Avoiding Babylon
Avoiding Babylon was started during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these difficult and dark days, when most of us were isolated from family, friends, our parishes, and even the Sacraments themselves, this channel was started as a statement of standing against the tyrannical mandates that many of us were living under. Since those early days, this channel has morphed into an amazing community of friends…no…more than friends…Christian brothers and sisters…who have grown in joy and charity.
As we see it, our job here at Avoiding Babylon is to remind ourselves and those who enjoy the channel that being Catholic is a joyful and exciting experience. We seek true Catholic fraternity and eutrapelia with other Catholics who, like us, are doing their best to live out their vocation with the help of God’s Grace. Above all, we try to bring humor and joy to the craziness of this fallen world, for as Hillaire Belloc has famously said:
“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”
Episodes
689 episodes
"Endless Scrolling": Pope Leo's Blunt Warning to Catholics
Joy is not hiding at the bottom of your feed, and Pope Leo says it out loud. We start with his short, direct warning about endless scrolling, pornography culture, promiscuity, superficial relationships, and obsession with image, then pull on th...
"Endless Scrolling": Pope Leo's Blunt Warning to Catholics (Full LOCALS Show)
A two-minute clip from Pope Leo kicks off a much bigger conversation: where do we actually look for joy, and why are so many Catholics being formed more by screens than by silence, prayer, friendship, and real community? We react to his blunt l...
Meat Cleaver Road Rage (LOCALS Only Show)
A “road rage” headline is easy to skim past, until it happens on your block, in front of your job, and the footage lands on your phone. We talk through a brutal Queens attack involving a meat cleaver, what our coworkers actually saw, and why th...
Rerum Novarum LOCALS Show
A Friday meat post shouldn’t turn into a purity test, but online Catholic culture often makes it one. We get into why public callouts feel satisfying yet rarely help, how converts and cradle Catholics talk past each other, and what fraternal co...
Rome Has Spoken: The Pope Who Fought Capitalism AND Communism | Rerum Novarum Part 1
A pope under siege, with no army and no worldly leverage, writes a letter that rattles the rising powers of modern life. Rerum Novarum is Pope Leo XIII’s answer to an age that demanded a choice between two harsh gods: the factory that grinds fa...
The Catholic Case for a Young Earth | Christian Bergsma
The older we make “creation,” the easier it gets to picture God as distant, hands-off, and only occasionally involved. That’s the nerve we keep pressing with our guest Christian as we dig into why Genesis isn’t just a timeline question, but a q...
The Catholic Case for a Young Earth | Christian Bergsma (Full LOCALS Show)
A dinosaur bone with intact hemoglobin proteins should make you stop mid scroll. If the standard story says “millions of years,” what do we do with evidence that looks more like “thousands,” and why do the stakes feel bigger than a science argu...
Shia LaBeouf's Stalker Thinks He's a Clone of Her Dead Husband - And She Found Him!
A state is on fire, we’re cooked from the sun, and somehow that turns into a conversation about stalking, marriage, and what the Catholic internet does to your brain. We’re joined by Alexander Poe, a recent Protestant-to-Catholic convert who st...
Shia LaBeouf's Stalker Thinks He's a Clone of Her Dead Husband - And She Found Him! (Full LOCALS Show)
A viral Shia LaBeouf clip looks like a random celebrity confrontation until the backstory lands and it turns into something darker: stalking, delusion, and the internet’s hunger for the most flattering narrative. We walk through what actually h...
Touch Grass: The Devil Is Using Church Drama to Keep You From Heaven
The Catholic internet can make you feel like you have to pick a team every five minutes and if you refuse, you’re the enemy. We’re tired of that, so we talk honestly about burnout after the SSPX blowups, the pressure to perform certainty online...
Touch Grass: The Devil Is Using Church Drama to Keep You From Heaven (Full LOCALS Show)
The Catholic internet is in full civil war mode, and we’re tired. We start by naming the burnout and then get honest about what happens when the arguments stop being theoretical. A funeral turns into “Novus Ordo roulette,” Communion gets mishan...
SSPX Fallout and Catholic Infighting w/ Michael Hichborn (Full LOCALS Show)
One decision lit the fuse across Tradland: SSPX consecrations, a papal command to stop, and the cascading arguments about excommunication, obedience, and whether “resistance” can stay Catholic. With Rob away, we sit down with Michael Hitchbourn...
SSPX Fallout and Catholic Infighting w/ Michael Hichborn
A single decision in Rome can light a fuse across the Catholic world, and that’s exactly what happens when the SSPX consecrations collide with papal warnings and a decree of excommunication. With Rob away at a family funeral, we take a hard loo...
SSPX Drama Continues: Sede Inc. Comes After Avoiding Babylon
A single letter from Rome can change the whole temperature of the Catholic internet, and this one hits like a brick: Pope Leo pleads with the SSPX to “please turn back,” warns of a “schismatic act,” and points to the seamless garment of Christ....
SSPX Drama Continues: Sede Inc.Comes After Avoiding Babylon (Full LOCALS Show)
A pope pleads with the SSPX to “please turn back” and warns that a coming consecration would be a “schismatic act” with serious consequences for the faithful. We read Pope Leo’s letter line by line, then read Fr. Pagliarani’s reply, and you can...
Catholics Lose Their Minds Over the SSPX Consecrations (Full LOCALS Show)
Catholics Lose Their Minds Over the SSPX Consecrations
The SSPX consecrations story isn’t just about bishops and Rome. It’s a stress test for the whole traditional Catholic world, and the reaction tells you more than the headline ever could. We talk through why people who never attend an SSPX chape...
Michael Knowles Just Betrayed Catholic Teaching on Israel
“Can we please be normal?” That’s the line we start from, because the Israel conversation rarely stays normal for long. We take a careful look at Michael Knowles’ comments and the broader conservative Catholic media instinct to treat the modern...
Michael Knowles Just Betrayed Catholic Teaching on Israel (Full LOCALS Show)
Somebody says “Just be normal about Israel,” and suddenly a huge question hides in plain sight: is this really only about foreign policy, or does it touch theology, biblical interpretation, and Catholic tradition in ways most people never exami...
Nancy Charles: I Escaped the LGBT Lifestyle to Live a Chaste Catholic Life
She was alone, spiraling, and ready to end her life. Then a single thought cut through everything: “What if the pain doesn’t end here?” That question didn’t just stop Nancy, it started a chain of events she still can’t explain away: five days o...
Rome Has Spoken: The Most Contested Encyclical in the Modern Church | Immortale Dei
You’ve probably heard the Saint Michael Prayer. The part most people miss is that its origin story is bound up with a Pope who believed the Church was facing more than bad politics, and he answered with something sharper than commentary: Immort...
Rome Has Spoken: The Most Contested Encyclical in the Modern Church | Immortale Dei (Full LOCALS Show)
If you’ve ever assumed “separation of church and state” is the safest way to keep the peace, Pope Leo XIII has a blunt counterargument: a state that acts like God is irrelevant eventually rewrites everything that holds a society together. We wa...
This can't continue... | Karmelo Anthony, Henry Nowak, and Belfast
Something feels different lately: the same news cycle, the same platforms, but a heavier sense of pressure, anger, and exhaustion. We start with a last-minute scramble when Rob can’t make it, and Mike Pantile jumps in on short notice, then we g...
This can't continue... | Karmelo Anthony, Henry Nowak, and Belfast
Everything feels louder, harsher, and more exhausting than it used to and we can’t ignore that mood anymore. With Rob sidelined by last-minute car trouble, Mike Pantile jumps in and we go straight at the question behind so many late-night doom ...
Rome Has Spoken: When the Pope Declared War on Secret Societies | Humanum Genus
For 146 years, pope after pope warns Catholics about a secret society and almost nobody listens. So Leo XIII does something different: he frames the whole problem as a war between two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, and then names ...