Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Council of Trend Podcast.

I'm your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker, Trent Horn.

It's easy to get discouraged in the time that we live with social media, with 24-hour, cable news networks.

There's always just seems to be a lot of bad news in the air, bad news in the times that we live.

Bad news related to the church itself. You hear some kind of a scandal breaking.

It can be discouraging. I don't know if you're like me, but sometimes if there's a person or brand or celebrity that I really enjoy,

whenever I see that they're trending on Twitter, I'm always like, please be dead and not be a scandal.

Please be dead and not be a scandal. That's a sad thing for me to say.

I know people that I've enjoyed actually, it was sad, the comedian John Christ for example.

He's a Christian comedian that I've really enjoyed listening to.

And then just a few months ago, I saw his name. He was trending number one on Twitter.

And I'm just thinking to myself, oh no, I'm sure it's a scandal.

Maybe he died in some horrible accident. We can just mourn him and the good and wholesome life he led.

And it turned out to be a sex scandal that he was involved in.

And he's a comedian I used to enjoy. And so that's just one example for me, but it always seems like you see,

oh, guess what? The Catholic Church is in the news. It's never like, oh yay.

What is it that I can rejoice in? It's always like, oh great. What is it now?

And that's not good for our spiritual lives because we're tempted to take those feelings and to become jaded,

to become cynical, and to give up on the one thing that God is calling us to be.

And that is saints. And if you think about it, the saints throughout history have had a lot tougher times than we have,

living under the sword, living under persecution, living under natural evils that we can't even fathom,

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