·S2 E26
Sharks, Street Gangs, and the Making of a Monk w/ Fr. Augustine Wetta, O.S.B.
Episode Description
Father Augustine Wetta, O.S.B.—Benedictine monk, teacher, surfer, and former professional juggler—joins the show to talk about Georges Bernanos's classic novel Diary of a Country Priest and the new unabridged translation that restores it to its full power.
Along the way he traces his own half-hearted, failure-strewn "yes" to God: riding waves at the beach that inspired Jaws, blessing a Los Angeles street gang at two in the morning, and praying the rosary beside the very protesters he came to disagree with.
What We Talk About:
- How Father Wetta describes his own "yes" to God as a half-hearted, tentative string of failures—and why that puts him in the good company of saints like Moses the Black and John the Baptist
- What surfing and juggling taught him about patience, silence, and learning to laugh at yourself, and how both became unlikely preparation for monastic life
- Why Diary of a Country Priest reads like the opposite of an action movie, delivering small, quiet bursts of grace instead of explosions
- What the new unabridged translation restores: the more Catholic passages cut from the English edition readers have had since 1937
- How the novel speaks to loneliness, distraction, and despair by recovering silence, boredom, and true leisure
Resources Mentioned:
- Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, translated by Michael R. Tobin
- Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux
- Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper
- Paloma&Fig
Chapters:
- 00:00: Welcome and Monk Camp Chaos
- 01:28: A Half-Hearted Yes to the Lord
- 03:51: Surfing, Sharks, and the Contemplative Life of Failure
- 09:37: The Flying Fettuccine Brothers and Learning to Laugh at Yourself
- 13:21: Shut Up, Keep Your Head Down, and Listen
- 16:37: Praying the Rosary at a Black Lives Matter Protest
- 22:10: Fourth of July and Blessing a Gang in LA
- 28:13: Diary of a Country Priest: Quiet Bursts of Grace
- 36:10: The Restored Translation and the Passages You've Never Read
- 39:43: Silence, Boredom, and Leisure in a Distracted Age
- 44:19: Failure, the Atheist, and a Faith Deeper Than Argument
- 55:05: Grumbling, Priesthood, and the Joy of the Eucharist
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios
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