Young Catholics of today want orthodoxy

In Search of Christendom – The Chartres Pilgrimage

The next documentary in the Christendom Project series of films for EWTN will be on the Chartres pilgrimage. We are calling it In Search of Christendom because it is clear that the thousands upon thousands of young people who make this pilgrimage every year are looking for the orthodox Catholic faith.

It was filmed in 2013 as a starting point for the Crusades docudrama which has just last month been screened by EWTN for the English speaking world; I believe that The Crusades English version may be repeated after Christmas. I wanted to start the Crusades filming during the Chartres pilgrimage for several reasons, to make the link between pilgrimage and the Crusades. Because it takes place in the heartlands of France where many of the Crusaders came from, it gave us some great visuals of pilgrims singing, banners flying and the great cathedrals of Notre Dame de Paris and of Notre Dame de Chartres; also, we had the opportunity to film the Traditional Latin Masses in these great Cathedrals.

High Mass with bishop of Chartres

In Search of Christendom is really a spin-off documentary from the Crusades but I always hoped that I could find the funds to put this into post-production. In the end it was St Clare Media – the British agents for EWTN - and EWTN themselves who found the funds.



Scouts carry a statue of Our Lady through Paris

What has taken so long in getting The Crusades and indeed In Search of Christendom finished is that we wanted to push the production values as close to those of the main stream media as possible, and even better them if we could. This is a very difficult task with limited funds and resources. Even now, because the team are making the Spanish, German and Slovak versions of The Crusades they can’t get onto the Chartres pilgrimage and finish it. Hopefully we will do so this week. I also need to finish some of the graphics. In addition, my next docudrama on The Inquisition is in pre-production – the spirit is willing but the time is short.



Young nuns join the congregation after large outdoor Mass to sing the hymn
Chez Nous, Soyez Reine

This is not just a documentary on the Chartres Pilgrimage itself but probes issues like why young people are rejecting modern secular values, why they crave orthodox Christian morality. As Jamie Bogle (President of the International Una Voce Federation) put it when I interviewed him: “the secular experiment is lost on these young people”. The leader of the USA chapter Michael J. Matt said in his interview “...I really believe what they see here is what they can’t find on MTV; it is something they can’t find in their computer games.” And Herve Rolland, chairman of IBM Europe and the Vice President of the pilgrimage, said: “young people realise that unlike their parents … we’ve been too extreme, we’ve been too far away. New laws – at the moment in France we are fighting the same sex marriage legislation which is against natural law and means nothing.” During interviews with young people themselves it became clear that their longing for authentic Catholic values was even stronger than I had expected, and they were not afraid to speak out.  Ashley Cloves, a young member of Human Life International, gave a very clear testimony on why young Catholics appreciate what orthodox Catholicism teaches, and that pro-Life and pro-traditional family values are paramount to their faith. The crew started questioning me on what have abortion and traditional family values got to do with the Crusades and the Chartres pilgrimage, – well I believe in some ways everything!

I also interviewed a young Chaldean Catholic whose family had to flee Iraq. They now live in France and he is a student. He was sad that such pilgrimages would be impossible in Iraq, for his country is now being ethnically cleansed of Christians. However, it may surprise some people that his chapter also included many Muslim converts to the Catholic faith – it’s the beauty and the truth that attracts.

If I have one prayer for this documentary it would be that once the documentary is released on DVD, orthodox and traditional Catholics should buy it and send it to the Pope and the Synod Fathers on the Family, and to anyone who believes that young Catholics want change. For young Catholics want authentic Catholic teachings on the faith and morality.

Many Thanks

Many Thanks to all who helped make and promote

EWTN’s Crusades docudrama

Templars filmed at Kenilworth Castle

I am very grateful to all who helped promote the Crusades docudrama which was screened earlier this month. It appears to have been a great success so we are relieved and particularly pleased with the very positive comments EWTN have received and also the great reviews by academics. I have now been given several new docudramas to script and produce in the next few years, so the team are going to be very busy with projects on Church history, some of which will be to dispel the ‘Black Legends’  that have been created by the post Protestant and secular world.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Professors Jonathan Riley-Smith, Thomas F Madden, Jonathan Phillips, and Damian Smith for their time and for sharing their knowledge with us. EWTN’s The Crusades was designed in some small way to set the record straight, so I heartily recommend the books, written by these historians, to those who wish to study the crusades further. The aim of the series was to dispel the myths about the crusades; I think we may have stimulated a new debate on the crusades, that they were in fact very necessary, for without them the history of Europe could have been very different and dreadful.

During the last month I have been travelling a lot, to Slovakia and to Fatima and also to EWTN in the USA where I appeared with Professor Madden to promote The Crusades. Please click here to see Fr Mitch Pacwa interview Prof Madden and myself.

 

Professor Jonathan Phillips

I would like to say a special thank you to Professor Philips for being our historical consultant. Professor Phillips is head of Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Also to Fr Thomas Crean OP who gave the theological background to the Crusades, to Fr Fergus Clark OFM of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and to Jamie Bogle President of the Une Voce federation for their splendid contributions. I would also like to thank the production team both at Lux communications in Slovakia and the executive producers at EWTN in States, and especially to thank St Clare Media and Buckfast Abbey in the UK.

The latest project which is in post production now is called In Search of Christendom – The Chartres Pilgrimage, for which we were honoured to conduct many interesting interviews especially by Jamie Bogle and by Michael J Matt. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Matt for his help in promoting EWTN’s The Crusades.

Our next project will be on the Inquisitions. We are pleased to announce that the historical adviser on this project will be Professor Damian Smith - who also took part in The Crusades docudrama - for his special knowledge on the Reconquista of Spain and Portugal. Professor Smith is a world authority on the Inquisition in Spain and has also written extensively on the other Inquisitions.

 

Professor Damian Smith

Please keep ‘tuned’ to this blog for news on the Christendom Project series of docudramas.



The Crusades - some reviews

EWTN’s The Crusades being well received

I must admit I am relieved that the Crusades docudrama is being so well received. It is the result of 18 months work so many thanks to all who worked on it both in the USA and in Europe.

Here is a link to a review from an academic

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3423/two_thumbs_up_for_ewtns_the_crusades.aspx

And on EWTN’s Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ewtnonline



God bless the Family, EWTN, and the Crusades

The Crusades Preview

The Crusader States

Episode Two of EWTN’s The Crusades

Filmed on location across Europe and the Holy Land the second part of the new EWTN Crusades docudrama is broadcast on the 9^th October at 10pm in the USA. It will be broadcast in the UK and Ireland on Saturday 11 in the evening when all four episodes will run consecutively from 7pm until 9pm.

After the miraculous success of the First Crusade, the Crusader hierarchy set up the Crusader States. One of the major achievements of the crusaders was that they successfully administered to an amazingly polyglot society containing Sunni Muslims, Shi’a Muslims, Jews, all sorts of Eastern Christians and Latins.

Professor Phillips says that there is no sense of ethnic cleansing here as the Crusaders treated all the peoples of their lands well.




Templars filmed at Kenilworth Castle

  

Local bandits and Muslim raiders crossing into Christians lands continued to attack and rob pilgrims. This led to the formation of the Military Orders the most famous of which were the Knights Templars. These were fighting monks who took the usual vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. They were dedicated to protecting the Holy Land and pilgrims.

Catholic Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith of Cambridge University,

the father of modern Crusader scholarship

and a specialist on the Military Orders

Also in this episode we have several mini-dramatised sequences such as Queen Melisende of Jerusalem and how she managed to rule alone after her husband was killed until her son became old enough to rule.

Queen Melisende of Jerusalem - a still from the series

We follow the second Crusade from Europe to the Holy Land, and we look at often neglected aspect of crusading the Reconquista of Iberian peninsula. 



Fr Thomas Crean gives the theological background to the Crusades

filmed here at the Dominican priory in Vienna.

Fr Crean’s book God is no Delusion is a must for anyone who

what’s to oppose Prof Dawkins nonsense



There were many providential experiences and happenings we experienced while filming the Crusades one was the meeting at Santiago de Compostela with a hermit friend of the cameraman Michal Benko so after filming around the Cathedral we jumped in the car and went to the Finisterre Coast to film him playing St James the Great, Apostle. Who appeared many times during the Reconquista to help the Crusades drive the Muslims out of Spain.

   

The help of the Spanish Crusaders, the Apostle St James the Great,

filmed here at Cape Finisterre



We finish episode two with the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, but that was not all there was to it.



Saladin - a still from episode two



Journeys of Faith

Let the truth be victorious

The Crusades, a new docudrama from EWTN

Episode one of the new EWTN mini-series, The Crusades will be broadcast on 8^th October in the USA at 10pm and 9^th October at 9.30pm in the UK, the following 3 episodes will be shown on consecutive days at the same time slot. There will also be a continuous showing of all 4 episodes on Saturday 11^th starting at 7pm in the Britain and Ireland.



The Camraman's father Julus Benko playing a Crusader,
from the opening sequence



The series is a co-production between EWTN, St Clare Media Foundation of the UK, Buckfast Abbey Devon and Lux communication of Slovakia. The team form Lux provided all the technical facilities for the series including the filming, editing, sound recording mixing. I am very grateful to the director Marek Polacek and to Michal Benko the cameraman/editor for all their hard work and for putting up with this grumpy old Traditionalist, as they call me: -). We all had to take on many disciplines in order to bring in a production that we were determined would be as good, quality wise as a documentary for the main stream media that would cost four or five times as much to make. The series has already been translated into Slovak, Spanish and German.

A scene from the series - shot at Kenilworth Castle England

Episode One – Journeys of Faith

The link here is made between pilgrimages and the Crusades, as the first Crusades were called armed pilgrimages, to help with this there are many clips from the Paris - Chartres pilgrimage, for which we spent three days filming last year. A separate documentary on the Chartres pilgrimage will follow later in the year.

A pilgrim preparing food from episode one

Journeys of Faith



Pilgrimages have always played an important part in the devotional and penitential life of Christians. From the time of Christ, the most important pilgrimage sites were in the Holy Land and in particular - Jerusalem. So we were awe inspired to film in the Holy Sepulcher. And after delicate negotiations with the Armenian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox churches (the Catholics were always very helpful of course) we had the privilege to film at the very sites of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial and resurrection. We conducted a very interesting interview with Fr Clark the rector of the Basilica for the Latin Rite.



The Chartres Pilgrimage



We look at the rise of Islam and how Muslims conquered the Christian lands of the Palestine, North Africa, even Iberia and at one point threatened France. In 1095 Christendom finally made a stand when Pope Urban II instigated the First Crusade after the Byzantine Emperor called for help to regain his lost lands, and to make the Holy Land safe again for pilgrims. There are some points here that main stream media fail to mention.

Professor Thomas F Madden being interviewed in Istanbul (Constantinople)

overlooking the Bosporus



Muslim conquests to 732 the once Christian lands are in dark green

The first episode, Journeys of Faith like the other three episodes in the series, contains drama sequences and re-enactments to better depict the crusading era. Also with the help of some of the world’s leading crusades historians such as Professors Jonathan Riley-Smith, Thomas Madden, Jonathan Phillips, and Damian Smith we were able to dispel the myths of the Crusades. The theological background is given by Fr Thomas Crean OP, also in episode one we have James Bogle who discuses the reasons for the original call to crusade.

Hagia Sophia

The Blue Mosque - a copy of Hagia Sophia?

I am very grateful to EWTN for allowing us to make what is really quite an expansive docudrama, we not only shot in 7 countries across Europe and the Holy Land, we also filmed two crusader re-enactor groups one at Kenilworth castle in England, the other was a Slovak crusader group who we filmed in Central Europe. Throughout the series there are drama sequences about 15 in total, in later episodes we have St Louis IX that great crusader king and St Francis meeting the sultan Al-Kamil and many other scenes to help tell the story.

On the 8^th October (9^th UK) before the first episode is shown myself and Professor Thomas Madden will be on Fr Mitch Pacwas EWTN Live programme to discuss the series and why and how we made it.





Music for the Crusades

The Soundtrack for EWTN’s new Crusades documentary and its recording

The soundtrack for the new EWTN documentary on the Crusades in an entirely new recording and the tracks are original pieces of music specifically composed for this documentary. Some traditional hymns and Gregorian Chants have been given new musical arrangements, using the traditional Latin texts of course. The director Marek Polacek, the cameraman/editor Michal Benko and myself all believe that the soundtrack makes up at least 20% of the impact of a documentary. So it was very important to get this right.

During my visit to TV Lux of Bratislava in October 2013 Marek and I met with conductor Zuzana Buchová Holičková, who was also the representative of the composer Mária Jašurdová and the choir Chorus Salvatoris. I can’t read music myself but we had a number of pieces of music and ideas we wanted to get across and had a number of Gregorian chants on a laptop and played them to her. So hoping desperately that I was making sense I gave her a list of pieces including a Latin Mass

 



Chorus Salvatoris recording the soundtrack for The Crusades

 

For the opening theme which has become to be known as Hail Holy Queen of Christendom we wanted a piece of dynamic but at the same time spiritual music. It had to reflect the main field of operation for the Crusades, the Holy Land, and the hot deserts, it also needed to express the spiritual side of the Crusades, of repentance, of pilgrimage, of service and of sacrifice – the themes of this documentary. The Crusaders were fighting for Christendom, Our Lady represents the Church, she is our mother and she nurtures us and the Crusaders in turn wanted to protect her. We wanted a desert type theme with a drum beat with an ethereal female voice to float above it all as the prayer of Christendom, the Hail Holy Queen. Revel’s Bolero was used as a starting point and the Latin prayer/hymn to Our Lady as the text. Of course I didn’t just want a straightforward Bolario and the Salve Regina said over the top that would be silly. But often composers use other pieces of music as launch pads for a new and innovative pieces so perhaps she could do this for us. After all George Lucas of the Star Wars films really wanted the theme tune of 633 squadron for his film and asked the composer John Williams to come up with his own 633 squadron which became the Star Wars theme. We are really pleased with the result, the composer did a suburb job with a wonderful piece of music better than we could have hoped for. The only professional singer in the entire recording, the soprano Hilda Gulyásová was hired to sing the lead part and what a beautiful voice she has too.



Soprano Hilda Gulyazova recording Hail Holy Queen of Christendom

The sound engineer at Lux Miro Šibík is also a composer he has composed a number of wonderful pieces and played and recorded them via a synthesizer and has really achieved some great orchestral effects. Special thanks is also extended to the other sound engineer at Lux Martin Noris for recording my narration, also to Alan Lewis at Glass Studios in England. Our thanks also goes out especially to music director Lukáš Borzík and conductor Zuzana Buchová Holičková and to all the members of the choir the musicians to the soloists. Photos Marek Polacek.





Its not all hard work