You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints.

This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Welcome to Form Now. I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute. And joining me is Paul McCusker, who's our creative director here at the Augustus. For many of our projects and an author. And we're going to talk about Brother Francis, St. Francis of Assisi, because we want to talk about this great, great saint. One of the most,

I think, according to recent polling, the most beloved saints of our Catholic tradition. And,

of course, he's probably one of the best-known saints in our Catholic tradition. And one of the

projects that we had a chance to do together, Paul, is work on the Brother Francis audio drama.

And so Paul headed up and did the script writing for our audio drama that we have here on Brother

Francis. And it was done, if you've never listened to it, we have it unformed.

We use professional actors and actresses. We film it in a studio in England.

And this audio drama, by the way, won best

audio drama in all categories in the Audio Awards in 2018. So that was a remarkable award to win

and beat out Audible and the biggest publishers who were doing audio dramas. This was the best audio drama for 2018.

Quite an award.

And, you know, Paul, you get to work with these actors and actresses,

and you get to see the story come live.

You work, first off, you spend time when we talked a lot about this,

researching about St. Francis.

So getting ready to know the person and and the angle that you want to tell.

And I think one of the ways you tell the story of Francis that I thought was just really unique and creative is

Francis is such a unique figure, but what you do is in each of the chapters of the audio drama, it begins with one of the characters

in the story, not Francis, but a character, like whether it's Francis's father or Francis's brother

or, you know, one of his friends who start talking about Francis and you get them as the

...