Lighthouse CD of the Month

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 02, 2009

Recently I received a note from Lighthouse Catholic Media asking if we would like to carry their ads on a percentage of sale basis. Lighthouse distributes audio CDs containing talks on various aspects of faith and spirituality. We checked them out and found that their selection of speakers reads like a who’s who of authentic Catholicism.

You’ll see the Lighthouse Catholic Media ads in the advertising rotation on our various pages, featuring their CD of the Month Club. The prices are utterly amazing, as low as $1.20 per CD. Now, let’s see, our percentage of essentially nothing is . . . sigh, well, never mind. The point is that Lighthouse will give you a great deal to listen to while commuting or at any other time you can pop a CD into a player.

We do vet our advertisers, affiliates, partners, and so on. We want to make sure that everything on our site, including advertisements, represents the Catholic Faith with complete fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church. There are so many vendors and web sites that compromise by publishing dubious materials under the Catholic name. The first two questions we seek to answer about any potential advertiser are these: (1) Is their material faithful to the teachings of the Church? and (2) Does their material include Catholic truths that are currently unpopular?

One of the great failings of secularized or Modernist Catholic enterprises—whether schools, or hospitals, or merchandisers, or publishers or web sites—is that even when they don’t directly contradict Church teaching, they emphasize only what the world wants to hear, removing the distinctive counter-cultural Catholic note. So you end up with what is comfortable, what doesn’t promote spiritual growth, and what causes us to slide into the mediocrity of the surrounding culture. As sure as night follows day, this sort of tepid Catholicism allows people to fall into grave spiritual and moral errors, and causes them at length to dissent from those teachings which cut across the grain of their lives.

At CatholicCulture.org, we try not to let that process get started. Instead, we want to move things in the other direction. We want to pose a Catholic challenge, to demand spiritual excellence, to witness to the light in an increasingly dark culture. That includes advertising. Happily, Lighthouse Catholic Media is appropriately named. Its light that can help you steer clear of spiritual shoals and rocks.