Transcript

Edmund: Hi everyone. And welcome back to the Real and True podcast. I’m your host, Edmund Mitchell. 

Emily: And I’m your host Emily Mentock. 

Edmund: And we’re back with another episode because another unit is out. Unit three is out. Uh, this podcast is for us to discuss the unit videos in more detail and dive deeper into the content and share a bit of the behind the scenes of the mission and vision of real and true. How are you doing Emily? 

Emily: I’m doing well. How are you? 

Edmund: Good. I’m excited about this unit. I mean, we think all the units are amazing. But this one’s pretty great. 

Emily: It is good. I think the explanation video for this is probably my favorite of these first three that we’ve done. 

Edmund: Mine’s the proclamation. This is my favorite of all the proclamations. 

Emily: That’s great. Yeah. Um, what’s the thesis of unit three that kind of all these videos fall under 

Edmund: The thesis of unit three is God desires to reveal himself to us and the paragraphs we’re covering in the catechism or paragraphs 50 to 141. For those of you following along at home. And if you’re listening to this and haven’t watched the videos, please go watch the three videos. And the fourth one you’re watching right now. 

Emily: There you go. And so the proclamation video is what, what selfies tell us about ourselves. And then the explanation video is what does God, or how does God reveal himself to us? And then the connection video is. The Big Three: scripture tradition and the magisterium. Yep. So go watch these videos if you haven’t. 

Edmund: So, uh, this first video, so again, our thesis, God desires to reveal himself to us. And just to remind everyone that thesis is kind of, we prayerfully thought of a sentence to hang all of these pieces of content together around, you know, God’s trying to reveal, reveal himself to us. 

Emily: So how do we break that open with the proclamation video? How do we dive deeper with the explanation and then how do we have fun with it and the connection video? Yeah. 

Edmund: So this first one, uh, the proclamation video, what selfies tell us about ourselves. This was a really fun one. This is one of my favorites and it starts off with my kids walking around with this toy camera and taking these photos. And then they start taking pictures of themselves and this, you know, phenomenon of selfies were, 

Emily: and I think it is a phenomenon, not even, you know, a specific dress to your kids, but every time you give a baby like a phone or a toddler, right? Like they, they know how to take pictures of themselves. And they think it’s funny to look at themselves and, and do that. And it’s selfies. It’s like, well, what are we are asking the question? What does it tell us about ourselves? Because if God desires to reveal himself, Taking selfies and sharing selfies. It’s how we tell others about ourselves in the world. And we’re made in God’s image and likeness. Then what can we learn from this? 

Edmund: Yeah. In the proclamation videos, we really try to explore the human experience and open up people to the curiosity and wonder of the world. And we know that the world in our human experience, like we’ve said in previous, um, units, like we can find God, we can find glimpses of God. And so if we have this desire for selfies, it can be. It would be tempting to just think it’s a negative thing. 

Emily: Right. And we, you know, it’s interesting cause we. Picked selfies thinking it would be a universal experience, but naturally we interviewed someone who swears he doesn’t take selfies. 

Edmund: Oh my gosh, Ian. 

Emily: But he does believe in the power of self portraits. 

Edmund: So it’s, there’s a technical distinction there. So we went back a little further. Like where did, where does this idea of selfies come from or does it have. A longer history and we thought about self portraits. And what is it that we really want people to know about us when they see us or they, or when we capture an image of ourselves, 

Emily: Because really the, we, we want to put that selfies. You mentioned it can be in a negative light. We want to put them in a little bit more of a universal experience. That it’s not just an obsession with ourselves or having access to cameras easily, or, you know, whatever influencing the world around us with photos of ourselves, but really okay. Revealing ourselves sharing a piece of ourselves with others or with the world is something that goes back even before cameras existed, that there was artists and people who would do that. 

Edmund: Yeah. So this is a fun one. Um, is there anything from the proclamation video that stood out to you from the behind the scenes? I’m trying to think some of the things. Definitely the little toy camera is actually a camera from our house and I had to give that to JP so he could like animate it and make a version of it. 

Emily: Okay. Kind of came over and, uh, recreated some of the shoots. Right. So you got a picture of your son using the camera to take a selfie. Edmund: That was really fun. And what else? That video. Yeah. So I just encourage people to go watch it. I don’t want to spoil too much of it. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. 

Emily: Yeah. It was fun. And I really liked just again, the way you can take something, that’s a trend. Now we do this a little bit in proclamation two as well with the genetic testing. It’s like, say something that’s a universal experience in the modern world. Connect it to the larger sort of human universal experience, even, you know, throughout time. And then, okay. If this is a innate human thing, it’s how we’re made. It’s our nature we’re made in the image and likeness of God, then what can we learn about God from that? And so what we’re really hoping for, for the audience at the end of the video is that by thinking about what are they trying to reveal about themselves through selfies. And then therefore, doesn’t it make sense that God would want to reveal himself to setting up, uh, you know, this question of revelation and that God desires it, which we get more into in the other videos. 

Edmund: Yeah. I think if you just heard God desires to reveal himself to you, you’d be like, I don’t understand anything about that, but if you could connect it to something. We can relate to, oh, I desire to reveal myself to the world and to other people it’s a little, it’s a little easier to start wrapping your head around, like, okay, I can, I can relate to that desire to reveal something about yourself. Um, and God does it in a very powerful way. 

Emily: And your favorite, uh, paragraph from the section about revelation. 

Edmund: Let’s go to our standout catechism paragraph. Um, so every unit we pick kind of our favorite and we encourage people to prayerfully go through the section of the catechism with us and find one that stands out to you and maybe comment on the video, your favorite paragraph. Um, so mine from this section is paragraph 68 from the catechism, and it says this by love god has revealed himself and given himself to me. He has us provided the definitive super abundant answer to the questions that man asks himself about the meaning and purpose of his life. Um, I love this one. I just loved the first couple of words: by love god has revealed himself. Um, I just think that’s really great when we think about revelation or especially if you grew up, um, in a Christian home or a Catholic. God we hear, God loves you. God wants you to know things about him. God wants you to know that he loves you. Um, but I love this idea that by love God has revealed himself. Meaning like he’s revealed himself, not just because he wants you to obey him or believe in him. Um, he’s revealed him. Through love. And it reminds me of this story. I heard, uh, when I was in college that did not make it into the proclamation video, it was a pitch. It was a pitch. It was a very good pitch. 

Emily: Not quite universal enough. 

Edmund: Yeah, I’ll share it now. So, uh, the way I heard the story was that. A long time ago, Jewish wedding feasts, the celebration of a Jewish wedding, um, went a particular way where the groom would go away and prepare a tent like a wedding tent, and a place, a kind of a home or a tent for his bride. And his bride would be in a different part of the village and would be preparing for the wedding. And she wouldn’t know. When the wedding was going to be exactly. She just didn’t know the bride didn’t know. 

Emily: Oh my gosh. 

Edmund: So it has all these, you know, you can read back through scripture and you know, the, the virgins who were waiting for the groom and the bride are all, all these things of like waiting for, when is this wedding feast? When is this wedding feasts? Well, cause the groom is preparing a place for the bride and preparing for the wedding. And then when he’s ready him and all of his groomsmen. And the whole village kind of get together and start singing songs and, and celebrating. And they get this chair and they kind of precess to the bride and they would pick her up on this big chair and kind of, um, parade her through the town. But, um, before this would happen, the bride, as she’s getting prepared, people would come with gifts for the bride. And the way it was explained to me was often there would be like cloths or yeah, like special cloths and stuff that would be laid over the bride. Yeah. Veiling her, you know, this idea of a veil, right?. Right. And there’d be all of these things kind of laid on top of her and this decorative manner. And then she’d be paraded to the wedding. And then at the wedding tent is where, um, she would be revealed, right? And the groom would be slowly, you know, revealing his bride, you know, and this idea that the that’s where we get this word revelation and the revelation of God throughout time has been a slow revelation. That’s a gradual and in stages, seeing more and more of who God is 

Emily: More intimate and closer. 

Edmund: Yeah. And not just an intellectual knowledge of him, but him giving himself like revealing himself slowly to us, you know, like, and not just revealing himself, but revealing who we. Because we’re the bride of Christ, right? So by revealing who he is, he’s also revealing who we are and that we’re made for relationship we’re made for this, this wedding, you know, this relationship with him. So that’s why I love this paragraph. It just reminds me, you know, by love, God has revealed himself to us. Um, and that it’s not just intellectual knowledge. It’s not just that we would be good people. Um, you know, God came not to make bad people good, but to make dead people alive in this relationship with him. 

Emily: Well, thank you for sharing. Yeah. Well, well, I think you’ve were kind of explaining what the, what was this Jewish tradition then? Uh, how or Hebrew tradition and then, uh, the, the references to weddings and feasts and preparing the bride and things like that, that we hear in scripture. And so like it, it gives so much more a richness to the context of what do we know about revelation or even how now in the catechism, like we’re taking what’s from scripture and tradition to then understand even now how God reveals himself to us. Um, so I think that’s great. And I think that the. That like revealing of both parties to enter into relationship is a really important part. And the gradually, that was a key in the video. We’ll talk more about explanation video in a second, but that was a really key theme that we focus on in the script so that people would see that what we know about God, it wasn’t just like a one moment in time. God dropped the Bible on somebody. And then that was what we knew about him. And it’s not that, um, that. Never ending relationship or revelation either. It’s actually that they’re in these moments of time, through certain people in the Bible, Abraham, Moses, and then through Jesus, that is what we have seen as the direct revelation of God and everything now has been just, you know, the tradition, richness of exploring that. 

Edmund: There’s like a well, not finite, but there’s a set amount. The deposit of faith. There’s a set amount that God wanted to reveal about who he is. And he’s not giving it to you just so you intellectually understand it. He’s giving it to you because he wants you to respond to it. So every bit of revelation is this, um, invitation to a response to, 

Emily: And the, our interpretation of that. And we do talk about this at the end of the explanation video, and then a lot in the connection video is that it’s the magisterium. It has a job, right. And it’s funny, the Magister is one of those like big church words. I think everyone memorize. But what does it really mean? 

Edmund: Yeah. So, uh, it comes through this word being the teacher and it’s, um, the teaching office of the church that can authoritatively interpret scripture and tradition. So Jesus entrusted the church with the apostles and the bishops who guard and protect the deposit of faith that’s been revealed. And so that it would never change throughout all of time. Now we can grow and deepen our understanding of it, but it never changes. It’s never mutilated or, you know, it’s not that at one point we believed one thing and then like years later we believed the opposite. 

Emily: Right. 

Edmund: Um, it can grow organically in our understanding. But the teaching office of the church has this special grace, um, given to it by the holy spirit to guard and protect authoritatively and accurately, and with fidelity the teaching so that we can trust that today a thousand years from now the same deposit of faith that God wants to reveal is there for us and it’s whole and entire and intact, and it hasn’t been mutilated or taken away from a it’s the same revelation yesterday, today and tomorrow. 

Emily: And the can, and that what the magisterium can then give us is help define the dogmas around earth, which kind of brings me to my favorite paragraph, paragraph 89. I have it saved here. Um, I won’t read the whole thing, but. This is the part that stood out to me that I think just again, tied this section of the catechism to what kind of helping, uh, what we hope our target audience understands about the catechism as being relevant to their life. So if we think of the catechism as having the dogma, this is the magisterium has helped guard the deposit of faith that is contained in this book. And this says there’s an organic connection between our spiritual life and the dogmas, and that dogmas are lights along the path of faith that illuminated it and make it secure. So kind of defining that path to illuminate the path of faith and make it secure. And so I thought that was really, um, relevant to sort of our mission of real and true that we want to, uh, bring the catechism to light for the modern world as a living voice, to the modern world, to help illuminate that path of faith, that young adult Catholics around the world are trying to walk or trying to find even sometimes. So I thought, and, and since magisterium and dogma or some of those big words that, you know, properly understanding them. They can feel like a little too heavy handed coming from the church. But I think that that puts them in the right sort of understanding that there are these lights along the path. Edmund: Like walking in faith as this light that can guide us in, in darkness. You know, like I, I really like that. So let’s move on to the explanation of. And connection video. So the explanation video, um, what is the title for the that’s? How does God reveal himself to us? And this one was great. We talked a lot about the stars. 

Emily: Yeah. Stars, stars, or a recurring theme and all the videos. There’s just something. So like, you always think bigger picture 

Edmund: Well, I love space astronauts, like, uh, that kind of stuff. So maybe I’m leaning on that too much. This is a really good, uh, video. We talk a lot too about how God desires to reveal himself because he’s a father. He’s not just this distant, you know, he’s not the force from star wars. He’s not just this like far away thing. He wants to be really close. 

Emily: And in how understanding how he reveals himself to us. We, um, can come to know and then trust that things like that are in the Bible or that our church dogmas or what’s in the catechism, um, that, that comes from God. That, that is what’s been handed down through the holy spirit protected by the holy spirit as God’s revelation of himself. 

Edmund: Yeah. The point in the video that you want to talk about with you and JP trying to talk through, like, what is the deposit of faith 

Emily: We were trying to get exactly right. You know, making sure that we’re presenting clearly this big concept of deposit of faith. And so, um, when we were originally originally reading through the script, um, we were, uh, kind of thinking, oh, there, JP was thinking, oh, there’s scripture. And then there’s the deposit of faith. And I was like, thinking that that meant, you know, tradition. I was like, no, we need to think like scripture is part of the deposit of faith, this bigger thing. Like is woven into that over time. So how do you think God, and then he came up with this amazingly cool concept that you see in the explanation video of, um, I mentioned my, and my character in the video is like, oh, like the Bible and you see the Bible and then you see, um, when you start to explain uh, scripture and tradition and the magisterium as the sort of guards and the foundation of the deposit of faith. And you see the Bible fit into this almost like DNA sequence or something that you see kind of moving through time. And I just thought that was one of our strongest visuals that we’ve had so far that took something that he and I were just personally wrestling with to making sure we are getting it right in our understanding of right. And then to see that Bible just fit into this beautiful sort of, yeah. 

Edmund: It reminds me of, um, there’s a man I’m forgetting the paragraph, but there’s a sentence in the catechism where it says we don’t believe in, in words and formulas, but in the realities they express, you know, like the words on the page or just words on a page. We don’t believe in the words we believe in the reality. That it expresses and scripture as like a physical book is, is not like the deposit of faith. It’s a, it’s a book, it’s paper it’s words, but the reality expresses is, you know, the speech of God is written down in human words, inspired by the holy spirit. Um, you have scripture tradition and the magisterium, they make this. This precious deposit of faith, you know, um, 

Emily: These three, three legs. Yeah. Yeah. The connection video. 

Edmund: So the connection video, uh, the foundation of that comes from this paragraph where it says that scripture tradition and the magisterium are so connected that one cannot stand without the other. And so I think sometimes we think of these things as all separate, but they’re like we said, they’re interconnected scripture tradition and the magisterium all, uh, can’t stand one without the other. You can’t write. Yeah. 

Emily: Like we would have like the accurate and deposit of faith without those three elements. 

Edmund: Yeah. Like you wouldn’t have a. You wouldn’t the church needs the magisterium and tradition in order to have said, this is scripture, you know, and the same for all the others. Um, so that was really fun. One thing that people I wanted to tell people was Ali Hoffman sat on the stool. There’s that part where she’s sitting on the stool and we had to like, saw the leg or pretend this all the way on the table. And I just kept yelling, like do it for Jesus, Ali, like, get up on that stool. Really fall 

Emily: I’m gonna knock you off this. 

Edmund: Yeah. And so we did a few takes where she wasn’t really falling and I was like, come on, you really fall. We have so many like shots. I think we have at least 20 takes of her trying to fall off the stool in a, in like a believable way. 

Emily: Thank you, Ali 

Edmund: thank you, Ali. Really putting her life on the line for Jesus. Um, so cool. Do we want to do a recap? I mean, this is the last unit of our pilot. Yeah, our pilot was 

Emily: The three first, three, three first three units. We were like, okay, let’s get out there. Let’s try this. Let’s see if people respond to it. If this is the right experience, what can we learn from it? Take a step back. And, uh, in this pilot phase, super excited to announce that we did reach our goal of 1 million views across, uh, across our platforms. I just channeled our videos. 

Edmund: I can’t imagine 1 million of anything, I guess 1 million m&ms. 

Emily: Would that be in this whole room full of them? 

Edmund: I don’t know. 

Emily: Well, it’s amazing because you know, you’ve ever people who are maybe watching this. It’s like, okay, yes, this is one video, one piece of it. But we have these videos in four languages on every social media platform. Plus the podcast is on, you know, Spotify, apple, all those things. And our website. We have people who are being directed to the website. So it’s been really amazing to see, uh, just the response to this and that we’re getting comments from people all over the world who are finding. Not necessarily even the whole thing, but we’ll resonate with one video really strongly, um, and comment in response to that. So I’m just really grateful for the way everyone’s supported that. 

Edmund: Yeah, me too. And I think what’s so awesome about it is we’re taking the catechism and like through our response to it, like making something and then other people are responding to it. And it’s just cool knowing that all of this is, is like centered around the catechism centered around. Like we said, the revelation of God that’s been revealed. For love and by love. 

Emily: Yeah. We, you know, I always, um, when talking about the project, like to tell people that like our mission isn’t to get people to pick up the catechism, I really feel that our mission is like the same as the catechisms mission, which is to help people encounter Christ. By sharing the truths of our faith directly. And we hope that people buy, you know, feeling less intimidated by the catechism do go and pick it up. We hope, you know, everyone can go and comment with their favorite paragraph from the section and things like that. But just to see, um, thinking creatively about the videos, but how do we bring this to life and totally aligned with what the catechism is trying to do to point back to Jesus, um, as the mission of real and true, that’s been just amazing to see play out over these three months. 

Edmund: Um, I want to remind everyone our mission is to transform the letter into a living voice for the modern world. And I’m excited for the next couple of units coming up. 

Emily: We’re working on unit four. Now I’ve got those scripts written, so they’re in animation and none of this would be possible without. Just amazing generosity of Our Sunday Visitor OSV, who is funding this project. We are so grateful for their, uh, sort of partnership in mission. And, you know, we get a lot of questions to you from the videos. We don’t have the blue one on here today, but there’s a people were commenting that you see, cause you’re such a catechism nerd. You own so many that people are commenting about different catechisms that they see. And people always ask us where they can go and buy them. And the OSV bookstore has a bunch of different catechisms that people can buy. So they’ve been commenting in response to that. 

Edmund: Is there anything else we want to tell people before we wrap up. Go subscribe on YouTube. If you haven’t and share the video with someone, ask them what they think. Start a conversation, 

Emily: Especially, I mean, this first, initially three units were, you know, they were a pilot. We wanted to learn from this, um, take those lessons into the rest of pillar one moving forward. Um, but if you had a favorite video or one that really impacted you the most, you know, maybe think about kind of helping share your faith, uh, the bishops talk about evangelizing catechesis. What they’re kind of on a mission toward right now, and we want this to be a part of that. So if there’s one video that really stood out to you, helped you be more curious about your faith or understand the truth of our faith in a deep way, maybe be sure that one video with someone today. 

Edmund: Awesome. Well, thanks guys. And we will see you in the next unit. 

Emily: See you in Unit 4! Thank You.