foreign and yes we are live I'm here with Dr Larry chop how are you doing I'm doing great thanks for having me on yeah well thanks for accepting my invitation I send out a lot of invitations I don't get a lot of people accepting and coming on and sharing their point of view so I'm really excited to talk to you and hear a bit of your story yeah uh first of all where are you geographically if you're allowed to divulge that and uh oh yeah absolutely I live in northeastern Pennsylvania in the United States near Scranton Pennsylvania which is in the northeast of PA we're currently having some rather lousy weather but that's par for the course around here yeah yeah it's been rainy and gray here in Montreal Quebec Canada I don't know if you know that's where I am Oh I thought you were in Australia no my friend my friend is in Australia my friend who sends me uh guests he's like oh you gotta interview this guy he's amazing and uh you were one of those guys so all right well great well yeah you're you're in Canada that's great so we're in the same time zone very good yeah we got the same weather problems so uh I'd like to start we're going to get into your uh current uh work and all the great stuff you're doing I'm really excited about it but first I want to go back to your childhood how are you raised what kind of uh religion were you raised with if any and what are the earliest memories you have like even before you could think for yourself uh before the age of seven like some sort of Impressions about what is God what is religion and all that sort of stuff sure okay yeah I was born in the American the great Prairie in the middle of the country in the state of Nebraska Lincoln Nebraska the capital city and I was raised by two wonderful parents and it was I was born a Catholic baptized to Catholic uh born in 1958 so I'm old I'm 64 years old uh but the reason why I say that is to indicate the time frame in which I grew up which was in the immediate aftermath really of the second Vatican Council but my family was not uh particularly religious it was a typically American Suburban kind of Catholicism some very beige as Bishop Robert Barron calls it very Anodyne very just blah very Bland and I had all the usual sacraments I didn't go to Catholic school because the nuns had beat up my dad when he went to Catholic school so he refused to send me to Catholic school and plus it was expensive my dad was a fireman didn't make a whole lot of money back in those days firemen did not make a lot of money and not that they do now but they made even less then and so very very middle class maybe even the little lower middle class my mom was a stay-at-home mom but like I said it was a very blah kind of Catholicism and I reached a certain age in my teens in which I decided uh that there was no God I was very smitten with science and evolution and the space program and that's that's what moved my needle and I really really was going to get into science but then I started asking deeper questions uh that science couldn't answer and discovered that I actually had a mind oriented towards ultimate things so my interest in science wasn't so much in science as such but in Ultimate questions what is the meaning of life why are we here what it what what's reality all about and I thought at first science answered those questions but when I determined that it didn't then I turned to philosophy and religion at the end I started reading widely and I started reading this dude I'd never heard of before I just found a book in the library by a guy named Cardinal John Henry Newman and started reading his sermons and thought wow there's a little over my head it was like trying to get a drink out of a fire hose for a young boy but I was very moved by it Smitten by it so one thing led to another and I kind of read my way back into Catholicism I was a very intellectually oriented kid very academically oriented and once I read my way back into Catholicism I decided Well now that I'm a Catholic I guess I need to go all the way in so I'm going to become a priest so off the Seminary I went and got degrees in philosophy and theology but decided at the end of my Seminary formation that priesthood was not for me that I was really drawn to the academic side of things and so I I left the Seminary and went on for a doctorate in theology from Fordham University in New York City got my first job at a place called DeSales University near Allentown Pennsylvania and was there 20 years and thoroughly loved it enjoyed it made my career as a theologian you know all the usual stuff Publications giving talks all this but then I decided this is not enough it wasn't challenging enough my life was too comfortable too cozy I didn't feel challenged I felt channelized and so on and so I decided with my wife and a friend of ours John gribowicz was his name former student we opened up the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm Northwest of Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania near Scranton and we've been there 10 years running the Catholic Worker farm and then about three years ago I decided you know what I love the Catholic Worker Farm but I still need an intellectual Outlet so I started this blog got him at space22.com and I just thought that it would I had former students say hey chap you should start a blog you know so we we want to still want to read your stuff so I thought okay my students will read this stuff but uh it's a very very surprisingly to me the blog took off it kind of went semi-viral it's not viral viral that's I don't have millions of followers I'm not that popular but it really kind of took off though and then I added to the blog essays I was writing eventually added these YouTube video interviews kind of like you're doing right now with various theologians and started writing for Catholic World Report National Catholic register wrote a book for Ignatius press which comes out next spring so here I am wow amazing amazing uh how many siblings have you got and do they are they faithful Catholics and your parents still living are they practicing their faith more now my my parents are still living my father's 89 my mom is 86 they are in very poor health now but nevertheless you know they're practicing Catholics uh I had four other siblings unfortunately I did have a sister who died very young in 1972 of she was born with a heart defect and died after unsuccessful surgery uh but I have three living siblings two brothers and a sister and uh two of my two brothers are not practicing Catholics anymore they married Protestant women and decided well we're just going to go Protestant and that's the kind of Catholicism that we were raised with you know it's like well the Catholic church is nice but all religions are kind of the same path to God so once they got married they said well Lutheran's pretty close Presbyterian isn't pretty close so why not let's not rock the marital boat here and I'll become a problem my younger sister is still a Catholic and a practicing Catholic okay okay and uh so are your brothers the Protestant Brothers do they are they on fire for Jesus Christ are they really uh deep into the Protestant thing I to say that they're on fire for Jesus Christ would be uh wrong that would be a you know an exaggeration uh but they're serious Christians okay they are they are serious Christians they take their faith seriously they raise their children in the faith okay and uh not that all their children continue to practice the faith it's the same sad old story that so many parents have had to face these days of children leaving the faith but both of my brothers are very nice men and very very uh moral men good husbands good Fathers and serious Christians okay yeah just good to get a sense of the context the family context where you're coming from and uh did you have any influence because yeah it would seem it would seem that you are the most hardcore Catholic in your immediate family did that rub off or they just think you're a kook or what they don't think I'm it didn't rub off no but and they don't think I'm a kook and you know I'm very close to my siblings and they're just sort of they're proud of me okay oh we always because I was always you know I'm I'm the only uh you can still hear me I can still hear it yeah yeah I can stay here oh okay well I lost the video it said I'm getting a message here but anyway I'll continue uh they they're just sort of proud of me in a sense you know I was interviewed by Bishop Robert Barron on his word on fire show wow they're proud that I'm they're they're they're proud that I am a sort of public figure that I'm known by people so they're just kind of well we always knew Larry would make good in this egg-headed nerd religion stuff uh and but they're good they're my I love my siblings they're good people and they love me but no I didn't really there I didn't really rub off on them no in terms of you know well we'll see we'll see on Judgment Day uh the seeds you planted how they bore fruit uh because God's in church of that right absolutely you're not supposed to say you're not supposed to see all of the uh Glory that you're giving to God until Judgment Day then you're going to get a nice surprise like look you did this little thing and it grew into that and you know absolutely absolutely that's so true and so I don't I don't evangelize my my siblings too much if they raise a religious question I bring up religion and I talk to them about it uh but you know they're all in their 60s uh so they're they're big boys and girl and and so I I don't I don't lean on them I don't lean on them no yeah yeah of course of course um what is the new book that's coming out you want to talk a little bit about that yeah yeah that's called Confessions of a Catholic Worker Our Moment of Christian witness and what it is here hanging you think you're buffering on your end oh whoops he'll be back here he goes here we go okay now I can see you again too okay good someone was probably trying to phone you or or either that or Satan was trying to sabotage our wonderful conversation you know I do a lot of these videos too and I've never had on this particular internet which is very good this problem anyway um what was the question oh the book the new book yeah yeah it's it's a cultural commentary kind of similar to my blog which is where I'm taking the truths of the Catholic faith and I'm and the Catholic Worker mainly Dorothy Day who started the Catholic workerman her writings as well as my dissertation of doctor in my area of scholarly expertise is the Theology of the late Swiss Catholic Theologian Han Source Von Balthazar and so I I take from balthazar's theological insights combine them with Dorothy day and do engage in a kind of cultural critique of of the modern Western culture and where it falls short what Catholicism has to say to that and and how how all of that cultural influences negatively impact acted many aspects of the modern Catholic church and and comment on all of that so it's a con anyway go ahead uh what is uh the impact of americanism the Catholic heresy americanism what it what is the impact uh of that on your analysis of culture in the church it's it's enormous actually uh precisely because I grew up as such a quintessentially Midwestern American young man I do have my finger on the pulse as do many others but I have my finger on the pulse if you will of of a sense of what it means to be an American these days and and and religiously speaking what it means is like it's it runs the gamut from religious indifferentism and there's an increasing number of religious nuns in the United States uh and that has infected even so many Catholics who now approach the faith uh largely as I don't know it's it's maybe a sort of hedging their bets where I'm going to go to church because you know maybe if there is a God I don't want to be called out at the end well and plus a sense that religion having some kind of religion is good for the kids uh and so on but largely it is a crushing crushing kind of religious relativism religious indifferentism that has infected so many Catholics in the United States which is why you're seeing the church in the United States just Hemorrhage Believers especially young believers left and right the churches I like to say it's message these days is just so it so boring it doesn't bite it doesn't doesn't it doesn't grab it doesn't seem existentially real to a lot of people uh and and in my great frustration is that there are too many areas of the Catholic church in the United States that don't seem to recognize the nature of this crisis of what American culture consumer culture religious indifferentism so on what it has done to the Faith Life of millions of Catholics you've got Bishops scratching their heads why are people leaving we need to have a centered on why people are leaving and we need to really get into panic mode here and run all kinds of committees and issue position papers and figure out it's real simple people just don't believe anymore uh it's what I call a de facto atheism that has infected the church uh and we're Cardinal rozzinger Joseph rotzinger Pope Benedict in 1967 already predicted in his little book faith in the future he said in in the future the church is going to be much smaller it's going to be a smaller Holier church as the cultural Catholics eventually just sort of drift away those who are never really deeply profound as you said on fire for Christ those Catholics wrought singers said are simply going to fall away they're going to burn away and what we're going to left with is a small number of what we call these days intentional Catholics Catholics who have who remain in the church because they believe in the church and want to be in the church and I think that's the process of shrinking talking that we are actually seeing now and and I think actually given the cultural realities on the ground I think it's almost inevitable now given the trajectory of things uh that the church is in some sense Beyond recovery as as uh as an institution that's going to have an enormously strong appeal to wide swaths of Americans because I I don't think it's going to you hear people say all the time well the church needs to do this and the church needs to do that and there are things the church can do nevertheless in some ways um there there isn't a whole lot in the church's repertoire of of you know of of ideas that that it can pull out of its bag of tricks and say okay we're going to do this and that's going to be the Magic Bullet that's going to reverse this trajectory no um you know almost always in almost every culture that has ever been religion is Downstream of culture and once the culture shifts in a secularist consumerist agnostic indifferentist Direction most people are not going to be able to swim against that current most people are going to drift with it and God bless them we have to pray for them we have to continue every effort to speak to them but I also don't think we need to change what the church teaches in order to accommodate to them and that seems to me to be the message of say the German synodal Way and others who are waving the white flag and saying well we just need to adopt whatever it is the culture says but the problem with that approach is that it's been tried right protest many prod Mainline Protestant denominations tried that decades and decades a century ago well that's just like chameleon take on the color of the culture and it didn't help them uh it didn't help them at all in fact it accelerated their Decline and so I don't have any hope that that kind of an accommodationist a secularist you know Christian project in the Catholic church is going to work the only thing that's going to work is to double down on the message of the universal Cult of Holiness Christ what it is that Christ brings the sacraments um you know the Saints the mystics we need to double down on that message and just be content with the fact that it's not going to appeal to everyone for sure I was surprised today pleasantly surprised at mass today because I think it's the first time since I converted to Catholicism in 2009 the first time I heard a priest preach about hell the reality of hell and so I was pleasantly surprised he was very very mild mannered wow mention of it but you know he was acknowledging you know the reality of hell and how it's Eternal and you know I was just that gave me some hope for the church like we're oh we're allowed to say that like we're allowed to talk about that we're still allowed to talk about Sin and hell yeah yeah I know uh I mean there was the case a couple weeks ago that priest elderly priest in Ireland I don't know if you read about this he he preached a ceremony sin in hell and you know that sexual sins are still sins and homosexual actions are still a sin uh sex outside of Christian marriage is still a sin and he was actually reprimanded by his Bishop in Ireland for preaching that and his Bishop apologized to the prisoners that were offended funded by that message and I'm scratching my head and well good on the priest because he said I don't care what the bishop says I'm just pre I don't mean to be disobedient to my Bishop but this is insane that I can't simply preach what it is the catechism teaches yeah for sure it's ridiculous it's absolutely ridiculous it is but uh I've got someone in the chat uh called new glove and uh he I think it's a he is asking about resource them all resource theology is that just a Catholic thing or is it in the Protestant and Orthodox circles as well that was basically his question for you oh it's it's as as the designated title for a School of Theology resource malt French word that means back to the sources is pretty much a Catholic theological movement although there are analogous and similar movements within Orthodoxy and protestantism as well in particular among the Orthodox I would say after the fall of Russia to the to the Communists in the both Revolution many Ortho Russian Orthodox intellectuals fled to Paris France and a school of Orthodox theology emerged emerged in Paris guys like berdiah bulgakov floresky uh Alex you know and others uh that began to develop a similar kind of Theology and it's and it was much easier for the Orthodox to do it because what race Source malt really as a Catholic moment was saying is Thomas Aquinas is fantastic he is the preeminent Catholic Theologian of of all times and we have to pay attention to him nevertheless there are other sources for Catholic theology other than Thomas Aquinas and one of those would be the the church fathers and one of those is of course is a deeply renewed appreciation of scripture and so what what characterized in the middle part of the century and that was my guy Han solos on Balthazar as well was a desire to stay with Aquinas but now to embed inquinas in this much richer uh richer soil of the patristics the early church fathers and scriptural renewal and so that's what racehorsement theology is is devoted to is uh retrieving vast areas of the tradition that had kind of gotten lost in 20th century Catholic theology with this exclusive influence emphasis on Thomas Aquinas interesting how would you feel about having an inquisition where and you don't have to be Catholic but if you're going to claim to be Catholic for example if you're going to call yourself a bishop there are certain standards you have to meet and there'd be uh you know chance to be educated and to brush up on what it is to be Catholic and even for the laypeople like if you you don't have to be Catholic but if you if you're calling yourself a Catholic you have to meet the bare minimum uh is that what the Inquisition was uh and would you welcome something like that in today's world with Trudeau Biden Pelosi all these people who are claiming to be Catholic I think we need to clean house no well in a sense yes in a sense no I would never use the word Inquisition simply because of the historical connotations associated with it we call it the Glorious Inquisition the Glorious inquisition of burning Heretics at the stake you know in car incarcerating Heretics I do embrace the second Vatican council's statement in its document dignitati sumane uh that religious freedom is a fundamental right of every human being which is a right which inheres in their fundamental dignity as children of God that faith cannot be coerced that a coerced faith is no faith uh that being said all that being said do I think that the church needs to be stricter with especially its public Catholic figures uh with maintaining Catholic Doctrine and the answer to that is yes I think it's an absolute no-brainer that people like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and other very pro-abortion pro-gay marriage Catholics and Pros transgenderism Catholics should be called on the carpet by their Bishops as you know you've got the Archbishop cordeleone in San Francisco who said Nancy Pelosi should no longer receive communion and of course heaps of condemnation where he'd done you know cordiolins cordellion's head but actually I think he did the right thing now that raises the thorny question though of you know to whom do you apply this I mean make sure that you apply that that discipline uniformly uh not not just on the issue of abortion but on other issues as well um I'm not arguing for moral equivalency here abortion is a terribly important issue so for example let's take President Biden he not only believes in legalized abortion fine okay let's let's just roll with that I guess uh but he promotes it I mean he said in his uh a couple of speeches when Roe v Wade was overturned that if he's you know if the midterm elections go his way one of the first things he's going to do is to introduce legislation to cotavai Roe v Wade is federal law and and so you know that goes beyond simply someone saying well you know I don't you know so many Americans believe abortion should be a right and I don't know if I can impose my Catholic faith on them it goes beyond that he's an advocate for abortion he wants more abortions he's going out of his way to promote abortions and I think that's a different kind of can of worms altogether than simply well we have to tolerate it uh and in that regard because he's a great promoter of abortion I think that he should be disciplined but I don't think the Archbishop Cardinal of Washington DC Wilton Gregory is ever going to do that it's certainly not what Pope Francis seems to want so for better for worse we're stuck with this situation well I like the idea of having like the adult table in the church and the kids table and the kids table is for those who are pro-choice and they're pro-gamers and everything it's just like a little you know basically anglicanism or whatever you know like you got your little it's like okay it's okay Biden you can believe all that stuff but you're you're a small Catholic now or you're uh some sort of put some sort of prefix on this Catholicism and it could still be happy to belong to this social group yeah I agree and you guys in Canada have it much worse actually than we do in the United States much worse uh because there are stronger linkages between uh governmental policy and for example what the what the schools can do they say I mean one of the downsides of that system is the government gets to dictate what the schools teach at least here in the United States because our schools are completely in our private schools are completely independent of the government and we do have a First Amendment that guarantees religious freedom so far the government hasn't come in to sort of impose a certain agenda on our schools but so in Canada you actually have a much problem bigger problem with wokism um and and like Trudeau uh at the helm anyway he just insulted all the nits everywhere yeah well you know it's for example I mean you had that whole Scandal and controversy about the schools and and the indigenous did you dig into that a bit the way that Canadian schools treat them Catholics yeah I mean the fact of the matter is I mean you would probably know the history of that better than I am it seemed to me that that whole issue was just once again used to Gin up hatred of the Catholic Church to to use the Catholic Church as a Whipping Boy when in point of fact the government was just as implicated if not more in the in the oppression of indigenous peoples uh and and then the Catholic schools were in a sense just doing what the government was asking them to do and yet I didn't see a great deal of you know from Trudeau or anybody else in the Canadian government any great self-flagellation any great Maya culpa Maya culpa any sense of oh my God we're just as responsible if not more than the church we're all as a society implicated no no you saw Catholic churches burn to the ground and Trudeau doing absolutely nothing about it and that was just shocking absolutely shocking and disgraceful yeah it's ridiculous but there is there is that thing about the Inquisition back in the day I want to dwell on it but it was a tree it was about all about trees and then the government was involved to prevent trees and that was the basic thing because Catholicism was so dominant in the culture and that those who were undermining the faith were undermining the the the nation and so it was considered trees and I don't want to dwell on this but I did want to point that out it's always intermixed and the same thing with the residential schools and even rabid anti-catholics like my wife she's rabidly anti-catholic because she was raised re-orthodox she's got that cultural hatred of the Catholic church but she even she had to admit that it was blown out of all proportion and that most of these kids died of uh you know tuberculosis and different things like that and that these were tree stumps that were showing up on the Imaging devices the high-tech Imaging devices they were just tree stumps and medication cases and on and on and on and it was blown out of proportion and the government was uh the the buck stopped with the government that they really the blame if there's blame to be handed out they would be first in line yeah you saw a similar sort of uh Witch Hunt against the church in Ireland with those what were they called the laundry schools oops can you hear me can you hear me he'll be back he's married outside you know and and there was a big hoopla about that look at that those it was like these the nuns run these around these schools for women that were pregnant but weren't married young girls all right so they'd give birth and some of their babies died and so they got buried outside apparently but then the claim was made there are thousands of these unmarked Graves and these and it turns out that that's just not true it isn't true okay and yeah there were some Graves their kids babies died because they had to be buried someplace okay and once again it was the government that was asking the Catholic Church to take care of these unwed mothers and so on uh and yet now to this day it's used as yet one more evidence of the Catholic Church's horrible evil from the past that we need to get Beyond so you can't have it both ways so were the Catholics eating the babies or burying the babies because you can't have it both ways yeah yeah and uh you know to go back to the Inquisition yeah even that even though I'm opposed to inquisitions of that kind uh the fact is it's it's become a kind of black Legend you see it all the time from anti-catholic bigot to say what about the Inquisition and when you go back and you study the actual history of the Inquisition and realize it's a far far more complex historical phenomenon than a simple case of the Catholic Church burning hundreds of thousands of witches and Heretics at the stake at willy-nilly simply and often often was the case that it was as you pointed it was the state the government that wanted to execute Heretics and quite often the Catholic Church actually moved in to protect the Heretics from from the government in fact one of the reasons why the church trials Inquisition trials were instigated was in a sense to ameliorate to mitigate somewhat the harshness of of the governmental punishments and and most people that went through Inquisition trials Church trials were found innocent either that or given a slap on the wrist and so now stop doing that now go away and so a lot of that also yes blown way out of proportion way out of proportion I know your your expertise is not in French medieval stuff but the story of Joan of Arc highlights an important aspect of the church militant because a church militant is corrupted it's full of uh corrupted members and we don't know exactly who's a good Catholic and who's not because we can't we can't read the heart the way God can but Joan of Arc you know she's a saint today in the church canonizer is the same but the same church in its corrupted members persecuted her from what I've understood I don't know the story perfectly but this seems to be a trend I've seen uh good Catholics that become canonized hundreds of years later sort of persecuted and at least doubted by their Bishops and these sorts of things you hear with the apparitions too sometimes they're very harsh treatment for the the seers or the alleged seers in these alleged apparitions so I want you to just sort of talk about the social cultural mix that we have here in this church militant and how imperfect it can be even though with time the church the the perfect society that is the church even in the church militant uh will course correct and it will say yes this was a saint and there's sometimes apologies offered by the church I find that a little bit embarrassing I don't think the church should ever apologize for the weak members of uh her body but uh what say you um well uh yeah the the church militant is the wheat and the tares right it's it's the mixture of the good and the evil and Christ Christ is seemed to indicate to us that to a certain extent let's not be Draconian here let's not be all scorched Earth let's not turn the church into a sect for the perfect we have to realize that we're all Sinners of varying levels and degrees and so it seems that Christ is saying uh you know let's not be purists here we have to have a certain leeway for for sinners in our midst uh even great Sinners but that's a that's a different thing I think entirely uh from from sort of the sins within the church that affect the church most directly and most negatively and I think those would be then sins committed by her leaders by her priests her Bishops you know heads of religious orders those kinds of things hopes and I thought you popes and I think that those are the kinds of sins that cannot be tolerated and should not be tolerated uh and and you see that today with the sex abuse crisis in the church where I think there is still way too much Toleration for example of Bishops who covered up sex abuse uh aided and abetted sex abuse uh and and let's also just the Corruptions among the clergy and so on in general I think the church needs a much a much more not in this a much stricter approach let's get that out but but not in a sense of some sort of harsh out of a sense of harsh retribution but out of a sense of Charity out of a sense of Love out of a sense of we need to bring these Wayward men to Christ and we need to protect the people of God from these men and we therefore need to show great resolve in making sure that there is zero tolerance zero tolerance for that kind of that kind of sin within the church militant because it can become it can become a kind of way of Simply dismissing sins to say oh wheat and tears you're always going to have sinners in your midst we just got to roll with the punches no big deal such as the church ever been and so on that is a Temptation in the opposite direction of a overly harsh and and punitive approach there's got to be a sense too that the the the laxity of our current practice is also not right and so yeah I would agree with you we need you we need a much uh stricter regimen with regard to that in the church today and I've called for it in my blog over and over again we need more we need more of that you know uh when you eat a hot dog I don't know if you eat hot dogs but um or any any food product but just as an example uh hot dogs in the factory the inspector will come around once in a while and count how many rat hairs how much rat feces in the hot dog and these sorts of things there's an acceptable limit okay uh so to the way I the way I see tolerance and these sorts of things is that yeah okay we can we just have to admit we're going to eat a certain amount of dirt and a certain amount of gross things in our lifetime especially if you're eating hot dogs but um for the factory owner to sort of insert rat hair and if feces because it's permitted just to just he's only putting in that small amount but he knows it's tolerated and he's going to always boost it up to that minimum level that's quite a different thing psychologically from just tolerating it and you're doing your best to keep your your shop clean so to speak so I see you know when we have wolves among the Sheep that's what sort of what I see like Satan's at work in the church the smoke of Satan has entered the church as uh Paul the sixth is that Paul the sixth who said that yeah Paul Paul VI absolutely is he a saint yes he's now a saint nice Saint Pope Saint Pope John the 23rd Paul VI and jp2 all three Canada nights and it's driving the set of acantis wild with anger they can't believe it yeah I mean I know a lot of traditionalists who are actually friends of mine who believe that uh canonizations are not infallible and that uh Paul VI in particular should never have been canonized I don't agree with them but you're right I mean it drives them crazy uh that their great betanoia Paul VI uh it's been made a saint I love John the 23rd too is he he's a Santa right he said yes he's a saint too and I love John the 23rd too uh what about uh Bishop Baron and Hell one of my friends uh is uh he's in Australia he uh he's the one it turned me on to you he is a big fan of Julian of Norwich is that how you say her name yeah she's a Mystic of some sort and she gives a lot of Hope to us that maybe there aren't that many people burning in hell for all eternity uh and Bishop Baron has made some statements about we can have this hope or something like that I don't know exactly uh if he was hinting at the fact that maybe we should uh not be too dramatic about the uh the numbers of people that are burning in hell what's your reaction to all that well this maybe you and I will part ways here uh somewhat uh I happen to agree with Bishop Baron what Bishop Baron is doing is following the Theology of my dude Hanzo us on baldness okay and Hanzo was from Balthazar wrote a very controversial book called uh well in German which means what are we allowed to hope for what may we hope for unfortunately it was translated into English is dare we hope that all men be saved uh and Balthazar was not quite making that claim like that he was saying what what are we allowed to hope for in terms of church doctrine what does the church allow us to hope for and his conclusion was based on lots of studies was that uh even though we cannot become universalists and dogmatically assert hey yes absolutely certain everyone's going to be saved Balthazar said we can hope the church actually asks us to pray for the Salvation of all and we can hope that maybe ultimately somehow some way in God's Great infinite mercy and wisdom uh all will eventually be saved somehow that's not to deny the church's teachings on hell and mortal sin and The Eternity of hell but this also emphasized God's mercy and say well his mercy and his Justice are both real um but God is a god of love and so on and so Bishop Barron subscribes to that now Bishop Baron does not say Point Blank everyone's going to hell but he does say we should not only can we should hope that everyone eventually goes to heaven it is God's I mean Saint Paul says in Timothy you know God Wills the salvation of all okay and uh and we say in the Our Father you know thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven and his will is that all be saved and there are various places in the Liturgy throughout the year where actually in the Eucharistic liturgy the church prays for the Salvation of all and we have then the prayer you know in the rosary lead All Souls to Heaven especially those in most need of thy mercy so I I don't think that it's outside the bounds of Orthodoxy at all you know it may not be the dominant opinion in the tradition but I certainly think it should be a tolerated opinion within the tradition that we can hope for the Salvation of all and that's my point of view as well have have you or your enemies and when I say you I just mean the people that have that hope and the enemies of people that have that hope uh have they put either has either group for or against that idea that you just characterized have they given it a nice handy label if it's not universalism what is it Oh They'll call it hopeful universalism okay that's that's the usual thing hopeful universe and they usually usually it's the traditionalists who don't like Bishop Baron at all for this reason they don't like Von Balthazar at all for this reason and they are very suspicious of me for this reason okay okay that you to say that you can they're saying yeah you should hope for the Salvation of all but not really I mean come on we know people die in mortal sin so what a dumb hope that is uh yeah so go ahead with your silly little stupid Pollyanna hope that everyone might be saved someday uh but we we trads know better uh that hell is going to be well populated and and you know and so there you go yeah yeah well you know I I don't like to Wade too deeply into those Waters because quite frankly none of us knows yeah uh it's it's not something we know as I like to say I don't think the gospels give us an eschatological census I I don't think that I mean show me and where in the New Testament and break breaks down by percentages here's how many are going to be in heaven and here's how many are going to be in hell we have the Broadway and the narrow way that's about it that's about it but notice something about that that statement the broad and the narrow way uh in in some ways I think that could be interpreted to mean that almost every single human being is on the broad way uh I think what Christ is saying is we're all Sinners and we're all on the path to Perdition in some but Christ is the narrow way Christ himself is the narrow way and unless you find that Christ uh you you you are risking your soul right but I don't think Christ was being predictive there I don't think he was saying by the way almost everybody's going to hell and I get a lot of I get a lot of flack from traditionalists who frequently bring that verse up but then I turn it back on them and I say look what you're implying if you're saying that Christ is being strictly predictive here that this is a form of of him giving us a census of Heaven and Hell of who will actually really end up in heaven and hell then that means you are committed to the proposition that most people are going to hell if you're going to take that verse as being strictly predictive then you have to adhere by strict logic to the belief that most people are going to hell now when I point that out to traditionalists they they squirm and they hem and they haul say well not necessarily because we don't know and I say exactly we don't know it's in a monetary statement from Christ he's admonishing us he's saying be careful you know hell is a possibility and a lot and most of you are sinners so get on the Christ wagon two things I'd like to clarify uh first of all no one in your Camp is saying that Satan is going to be saved right Balthazar doesn't say it I don't say it and Bishop Baron doesn't say it no other explicitly says that Satan and the demons will not be saved okay I mean because I mean just to let you know where I stand it's like I do not want anyone Hitler or anyone else Judas or anyone in hell I do not but I also know that there's absolutely no possibility of morality without an eternal hell as at least a potential possibility but I don't want I don't want anyone in hell even Satan I mean I have I'm not allowed to have Sympathy for the Devil but I'm tempted to have Sympathy for the Devil um you know but the church I'm pretty sure the church firmly dogmatically teaches that Satan cannot be redeemed it's too late uh he's he's in Hell forever I'm pretty sure that's a Dogma that I I would agree with that I would say that that's definitely the dogmatic tradition but I don't see anyone but for me to have to for me to have hope and I do have hope it's not a big hope but I do have a non-zero hope for Hitler and for Judas and for some of the other bad guys uh for me to have that hope I think puts me in your cap right I think so and and you know there there are those for example who would say well you know most people go to heaven except for those really bad actors right uh and well you know that's almost we can't we can't say for certain but it's almost certain that those really bad dudes like Stalin and Hitler and Mao say tongue and Pol Pot and those guys those guys are they're in hell all right I don't know that I hope they're not but uh like I said I you know who the heck am I I don't know and the New Testament is littered with statements about heaven and hell and I think we have to take those statements uh seriously uh but there are also statements in the New Testament about uh uh uh uh you know about God's mercy about God's infinite love even the great domestic philosopher Jacques Mary tan uh said that you know maybe maybe just maybe Hill that those in hell not the demons but people who are in Hell through the merits of the Saints and God and Saints eventually through God's mercy might be granted eventually a kind of reprieve from hell and a sort of natural habit not they won't be given heaven but maybe a kind limbo a kind of natural happiness that was meritan's uh point of view and he seemed he was very Orthodox and seemed to think that was not a foul of Orthodoxy either so um anyway yeah that's it's a complicated question absolutely yeah I think we pretty much agree uh I wanted to say something that you inspired me just when you were talking about the Broadway the narrow way it's sort of it's like an antidote your interpretation of that is an antidote to pelagianism because it's kind of like no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me that's the solution and it's I've been listening to a lot of protestant radio and you know how they feel about works right and it's just faith alone and that sort of thing and there's something to that like there really is something to the Protestant angle on uh like I read about the way Luther died and he was clutching onto his crucifix or Cross or whatever it was probably just across but uh it was just a a really childlike innocent faith that was so pared down and so simple it's just between him and Christ and he just gave himself if the if the story is true I don't know if it's true there's a lot of uh propaganda but if the story is true it really did touch my heart the Simplicity of his faith and it was not about it was not about Luther it was about Jesus Christ and he was just looking to that with complete confidence and I grew I I grew to love him and in that moment because I'd always hated Luther you know yeah uh I think a lot of Us wish that Luther had been had acted differently for sure church history would have been different but the thing is I agree with you about the Protestants having a certain insight there into the fact that uh we have to avoid pelagianism and a kind of works righteousness as they call it on the other hand on the other hand theirs is a misinterpretation of Saint Paul as well and there are even many many many fine Protestant theologians today who are come even Lutheran theologians who are coming out of the woodwork to say Professor Campbell for example Lutheran Theologian teaches that Luther was simply wrong uh about you know the the fact that it's faith and and no works at all um because Faith should regenerate all right the Catholics believe not just in justification but sanctification otherwise Purgatory would make no sense and and so the idea that all I need is Faith also has its pitfalls we don't want to be pelagians and say well those others over there have not earned enough merits to make it to heaven like I have so I'm on the Narrow Path because I've built up these merits no that's not it on the other end we have to acknowledge that Saint Paul says I can have faith that moves mountains but if I don't have charity I'm just I'm nothing and he said there's faith hope and charity now those three charity is the greatest one now that's not to say oh then all I need is charity and I don't need Hope and Faith No they all hang together but what Paul was pointing out was that they hang together right that you you cannot really say I'm a man of faith if you lack charity and you're never going to maintain your charity for very long unless you have faith pretty amazing uh that I guess fidaism has been condemned fidas explicitly by the church I think so yes that you don't need reason all you need is Faith and and uh I'm pretty sure that that's that's been condemned I can't cite chapter and verse off the top of my head but the Catholic church is always always always been a church devoted to the intellectual life and the need you know as Saint Anselm said Faith seeking understanding that's theology Faith seeking understanding through what through reason through the use of our reason he's one of my all-time favorites the second Augustine as they call him uh yeah Saint Anselm this is a bit of a segue but it's a free-flowing conversation what do you think of his uh ontological uh proof or whatever you call it I don't really know I'm not an expert on anselves I think that as a as a strictly logical argument it probably doesn't work but as an intuitive argument I think it does work on a moral level in this regard I think what Anselm is really saying is uh if God doesn't exist he damn well ought to uh because as as as if you examine the trajectory of our moral life and our spiritual life uh then we we have these spiritual appetites and spiritual trajectories that unless God exists they don't make any sense uh and and our our nature seems uniquely thwarted and frustrated tragically unless God exists and so as as an as a postulate of our moral life and our spiritual trajectory I I think the ansonian argument that you know God is a being greater than which we cannot conceive and part of that conception is that God exists um I don't think it works logically but I think it works intuitively um as an affirmation of the necessity of God's existence in order to make sense of existence so that that brings me to another little segue here about uh presuppositionalism I don't know if you know there's a young or middle-aged young middle-aged guy that's sort of taking over the whole Catholic presuppositionalist position online uh Jeremy Bentham or Bentham or something like that uh he uh calls himself paleocrat do you know about him no I don't know about it at all but do you know about presuppositionalism as a no no no no I do not okay so we won't talk about that but it's interesting it just sort of uh presumes everything from the outset instead of trying to build toward it as most uh apologetics uh approaches we'll take we'll start with the pure reason what coming on with pure reason and just build uh that's right that's sort of my Approach but um The Joint Declaration on justification can you talk about that how much of a success or a failure was it in your estimation have you read it have you studied it oh I've read it years ago uh when I was still at Fordham University uh that was uh bandied about and and I think it's an important document because what it shows us is that on the level of theology you see the coming together of Catholic and Lutheran theologians to say that our differences in matters pertaining to justification uh are not should not be Church dividing and are rooted in some historical misunderstandings one of the other specially Protestants misunderstanding the Catholic view so in that sense it's important it's an admission of the Catholics are not in a sense wrong here and we need to find Common Ground was it successful no uh it didn't really alter the theological landscape very much and this is one of the problems with all sort of ecumenical dialogue that takes place amongst theologians is that it's a conversation among theologians and it doesn't really ever really trickle down so for example if you if for example you mentioned your wife is Greek Orthodox right okay so there's been a lot of theological conversation between Catholic theologians and Greek Orthodox theologians and the current patriarch of Istanbul Constantinople seems very open to ecumenical dialogue but the Catholic faith and so on but as you and I well know that's it's going to take a miracle of the Holy Spirit to move most Orthodox Christians to accept that maybe just may maybe the claims of the bishop of Rome have some Merit and we need to pay attention to it uh most you know Orthodox are vehemently opposed to the Catholic church and and so yeah there's no trickle down it's a sad State um it was Jeremiah Bannister by the way if you want to look him up in your spare time with the presuppositionalism yeah it sounds interesting actually uh you know the Bible if you don't mind I'd like to talk just a little bit about the Bible I've got a pet theory about the Bible sure which is that there is a Bible that is inerrant and fallible in all of its parts and all together as the church teaches infallibly teaches uh but no one's ever seen it here below we've never seen it because we don't have even one iota of the original autographs of the human authors who co-authored the scriptures so we have what we have in the church militant is we see through a glass Darkly so we have fragments we have errors we have omissions we have additions we have all kinds of stuff messing up the perfect uh scriptures and only in heaven in the church triumphant do we have access to that and when obviously when we make it to Heaven God willing we'll be able to enjoy all of that and I think Judgment day will be uh there'll be a retelling of that that's just my intuition that we're going to sort of see the story of everybody and uh I just want to get your uh interpretation of the uh for example the Vulgate that was approved as sort of not least it's safe it's not going to lead us astray um uh but what does that mean given the fact that there are errors emissions and additions in every Bible that you could go and buy from a bookstore well I just think it means that we have to pay very careful attention to uh the doctors and Saints of the church and and the church's Orthodox scripture Scholars uh to fully and completely understand the depth and the riches of of the scriptures I am not a scripture scholar and I'm not totally versed in all of the debates surrounding biblical inerrancy and infallibility and quite frankly sometimes they just make your head explode when you start reading all these various things I like your take on it your spin on it I would say this though um that as Catholics we have to approach the scriptures fundamentally and you see this in the church fathers all the way up through Aquinas you have to see the scriptures fundamentally as a text about Christ uh Christ is the ultimate interpretive key as to what the entirety of the scriptures are all about from the Old Testament to the New Testaments everything points towards Christ culminates in Christ as fulfilled in Christ so he is as we say in fancy academic term he is the hermeneutical key to understanding the whole uh and therefore when when you do that when you use Christ as your interpretive key for understanding the whole then what you see is that some of the yeah the errors of say translation and copying of the text and so on that they involve usually very trivial matters that do not touch upon the core the core message of the scriptures uh and that they are therefore uh trustworthy as as the word of God uh pointing towards the word of God priced um and so that that that's simply been my approach to scriptural exegesis scriptural interpretation so the entirety of my theological career which is you you begin with Christ and then you work out from there uh in your interpretive apparatus it seems like a good approach um I'm a young Earth creationist I think the whole universe is less than seven thousand years old or roughly seven thousand years old uh is that how common is that among the theologians that you know and what's your opinion on Evolution and Darwin and do you think the Blessed Virgin Mary was an ape and a fish yeah uh no I I think yeah I do not know a single Catholic theologian in the academic realm not one who was a young Earth creationist uh in fact you can go back to the early church fathers uh and and find probably that a strict literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis was not their their modus operandi uh and and so I accept evolutionary theory I accept uh some version of Darwin I wrote a book called The God of Covenant creation Covenant and creation scientific naturalism and its challenge to the Christian faith and and it's it's on these questions of Science and religion it was one of the areas of my expertise as a scholar was the interfacing between Christian faith and evolutionary theory both Cosmic and biological and if you don't accept that Genesis is a strictly literal account of of how creation came about then I think it's perfectly acceptable uh as even Pi is the 12th stated you can accept uh evolutionary theory as a Catholic so long as you accept that Humanity you know is a special creation of God that each and every human soul is created specially by God in order to maintain human dignity but the idea that our bodies Our physicality evolve out of in a sense other animal forms and other animal species I think Pius XII indicated well so long as certain doctrinal parameters are kept in view you can you can accept that point of view uh I think it might have been um Colby maximally Saint Maximilian Colby who suggested that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception that Mary is the one and only Immaculate Conception rules out uh Adam and Eve having been formed in the belly of any animal because if they were conceived obviously they would have been conceived without sin because they only fell once they were conceived once they were alive you know so they were conceived without sin and that violates the dogma of the Immaculate Conception that's how I became a young Earth creationist okay so it has to do with Catholic dogma and the fact that uh with sin with the fall then you have disease and uh you know looked at different things like that death um so I don't want to put you on the spot and you know you can look into uh young Earth creationism from a Catholic perspective there are many resources um if you're interested you can look more deeply into it but I think it's a grave grave error to buy into any form of theistic evolution but what do you think of that Immaculate Conception argument I think it's wrong okay um explain I don't really I don't well I don't follow the logic of it uh why why was Adam conceived was Adam conceived no God well probably you know it probably was he probably was he conceived with sin or without sin well he especially create his soul was specially created by God and therefore without sin I would say but but whether or not uh Adam and the pre-lapsarian condition his soul was in a sense specially created by God and since he had all The Graces necessary to be in communion with God in a pre-laps Aryan State uh that might not be the same thing as Mary being Immaculate Conception in a post-lap Syrian sense where she is preserved from the stain of original sin which came after Adam and Eve fell uh I'm I'm not certain that Mary's immaculately conceived soul that God specially created uh is is exactly the same thing as Adam and Eve's Souls which were specially created without sin um two kinds of Immaculate Conception Maybe yeah yeah and since um you know um you know there's there's that the Great Line in the exalted uh the great you know Easter hymn and the Easter Vigil that the Deacon sings or somebody sings where you know oh Felix culpa oh happy fault oh necessary sin of Adam that gang for us so great a redeemer that sin is not saying hey hooray thank God they sinned but what it's saying is is that God is so great God is so amazing God is so wonderful that even after we sinned what he brought out of that condition was something better than what we would have been had Adam and Eve not even sinned because what we got was Christ and Christ's Redemption which actually elevates us to a higher level uh of of of of baatific vision and Union with God than what Adam and Eve would have had had they never sinned and just lived on in a state of sort of natural happiness in a natural communion with god um and and so what we end up with is an even greater reality that we live now a christological reality and I think we have to view Mary's Immaculate Conception within The Narrative of of that christological elevation um more than simply a return to some kind of pre-lapsarian state that's my take on it anyway what about uh the real presence and transubstantiation you obviously uh believe in transubstantiation oh yeah yeah absolutely I think it's I think it remains uh probably the best the best way of viewing the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist so I mean it hinges on accepting certain errors to see in categories of metaphysics you accept those Essence yeah I do okay um evolution is incompatible with uh with that Aristotelian Essence and accident sort of thing it's completely uh it flies in the face of that because uh there's this principle of proportionate causality where you can't give what you don't have so you can't get a man from an ape just like you can't get a man from uh from a single uh single-celled creature like this just it's just metaphysically it doesn't make sense I don't know if you're uh studied in metaphysics uh but you cannot you cannot get you cannot give what you don't have so only in essence can uh cause another Essence right so this is why maybe you as a theistic evolutionist I won't dwell on this but you would need to call on God for a lot of Miracles all along that uh evolutionary thing not not miracles uh but interventions not even interventions just a realization that the metaphysical economy that God has gifted Creation with is rather robust and and that as as forms evolve okay over time over billions of years that this is you're absolutely correct about something and that is that a strictly materialistic understanding of evolution is completely incompatible with the Catholic faith in other words a reductionistic materialistic account of evolution that you would get from somebody like say a Richard Dawkins that would view Evolution as simply building a pile of sand one grain at a time sort of these tiny little incremental additions and more additions and more and then so we just finally get to this very complex big brain prime age and poof you've got a human being now that that is completely incompatible with with the Catholic faith and I agree with you on that uh nevertheless a lot of a lot of cap if not most Catholic theologians would argue uh that that Evolution proceeds precisely formally through its Essences uh through um through a kind of through a kind of teasing out of Essences of of what is already latent within them the potential that is latent within them uh you're absolutely right Nemo dot quad non Hobbit yeah yeah you cannot yeah it's a very bonaventurian idea you know an augustinian idea that there are seminal reasons there are seminal ideas logo implanted within the formational economy of the world that then gradually sort of grow and unfold like an acorn into an oak tree that the reality of the oak tree is somehow latent within that Acorn uh the fullness of that oak tree is somehow latent within that Acorn uh and I was I would argue the same um with regard to Evolution but you know do you think do you think we all evolve from one human pair Adam and Eve because that is a Dogma uh yeah I would think so you I think we have to be wedded to some kind of monogynistic uh I think Pius the 12th sort of laid that out you know the great debate between monogenism and poligenism that yeah did we have a single set of parents or a multiple set of parents and a strict evolutionary theory would seem to indicate a polygenistic origin evolutionary theory might indicate a polygenistic origin for our bodies uh as we see from The evolutionary record uh all kinds of Relic hominid skeletons throughout throughout the world but and so people make a lot of extrapolations from that oh see there there's there was a human being there and a human being you're making an extrapolation uh that just because there might be morphologically hominid type animals in in the history of evolutionary tree that God didn't select out from them but two two to be in a sense the first true human beings the first true human parents that out of all of those Relic hominid forms there was just one you know Adam and Eve two people that became the first real humans okay um yeah I would love to press you on this just but it's just I just feel uncomfortable doing it because it's just awkward but there's so many questions that uh I don't think could be properly answered by a theistic Evolution but I'm not going to dwell on it and I respect your opinion and I'm certainly outnumbered like that's for sure but I want to segue into science generally and something we're going to wrap it up here but something a little bit controversial and I want you to be very careful with your language because I don't want to get another strike on YouTube as I've been getting um there's a certain there's a certain medical condition that's rumored to have been going around for the past two and a half years and certain medical uh suggestions that have been sort of strongly suggested and these sorts of things I want to be careful with my language but the pope seems to be behind it and I love and respect the pope and I like him as a as a person I think he's a good Catholic man but I happen to disagree with him about Evolution and I also disagree about this recent uh thing we've been going through for the past couple of years uh do you have any do you have any opinion about that without getting me in trouble without getting you in trouble don't say any keywords okay I won't say the keywords I would say this though I I do not have a certain injection okay okay I don't have a certain injection and I refuse to receive a certain injection okay ditto my wife glad to hear that and uh I also think that there was um I don't buy into the the the most full-blown of conspiracy theories okay I tend to believe that it rather in in the idea of that there were those who said well let's not let a crisis go to waste and that opportunistically uh things happened that should not have happened and so I think we might you and I might be on the same page here yeah yeah uh in that regard I would highly recommend that all of your viewers watch a video that I think you can access uh and I hope this doesn't get you in trouble uh by Robert Kennedy Jr uh he's got a book out called the real Anthony fauci which I would highly recommend people discuss is disgusting made me sick I had to stop reading it it was just so yeah depressing so you know yeah you know what I'm talking about and there is now a movie that got a video that goes it's it's even more it you know it's a great visit long about an hour and a half I think oh really because the book was so was so dense with the footnotes and everything but but what's really incredible about the video or the number of Highly reputable scientists who are there supporting Kennedy's point of view and uh it's let's just say it's very damning it's very very very damning and uh so yeah I think there were a lot of shenanigans that went down and uh that I've you know let's just leave it at that there were Shenanigans and I think you and I we leave it at this are probably pretty close in our opinions as to what was going on there thank you for that that was very well said and uh I agree with you uh another slightly controversial opinion that I don't think I'm gonna get in trouble for is uh Russia Ukraine I support Russia just sort of because they seem to be promoting Christianity more than the other side the globalist West seems to be satanic pushing abortion and lgbtq and all that sort of thing and I had a guest on recently a couple days ago that made a really beautiful documentary about the transgender how it's hurting people and I seem to be able to get away with this on YouTube they don't they don't strike me for that for some reason but what's your opinion with the globalists and uh Russia and obviously Putin is no saint but I do have it from us a close source that he does go and visit the Russian Orthodox monasteries in Mount Athos in Greece and that he is deeply religious images I can't confirm that that's 100 true but I'd like to think so uh so what's your what's your feeling what's your intuition well I think that uh you know I I don't think any of us know what's going on behind the scenes either in Washington or Moscow or Kiev or London or Paris Ottawa or Ottawa I am extremely distrustful of I'm extremely distrustful of governments today especially the large powerful governments of large powerful states bristling with nuclear weapons and armaments I agree with you on the globalist problem on the transgendered stuff the lgbtq steamroller uh I agree with all of that and the West has become utterly smitten with that I agree with you that the Russians seem resistant to that very much so as a matter of fact um and so but I don't know what to think of the Russia Ukraine war I don't know why Russia would have to invade Ukraine in order to roll back that kind of globalist agenda um I don't know why tens of thousands of people people had to die in in a very bloody war that it looks like Putin is going to lose uh at least short term here um so I don't know I have very mixed feelings I I tend to be very because I don't trust governments I tend to be very anti-war between Modern Nation States but I will say yeah I mean the globalist transgendered lgbtq stuff is is a problem it's a major problem and to the extent that the Russians oppose it okay then I'm pro-russian you you go you go Russians do it but um I'm just not convinced that an invasion of Ukraine was necessary in order to in order to roll that back if you've if you study the history of the Ukraine even briefly you see how messy has always been uh you know for hundreds of years very messy personally I don't see what stake the United States has in this battle I mean for how many decades was Ukraine part of the Soviet Union and like you said its history is messy I tend not to support Wars of aggression one State against another like this um on the other hand it's a messy historical situation and I really don't see why the United States should be risking nuclear war with another nuclear power uh in in order to pull I don't know why Europe should be plunged into what is going to be a horrible winter of no energy and no heat uh because of because of this war um there seems to me to be something going on behind the scenes that we don't know about why for example has the Press not really pushed hard to examine the relationship between Hunter Biden and the ukrainians okay why why is that why do we not you know in in a day and age when we might eventually come into a hot war with the Russians over Ukraine why is there not more media attention on the fact that Biden seems implicated in Ukraine somehow some way financially I don't know you know this is this is the level of distrust that I have it's a dirty dirty world uh do you feel it sure is do you feel like I mean I I like I said I've been listening to Protestant radio and some of them are not shy to talk about the raptures just around the corner and this is the way they've always been but uh you know this is the end times and they point out the obvious to us about how dark these days are has it always been like that uh because it seems to me growing up in the 70s 80s and even the 90s like it was just sort of we were left alone to do our own thing and it seemed like we had you know a certain amount of freedom and peace and this sort of thing and there was corruption there was crime and everything else but it seemed like it's starting to look like the good old days to me now and my wife we look back on the you know the 80s and those sorts of things the naive sort of Freedom that we had was it always like this does every generation get cynical and jaded as they get older because they see the corruption of the those who have power and money I think every age has something similar to this but as Saint Paul Saint Paul uses the metaphor of birth pangs you know and as any woman who's ever given birth knows that as the crow the closer and closer you get to birth the stronger and more incessant the birth pings uh become and so yeah every era has had its birth Banks every era has had its pains its evils it's Corruptions it's cynicism it's horrificness but it just does seem right that we're going through a period of intensification uh uh a period of I'm not saying we're living in the end times and I'm not saying I don't believe in the Rapture but I'm not saying we don't we're not in the end I don't know I do know this so we're living in very evil times and we are going to be suffering because of it and we are going to be persecuted because of it and we better be ready to be persecuted because of it because we are living in probably the most evil times that the world has ever seen I will say that wow um you know I think we are living in and also that for the first time in human history Humanity has the ability to do two things it has its the ability to completely obliterate human life on this planet through Weaponry it also has the ability to completely obliterate the human race through genetic manipulation and never before has the human race had this power this titanistic power within its hands to destroy human life or to so alter it that is effectively destroyed as well so we are we are living in exceptionally perilous times yes yes do you believe like I read the Alta vendita or whatever it's called of the Freemasons It Was Written probably a couple hundred years ago now but it seems to if you take it at face value it seems to place Christianity as it's sort of top priority getting rid of Christianity and putting reason number one it has a lot in common with Satanism I was an atheistic Satanist before my conversion of 2009 and it elevates reason and of course uh uh religion is the enemy of Reason according to the satanists do you think that the Bavarian Illuminati the Freemasons and all these different uh underground secret societies skull and bones do you think that it's a joke uh with the Shriners and these sorts of things is it a joke or is Satan at work using these these powerful influential rich people to actually run the world is Satan the prince of this world or or not I think Satan was the prince of this world but Christ is now the king of this world okay and Satan and Satan is given a certain leeway within the Christ's kingship why we don't really know but you know Satan has been given the leeway to do certain things still even in the Kingdom of Christ but I do not believe that Satan is any longer the prince of this world as Saint Paul says you know Christ destroys the principalities and powers of this world uh and so Satan has been defeated he has been definitively defeated by Christ but he continues to be allowed and you see in the Book of Revelation that that will eventually come to an end all right that eventually Christ will be Satan will be thrown into the burning pit and changed there um but he's being allowed now as with regard to the Illuminati and the Freemason to be honest I don't really know uh I know that Freemasonry uh is not compatible with the Catholic faith and I have read things you know about the upper echelons and Freemasonry isn't is somewhat satanic but I don't I've never made a study of it I don't really know I know there's a lot of groups out there that are pushing the the Freemasonry sort of conspiracy thing I have no way and maybe they're right I don't know I just don't know and in some ways I don't care about Freemasonry and stuff because the the reality is powerful people rich people powerful people have always opposed the gospel and in order to ensconce their continuing wealth and power and manipulation in the world and we have to be on our guard because Satan does prowl like a lion to devour us we have to be as wise as serpents you know and and uh gentle as doves we have to be we have to have prudence and wisdom but most of all we have to pursue the path of sanctity we have to put our nose to the grindstone look at Christ live the gospel and pursue a Sanctified life and I'm going to let Christ deal with the Freemasons and the Illuminati and if they come out in the Woodwork of the woodwork and expose themselves for what they are then I will oppose them um we'll see we'll see what happens uh on a more cheery note I I see you know the Blessed Virgin Mary and son on the icon behind you but there's also a Dorothy Day if I'm not mistaken and another icon behind your head you want to talk about uh who the second person is there the second person there let me get out of the way uh that the one over okay yeah one is uh Peter Morin and that's and the other one is there's Dorothy Day obviously but Peter Moore Peter Morin was uh uh the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement he was the after Dorothy Day converted from sort of atheism and Marxism to Catholicism she was very very influenced by Peter Morin who was just Peter Martin was a french guy who grew up studying to be a Christian brother in France uh very very intelligent very well educated very well read in Catholic theology and philosophy all the good guys that we would recognize in Catholic philosophy and Theology and he tutored Dorothy Day in the Catholic faith and she was absolutely indebted to his tutelage for the for the intellectual formation in the Catholic faith that she got and he he sadly died of Alzheimer's in you know in the 1940s and so did not have a long lasting influence on the movement as it went forward sadly there are large aspects of the Catholic movement today Catholic Worker movement today that are not in line with the Catholic faith and not in line with no what I want your viewers to understand because there is Dorothy day has a very bad rap amongst many traditional Catholics is that Dorothy day was a thoroughly orthodox Fox Catholic I mean she accepted everything the sexual teachings anti-conterception everything um and she she was not some wild-eyed Progressive liberal Catholic as a lot of people seemed to think she was simply not her movement unfortunately spun in that direction sort of beginning in the 60s but even now there's kind of a rising up within the Catholic Worker movement of people very interested in um reinvigorating her more robust Catholic vision of things um and I'll leave with it but that's that's who are the icons are is there any uh because I I've been avoiding her just because I sort of sensed there was something suspicious about her there's some sort of rumor that maybe she wasn't completely Orthodox I haven't really looked into her but I'll take your word for it and uh she's been canonized as a saint no she's a servant of God she's on her way to being canonized she's not she's on her way to being canonized her cause is up for canonization it looks good my wife is actually involved in the process uh and uh she's currently a servant of God Dorothy day do we owe respect to the Servants of God I would I would think so I would think so yeah yeah I would think that if the church has bothered to elevate them to servant of God's status then there's a reason for that she was a very very Sanctified person in her individual life devoted to the poor um she well that doesn't mean you have to agree with everything she stood for uh I think she was completely Orthodox in her theology but for example she was a complete pacifist yeah uh and the church allows one to be a conscientious objector in that regard yeah the church doesn't but the church doesn't believe that it can adopt that as official church policy and I disagree with her complete pacifism I disagree with it I think charity demands that sometimes the strong have to protect the weak uh and that sometimes means taking up arms against other strong who are oppressing the weak you know uh so I simply cannot accept the thorough going pacifism as as she did what was the what was the idea with the the notion of work because I'm I'm a fan of Saint Jose Maria escraval with the Opus Dei I'm a fan of his right his his idea of sanctifying work and the you know the universal called Holiness through work and through doing the boring crap that I hate so uh I like that idea of suffering daily and just doing what you're supposed to do and taking on your responsibility it's less romantic than thinking oh well if I could go over to the third world and help them over there then I could be a saint and a martyr yeah right and fight the Muslims over there and I'd get murdered it's easy to fantasize but the down to earth idea of just working your crappy job like I have a crappy job and you know I'm not putting it down but whatever I don't enjoy it I'd rather just be a bum you know but um the idea that I can sanctify myself through the little duties and obligations of work and these sorts of things it's very powerful to me and it's so accessible it is like suddenly I'm surrounded by the means of salvation you know yeah yeah and I agree with that is there a connection with Dorothy Day on that or no oh yeah very much so uh two things first the the title of the movement the Catholic Worker movement really doesn't have a whole lot to do with that per se uh we have to understand that when when Dorothy before she converted she was part of sort of the Marxist worker movements and what she wanted to do once she converted was to subvert that in a sense that what she wanted to do was to show that Catholic Social teaching was actually more pro-worker than the marxists were than if you adopted the Catholic view that was going to be much more a much more socially favorable thing for workers than the Marxist point of view so she labeled the newspaper that she and Peter Morin put out the Catholic Worker which made Peter Morin very upset Peter Morin wanted to call the paper the Catholic radical I mean he wanted it he's hey we're going to be crazy hair on fire Catholics here all right that's what we're going to do we're just going to go out there and be crazy hair on fire Catholics and change the world and develop ourselves to the poor in The Works of Mercy and Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy and so on uh and so he was disappointed when she named the paper the Catholic Worker but that's why she did so because she was trying actually to subvert the Marxist co-optation of that word worker on the other hand all that explanation aside Peter and Dorothy were all about the universal call to Holiness and believed strongly that Holiness is something that lay people not just priests and nuns in the monasteries and so on but lay people can achieve Holiness in their day-to-day lives and in that sense she's very they're very much in line with the message of Opus day very very much so um uh one quick thing about uh Pope Francis my friends uh who are sort of libertarian right-wing whatever uh not that all my friends are but uh those who are suggest that Pope Francis is a communist and he's like maybe the Antichrist I don't think Pope Francis Antichrist but I uh I don't know I don't think he's a communist but he might have Marxist sympathies I don't know I'm told by people that I know in South America from South America that if you study uh Jorge bergolio's biography uh an upbringing what he is is a pironist you know a a believer in a kind of populism uh translated into politics so he's a bit of a populist a political populist and and and that sometimes might translate into a kind of socialist uh looking out after the people through the government and so on time to be honest with you Pope Francis to me is a gigantic question mark and an enigma I don't I don't hate him I don't love him he's a pope I respect him because he's the successor of Saint Peter uh but he's not my the favorite pope of my lifetime yeah yeah yeah yeah uh so uh yeah he's a bit of mystery uh I think he's playful I think he likes to play around with ambiguity I think so well I think what it is is he he likes to he likes provoke the bear in The Eye yeah I don't think he cares much at all for Conservative Catholics and I think he likes sticking Conservative Catholics in the eye yeah I don't think though that Pope Francis is a straight up old-fashioned Progressive Catholic either I mean if you look at the laundry list of things that liberal Catholics have wanted for a long time like married priests women priests he hasn't given that to them uh and and so I think there's a part of him that's still very kind of traditional um but he is a strange mixture of things and to me he's just a walking mystery and I say okay he's the pope but I'm not a huge fan yeah yeah have you but in all honesty have you looked at him and the way he lives his life and the things he said and the way he treats people and uh even maybe against your better uh inclinations found yourself inspired like wow this man's Christian and he inspired me and I understand Christianity better because of him because I've had those moments with him yeah there are times when I find him very moving in his what I think is his genuine Humanity genuine humanity and his warmth and I I think that he has a pastor's Soul you know sort of at heart I think it's a bit clouded over because I think he can sometimes be also be kind of petty and vindictive uh and and doesn't like to be criticized I think he can be very thin-skinned uh I think he has a long memory of who has wronged him uh in that regard in that sense he's it's I think it's it's his feminine side give him a break that's his feminine side well it's he's I think what he is is a very emotional man yeah I think he is an extremely effective man emotional man a man who lives in his passions and at times I find those passions simpatico with mine and I find it very moving I say yeah yeah yeah yeah and other times I'm going oh God you know could you just maybe could you throw them bone Holy Father I mean did you really have to put down the traditional land mass so harshly I mean do you really have to treat traditionists like that are they not on the peripheries are they not on the margins are they not Catholics too right right you know and so I just you know that's that's that's who we have that's our Holy Father you know I pray every day for the pope whoever the pope might be at that given time and part of the prayer is uh asking God to protect the the pope and we acknowledge in this Catholic prayer that it's God himself who has appointed the pope to preside over his church so there there is you know you may not like it but uh some of the traditionalists say that we don't get the pope we want we get the one we deserve you know for whatever reason sort of a punitive aspect to uh who is Hope but when I was looking at uh your uh Dorothy Day behind you at first when I first uh had you on screen I thought it was Pope Benedict XVI uh so well it's a long ways back there so yeah yeah but so can you tell me how much do you love pope uh Emeritus Benedict XVI and what do you think of him as a theologian as a man well as as a theologian myself I spent a very long part of my theological career reading the writings of Joseph rotzinger and I think he is right up there as one of the top two or three Theologian Catholic theologians of the 20th century I think he's a great great man and I'm going to be very sad at his passing uh he's just a giant of an intellect and I think a personally a holy man uh I wish he had not resigned um for that reason just because I hold him in such high esteem and but this might anger some of your viewers I don't know but the the my the the greatest Pope in my opinion of my lifetime though is John Paul II John Paul II remains my sort of ecclesiastical hero I mean there you go I went to Seminary in 1978 for the first time and that was the year he was elected Pope and I grew up in the Silly Season after Vatican II I grew up in all the craziness post Vatican too and I entered into seminary in the midst of that craziness and when this young charismatic polish Pope walked out under the balcony of Saint Peter's you know and in that baritone voice of him you know be not afraid and all that stuff you know I saw him in the United States when he visited when I was a seminarian I just uh I loved John Paul II and I know I mean he wasn't perfect you know yeah there are things he did that I don't agree with but nevertheless kissing the cross well yeah and then the assistant prayer media and stuff I think was ill-advised uh I think even Joseph I think uh Benedict Joseph money was still Joseph rosinger anyway uh also had some reservations about that Interfaith prayer service in Assisi I think it's some way if I remember correctly that Joseph rossinger I thought well I don't know if I'd have done it quite that way you know uh but but to insinuate from that though that John Paul endorsed some kind of religious relativism is absurd he is the Pope that asked Joseph rotzinger when he was head of the CDF to put out that document Dominus Jesus that asserted strongly against all these liberal Catholic theological objections that there's one path to cry to heaven and it's Christ all right and and so to to insinuate the jp2 may have been a closet sort of indifferentist is ridiculous it's absurd but that doesn't mean that he was prudentially correct to hold that Assisi prayer meeting you know so you know Popes are not perfect yeah yeah the the reason I was excited to talk to you one of the reasons was because of the your stance on your Manifesto with the the new uh sort of tradition married with Vatican II and all that so I don't want to take up too much of your time but if you could just touch briefly on that it's so exciting to me I'm surprised I didn't I didn't focus on it more during our talk well yeah I mean I was not the the main author of it uh the main author was another guy who runs another Catholic Worker house one of these young Orthodox Catholic Workers a guy named Sean demensic okay uh who has a Catholic Warehouse in Lancaster PA and is a brilliant Theologian in his own right and uh he he was the main author of it and I signed off on it I tweaked a little bit uh along with Mark Barnes of the new polity uh Group which are also very interesting people and yeah in essence it is look in a lot of ways what what goes by radical traditionalism today in our view that they are their own worst enemies that they are too scorched Earth with regard to the modern church I mean you I think all your viewers know what I'm talking about and you're either sympathetic or not with that movement but we think that that traditionalism all Catholics need to be traditionalists of some type or another uh it's just sort of what kind and I think that a traditionalism that loves even you know very old-fashioned elements of the tradition like the Latin Master that's great but but that has to be nuanced also with an acceptance of the insights of Vatican II and the acceptance of say the teachings of John Paul and Benedict and even Pope Francis to an extent that you just can't go all Saturday vacanti or or been a vacant you just you cannot go down that path and remain sane cannot remain a Catholic so you had better at some point if you're a traditionalist make your peace with the modern church and find a way to bring those things together uh and if you don't you're either going to end up on the very fringes of the church screaming at windmills or you're going to end up with a liberal or whatever I just think some kind of this new traditionalism is the only real path forward that's that's my view it's amazing it's amazing to see because I've started to notice it my first sort of foray into online Catholicism was very dark because there's so many loud voices that are anti you know uh anti-vatican 2 and Pope bashing and these sorts of things uh but it's start the tide I feel like the tide is starting to change a turn with the young Catholics there's a conservative uh you know uh controversial Catholic Nick Fuentes with his America First and all that sort of thing he he uh he also respects the living Magister and he doesn't talk too much about the living magisterium where Pope Francis but he he respects it and he's not he's not a rad tread in that way and my biggest my biggest pet peeve is the ratatrats that's my biggest pet peeve because of the uh the bitter absurd arguments that I got from them when I first came online and it just it just doesn't make any sense like there's nothing more traditional than embracing Vatican II and the living magisterium warts and all and we have to keep everything in perspective but it is a sacred ecumenical council and the pope is the pope period that's that's right and we have to make our peace with that I love Vatican too but Vatican 2 was not perfect Vatican II made some mistakes pastorally speaking uh and we just we have to frankly acknowledge that but then not just reject the whole thing to court and say okay let's just go back to Pius the 10th and the syllabus of errors and forget all that other stuff it's not it's not that simple it's not that simple it's complicated well I really appreciate you coming on and talking to me it's a real pleasure and uh thank you you'll come back again sometime I'm sorry I'm sorry that my channel doesn't get a lot of uh views you're not going to get a lot of views off of this but it's just another it's just another uh it's another sort of piece in that time capsule this is how I sort of view my content it's like I can go back and I can go back six years and look at uh what I was talking with people about it's just fascinating the internet and I hope that we're going to have a free internet because up here in Canada there's Bill C11 which is going to try to clamp down and restrict all the content yeah have you heard about that yeah yeah I have and maybe here in the United States as well really an advice I have been advised by certain people tech people who because I'm a complete and non-tech person I don't know anything so I have tech people that advise me and they tell me like when I make my own YouTube videos make sure that I keep the the video the original video yeah because the day may come where YouTube decides all that Catholic stuff is gone and so yeah we have to be aware of that we do have multiple backups yet for sure for sure that's right yeah so uh I really appreciate you coming out I do I do enroll all my guests into Perpetual Master you and your family are going to be enrolled and have the benefits of the mass uh every day until the end of time so even if you end up in purgatory God forbid you'll get the benefits of those masses and I'll need it take good care and please pray for me and mine I absolutely will thank you for having me on God bless you bye-bye