This week's David Hahn Show opens with a conversion story few saw coming. Joe Schmid, a Princeton philosophy PhD student best known for his Majesty of Reason YouTube channel, announced on Saturday that he had returned to the Catholic Church after years spent rigorously challenging arguments for God's existence and classical theism. Catholic philosopher Patrick Flynn, who had spent years responding to Schmid's objections, said he was "overjoyed" that the man most often cited to him as a reason not to become Catholic had now become Catholic himself, while fellow debater Caleb Jackson called Schmid "amongst the most well respected and intellectually honest thinkers currently engaged in the God debate." Schmid has said his own investigation into Catholic miracle claims, including those associated with Fatima, Zeitoun and Padre Pio, played a significant role in his decision. His announcement lands alongside wider signs of religious movement on American campuses: a Hallow survey of around 60 colleges and universities found OCIA participation had grown by an average of 115 per cent in the past academic year.
From there the show turns to Pope Leo's weekend visit to San Marino and the Rimini meeting, where he addressed 60,000 pilgrims at the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples. Leo urged the crowd to "free our lives from suspicion, our culture from arrogance, education from ideology, work from the idolatry of profit and technology and finance from the business of death," and told San Marino's civil authorities that the republic's motto, Libertas, points beyond mere political independence toward a freedom rooted in conscience. David uses the visit to draw out the Augustinian distinction between liberum arbitrium, the bare power of choice, and libertas, the fuller freedom of a will ordered toward the good, arguing that the secular West has largely collapsed the two and lost sight of what freedom is actually for.
The show's third segment turns to the trial of Lindsay Clancy, who is accused of strangling her three children, five year old Cora, three year old Dawson and eight month old Callan, in Duxbury, Massachusetts in January 2023. Neither side disputes that Clancy killed her children. The trial instead turns on her mental state, with defence witness Dr Phillip Resnick testifying that she was suffering postpartum psychosis, and prosecution witness Dr Avram Mack arguing she remained criminally responsible. Alongside the courtroom proceedings, a wave of online sympathy has grown for Clancy, including women filming themselves in tears under the caption "Same, Lindsay," even as her husband Patrick, who has never been a suspect, has faced baseless accusations from amateur internet sleuths. David argues the case has become a case study in how social media rewards confident speculation over patient attention to evidence.
Finally, the episode covers the case of Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish physician, longtime member of the Finnish Parliament and former Finnish Minister of the Interior, who was convicted by Finland's Supreme Court in March in a narrow 3-2 ruling over a 2004 booklet on Christian teaching about sexuality, and fined €1,800. That conviction appears to have followed her outside Finland: her UK travel authorisation, granted in June, was cancelled in July, and despite applying for a full visa and writing directly to the Home Secretary, she was ultimately unable to attend a Northern Ireland religious freedom conference in person. Fr Benedict Kiely, one of the conference's organisers, called the decision "scandalous," and Räsänen's lawyers at ADF International have taken her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
What connects all four stories, David argues, is a civilisation increasingly confused about what freedom, truth and conscience actually mean. A brilliant young philosopher had to relearn that reason alone could not settle the question of God, and needed the shock of the miraculous to see past his own scepticism. A pope had to travel to one of the world's smallest republics to remind a continent that liberty divorced from virtue is not liberty at all. A courtroom in Massachusetts has to weigh psychiatric testimony against a public that has already decided the verdict on feeling alone. And a European parliamentarian has discovered that peacefully stating a belief millions held until recently can now cost her the right to cross a border. Each story, in its own way, is about a society that has lost its grip on the difference between what is true and what is merely felt to be true, and about the cost of relearning it.
