Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

Follow NewsClips channel at Brighteon.com for more updatesSubscribe to Brighteon newsletter to get the latest news and more featured videos: https://support.brighteon.com/Subscribe.html

Providentially, one of the more sobering, numbing, and yet unifying films of recent years was just released during this time of a disturbing rise in antisemitism in America. The movie is about the Holocaust, and specifically about the horror house known as Auschwitz. It’s a film about a priest who brought a glimmer of light into that darkness for Christians and Jews alike, and even for atheists. His name was Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar who today is a saint. The film is Triumph of the Heart. Unlike the outrageously secularized 2024 film about … Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), this saint’s heroic piety is not gutted for the approval of non-believers. Triumph of the Heart is a powerful work, difficult to watch and even more difficult to review. As someone who has long known and written about Fr. Kolbe’s story, I think I can be of assistance in providing crucial, helpful background to those about to see the movie. Maximilian Maria Kolbe was born on January 8, 1894. As a 12-year-old boy, Kolbe received a dramatic image. He had just had a bitter quarrel with his mother, a kind, devout woman who in exasperation asked what would become of him. The boy sought answers in a nearby church, where a heavenly mother — the Blessed Virgin Mary — appeared to him in a mystical vision. “What will become of me?” he asked her. The woman who had watched her only Son accept a crown of thorns before accepting a crown of glory held out two crowns to the boy. “She came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red,” said Kolbe. “She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns.” The white crown meant he would persevere in purity; the red crown meant he would become a martyr. Kolbe said he would accept them both. Shortly thereafter, Kolbe became a Franciscan and entered seminary in Lwów, Poland. He completed his vows in 1914. He went to Rome where he earned doctorates in philosophy and theology from two of the eternal city’s most prestigious Pontifical universities. Kolbe became a pioneer in the movement of Marian entrustment and consecration. In 1917, he organized the so-called “Militia Immaculata.” His militia would fight with prayer and words. Kolbe became very adept in the media technology of the day, harnessing new methods of communication, including the best available printing presses. He created a popular, influential publication called The Knight of the Immaculata, which he used to criticize the Nazi regime threatening the country. Once the Nazis seized Poland, they wasted little time rounding up and imprisoning Kolbe as well as the nation’s millions of Jews. On February 17, 1941, well before even the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Kolbe was sent to a concentration camp. He became Prisoner #16670. He was singled out for special persecution and humiliation. One day near the end of July 1941, one of the captives escaped Auschwitz. In response, the German commander ordered 10 other prisoners to be rounded up and starved to death. This was just one cruel method employed by the Nazis to deter anyone who dared to consider an escape. One of them, a young father named Franciszek Gajowniczek, pleaded, “My wife! My children! I shall never see them again!” Kolbe stepped forward and announced that he was a priest and wanted to die in place of the young father. A priest serves in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. The Germans accepted the priest’s sacrifice of his body and blood — laying down his own life for the life of his friend. Kolbe and the others were dispatched to an underground cell aptly known as Death Block 13. Over the next two weeks, Kolbe said Mass and led the others in prayers and hymns. After two weeks of complete deprivation of food and water, only Kolbe remained alive among the 10. The Nazi guards decided to finally rid themselves of the pesky priest. They brought in a lethal solution of carbolic acid. Bruno Borgowiec was an eyewitness. “Immediately after the S.S. men with the executioner had left I returned to the cell,” he later remembered, “where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.” Kolbe had sealed a covenant he made years earlier as a boy. He donned the red crown of martyrdom the Blessed Mother had offered him. He would now receive a crown of glory, too. Four decades later, on October 10, 1982, Maximilian Maria Kolbe would be sainted by a native son of Poland: Pope John Paul II, the first and only Polish pontiff, and himself a survivor of the Nazi occupation. There for the canonization was Franciszek Gajowniczek, the young father at Auschwitz who had been given a long extension of life by Kolbe, the so-called “Saint of Auschwitz.” That’s the background, which is captured brilliantly but painfully in Triumph of the Heart. Regrettably, one element of my backdrop that isn’t carried through in the movie is Franciszek Gajowniczek’s appearance at Kolbe’s canonization, which I thought would be a beautiful ending, perhaps akin to the close of Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, the filmmakers left that thread out of the ending. They must have felt it was another moving part that would have kept the narrative not as tightly focused. Filmmakers make those hard choices. That aside, viewers are spared nothing from inside that cell block. What they see is very hard to watch. It’s crushingly sad, even amid the spiritually uplifting moments and the promise of life and bliss eternal. The earthly suffering is so brutal that it seems like quite the defeat. But it’s the promise of a better existence beyond our harsh realm that constitutes the triumph of Kolbe and friends at Auschwitz. At the start of the film, when Kolbe offers himself in exchange for the condemned prisoner, the Nazi guard callously shrugs, “Very well, sir. You have proved nothing.” But in fact, he proved everything. He proved that this life is a proving ground for the next. Ultimately, our place and goal is not this world but the next. To be sure, it doesn’t feel that way amid those bitter powers of the present darkness. But we fix our gaze not on the sufferings of this world but our resurrection to the glories of the next. And that was the triumph at Auschwitz. It was captured movingly and repeatedly by the filmmakers as with each prisoner’s earthly expiration they subtly showed the seemingly defeated victim alive again, alighted, the soul ready to ascend to its heavenly destination. The movie was filmed on location in Lodz, Poland. The writer and director is Anthony D’Ambrosio and the company is Sherwood Fellows. It isn’t a cast of big names, but the actors provide impressive performances. The filmmakers are Catholic, and they rightly retain the Catholic-Christian spirituality if not theology that’s the bedrock of the story and of Kolbe’s life and witness. Unlike the outrageously secularized 2024 film about the wonderful Italian-American saint, Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), this saint’s heroic piety is not gutted for the approval of non-believers. (READ MORE from Paul Kengor: Gutting Jesus: Feminist Cabrini, Secular Saint) Catholics will appreciate that Kolbe is kept unapologetically Catholic by the makers of this movie. At the same time, non-Catholics will appreciate and applaud that this film honors their faiths, too. The Jewish characters are kept Jewish. One of the first to perish is a Jewish professor of the Torah who amid the frowns musters a smile and tells Kolbe that he hadn’t thought there was an ounce of good left in the rotten world until he saw the priest offer himself for the other prisoner. “You have chutzpah, my friend!” he tells Kolbe. Near the end of the film, the priest pulverizes a sharp-pointed rock that the Nazi guards had left for the prisoners to slice their wrists and commit suicide. He creates ashes from the rock and makes a Lent-like sign of the cross on the foreheads of each cellmate. When he comes to the remaining Jewish man, the man offers not his head but his hand in a firm shake of faithful solidarity. The filmmakers did not insist on the Catholic priest converting every Jew in that room. They were faithful to the other faiths and the historical truth of what happened. Throughout the film, the prisoners show a healthy respect for one another’s faith and the knowledge that they’re in this pit together, all sides battling the same evil foe. They even find a way to laugh about the situation, with the communist prisoner at one point remarking, “A communist, a Catholic, and a Jew—sounds like the beginning of a joke.” They bond nonetheless. They know that the beast at the door is Nazism, a friend of none of the men, an ally only to the sons of darkness. At one point, the atheist prisoner confesses to Fr. Kolbe that he doesn’t believe in Heaven but he does believe in Hell. Indeed, by the point, how could he not? He was witnessing Hell. Maybe he wasn’t yet sure that God existed, but he sure as Hell was sure that the Devil existed. That much was made clear to all in Death Block 13. The film is ecumenical in the best way. It isn’t a display of some namby-pamby, sappy, silly, kumbaya, spineless ecumenism. And at this moment in America, when Jews and Christians need to come together to once again fight common foes, that’s a timely message and mission. After the film ends, the writer/director appears on camera with an anguished but inspired plea to prayer and to remember Kolbe and his cause. D’Ambrosio also makes a plea for donations to filmmakers like him and others who struggle terribly to get their projects financed. That’s a wish often shared at The American Spectator by writers like our Lou Aguilar and yours truly. At our recent annual gala, I closed my Q&A with filmmaker Robert Orlando with a plea to benefactors big and small to support religious and conservative filmmakers who don’t have the luxury of the Hollywood money machine behind them. (Orlando’s new documentary film on the history of The American Spectator will premiere in Washington, DC on December 4. Please join us and click here to register. To reserve your seat, please RSVP to Morgan Weiner, Development Assistant, at weinerm@spectator.org.) I share that only to underscore that I can relate to D’Ambrosio’s pain. But this review is not about other movies right now. For this moment, go and see or just plain support D’Ambrosio’s film on Maximilian Kolbe. Remarkable works like this deserve your support, especially at this time of badly needed unity among Christians and Jews alike. READ MORE from Paul Kengor: The Mamdani Model: More Socialist Mayors to Come New Yorkers Elect ANOTHER Commie Mayor Hammering a Higher Vision for Higher Education: The College of St. Joseph the Worker    

Christianity has been America’s steadying force for generations. It shaped the calendar, the family, the town square, and the culture. Today, that foundation’s beginning to crack. More Americans than ever are leaving the old denominations and choosing nondenominational churches. For many, the change feels fresh. For pastors trying to keep their congregations alive, it feels necessary. But for conservatives, especially Christians who care about doctrine, continuity, and the protection of the faith, this trend should set off alarm bells. At first glance, nothing seems troubling. A church meets in a gym instead of a sanctuary. A pastor wears jeans instead of vestments. The worship band sounds like a road-trip playlist. Someone quotes Disney before quoting Scripture. The crowd claps in rhythm. The atmosphere is warm and relaxed. People feel welcomed rather than intimidated. They don’t feel judged for missing a creed or misunderstanding a prayer. It’s Christianity dressed for modern life: friendly, familiar, and simple. (RELATED: Church Attendance Is No Longer Optional) For newcomers, this model works. It lowers the barrier to entry. It avoids the heavy formality that can scare away people who never grew up in church. It offers what feels like a clean slate. But beneath the casual style lies something troubling: the loss of the very structures that kept American Christianity strong. The mainline denominations — Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian — were never perfect. But they offered clear teaching, shared beliefs, and a history that stretched back centuries. They taught that faith is not invented by each generation but received, studied, and handed on. (RELATED: Trivializing Religion Left Us Unprepared for Political Islam) With no broader tradition to lean on, the church stands or falls on the pastor alone. Nondenominational churches can’t offer this. They’re built from scratch, shaped by one leader’s vision, and held together by the energy of the moment. There’s no larger framework to guide them when trouble comes. There’s no long memory to anchor them when culture pushes against them. With no broader tradition to lean on, the church stands or falls on the pastor alone. (RELATED: Nicaea’s Echo: The Creed) The numbers show the scale of the shift. In the early 1970s, fewer than 3 percent of Americans identified as nondenominational Christians. Today, nearly 40 million do. Analysts believe they could outnumber Catholics within a generation. That’s not a minor adjustment, but a sweeping realignment. It shapes how Americans pray, how they behave, how they vote, how they teach their children, and how they understand God. A country once united by a few major Christian voices is now listening to thousands of small ones. Why does this appeal to so many people? Because nondenominational churches feel personal. They feel modern. They feel flexible. They don’t ask newcomers to learn ancient prayers or wrestle with the tougher parts of Christian teaching. Hard edges are sanded down. Serious doctrines become soft suggestions. The sermons lean toward inspiration rather than repentance. The tone stays gentle, the expectations stay light, and no one ever feels the weight of being called to change. But Christianity without some form of sacrifice can’t stand. When Scripture becomes selective, it becomes weak. When tradition is forgotten, errors fill the space quickly. When a church loses its anchor, it begins to shape itself according to what people want, not what people need. It becomes faith arranged around comfort. It becomes belief arranged around preference. For conservatives, this presents an even greater challenge. A loose form of Christianity can’t withstand a culture that grows more hostile by the day. One only had to watch how parts of the Left cheered the assassination of Charlie Kirk and hailed Luigi Mangione as a “hero” for killing a man in broad daylight. A weakened faith can’t survive a world that celebrates wickedness. (RELATED: The Age of Spiritual Warfare Is Here. Will You Rise or Fall?) For generations, the old denominations built schools, hospitals, seminaries, and charities. They trained pastors who could answer tough questions and defend the faith. They established communities strong enough to survive political storms. They held the line when society tried to move it. Nondenominational churches often avoid speaking clearly on controversial issues. Topics like abortion and the nature of sin appear rarely. And when they do, they’re handled the way people handle a hot pan: touched for half a second and dropped immediately. The goal is understandable: don’t scare off visitors. But silence has a cost. When the church goes quiet, the culture speaks louder. When pastors hesitate, universities, corporations, and social movements fill the space. And none of them speak with the church’s best interests in mind. There’s also the matter of authority. In a nondenominational church, one leader holds enormous sway. If he’s wise, humble, and steady, the congregation flourishes. If he’s shallow or self-impressed, the church suffers. If he stumbles morally, the entire community can collapse overnight. Americans could fill books with stories of churches that rose and fell on a single personality. And this is where the danger intensifies. Without a broader structure to keep a pastor accountable, a church can drift toward something far darker. Too many of these independent congregations end up orbiting one man’s charisma instead of Christ. At their worst, they start to resemble the cults Americans warn their kids about — tight circles built around a single, unquestioned voice. It doesn’t begin that way, but without guardrails it’s a short slide from “pastor-led” to “pastor-centered.” And from there to a church that no one outside the building can recognize as Christian at all. The older denominations tie believers to a story that began long before them and will continue long after them. They remind Christians that faith isn’t a personal invention but a living inheritance. This is why the early Church wrote creeds. They understood the danger of improvising belief. They saw how quickly people could wander away from truth. They knew that shared teaching protects unity. They knew that a clear foundation protects the future. None of this is an attack on churches that meet in warehouses or pastors who preach in sneakers and baseball caps. God can work anywhere. He often does. But if American Christianity becomes entirely nondenominational — if the long-standing traditions fade without something strong replacing them — the faith will stretch wide but not deep. It will bend in the face of pressure. The rise of the nondenominational church isn’t a crisis. Not yet, anyway. But it’s certainly a warning. A faith shaped only by emotion can’t survive hard times. A church without memory can’t pass down conviction. A Christianity built for comfort may find it has comfort but no compass. And in a culture this disoriented, losing your compass is a sure-fire way to lose your way entirely. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Imagining a Post-Trump America Where Populism Magically Disappears Train Dreams: An Elegy for the Men Who Built America America’s Crime Divide Is Racial, Regional, and Ruthless

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has made repeated missteps when dealing with the issue of immigration. These include misrepresenting the Catholic Church’s teachings on refugees, mitigating the Church’s teachings on national sovereignty, downplaying the responsibilities of immigrants, and lambasting faithful Catholics for upholding national security and cultural identity. The latest example of the USCCB’s pontificating on the subject has drawn strong responses from numerous prominent Catholics, including the Pope himself! “We are punishing individuals…. But they are part of a system that for more than 40 years has been left broken by our leaders.” Earlier this month, America’s bishops issued a “special message” condemning President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, particularly mass deportations. In a press conference last week, the American-born Pope Leo XIV, who has generally avoided commenting directly on Trump’s policies, affirmed the Catholic Church’s teachings on immigration. “No one has said that the United States should have open borders. I think every country has a right to determine who and how and when people enter,” the Pontiff asserted. He did, however, urge that illegal aliens in the U.S. who are seeking a legal pathway to permanent residency ought to be treated with dignity, even in the midst of enforcing immigration law. “If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that — there are courts, there’s a system of justice. I think there are a lot of problems in the system,” he suggested. “I think we have to look for ways of treating people humanely, treating people with the dignity that they have.” Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, also critiqued the USCCB’s message, echoing much of what the Pope said. “You may not know it, judging purely from the comments of some people on social media, but the Catholic Church’s views on this are actually quite clear,” Vance noted in an interview with Breitbart News’s Matt Boyle. “It’s that, yes, you must treat immigrants humanely.” “On the other hand, every nation has the right to control its borders. And obviously, how you strike that balance is very important, but there’s a lot of room there to actually control your own borders for the sake of your own people,” Vance continued. “My priority, my charge is to look after the people of the United States of America, and you cannot do that if you’re flooding the country with a ton of illegal immigrants and the drugs and the crime that they bring,” the vice president said, noting that illegal immigration often results in assaults on “dignity, even of the illegal migrants themselves.” He added, “When you empower the cartels and when you empower the human traffickers, whether in the United States or anywhere else, you’re empowering the very worst people in the world.” Another Trump administration official, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) principal deputy assistant secretary for communications Nathaniel Madden, also offered a Catholic defense of the administration’s immigration policy. “We are upholding federal law that’s been in place for 60 years,” Madden told Catholic News Agency. “We are upholding federal laws that were justly and duly passed by the United States Congress, by the American people … and none of those laws are unjust,” he said, pointing to St. Augustine’s City of God, in which the Doctor of the Church clarifies that immigrants have a moral responsibility to respect and adhere to their host nation’s laws, while lawmakers and magistrates likewise have a moral duty to enforce just laws. “We have to take into account that laws were broken,” Madden said, addressing illegal immigration. He said that St. Augustine clarifies a “key distinction” in how to demonstrate charity “when you’re talking about people who have knowingly broken laws to get somewhere,” which is “a much different situation than dealing with the blameless poor who are citizens of the same country.” “This administration cares deeply about the intrinsic human dignity of everybody it comes in contact with,” Madden said. “Whether you are a citizen, whether you are somebody in our custody who is being removed from the country, you have that dignity … [and] that worth just simply by being made in the image of God and this administration respects and upholds that.” As an example of this, he pointed to the administration’s “incredibly humane” encouragement that illegal aliens “self-deport,” noting that the administration has offered self-deportees a small stipend and a legal pathway to return to the U.S. once complying with federal law, while immigration authorities focus on arresting and deporting “severe criminals,” illegal aliens convicted of murder, rape, human trafficking, child sexual abuse, terrorism, and other serious offenses. Conversely, Mexican-born Archbishop José Gómez, who has served as the archbishop of both Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas, both major immigration hubs, offered a more nuanced defense of his brother bishops’ “special message,” rightly noting that mass immigration is an issue of great concern for Americans and threatens to fundamentally reshape American culture, economy, and life. “Immigration has become the defining issue of our times,” the archbishop wrote. “The election results [in 2024] were more than a reaction to the previous administration’s loose border enforcement policies. They also reflect growing anxiety and fears about how the global economy is reshaping local economies and communities,” Gómez continued. “Many of our neighbors see immigrants as threats to their livelihoods. They are worried about crime, if there will be enough jobs, if our education and welfare systems can handle more people, and if our country will be able to integrate so many who are coming from different cultures.” While he characterized the president’s mass deportation program as “disturbing,” Gómez also warned that such a drastic measure may seem like a necessity due to decades of increasingly liberal immigration law and lax enforcement policies. “We are punishing individuals; and it is true, they have responsibility for their actions. But they are part of a system that for more than 40 years has been left broken by our leaders,” the archbishop rightly noted. “Many who are here illegally came with the implied understanding that the authorities would look the other way because businesses needed their labor. Politicians, business leaders, and activist groups have long exploited this issue for their own advantage. That is why the problem persists.” READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Bishops Blast Trump on Immigration, but Not Biden on Abortion US Priests Remain Conservative but Diverge From Trump J.D. Vance Proclaims Christ as ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life’