Blogs
Featured Image

February 12, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — I’ve been trying to get my friend (and well-known pro-life warrior) Jason Jones on my podcast for the longest time. Well, it finally happened. Today, he made an appearance and he did not disappoint. 

It’s always a pleasure when I get to catch up with Jason. He’s so busy making amazing films like Bella, Crescendo, and Divided Hearts of America, that it’s difficult to pin him down.

Jason has a rather unique story to tell and it’s one some of you may be familiar with already. When he was younger, Jason was adamantly anti-Catholic. At one point, he embraced the philosophies of atheist Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. Although he was convinced that the pro-life stance was the correct one, he resisted the teachings of Jesus Christ. 

“When I graduated college … my goals were to end abortion and develop Ayn Rand's anthropology, metaphysics, and victimology and to destroy the Catholic Church,” he said.

We talked about how he eventually converted to Catholicism thanks to G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and the Church’s teachings on the dignity of the human person.

What I found most interesting during our discussion was not so much his past, even though it is a miraculous story, but what he had to say about the present day in his duty as a parent. 

“There are two big obstacles that our children are going to face,” he said. “First of all, if our children are drifting from the faith, especially as they get older, as you mentioned, there's the spirit of the age.”

“It’s so important that we impress upon our children the importance of remaining in a state of grace, frequenting the sacraments, especially confession, sacramentals, filling our houses with the music of our faith.”

The second obstacle children face today, he continued, is scandal.

“The greatest scandal to my children could be me,” he explained. “I think the first thing me and my wife want our children to see is that that we serve and love and honor the vulnerable and, in doing so, that we show that we will not conform to the spirit of the age.”

Jason advised parents to “not allow the world to puncture the moral imagination of our children …. our children's moral imagination should not be invaded at every minute with discussion about politics and that the tragedy of the of bishops openly dissenting from the teachings of the faith.”

“We cannot let the hatred and the division and the calumny and the gaslighting and the insanity that's that we're all having to deal with as adults” invade our children’s lives, he added. “Let's shelter our children from that, ground them into transcendent truths, fill our life with the sacraments, the beauty of the faith, bring them to the sacraments, be the same person inside the house, outside of the house to the best of our ability.”

Great advice from a great man if you ask me. If you haven’t already, be sure to watch Jason’s latest pro-life movie Divided Hearts of AmericaWe need good and positive things to watch now more than ever. May God bless you.

The John-Henry Westen Show is available by video on the show’s YouTube channel and right here on my LifeSite blog.

It is also available in audio format on platforms such as SpotifySoundcloud, and ACast. We are awaiting approval for iTunes and Google Play as well. To subscribe to the audio version on various channels, visit the ACast webpage here.

We’ve created a special email list for the show so that we can notify you every week when we post a new episode. Please sign up now by clicking here. You can also subscribe to the YouTube channel, and you’ll be notified by YouTube when there is new content.

You can send me feedback, or ideas for show topics by emailing [email protected].

 

By clicking subscribe, you are agreeing to receive emails about The John-Henry Westen Show and related emails from LifeSiteNews.

Featured Image

John-Henry is the co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of LifeSiteNews.com. He and his wife Dianne have eight children and they live in the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, Canada.

He has spoken at conferences and retreats, and appeared on radio and television throughout the world. John-Henry founded the Rome Life Forum, an annual strategy meeting for life, faith and family leaders worldwide. He is a board member of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family. He is a consultant to Canada’s largest pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition, and serves on the executive of the Ontario branch of the organization. He has run three times for political office in the province of Ontario representing the Family Coalition Party.

John-Henry earned an MA from the University of Toronto in School and Child Clinical Psychology and an Honours BA from York University in Psychology.