the kind of person who can uncover the truth, and that kind of person is a person formed by the Catholic faith and enlivened with the sacraments. I really believe it. Been formed in the Catholic faith and enlightened in sacraments does make us better able to detect the truth wherever it lies, even when it’s hiding from us, sometimes in plain sight, because of the confusing way things are being reported in the media.
Hey, thanks for joining us. We’d love to get an email from you, focus@catholic.com, focus@catholic.com is where you can reach us. Also, don’t forget to subscribe wherever you’re getting this podcast. If you subscribe you’ll be notified whenever a new episode comes out and we’d like to notify you. If you’re watching on YouTube, particularly, please like, and subscribe. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know how any technology works, but they tell me if you like and subscribe on YouTube that makes a big difference in growing this podcast. So please do it, and if you wouldn’t mind giving us your financial support, you can do that givecatholic.com. I’m Cy Kellett, we’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.