Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 02/15/23

Finding the funny in faith. The Catholic Church traditionally holds that those pesky seven deadly sins of vanity, greed, lust, envy, anger and sloth can be counteracted by the seven virtues of humility, charity, chastity, gratitude, temperance, patience and diligence. I’m certainly no Catholic theologian but, if you ask me, chastity and temperance could be rolled into a single virtue of self-control and the seventh virtue might just be humor. Produced by Family Theater Productions in Hollywood, Catholic Central  is a video series that explores the serious aspects of Church doctrine, culture and history with humor. Family Theater Productions National Director Father David Guffey co-created and co-executive produces the show.

JWK: Tell me about Catholic Central. How often are new episodes produced and what do you hope the show accomplishes?

Father David Guffey: Catholic Central is a series that Family Theater Productions developed to reach out to young people who have questions about their faith. Each episode – which is four to seven minutes long – is written in a style that’s really hospitable in that, if we use any religious words or theological jargon, we try to explain it. We try to make it entertaining and clever. We’ve got great animation. I hire entertainment writers to work with the theologians to write the episodes. Right now we’re releasing about every other week a new episode for Catholic Central. We produced for a while and then we took a hiatus. Now, we’re back to the point where we’re releasing one about every other week, putting it out there and hoping that when people have questions they can get their answers at Catholic Central.

JWK: You utilize humor frequently in these videos.

DG: We try to. We’ve found through studies of all kinds of different ways of preaching and teaching that when a message is delivered in an entertaining or a humorous way, first of all, people listen and they continue watching. The other thing is they retain the information better. As a preacher, I know if I give a homily that has a story that has some humor in it that people will not only remember the story that I tell but they’ll also remember the theme of the homily better. I really think that’s true with Catholic Central too. Some of the humor is through animation and through the graphics. Some of it is through the text itself. Our hosts are really great at improv. They play a lot of different characters on the show. We try to make it so that it’s entertaining for our audience.

JWK: What do you consider to be your target audience in terms of age?

DG: When we first developed the series we really aimed for middle school through high school but, as the series is going on, we’re finding our audience is skewing really high school and even into the mid-twenties. A couple of things about that. One is, you know, there are a lot of people out there who start to have questions about their faith and where do young people go for answers to things? They go to the internet – and lot of people go to YouTube (where episodes of Catholic Central are posted) as their kind of first place to go to find out about something. So, we’re getting a lot of people in the eighteen to thirty group. We’re also finding that people are using (the videos) for adult ed, especially for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults which is the process by which someone becomes Catholic as an adult. So, a lot of RCIA groups or adult formation groups are using these as a discussion starter and then they go deeper with it in their lessons and their discussions.

JWK: Do you think people are surprised by the tone? I mean you don’t always associate the Catholic Church with humor?

DG: (laughs) I think some are…I have to give a lot of the credit to David Impastato. David is a grandfather and a father. He works in religious education and has for a lot of years. So, we were looking for a way to do a teaching series. His idea was to add the humor to it. Some people have been surprised but, as people looked at it – especially people in the Church – we had an incredible response. In fact, this is listed as one of the official resources for several diocese in the country, including New York and Los Angeles. Both have it on their list of sort of approved sources for faith formation and catechesis.

JWK: So, you and David co-created and co-executive produce the show.

DG: Then we have a dynamite group of young people that work on the production team. The current director-producer is an incredible young woman named Susana Dueñas. She’s (also) a writer (on the show). Before her was a young woman of great faith and great talent, Mary Ashley Burton. Then we have other young people that are involved on the production team in other roles. It’s just been great to work with different ages and different people to put the show together.

JWK: And you’ve been getting good feedback?

DG: We’ve been getting great feedback. We pay a lot of attention to the comments. With this kind of content, you’re always going to get some comments that are critical or a little nasty – but not too many of those – and we’ve gotten some…great ideas and suggestions. We’ve taken ideas from some of the comments to do additional episodes and to kind of grow the series in particular ways. We’ve had incredible response.

JWK: Do you get any criticism from within the Church?

DG: Every once in a while we get some kind of a glitch where we get a fact wrong or something. Those are pretty rare…The kind of criticism we get is more anti-Catholic stuff or anti-religion stuff more than criticism from within the Catholic Church.

JWK: What else do you have going on at Family Theater Productions?

DG: We’re involved in a variety of media. We have a companion series to Catholic Central that’s in Spanish. It’s called Lente Católico. Same show but different hosts and in Spanish…We’ve got some great things coming. We’ve got a couple of holiday films we hope to get in production this year, a children’s animated series and then some other kinds of family faith-based dramas that are all in the works. We’re excited about what’s coming ahead for Family Theater.

Note: Besides YouTube, you can also watch episodes of Catholic Central at the Catholic Central website.

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.