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Episode 1: Intro · The Uncensored Catholic

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Hey, y'all, welcome to the first episode of my new podcast, The
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Uncensored Catholic. It's going to be a bit different than your average Catholic podcasts.
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It may have already struck you that, Hey, wait a minute,
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that guy sounds like he's got a Southern accent. Well, yes, it's
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true. I am Southern. I am a convert to Catholicism. I convert
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to Catholicism while I was in college, so it's been a several years now,
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and I do come from a very old Southern family. My family settled
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in the Carolinas and Virginia somewhere around the late sixteen hundred. I obviously did
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not grow up in a Catholic environment. In fact, in North Carolina,
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where I grew up, where my family's been for most of its American history,
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it was illegal to be Catholic, essentially until just before the Civil War.
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You see, Catholics were not allowed to n property, your vote,
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and they had to sign the Oath. The oath was essentially renouncing Catholicism.
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We finally got our first Catholic church just before the war. It was built
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right up around the Virginia line the coast and Sherman's troops came through and burn
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it down. So Catholics really didn't get established in my estate. I told
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really about the nineteen forties, so there was really no Catholic influence when I
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was growing up other than just were the vestiges of the tradition of coming from
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an Irish family predominantly my family's Irish, French and English, and the English
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is actually descendted the House of Wessex, which would be you know, Catholic
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England before the protests of Revolution, reformation, whatever they want to call it.
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They didn't reform anything, but oh yeah, we get into that later.
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I am quite outspoken. I speak plainly, I speak bluntly, and
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I say things the way I see them. This is really sort of new
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for me. You see. I worked for several years in politics and journalism.
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I was actually working in pro life politics, conservative politics in Virginia and
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attending a major Southern Baptist university when I converted to Catholicism. Before the end
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I had well, I had been at the University of Georgia and loved it
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and was playing music because you know, it's what you do down there,
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big music town. And I became a Methodist youth minister, and various things
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happened brought me to Virginia. I got far more involved in politics really after
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nine to eleven. I started listening to a lot of news talk radio,
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a lot of Russia limball. Now. I had grown up on William F.
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Buckley, he was always an influence. But I got up to the
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university. I'm just I'm not gonna call it by name, and I got
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involved very heavily in politics. I was working for senator or a congressman,
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a couple of people running for state offices, on the phone all the time
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to Supreme Court justice state Supreme Court justice is not the federal level. Very
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involved with various activist groups. Eagle Forum. Wow, there were so many
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actually young Republicans, all kinds of stuff. And actually found a mentor in
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ge Gordon Letting that was really unexpected. And during that time I had this
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sort of revelation that basically all the smartest people I knew were either Catholic or
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Jewish, and that really most of the books I was reading and most of
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the major Protestant thought leaders were nowhere near as informed. I won't say they
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weren't as intelligence, but they didn't intelligent, but they didn't have the depth
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and breadth of knowledge. And I kind of had to face this quandary,
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why was this, you know, was it a matter of genetics or was
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it a matter of these people who had just been better educated? And then
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I was really in a tough position because I was spending tens of thousands of
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dollars a year intuition to go to said university. So I started exploring and
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really the first Catholic book I read was William F. Buckley Juniors Near My
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God, an autobiodic autobiography of faith, and it was just astounding to me.
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After that, I began reading the early Church fathers, eventually Scott Hahn,
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various you know, the you know, the pantheon of Catholic authors,
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the guys on EWTN, but a lot of older stuff really led me to
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Catholicism. Was the early Church. When you read the first you know,
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two to three hundred years of Catholic writing, especially the d K. Well,
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there's no doubt that the Catholic Church is the church founded by Jesus Christ,
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the only church descending from the apostles, with the authority given by God
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to his apostles. To teach the fullness of the truth. You know,
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obviously I couldn't become Jewish because I believed in Jesus christis the Messiah, and
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I had no choice but to convert to Catholicism. When I did, I
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was completely ostracized. People would not talk to me. They would actually turn
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and run in the other direction when they saw me. I was actually asked
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to leave that school. And I wasn't causing trouble. I was not arguing
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or debating. I had just expressed to a couple of friends. You know,
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I think I may be thinking I'm converting to Catholicism. I believe that's
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the way the Holy Spirit's leading me. And the head of the disciplinary committee
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in the school, they had a lot of rules, trust me, comes
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up to me and says, we think you need to leave the school.
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You don't belong here. Word got round that I was Catholic and they wanted
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me out. Well, that put me back in North Carolina working in politics
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for a while. You know, things happen two thousand and eight, major
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financial collapse. I had a small business at the time. It was actually
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publishing a newspaper and really just about lost everything. It was deep in debt
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and ended up back in the mountains of North Carolina where I grew up,
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and starting then, I started working on various projects. I'm actually a master
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herbalist. Long before I ever got into politics and all that. I at
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the age of fifteen I apprenticed as an herbalist and I never stopped doing that.
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And so between then and really especially when COVID hit and now I know
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there's several years in between, I'm skipping over a lot of history of y'all
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are interested in. I know that I started writing books. Folks convinced me
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that I needed to teach herbal medicine. Well, I have written eleven books,
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and nine of them are on herbal medicine. One of them is an
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analysis of a book written by a Swiss priest, Fallow Johann Kunzel, so
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it was really my first Catholic book. Another one was The History and Practice
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of Christian herbal Medicine, where I trace the history of herbal medicine through Saint
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Hilgard I Mention and the Benedictines and all the monastic orders that founded hospitals and
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really spread Christianity throughout Europe by providing healthcare and education to everyone for free,
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using herbal medicine grown in their own herb gardens. That was actually beginning the
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Capitulair. It was an order by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne go out and
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do this. Herbal medicine is hugely important to Catholicism, really, and I
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would urge you all to check out my herb books if that's what you're interested
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in. But this podcast isn't going to be about eble medicine. This podcast
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the reason it's called the Uncensored Catholic it's because I'm going to talk about those
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things you're not supposed to talk about, religion, politics, and culture.
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I'm going to talk about all those rude subjects. I'm not going to do
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it in a rude way. I don't cuss. I'm just going to be
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a nice, clean program. You see, after I published my book on
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the history of Christian erable medicine, some folks got in touch with me from
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a wonderful publication called Missy O Day, and I ask if I would consider
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submitting an article or two. And you know, it wasn't anything I'd ever
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done before. Now, I mean, obviously I had been reading voraciously and
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studying Christianity for many years, really going back to well, this is another
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story for another day. But when I was about nineteen, I was in
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a very bad accident that left me partially paralyzed, and prayer was what healed
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me. That led to me becoming a really committed Christian, and that's really
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what put me on the road to becoming Catholic. So something I've been doing
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for a long time, and that's a story I'd be glad to talk about
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another time. I'm sure y'all find that interesting. But I started writing articles
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and eventually I became the filling guy for the daily Gospel reflections. You know,
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every day we have our Mass readings, and so what Missi O'Day does
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is every day they send out a free newsletter to subscribers with their daily mass
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readings and a gospel reflection or reflection could be on the Psalm, it could
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be on the part of the Old Testament, whatever the mass readings are for
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the day by one of their writers. Now they've also serialized my book,
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Christian rbal Medicine, for which I'm very grateful. Let's just say it was.
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It has not been a bestseller. You know, a lot of herbalists
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are kind of new age folks and I'm very much not. So it's a
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vetter of getting Christians and especially Catholics interested in reading the book and then they
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love it. I mean, you know, it's it's great history, it's
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really interesting information. I mean the well, I'm digressing again. But the
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first Christian era herbal medicine book, what we just call a herbal this is
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post you know, Pagan Roman Empire, was written by Abbot Walaford Strabo.
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Ralfred Strabo was one of the greatest Christian thinkers of about what I was that
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eight hundred eighty or seven hundred anyway, really pivotal figure. So it's very
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much associated herbal medicineism with Catholicism. But my gospel reflections have become pretty popular,
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and I've done some interviews on Catholic podcasts, and eventually that led to,
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thanks to my friends encouragement, writing a book, my own autobiography of
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faith after mister Buckley's. It's called Confirmation, An Autobiography of Faith, and
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it's just come out. The first half of the book is essentially my story
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as it relates to religion. I talk about my childhood, my parents,
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my grandparents, the community I grew up in the whole way. I talk
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about that injury and the miraculous recovery. I talk about my time as a
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youth minister. I talk about my true conversion to Catholicism and what's come after,
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and really how much the sacraments have become such a hugely important part of
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my life. The other thing about the book, you see, where I
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live is in a very remote part of the sun Appalachians, which is ideal
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for a herbalist, I mean, and an outdoorsman. I'm a woodsman.
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I love to hunt and fish and garden, and I'm a wood carver,
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and I'm a very natural nature oriented person, basically a homesteader. But it's
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not perhaps ideal for a Catholic. You see, my so called town is
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about seventy people. The county seat is about four hundred people, and that's
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like fifteen miles away. We're a seasonal summer resort community, so the Catholic
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church is basically open full time in the summer, and that's when we have
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the Catholics there. And most of my neighbors are like Seven day Adventist Church
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of God, Southern Baptist Jehovah's witnesses. I've had to become very adept at
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defending my faith in my church and to learn to do that using the Bible.
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So really, whereas like the first third of the book is by autobiography,
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the second two thirds or so is a defense of various Catholic doctrines,
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from obviously the founding of the Church, from you know, Saint Peter the
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Rock up through you know, confession and well all the sacraments, to our
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beliefs about the saints and everything. You know. Protestants attack us with,
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first why do we go to church on Sunday? Well, I explain,
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I give biblical references, and then early church writings from the DK, you
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know, Saint Justin Martyr Polycarp different ones Pope Saint Clement of Rome expressly saying,
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you know, Christians decided to go to worship on Sundays to make a
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break from Jewish tradition, and because Sunday was today Christ rose from the dead
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and Sunday was the day of Pentecost. That's something, well, the Seven
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day adventis and such don't know or understand or our tour observant brothers and sisters
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who believe we worship Satan and are going to Hell because we go to church
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on Sunday. Well, they also believe that about all mainline Protestant denominations.
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They just blame the Catholic Church for it, you know. And speaking of
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the tour Observant Christians, they say that you shouldn't call Jesus Jesus, you
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can only call him by the Hebrew name Yeshua. Well, I go through
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biblical evidence and early Church doctrine and actually consulted with a Catholic linguist to prove
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that Yeshua is actually Hebrew for Joshua, so it's not exclusive to the name
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of Jesus. And well, in the Bible, Jesus isn't always called Jesus.
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He's called the Son of Man or the Messiah or you know, Jesus
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has many names, and where has his Hebrew name may have been spelled,
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much like Joshua or even Elijah. His name in Latin was Yesu, and
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I can't really pronounce it in Greek, so I'm just gonna skip of that
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for now, you know, and eventually it became Jesus. Right. Well,
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my name is the same in English, okay, my first name is
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William in English, that's William. If somebody from France calls me that same
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name, they're gonna call me Guillaume. It doesn't change who I am.
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So there's a lot chick as well as history, as well as biblical quotes,
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lots of quotes from the early Church. You know, when someone says
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Catholics worship statues, you know, I go back to the Old Testament with
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you know, Moses raising up the bronze serpent to the cherubim on top of
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the ark, to the the well. I guess you would see it almost
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a theological concept of how there was no image of God until Jesus came as
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the image of God. Jesus was God incarnate as man, and now he
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essentially sanctified the physical world. And the basic logical argument that a image of
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a saint, whether it's a statue or a picture, is an image of
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a you know, an older brother and sister in Christ, it's a it's
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a picture of our family member, and we look at it with fond admiration,
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just as someone would look at a picture of their mother or father that
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was deceased, and you know, we it's pretty good on these points it's
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a pretty strong book. Everyone who's read it so far says it's very convincing.
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So along with that book, I decided to initiate this podcast, however,
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where it's that book, which, by the way, you can buy
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on Amazon dot com. It's once Again It's Confirmation and Autobiography of Faith by
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Jutson Carroll. Or you can get the PDF directly from me. Just go
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to Jutsoncarroll dot com or my blog from my Herbs which is Southern Appalachian Herbs
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dot blogspot dot com. I'll put notes in the I'll put the details on
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the show notes. Don't worry about that. But I didn't want to just
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do a podcast about religion. What I want to do is a daily podcast,
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five days a week. Most times may go six. You know,
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I'm not going seven days a week, but I want to provide a very
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common sense Orthodox Catholic worldview. You know, our world society, our culture
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is an absolute chaos. I mean, it's spinning out of control. Like
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really we haven't seen in a very long time in America. I mean,
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financially economically, we're seeing numbers like the Great Depression, not like the Recession
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of the seventies. Not like the recession of the Nities, like the Great
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Depression. And we've just gotten out of COVID lockdowns and empty store shelves.
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We're on the verge of perhaps a war with Russian and China. Bad stuff,
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crazy stuff. We got this whole transgender thing and a society that's just
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absolutely opposed to Christianity, absolutely opposed to orthodox Catholic belief I want to provide
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for my listeners a place where you can understand that there are some of us
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out here that still believe, that still believe in what the Church teaches,
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that still believe in the Catechism, that still believe in the Bible, that
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still have a worldview solidly based in Catholicism and Christian doctrine that has been this
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essentially unchanging. Of course, there's been certain developments and deeper understandings of doctrine,
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but the fundamentals have been unchanged for two thousand years. We're still here
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and it's probably a lot of us. And you know, I'm going to
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get into politics. I'm gonna tell you exactly what I think, and trust
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me, I can be very blunt, very I'm not gonna pull punches.
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I'm not gonna be politically correct. I'm going to talk about culture. I'm
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going to talk about social issues. I'm going to talking about problems in the
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church and you know, Catholic education and especially Catholic charities. I got some
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serious problems with what Catholic charities is doing on the border. They seem to
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be facilitating human trafficking as opposed to caring for immigrants. So you know,
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that's an issue we're going to get into and I'm going to hit it very
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hard, very hard, but we're going to have on it's lighthearted. You
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know. Eventually I'll get a little theme music to go with the show.
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On my other podcast by Herb Southern Appolich Nerves Podcasts, I play a couple
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pieces on the guitars and intro in or out. I'd like to do that
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for this too, But as I said, I am a wood carver and
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I slice the tip of my finger open last night. So that's going to
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take a couple of days. But I'm going to have some really good interviews.
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We're going to have interviews with Catholic writers and speakers and teachers and priests
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and you know, the thought leaders, political people to some extent, I'm
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going to keep you kind of updated on the issues of the day. I
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collect a lot of information from all over the place, and I'm gonna help
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you. Have hope. That's the goal. This isn't a sky's falling chicken,
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little freak out kind of thing. We know how the story ends.
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Those who endure to the end will be saved. So I hope you'll join
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me in this. Uh it's probably gonna be a little bumpy at the start,
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but we'll get it going. And uh yeah, I mean this is
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this is our family. Let's have a family discussion and try to try to
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work things out and try to give each other some encouragement. So y'all,
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I'll talk to you next time. Enjoy this beautiful mayweather, and it's the
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month dedicated to the Mother of God. And you know our Mother loves flowers,
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So go out and as Saint Paul said, look at those things that
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are beautiful and really just enjoy, uh the incredible gifts that God gives us.
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And let's we'll get into the we'll get into the tough topics. We'll
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get into the tough topics, but we're gonna keep our eyes focused on God.
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So have a good with go,