A Church in Crisis w/ Dr. Ralph Martin!

dr ralph martin hello hello matt it is nice to be here in your uh real studio rather than doing this by zoom yeah there's something that's lost uh in skype interviews it's nice to be sitting across the table from you yeah with your flannel shirt that's right i feel so comfortable being able to wear my final shirts what i most prefer to wear every day of the week when i'm at home and i i heard it was okay to wear it here did you hit an age where you just started being like this is this is what i'm gonna do from now on i'm just going to wear this one thing you know they talk about people as they get older i've already hit that stage i wear black shirts and jeans and that's pretty much it well i've always preferred this from a very young age and i've tried to wear it whenever i can although sometimes i have to wear a coat and tie you know i don't know if you remember this but the first time i met you i was speaking at a defend the faith conference back in maybe 2013 and uh i was used to speaking at youth conferences back then and so i show up at this gathering of all your wonderful brilliant phd people and i had ripped jeans on and a superhero t-shirt on green lantern well that's the appropriate gear for talking to young people right but here in this room i've got dr ralph martin dr janet smith dr scott hahn pat madrid and i remember i remember scott said yeah you've got the youth vibe going on yeah i looked at the person who drove me from the airport and i said we need to go and change clothes now find me somewhere to go but of course it's steubenville so yeah i'm not sure i forget where we went but yeah anyway well i still firmly believe that god loves people no matter what they wear really i do interesting i do it's a little bit of an outlier kind of a position these days but well it's good to have you on the show um renewal ministries is doing phenomenal work i was telling you before the show your youtube channel has really taken off people love hearing what you and pete herbeck have to say and i think it's because you're addressing a lot of the crises in the church and the culture and yet you're proclaiming that jesus christ is lord through it all so you have the orthodoxy and the straight talk of yeah yeah well you know when covet hit you know all our international travel was was canceled all our domestic travel was cancelled so we said what are we supposed to do so we decided to try to speak to people now through our youtube channel we had maybe 7 000 subscribers when covet hit and i never really did youtube videos and so peter and i began to alternate weeks and it's really grown we have over 54 000 now and it just seems like people want to have a clear voice you know like when the trumpet doesn't give a clear sound who's going to come for battle so we feel like the lord has given us some clarity about what the gospel is some clarity about who jesus is some clarity about yes indeed we got big problems in the church right now but it's okay because jesus is the lord that's great it doesn't feel like we do have a clear trumpet blast i mean it felt like with john paul at the helm we had somebody we loved and trusted and the church may have been a mess but we felt he was on our side benedict the same thing pope francis we had high hopes for but it doesn't seem like we have a strong holy leader in pope francis you tell me if i stated that too strongly and feel free to well he may be strong and he may be holy only god can judge but he's certainly not clear you know and uh we are getting a lot of conflicting signals we are getting a lot of ambiguity we are getting a lot of very troubling actions and decisions so it doesn't you know some of these things we don't have to guess at what's going on we just can say it's objectively better okay see this is good what you just did there was really good because you're right i shouldn't have made that judgment about his holiness or whatever because that is that's an internal thing um but we can point to actual real things that we're seeing with our own eyes yes and and that's good okay yeah that and a lot of people don't want to admit that we're saying those things but we have to kind of if we're going to have solutions that are realistic we have to be real about what the problem is we got some very significant problems in rome like when pope francis kind of appointed a new person to head up the john paul ii institute of marriage in the family and put archbishop paglia in charge of it who is mostly known for the homoerotic mural he painted in his cathedral and bankrupting his diocese and when he removed the two professors who were really experts in john paul ii theology of marriage and family life and reappointed two people who were dissenters from catholic doctrine on contraception and even wrote articles opening to homosexual relations which say what the heck is going on here and but but nobody's pursuing that it's just been it's been done it's going on and nobody's nobody's asking the tough questions at vatican press conferences about how could you have appointed people who are undermining catholic teaching to john paul ii institute on marriage to the family and then of course you have you know the amazon synod and you know they say one picture's worth a thousand words and that picture of people prostrating themselves in the vatican garden one franciscan and his habit in the presence of pope francis venerating clearly venerating little statues of naked pregnant ladies that mysteriously the vatican press office would never tell us what they signified or where they came from or who was paying for them and they were carried in a canoe into saint peter's basilica they were there at the deus you know during the synod and then the first person to identify who it really was was pope francis after some german lay people threw them into the river blessing yeah and and pope francis thanked the italian police for recovering yeah so it's uh the cat's out of the bag from pope francis and pachamama of course is an earth goddess from latin america and you know so i was saying like you know and then of course in the post-sonatal amazon exhortation that he wrote he replied to criticism about that saying well you can use these symbols without idolatrous attempt intent so okay they weren't intending to worship idols but it sure it sure looked like something was going on where veneration was being paid to an earth goddess you know and so this is confusing for people i mean and then of course the bishop who was appointed in charge of the main person in charge of the content of the synod on the amazon bragged that in 39 years of ministry in the amazon he never baptized a single person so evangelization what are we what are we talking about what kind of conflicting signals are we giving so i could just go through a dozen things like that you know including the most recent thing with the visit with president biden well let's do that um because yeah i was in the airport and i opened up i think a copy of the washington post and it said that pope francis said that joe biden was a catholic in good standing and can keep receiving holy communion now to be fair biden seems confused about a number of things and so it's possible that he misunderstood i think most of us don't suspect that's the case uh but the vatican press is that right they didn't clarify what had happened no they still they still won't so this is what they say is a private conversation we don't come in on private conversations yeah you're the theologian so correct me if i'm wrong but if someone is in grave sin public manifest grave sin uh receiving eucharist is a sacrilege whether or not it's public it's it's a sacrilege so what probably happened i'll say probably you can back away from that if you want but is that pope francis encouraged and sacrilege which means that his soul and the soul of biden aren't there's a reason to think aren't in a good place and we should be praying for our brother pope francis who may have just done something incredibly awful yeah well i think objectively talk me off the ledge if i'm going too far well we don't know what happened we we don't know really what was spoken about uh abortion wasn't on the agenda uh the official agenda hopefully it was on the private agenda hopefully pope francis would have talked to him out of concern for his soul saying joe you know you need to repent here you know this is really a very serious thing you're doing advocating killing babies on even a wider scale that's really that's really gravely wrong and you really need to repent you know and you shouldn't be going to communion now obviously pope francis didn't say that because it would have been harder for joe to say what he said uh so we don't know what he said um maybe joe said you know i'm trying to be a good catholic and the pope encouraged him you know like yes i'm glad you're trying to be a good catholic that's good and joe kind of added something that you know obviously that means i should still go to communion so we don't know if there's a setup you know we don't know if it was set up by the biden advisors to come very good at this charitable you're very charitable i think for the rest of us we're just so tired of making excuses that we're just done that's kind of where i'm at but i think what you're doing is the way to go well we don't know it could have been a setup where joe said something big about being a good catholic and the pope said yeah you're a good catholic type of thing and uh or maybe he said something like uh oh yeah yeah just follow the guidance of your bishop you know cardinal gregory you know who is on record for you know giving joe communion yeah you know type of thing but here's what really troubles me vatican diplomacy vatican protocol probably overshadowed the concern for the salvation of joe's soul because the vatican never comments on personal conversations hardly although there's a local pastor in in michigan who is trying to address the confusion in his people about this whole event and said uh you know if joe came out of there saying the pope feels like it's not such a big deal about uh you know the sexual abuse of children the vatican probably would have you know felt like they had to kind of you know correct that saying you know you know this was a misunderstanding pope didn't say that because the world wouldn't have liked that that was the worst the culture wouldn't have liked that he would have lost his you know credibility popularity so why wouldn't they consider abortion even you know graver in a certain way killing people uh why wouldn't they make a clarification so you could say vatican diplomacy vatican protocol they didn't want to embarrass the american president but vatican diplomacy and protocol can't trump the concern for the salvation of souls or scandalizing literally scandalizing causing people to stumble and fall to believe that it's no big deal about abortion and we're making too much out of it strengthening the hands of the american bishops who are in that camp which is a very bad camp to be in i mean there's really a division opening now on the american bishop between those who really are manifesting that they believe the church teaching and those that are sort of waffling and worse than waffling which makes you wonder whether what john paul ii said years ago when it was just cardinal uh you know ortilla that we're we're in a final confrontation between the gospel and the anti-gospel between the church and the anti-church between christ and anti-church like there's really a different gospel going on right now in the catholic church there's really a different church which is a church of accommodation to the culture uh cowering before the world and so i think it's scandalous what pope francis did do and didn't do you know and uh you know the the purpose of the catholic church is not primarily to be in good relationship with the nations of the world and not embarrass presidents who are living fornication the president of brazil came to the vatican and received communion with his mistress you know in st peter's basilica you know uh you know we're saying well we shouldn't embarrass heads of state well guess what you know our primary mission is calling the whole world to faith and repentance of jesus christ and we can't let diplomacy and protocol trump the gospel and that's i think what's happening yeah i think what we all want to know what to do now is what to do now um because those who are blowing the trumpet on on the stuff that's coming out of the vatican or whatever often have a lot of good things to say but it's almost like they they they they wouldn't exist or continue to make their funds if they stop saying all the negative things that are happening and probably it's probably a good thing that they're saying many of the things that they're saying but it does tend to breed a sort of cynical spirit maybe i've even fallen into that i'm not sure i don't think so um but surely that's not the answer just to keep ingesting you know ecclesial politics well we need we need to remember people are tending to get discouraged or cynical or frustrated or fed up or whatever and they tend to fall into our reactionary camps of one one kind or another type of thing like clutching for security onto certain things uh falling into mentality of suspicion fear uh connecting our ecclesiastical frustrations with frustrations with the government and mixing things together yes so i i just think we need to remember that all this is happening under the providence of god now this is really really important and most people don't understand how radical the promise of god is there's nothing that's happening that's not being permitted to happen by the lord and he's got a plan to bring good out of it so we've got to say what what's the good here well one good is that corruption and confusion within the church is being exposed uh hopefully giving people a chance to repent but if not repent uh just judgment perhaps is coming because god is going to judge unrepentant wickedness god is going to judge false shepherds and false teachers god is going to judge people who are misleading the flock you know we have all kinds of prophets in the old testament talking about church you know church leadership at that time who were calling virtue vice and vice virtue and weren't giving a clear sound from the trumpet and we're you know mudding the works and you know that type of thing and so you know maybe the lord's setting things up for for judgment but certainly what he's trying to do is bring purification to church i i have a chapter in the book i wrote on that chapter five it says stop straddling the issue i think individual catholics have to now make a deeper personal choice than ever before and answer the question who do you think he is who do you think jesus is if jesus is really the lord the only sensible response to make to him his total commitment and total obedience eagerly wanting to know what he teaches eagerly wanting to follow what he's asking us to do really becoming missionary disciples which which is a very radical thing to become not just somebody who believes in jesus but somebody who obeys jesus follows jesus and wants other people to come to jesus and and a lot of catholics need to be awakened to that kind of radical commitment to the lord because it's the only commitment that jesus asked for in the gospel jesus is not asking for lukewarm commitment from anybody he's saying unless you love me more than mother and father you're not worthy to be my disciple and unless you renounce all you possess you're not worthy to be my disciple so if we want to really be called a disciple of jesus and that's the new buzzword in the church today isn't it matt you know everybody's talking about discipleship but disciple is a radical commitment to jesus a radical commitment of obedience of love a personal loyalty and i think the lord's trying to gather together a remnant i think he's trying to gather a nucleus in the catholic church very much like pope benedict years ago when he was just father wrestling jerry where he prophesied that the church is going to get smaller it's going to lose its buildings it's going to lose its prestige in society it's going to lose its it's reputation it's gonna lose its money and but out of that the lord's gonna bring together a white-hot fire of love for the lord and love for people and then he also prophesied you know not in the form of prophecy he's just saying i think this is what's gonna happen but i think he was really seeing things out of that's going to come people who are become unspeakably lonely in a technological society are going to stumble across this little band of disciples and find a home they never knew existed so i just think something big is going on matt i think something really big is going on and it's totally under the control of the lord so people ask me if i'm discouraged i'm not i'm excited oh yeah i'm excited the lord's really about something very significant about the judgment of the wicked and the gathering of remnant now i think many of this many of these people recognize intellectually that there's probably been times throughout church history that we've had a great deal of confusion and sin from leaders in the church and even from the pope but can you maybe shed some light on that i'm sure you're familiar with this throughout history where there's been tremendous chaos and confusion and how the churches yeah and people say you know is this the worst thing ever is this the worst time ever i don't know but we do have some unique things right now that weren't present before we really have confusion in the church happening at the same time as an incredible array of the powers of this world against christ in the church it reminds me of psalm 2 where it says the kings of the world array themselves against the lord and his anointed so all the levers of power now and culture today all the levers of government all the levers of entertainment even sports how about this professional sports kind of becoming woke you know professional sports kind of persecuting people for not going along with the global elite agenda uh education i mean it's it's incredible how public schools are have so quickly become indoctrination centers for gender confusion and homosexuality and uh disobeying your parents and don't telling your parents separating parents from children you know so i mean it's like wow i mean there's a takeover about every kind of you know avenue of influence in our society by by something really inimicable to christ in the church and i i don't think you can explain how quick and how thorough it's been without supernatural power and it really reminds me of something pope benedict said when after he retired could could i read that to you yeah yeah because we do often kind of point to secret groups within the church but there's also the demonic yeah who are seeking the destruction of souls and christ's church yes and paul says our battle is primarily not against flesh and blood not about political parties not about planned parenthood not about this out of the other thing those are instruments of of spiritual powers that are just incredibly intelligent incredibly hate-filled towards the human race and towards christ and so people without even being aware of it can be actually instruments of the satanic you know and you know what's the definition of the antichrist somebody who refuses to acknowledge christ you know and these movements these organizations these parties are opposed to the truth about jesus they don't mind a false jesus they don't mind a jesus and a church that you can use to as like a chaplain to their agenda and i'm a little concerned that that's what the catholic church is being lured into uh they're they're being lured into almost being like a chaplain to the un or chapel to the chaplain to the global reset but anyway pope benedict said 100 years ago everybody would have considered it to be observed to speak of a homosexual marriage today one is being excommunicated by society if one opposes it the same applies to abortion to the creation of human beings in the laboratory you know latest announcement we just kind of did a a blend between a mouse fetus and mouse cells and human cells you know i mean you know this stuff is really crazy stuff is really happening then he goes on to say modern society is in the middle of formulating an anti-christian creed and if one opposes it one is being punished by society with excommunication the fear of the spiritual power of the antichrist is natural but it really needs the response of prayers on the part of an entire diocese and of the universal church in order to resist it so you know not too long ago wow that's so well put yeah you'd think that he was responding today you know not however many years ago that it was and not too long ago to have somebody with his respect uh talk about the antichrist you'd label like come on now this is a little crazy you're getting into end time speculation you know but he's saying people are beginning to sense that something big is going on that's really really big and bad and there's a natural fear about the spiritual power of the antichrist but then he says it needs to be countered by prayer you know type of thing and so uh i mean there's just so many places we could go with this matt you know so many different directions you know ephesians chapter six spiritual armor um you know what the catechism of the catholic church says about the antichrist you know i mean this is just something yeah it does feel like for too long we haven't recognized the the demonic yeah i remember sitting with a nun and a couple of catholic women and they found an old prayer book this was back in 2003 and they were reading the saint michael prayer and were astonished at how ridiculous it was they had never heard of it before yeah and they were laughing at it and how silly it was yeah yeah yeah we you know archbishop gomez just a couple days ago said something almost identical to what pope benedict is saying and that's pretty amazing for the president of the bishops conference knowing that the bishops are divided knowing that he's going to take flack for saying something like this he said something very similar he said that these movements of kind of global reset uh and he mentions black lives matter and he mentions other things uh are actually in the for in the process of forming an alternate worldview an alternate religion that has no place for christ in the church amen yes and he says god bless him he says we need to really be honest about this that's what we're dealing with now we're not dealing with uh you know a christian culture anymore we're dealing with an alternate religion and all that world view that's coming up that we need to be yes really realistically i'm gonna make a t-shirt that says reject secular dogma what do you think what is wokism define it for me well a lot of it is rooted in something called critical race theory which basically says the world should be divided into the oppressed and the oppressors and that the the key to understanding history is that there's those who have the power and those who don't have the power and those who have the power press those who don't have the power so what we need to do in order to get equity yeah this is kyle max it is it's class warfare and archery shigoma specifically says that he says this is marxism coming in under all these new labels and we know where that goes now believe it or not putin the president of russia about a month ago gave a long talk where he said the west is heading towards destruction because it's embracing this woke-ism and he says we tried this god bless him yeah he says we tried this we did this it leads to a totalitarianism it leads to eliminating people it needs to uh disaster i mean it's not human he says this whole gender stuff is not human he says it's not good for human beings so so who would have thought that ally and putin yeah that the president of the united states would be leading the charge to a post-christian anthropology in a post-christian religion really and he's basically sometimes it looks to me like he sold the soul to get elected because he used to have some reservations about abortion he's a puppet yeah yeah he's he but i mean like when when the radical left put pressure on him to get the nomination he abandoned any resistance he had to any any curbs on abortion so you say well what people will do to get power you know it's really really an awful scary thing that's why i'm so concerned about the salvation of his soul yeah but anyway uh so putin so you've got the yeah united states president pushing away from christ and the putin guy saying the judeo-christian tradition about marriage and family and sexuality is uh is is what human beings need you know not that he's you know an icon of living it necessarily or anything like that but it's so strange to come out of out of the soviet union a voice saying we did this and it was wrong and it was a disaster and you're doing the same thing now it reminds me the same thing when the catholic church tries to accommodate to the culture i feel like saying do you see what happened to the mainline protestant churches who accommodated to the culture yeah i mean you can't drive down downtown ann arbor right now without first baptist of first methodist flying their lgbtq flags i mean it's like a different religion it's and it's directly contradictory to uh the deposit of faith directly contradictory to the teaching of christ the apostles and they're trying to win friends and influence people and get members by changing the message rather than calling people to faith and repentance so don't you see what's happened to those churches don't you see the decline in the protestant churches why are we even thinking about this why are there german bishops even thinking of saying this is going to actually help us you know win people people are going to say what's left to believe in what you know you're just coming around to the culture the culture's fine for me i don't need you know what's sad though is what you're saying right now is what faithful catholics were saying 20 30 years ago yeah but it's just escalated yeah it's really escalated there were many voices raised years ago you know many voices raised years ago warning about what was coming but now it's here and [Music] you know persecution is coming persecution is here i i know lots of people who are trying to uh hope that their company they works for don't require them to sign on to things that they can't sign on to people are getting canceled every day people are getting removed from social media every day people are getting fired from their companies or dismissed from their teams because they're not going along with the new agenda and i'm just concerned that a lot of catholics aren't ready to draw the line someplace and that they're going to be kind of sucked into becoming actually part of the demonic strategy out of fear out of cowardness out of weakness and jesus clearly says and he says this in the context of persecution he says if you deny me before men i'm going to deny you before my father in heaven now you say that is so shocking that is that is so harsh that is so radical how how could justly jesus say that you know what does he expect from weak human beings and i think the only way of understanding that is that the gift of jesus to us is so immeasurably precious so immeasurably you know takes our breath away what god the father is willing to do so that we can be reconciled to him that we can be forgiven our sins that we actually could have the gift of eternal life you know all these technology billionaires are paying lots of money hoping that they can extend their lives you know and you know you know extending natural life is one thing a natural life is shot through with sorrow sin and ultimate destruction supernatural life like life of the resurrection life of no more suffering and no more tears a life of perfect communion of love with each other and with the lord is what is being offered to us in jesus and so to reject jesus is really a serious thing you know francis martin who used to do a lot of teaching here at press conferences of steubenville a very well-known scripture scholar recently died he said one of the gravest sins in the new testament is the sin of unbelief not to believe the testimony that god the father has given to his son not to believe the testimony of the son himself the way he spoke with authority that nobody ever spoke like that before the the signs and wonders he did not to believe the testimony of the apostle who said we touched him we felt him we saw him this happened we're witnesses to the resurrection the resurrection did happen and then paul says if the resurrection didn't happen our faith is in vain that's because that means that death has the final word even over jesus you know death doesn't have the final word you know there's really hope for eternal life you know what would you pay for eternal life you know like i mean you know it's like the golden ticket from willy wonka you know yeah it's like we got the golden ticket you know and and uh it's just so so i have to think we we have to prepare catholics for persecution we ha and that means helping them to develop a depth of loyalty to jesus a depth of relationship to jesus depth of personal love for jesus that they would not deny him whether it's like soft persecution or hard persecution but every time i talk about this i feel like i also need to say don't worry about what might come in the future yes persecution is coming and you need to kind of make sure you got enough to build the tower you know so you need to know that you're in that relationship with the lord that it's not going to be easy for you to deny him but uh jesus says don't worry when they bring you before communion judges because at that moment it will be given to you what to say the holy spirit will give you what you will say at that time what you should do what what's fancy should take towards the questioning you know sometimes paul uh appealed to rome he used legal natural methods to uh it wasn't his time to go type of thing other times he used argument he used debate other times he was you know snuck out of the city by friends type of thing but other times he knew that the time had come and so he went to jerusalem even though the prophets were telling him you're going to be arrested there you're going to be bound you know that type of thing and then when he was in rome he said i know that i'm about to be poured out like a libation and the time comes but other times you're supposed to avoid persecution but catholics need to be sensitive to the holy spirit you know jesus says the holy spirit will tell you what to do so that means we need to have a living relationship with the holy spirit we really need to love the holy spirit we need to pray come holy spirit we need to have as much of the holy spirit as possible amen amen amen um i think one of the things that we have to do at least is to start calling things by their proper name yes you've read 1984 yeah uh get do away with language change how we think um the words of heretic apostatizing i said i pronounced that right didn't i yeah i always think it's poster sizing apostatized right so when we have fellow catholics oh they fell away no they are possibly apostatized they rejected the gift given them yeah and we have prominent catholics doing that like audrey assad who is a beautiful catholic musician who is apostatized bless her but pray for her but she's made it very clear and there are others who are doing it we have to use words like sodomy instead of gay yeah fornication right instead of hooking up right adultery instead of cheating cheating this isn't a game yeah this is a lisa and we have to apply those ugly words to our own ugly behavior if we are engaging in these things and go to war on our ego as it were in the sacrament of confession we can't keep pussyfooting around with sin and we can't keep pointing to the sin of others to make our own sins seem more bearable uh god is not going to ask me about the sins of joe biden when uh the judgment comes for me and so i have to i have to want to i have to hate sin in my own life and have to be more committed to doing away with my own ugly sin than i would be if i had cancer what would i be willing to bloody do yeah yeah how much would i not be willing to pay where wouldn't i be willing to travel if i thought gee i might be dead here yeah and then i apply that to my sin and i just find myself lazy and yawning and pathetic no you know amen amen you know jesus said if your right hand caused you to sin cut it off if your right eye causes you to sin pluck it out better to enter the kingdom missing an arm or missing an eye than to go down to hell with an intact body so jesus isn't asking us to actually literally cut those things out but he's saying do whatever it takes to get free of serious sin and he says don't be afraid of those who can kill the body rather be afraid of the death of soul and body in hell so catholics got to get their priorities right you know yeah the the the biggest problem in the world is sin you know and and and that that rebellion against god that indifference to god that refusal to worship him that in gratitude towards the creator the not valuing the precious gift of jesus you know so uh yeah we we gotta really just just what you said really and i think we have to band together too one of the things i've so loved about moving to superville ohio is i know five or six families on my street who love jesus christ and want to be faithful and if i was to abandon my wife in cowardice or abandon my family i know i would have people who would like smack me around yeah in the sense yeah they would they would corner me they would you know and that's obviously an extreme example they would admire the city it would admonish the center yeah and uh but i lived in atlanta prior to this and my closest friend lived a 15-minute drive away yeah the church was a 30 minute drive away and i know not everybody can move to different places around the country but i feel like living in this society is difficult enough without good brothers and sisters to worship with it's almost like finding a family in the modern world is like finding a child lost in the forest you think you will not survive unless you have help yeah the modern family is everything in modern society is aimed at destroying it and sifting us like wheat we have to do whatever we can i think to plug ourselves in with other sinners yes but people who want to be holy yeah yeah yeah no absolutely i you know i have a very practical example of that my wife started a and her sister who lives near us which is really a blessing they started a neighborhood bible study and they just reached out to various neighbors you know some they knew already as catholic they asked the local parish for the names of catholics that live in the neighborhood that they didn't know and invited them to the bible study so out of that maybe about 15 women have gotten connected and they're really supporting each other in a very significant way you know they're doing a weekly bible study and uh it's it's sort of like that you need to find other people that you can make the journey with that could strengthen you encourage you and they're reaching out they're they're kind of challenging me to do something for the husband good do it do it oh it's hard yeah no this is not a comedy we've found ourselves in this is saving private ryan yeah so those women over a cup of coffee studying the bible are like going to war yeah and i think if you try to understand your life in any other way yeah then you have a target on your back and someone hates you intensely yeah they can't understand your life i won't understand my life it'll just seem like a series of inconveniences and i can never seem to quite be happy as i wish to be and these health issues keep coming up and if only they wouldn't then i could finally be right it's like no we're at war yeah yeah no they're concerned about the salvation of people in the neighborhood they're praying for people for conversion they're inviting people they're trying to be witness through charity you know they bring meals to people that need meals things like that so they're living the catholic life you know type of thing and so everybody needs to be connected somehow maybe get connected through a bible study at your parish or maybe you could start to get together people in your neighborhood that you know have christian faith you know even ecumenically and uh you know it's sort of like yeah we need we need each other or sometimes with families you know sometimes families are blessed by having you know blessed uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews and really kind of praying together when you're together in family gatherings and things like that strengthening families you know i just got together with my daughter and son-in-law who live here in steubenville with their five kids and you know they're a blessed family that's following the lord and you know when you're raising kids there's always challenges you know but uh they're they're there with the lord with those challenges and that's good yeah i gave them a little holy card last night what was that well it was something that the apostolate for family consecration which is just down the road printed and it's the image that the three children of fatima had during the miracle of the sun like during the miracle of the sun the three children jacinto francisco and lucia saw things that nobody else saw like mary was showing herself in different different tableau so to speak and one of the tableaus was joseph mary and the baby jesus blessing the people and so tell us about fatima because i know that you've been uh had maybe a renewed interest in devotion to lady of fatima tell us how that happened and what we need to know yeah i think it's incredibly relevant for for right now you know 1916 three little children brother and sister jacinta and francisco and their cousin lucy uh seven years uh six years old eight years old and nine years old were tending the sheep they were ordinary catholic kids they weren't particularly noted for holiness they were part of a catholic culture so they tried to say the rosary every day but they said it in a very shorthand way they say hail mary hail mary hillary 50 times you know so they want to get back to their games you know whatever they're doing so they're doing their super short and abbreviated rosary and this image appears of a shimmering person they said it looked like a 15 year old boy radiant light and he introduced himself as the angel of fatima and he said uh i want to teach you a prayer and so the angel i don't know how much detail do you want i like this yeah this is helpful people are out there this is real this is really they don't know much else about it so this is real and and what the angel and mary ask of them are also being asked of us as very important that we pay attention because this relates to what we're going through right now so anyway the the angel bows down puts his forehead on the floor and says i adore you i believe in you i adore you i hope in you and i love you and i ask your pardon for those who don't believe in you and don't adore you and don't open you and don't love you and then the angel said offer the sufferings that come your way as reparation for sin and for the conversion of sinners that say this prayer and um and they he left so ever since for the rest of their life they put their foreheads on the floor and prayed that prayer not in public but when they were by themselves and then that was in spring then the summer the angel returned this time he was a little a little more direct and he said uh what are you doing pray you know uh pray for the conversion of sinners pray for reparation for sin then he taught them another prayer about reverence for the eucharist and the reparation for all the offenses against the eucharistic lord and the mary and then he appeared one other time and um and then the next year uh another shimmering form came to them while they're tending to shape and it was a beautiful lady from heaven she didn't identify herself she just says i'm from heaven and they they never identified her as mary although they probably had their suspicions until she told them because she they kept saying tell us who you are give us a sign so people will stop beating us up and start believing us and mary asked them to do the same thing with the angel ass she said offer your sufferings for reparation for sin and for the conversion of sinners and then the only thing she repeated in all six apparitions she said say the rosary every day for peace because the world is in danger and she says this this war world war one is going to end soon you know this was 1917 now so the war ended in 1918. she says but unless there's repentance there's going to be a worse war comes and then she says when you see a certain sign in the sky and know that the war is about to come it was the aurora borealis that happened just before germany invaded the czechoslovakia and uh we know that 20 million people died in world war one 50 million people died in world war ii so there wasn't repentance so there was a very severe punishment a very severe judgment on godlessness now i don't think we're in a better situation than the people were in between world war i world two in fact i think it's accelerated in a in a really negative direction i mean catholic countries like ireland have crumbled you know uh there used to be a number of european countries that were holding out against the secularizing tendency it used to be ireland malta poland poland's still holding out but by by a uh hungary and slovakia are sort of in the battle too uh but malta legalized divorce and was like you pulled the thread out of a cloth and the whole thing is kind of unraveling right now i was doing a retreat for priest in malta a couple of years ago i was talking to the auxiliary bishop and he said the government no longer even consults us all they're doing is consulting us these radical change groups the lgbtq pressure groups and they they know that the people don't believe us anymore they know the people we're 90 catholic they they think we're a non-entity we we don't count people don't really believe the teaching of the church anymore and it's just all crumbling there in malta then in ireland when you know 800 years of poverty and persecution only strengthened the irish people in their commitment and they sent out missionaries all over the world way out of proportion to their population irish missionaries all over the world i was talking to an irish missionary in rome a couple years ago for a very famous missionary order and he said we don't have any novices anymore and we just changed our mission statement to include promoting the rights of women yeah they didn't deserve anyone obviously taking concern ecology yeah and they were just like sort of aping the world they were they were they were adopting the world's agenda thinking that was somehow going to help them attract vocations it's such an incredible blindness darkness veil they don't understand the gospel anymore they don't know jesus anymore they're they used to live there for three years it was godless oppressive yeah and then ireland legalizes abortion not too long ago and tens of thousands of people flood into the streets of dublin celebrating that ireland can now kill babies like the rest of europe like we're with it you know we've we've joined the modern world we've thrown off this ancient superstition how dark is that let's despicable yeah how tragic is that and that is the apostasy you're talking about that's apostasizing that's rejecting the treasure that god gave the irish nation through saint patrick and all the irish saints and all the irish missionaries for so many years you know uh you know people would risk their life to go to mass being set in the the countryside on mass rocks and uh you know and so you know my my grandparents came from ireland as immigrants and they they had such a strong faith they just insisted that you know my parents and us you know went to catholic schools when catholic schools were really catholic and so it's just it's just so tragic to see that so we're in danger right now mary says pray pray the rosary every every day for world peace i try to do that if i miss one day i say two the next day you know and then she also said so many souls are going to hell because so few people are willing to pray and offer sacrifices for them so besides accepting the suffering that comes to you as a normal part of life mary also said make voluntary sacrifices so what the children began to do is sometimes they would give up their lunch sometimes they would give it to the sheep sometimes they would not drink water on a hot day and i was talking to a catholic grade school about mary's appearances at fatima and the the teacher in charge asked them to write down what they got out of it and i've got like i don't have them with me here but 40 or 50 students wrote down uh i'm going to make voluntary sacrifices now uh you know when when i have a chance to have candy i'm going to say no sometimes or my little brother teases me i'm not going to tease him back or i'm going to sleep without a pillow tonight or uh the 5th grade boys basketball team decided to give up water during practice you know things like that you know so it's just sort of like little children are capable of understanding the mysteries you know so i'd like to say anybody working with little children anybody who has little children don't underestimate their ability to understand god don't underestimate their ability to make a commitment to him don't underestimate their their spiritual sensitivity and how even for an early age they can be called into a journey towards holiness that type of thing so anyway people didn't believe the little kids their lucia's own mother probably never believed her to the day she died she got beaten uh you know so they say mary could you please give a sign that that would people would believe us but before that one one other thing happened she gave them a vision of hell in july this the third apparition she gave them a vision of hell and lucia describes it uh and she says it was absolutely terrifying what we saw the the shapes kind of you know the agony the the darkness the ugliness the foulness of the whole thing and we we just were really shaken up we looked to mary and mary said this is where poor souls go because they have nobody to pray and offer sacrifice for them and so every every day jacinta after that would really ask her cousin and her brother what have you done today to sacrifice for the salvation of souls you know so the whole thing is focused on their own personal holiness but also evangelization you might speak they're concerned about others they're concerned about salvation of souls they're concerned about loving god loving their neighbor type of thing so the day of the miracle sun comes in october of 2017 and all the newspapers were there maybe 70 000 people in the vicinity it was a very extremely rainy muddy day it took some commitment to get there at noon time lucia shouts out put down your umbrellas and uh all of a sudden the rain stopped and the sun began to spin in the sky and i hadn't really known this before until i read lucia's first hand account the best thing written on fatima i think is uh fatima and lucia's own words that nothing beats really okay nothing happens to read this yeah nothing beats the first hand account of how they experience it what happened is that the bishop said luchier write down everything you can remember about jacinta and francisco after they died write down and nobody knew that the angel had appeared the year before all they knew was that you know mary came out so all kinds of things came out when she was being asked to write things down so that it's called the fat amount of cheese on words fatima and lucia's own words can we put a link to that neil so sometimes people have a hard time finding it we do stock it at renewal ministries renewalministries.net but uh sometimes you can get on amazon too um so the miracle sun happens the sun starts coming down towards the earth people thought the world was going to end so they started out publicly confessing their sins yeah wow yeah they said they thought their life was going to end type of thing they started publicly repenting that type of thing and then afterwards people felt like a new joy came into their heart is like a new pentecost had come like there was an infusion of god's grace into the souls of those who are there cardinal maduro's former archbishop of boston whose portuguese wrote an account of it he interviewed a lot of people and many people said it was like a new pentecost you know happening at the end of it so that's what happened uh jacinta and francisco died pretty soon they went through a lot of suffering very moving accounts by lucia about francisco's last days um very moving account of jacinta being willing to suffer more for the salvation of souls mary has their you know are you willing to stay a little longer you know and for the sake of souls you know things like that so so i find it very inspiring i find it very relevant i i i feel like it's um a warning a message for us you know uh it's probably the most approved marrying apparition in the church yeah pope the pope has gone to as a feast day just like our lady of guadalupe and so one of the hopeful things is that every now and then the lord does divine interventions you know and he he's been doing them through mary you know in lots of different ways you know uh you know guadalupe fatima you know lords they all have a story about why that was a timely time to to intervene in a particular way so we can't pin our hopes on an intervention we have to do what we have to do right now but the lord's has an eye on things and mary has an eye on things and when when the time is right they'll do what they're supposed to do but we need to be doing what we're supposed to do beautiful i want to take a break and then when we come back i want to talk about marion devotion i want to talk about religious pluralism and the sort of universalism that seems to be creeping into the church and then we'll take some questions from our okay our viewers all right [Music] all right i want to say thank you to ethos logos investments for supporting this show el investments.net pints i guess when i was a bit younger i thought that investing was something that only rich people did or old people did or rich old people did i didn't realize it was something that i should be looking into as well and when i began looking into it i realized i don't want to invest in companies that are doing immoral things and that's where ethos logos investments comes in they were founded to work with individuals and institutions within the united states that seek to infuse their morals into their investment portfolio with portfolios that adhere to the us conference of catholic bishops responsible investing guidelines you can be sure that you aren't profiting from intrinsic evils like abortion embryonic stem cell research pornography or human trafficking please go check them out ethos logos investments is what they're called el investments.net slash pints there's a link in the description below el investments.net slash pints for employers they offer socially responsible and catholic 401k and 403b options as well so yeah go check them out el investments.net pints securities offered through securities america inc member finra sipik ethos logos investments and securities america are separate entities advisory services offered through securities america advisors incorporated yes the second group i want to thank is hello hello h-a-l-l-o-w dot com slash mattfraddhallow.com hello is a fantastic app that will help you to pray and meditate it's not like new age mindfulness apps that lead into wrong ways of thinking this is a hundred percent catholic and it's super sophisticated if you go to hallow.com matt fradd and sign up there you'll get a few months for free before deciding if you want to pay a minimal amount every month to have access to their entire app now you can download the app right now and you'll get access to certain things for free so be sure to check that out if you just want to you know play around with it and see what they have to offer but if you want access to everything that they have like sleep stories and bible studies and all sorts of beautiful things like that you you have to pay a certain amount every month to get access to that if you want access to everything for a few months just go to hello.com mattfraddhallow.com and sign up there [Music] thanks all right um this book i read it a year ago because people probably send you books all the time too look at the camera on that we'll look at the uh cover notre dame is that it yes it is and it's burning yeah yeah i was talking to somebody who works in a bishop's office in washington totally spontaneously he said we see the statistics the church is burning we really you know like when you see the like i've never known somebody who speaks so negatively about the state in which we're in and yet be so joyful that's what you do so well how can you not be joyful when you know that the lord's in control yeah well anyway i wanted to say i read that book over a weekend and uh people it's a big book and uh people send me books all the time i'm sure they send you books all the time as well and i try to read them before the show and sometimes i don't and i admit when i don't but yeah but i read that over the course of the weekend i was so inspired by it that i uh if you remember i contacted the publisher and said let's let's give a hundred copies away for free and they agreed to do free shipping and we broke their website that's how many people showed up but i just the only reason i share that is i want people to know i am not just saying this because you're sitting across from me i think this is a vitally important book and i would encourage everybody watching right now to go and buy this book now now now now read it and then as saint jose maria esquivel said let it collect souls not dust that's great well i was shocked when you bought a hundred copies to give out the people watching i mean that was really yeah thank you yeah it's an excellent book it really is okay one of the topics you addressed in a church in crisis is this waffling on hell and there's universalism and i just want to you know say that i i think it seems like we all agree the whole pendulum swing phenomena is a is a legitimate thing right uh maybe people thought that for too long the church focused too much on hell probably didn't but maybe there was that perception and we they kind of swung the other way where we had these awful hymns that seemed never to talk about the reality of the war in which we find ourselves people constantly said they never heard talk talking about hell there's a possibility that we're going to see another kind of pendulum swing here which is why it's so important that we just stick to what the church teaches right and ludwigt in fundamentals of catholic dogma points to what was it the sixth session at the council of trent and says that the church has never said that we cannot have uh uh a sort of certainty of ours not a certainty but a sort of assurance of our own salvation but not in a sort of infallible inerrant sense because we can apostatize um and we might be deluding ourselves so how do we thread this needle because the idea of unending torment forever is enough to someone entirely yeah especially when they already feel like a failure yeah they've been living in a society that's pushed porn down their throat they're engaged in all sorts of things it was it was even imposed upon them as it was on me and i'm now supposed to love this god and there's a real possible possibility that i will spend eternity in hell uh it's terrifying yeah and yet apparently it's part of revelation and we're not free to throw it out yeah well i think the proper balance which you're talking about really we really find it in john chapter 3 verse 16 which is a great summary of the gospel god so loved the world and it's talking about loving the world in its fallen condition you know loving human beings in our fallen condition because it's implying that the world has fallen and is alienated from god and is going to be eternally separated from god but god doesn't want to leave us or the world in that condition so god so loved the world that he gave his only son now wow i mean like wow he could have done it some other way but that's such a personal way of doing it that's that's that's such a such an expression of profound commitment to humanity the word became flesh and dwelt among us god forever took upon himself a human nature and and right now at the right hand of the father the man jesus is there and uh and we can be there too and that's the whole point of the incarnation that god has joined himself permanently to human nature and we now can be permanently with god you know at the right hand of the father with jesus in fact scripture even says our life is even now hidden with christ in god so right now if we're in christ we're with him with the father so it's some mysterious mystical way but it's pretty significant to be in christ anyway god soul of the world they gave his only son that whoever believes in him so it isn't like there's an automatic thing going on here there's an offer being made here there's a gift being given whoever believes in him may not perish so there is the possibility of if we don't accept the remedy we're going to die of the sickness if we don't accept the medicine that god is offering his own son and what we talk about in the eucharist the medicine and immortality the body and blood of jesus the nucleus if we don't accept the gift if we don't accept the cure if we don't accept the medicine we're not going to be cured of the horrible death dealing disease of sin so whoever believes in him will not perish may not perish but have eternal life so you say this is a no-brainer but it's not a no-brainer to us in our fallen condition we're we're we're thrown about by disorder desires the wounds of original sin we're living in a culture that's uh brainwashing us away from god uh and then we know from the testimony of scripture that the devil is like a roaring lion seeking to devour our souls so the offer of mercy the offer of love the offer of eternal life is coming not into a neutral environment but we are we're swirling about in lostness we are swirling about and deception and lies and hatred and lust and greed and envy and jealousy we're swirling about in a totalitarian dictatorship that wants to seal us off permanently from god so we got to reach out we got to say here's my chance here's the gift and we've got to take hold of jesus we got to put our faith and trust in him and belief doesn't just mean intellectual belief oh yeah i believe correct doctrine orthodoxy is not enough orthodontics is not enough it's absolutely essential i spent my whole life fighting for orthodoxy but orthodoxy is not enough relationship loyalty to jesus friendship with jesus uh personal love of jesus becoming part of him scripture says you know how dare you how would you even think of taking the members of christ and making him members of a prostitute don't you realize that you're one body one spirit with the lord don't you realize that you're a temple of the holy spirit don't you realize that god's dwelling in you that's who you are you know live up to who you are you know live up to the holiness that god has placed in you so um hell is a a terrible possibility for people who aren't willing to humble themselves aren't willing to swallow their pride aren't willing to let go of being beyond good and evil and arbiters of their own morality like nietzsche talked about once god is dead everything's permitted so what's going on in our culture right now is god is dead and it's a power game you know the powerful are going to decide what's right and wrong and once you separate yourself from the objective reality of god and his structure of reality and the ten commandments which are just pointing to this is what human life was created for once you separate yourself from god anything goes and that's what we're seeing right now anything goes anything goes in fetal experimentation anything goes and euthanasia anything goes in abortion anything goes in eliminating people from public discourse who disagree with the direction of the culture so we're in a very terrible situation but we need to recognize that we need help we need to recognize that we are sinners that need forgiveness and if we're not willing to accept the mercy that god is offering us we're choosing ourselves in eternity apart from god you know this is awful this is yeah it's awful and it's awful that people would make that decision but sometimes people would rather be god themselves then humble themselves and swallow their pride and go through the repentance that that's necessary and the change of life and the surrender and it doesn't mean that we're instantly delivered from the devil or from our sins or from the culture but if we begin to move towards jesus little by little he's gonna heal the wounds of sin he's gonna little by little free us from addictions and gonna be little by little uh bring us into the true shape that he created us for into the true person that we were meant to be and the only the only real happiness for a human being is to being fully in union with god's will for their life you know the whole purpose why god created us is to be one with him period that's it that's the purpose of why we exist as a race we exist as a race to be one with god and and the only tragedy as people say is not to be a saint not to be one with god now sometimes people will speak like they're not committing heresy but they're speaking in a way that gives people the wrong opinion or the wrong impression and i think you've done a really good job at charitably responding to bishop baron who i don't think is a heretic i don't think he's taught heresy but he sometimes speaks in a way that gives you the impression that we're all kind of going to heaven and christians are just sort of like in first class and so it's a much better thing like wouldn't you prefer to come to first class as we all go to heaven yeah um yeah again it's that impression like he was on ben shapiro's show and ben shapiro asked him about that and i just thought it'd be rather simple for him to say ben you need to repent and accept the gospel you need to stop you need to embrace the fullness of judaism or something yeah you could put it in a nice way but yeah just what's what's the yeah well i think this goes back to the pastoral strategy of vatican ii which we're opening up another can of worms here the pastoral strategy of vatican ii is to try to reset our relationship with the modern world to try to kind of live down our reputation as being anti-science anti-democracy anti-labor unions uh anti-culture you know and to try to affirm as much as possible the positive aspects of modern culture and get over our alignment with right-wing military regimes in south america and bringing back the french monarchy and you know all that kind of stuff you know so so it was it was it was you know it made a certain amount of sense to try to do that and then after vatican 2 people were i have i wrote another book called many be saved what vatican 2 actually teaches in its implication for new evangelization and i quote a bishop in there saying now that we've reset our relationship with the modern world people are just going to come flooding into the church they're just going to they're just going to see how how wonderful and positive we are and how much we're for all the good and the beautiful and the true and of course right after vatican ii just the opposite happened now partly we can trace it to the strategy that was adopted and i want to say more about that but partly unfortunately the devil had a plan to counter the good that the holy spirit was trying to do in vatican 2. in 1968 a couple of years after the council ended we had probably the most significant cultural revolution that we've had in a long time where the whole repudiation of authority the whole repudiation of tradition the whole mockery of older people the whole make love not war the whole glorification of fornication the whole glorification of rebellion the whole glorification of breaking with the past breaking with the church just came in there big time the student rebellions the anti-war demonstrations all those things you know we still have bumper stickers in ann arbor to this day say question authority you know where we were the epicenter of of the student rebel revolt in many ways and uh so um so you had just at the moment when we were trying to make friends with the culture the culture was releasing something that was profoundly rebellious against god and the church and uh we've been trying ever since to make friends with the world you know we want to see it at the table well you know if you have to kind of sell your soul to get a seat at the table it's not a good bargain it's like a 40 year old man trying to be hip with the teens and the teen's like you're kind of gross would you go away please yeah yeah so so we're still in the mentality of let's affirm as much as we can in modern culture this might be where some of this is coming from yeah i think so i think baron i think he was formed in that he's still there that's where a lot of bishops are still but some bishops are starting to wake up shall we say saying this strategy is not working anymore the culture that we're dealing with has radically changed in this approach of being a friend of the world is going to end up making us an enemy of god you know like the epistle of james says he was a friend of the world will be an enemy of god so i think unfortunately some bishops and probably the pope are still in this mentality and unfortunately it's it's naive it's not productive it's not working and it's actually feeding into the hands of the enemies of the church it's making us appear like we're we're blessing the world we're a chaplain to the you know the culture you know which which is terrible the gospel is not being clearly proclaimed people aren't being called to repentance and conversion the mission of the church is not to improve this world the mission of the church the world will get improved because people become christians but the mission of the church is called the entire world to faith in jesus christ as the only hope of eternal life to repentance to membership in the church to eat his body and drink his blood to be baptized uh and that's not being heard the world's not hearing that what the world is hearing that what the world's been hearing is let's be friends let's have inter-religious dialogue you know you know let's affirm uh you know global warming has the biggest danger facing the world that's a firm climate change you know let's get everybody vaccinated you know we're being charitable we want to help the world and the gospel is being suffocated it's being muffled it's being submerged in in in the midst of this terrible attempt to appear a friend of the world you know so uh bishop baron did do a video not too long ago about the salvation of people who don't hear the gospel and he did give the impression that oh yeah vatican ii says you know we should be really optimistic about that and i actually did my doctoral dissertation on this particular issue and so i just felt like and he referred people to lumigence lumenegencium16 and but he didn't he didn't identify what lumajesting16 said but just kind of gave the impression that you know this is backing his position so i you know i don't like to get involved in controversy i really want to work for unity in the church i i really don't want to cause the vision but i just felt like i needed to say a little bit more clearly what what the official church teaching actually is on the possibility of people being saved without hearing the gospel so i did a youtube video i felt like it was you know very respectful and um would you remind us to link to that below neil yeah i thought it was very very respectful yeah i thought so oh you know i appreciate what bishop baron's trying to do i appreciate all the people he seems to be helping he does but but um i really felt like he was giving that impression that you just said that he gives you know that you know in the in the interview with ben shapiro and with david rubin and other people where he doesn't quite pull the trigger he doesn't quite tell the truth about about jesus you know so have you had him respond to you well i've tried i've tried to reach out i really have i don't want to get into too much about that i've tried to reach out and even he made some comments in the chat box to his original sermon that i responded to that made me feel like gee i think there's grounds here for that were closer on this then maybe people have the impression but it didn't you know materialize yeah yeah that type of thing so uh so i i hope uh you know i hope sometime to be able to talk to him about about this more you know type of thing good for you for reaching out i mean that is the kind of gospel injunction isn't it yeah appreciate your brother and if somebody's publicly saying something and publicly leading people same thing with me please god that people would correct me publicly yeah and i i think we need to do that in the church i think we need to recognize we're brothers in the lord we're not enemies we're working on the same team we're trying to accomplish the same goal and you know if we have things to help each other with we should try to help each other with so anyway i should probably say very briefly what the church actually teaches about this because this is important for people to know so lumigenesis 16 says uh it is possible under certain circumstances for people to be saved without hearing the gospel so people people hear that and they say oh praise the lord i'm really glad to hear that i don't we don't have to worry about people anymore and people make this big leap from possibility to probability to virtual certainty so this is one of the reasons why there's not a big response to evangelization in the catholic church people say why bother does it really make any difference you know like you know like here we have these meetings with you know hindus and muslims and jews and everybody's all friends and you know don't all roads lead to god and isn't that kind of sort of like what the church is saying this day these days is that what vatican ii said type of thing and it's not but people can get that impression because of how things are being done and what's being said so then it goes into the three conditions under which it's possible for people who haven't heard the gospel be saved condition number one it's not their own fault that they haven't heard the gospel it's an inculpable ignorance of the gospel now there can be a culpable ignorance of the gospel say say say a young person says hey matt fradd's coming to talk in our town today and i'd like you to come and talk to him he's a far away catholic you know or whatever he or he's never heard the gospel or he's a you know just he's a nun he grew up in a you know atheist family but he has a little idea about what you're going to say and he doesn't want to hear it that's culpable ignorance of the gospel perhaps second condition is even though they're inculpably ignorant of the gospel they're sincerely seeking god now there's lots of stuff in the scripture that says if you seek me with all your heart i'll let myself be found by you so the lord expects people to seek him why does he expect that how can he expect that because romans chapter 1 says god has revealed himself to the entire world to the entire human race that everybody can know by looking at the creation that there is a creator and that he's god and he's powerful he's the vine so there is a revelation that god makes to everybody that he expects people respond to by seeking him who is this god what what is his will why do we exist how can i know him type of thing and then the third condition is people are living according to the light of conscience assisted by grace this is like romans chapter 2 it says people who know the law of god will be judged the basis of what they know but people who don't will be judged on the basis of the light that god gives to their conscience so everybody has a measure of revelation that god is making to them in creation in their conscience and so god expects people to respond to that by seeking him desiring to know him looking into the truth about god and two living according to the natural law now the catechism of the catholic church says nobody should be deemed to be ignorant of the natural law that everybody knows in some real way that you shouldn't kill people that you shouldn't take somebody else's property that you shouldn't lie and things like that that there's some in encode sense about those things assisted by grace so that's really key because the catholic church firmly teaches and a lot of protestants don't news notice that the only way we can be saved is by faith through grace ephesians chapter 2 says that as a doctrinal teaching of the catholic church so that means even people in this situation need the grace of god in order to be saved so how could the grace of god come to somebody in that situation there's a footnote i won't get too technical there's a footnote in lumogen 616 that talks about the father feeney case and and father finney taught a very strict interpretation unless people actually became catholics and died as catholics they couldn't be saved so uh the holy office at that time the congregation for the doctrine of faith says well there can be an unconscious desire that contains within it implicitly a desire to do god's will as they know it if they knew it that they would become part of the church if they knew that was god's will for them but it says it can't be just any kind of unconscious desire it has to actually be a response to a light that god's giving that requires a definite ascent a definite yes a definite surrender that births supernatural faith and supernatural charity in the soul that enables them to live the natural lore in a way that they could unless they hadn't said yes to that grace okay now good yeah now people people never hear about these conditions uh and the reason why i felt like i needed to say something is bishop baron never talks about them directly i just wish what people would respond to my reading of vatican 2. i just i just wish people would respond to yeah but but but like not just bishop baron but other people say oh ralph's really invested in people going to hell no i'm really invested in people going to heaven that's why i want to teach the truth about how people get there you know and and i i want to i want to do away with kind of wishful thinking about how people get there let's get to the truth about how people get there you know i've had people write critiques of me where they say ralph's really invested in most people being damned and he's really you know he's you know i remember terrible things that totally misrepresent you know what i'm saying so anyway yeah the the last three sentences of women genesis 16 though i don't know anybody who's ever really commented on them even carl rauner when he's doing his high level theological work on this issue totally ignores the last three sentences all he says is that vatican ii adopted my position vatican ii is very optimistic about the salvation of non-believers and you can decide yourself whether this is optimistic or not but the last three sentences say very often human beings exchange the truth of god for a lie and worship the creature rather than the creator or else they give in to ultimate despair and boy we're seeing ultimate despair rise in our culture the suicide and drug addiction and i mean just mental illness i mean it's just kind of like going crazy you know as people separate themselves from god it just gets more hopeless you know you know more and more hopeless suicide rate amongst people in in illicit sexual relationships uh i mean just like these things don't work they're not good for human life you know that type of thing and the isolation of pornography and the isolation of it you know so it's just so it's anyway jesus is the way the truth and the life but anyway it goes on to say therefore because we often exchange the truth of god for a lie because we often worship the creature rather than creator and that's what the culture is asking us to do is to worship the creature you know they're asking us to worship the creature rather than god we we can form heaven on earth and of course as putin warned us every time you try to make heaven on earth you turn it into hell on or if you turn into concentration camps and eliminating your opponents who are standing in the way of of equity you know type of thing so um i just love whoever just joined the live stream heard you quote putin listen to the whole interview yeah i know it says therefore it's urgent that we carry out our missionary vocation it's urgent that we evangelize why is it urgent that we evangelize because very often people don't avail themselves of the grace of god the mercy of god even us catholics with all the help we have of scripture of tradition of the sacraments of one another the kind of support we were talking about sometimes we choose the darkness rather than the light how much easier is it for people who don't have christ don't have the church don't have the christian community don't have the sacraments don't have the scripture don't know the explicit word of god don't know that jesus is the perfect image of the father and this is who god is really like people who don't have that what are they left with they're left with i think god exists but i don't know what his will is you know how can i find out as well you know how can i live according to what i know is right in me i can't you know type of thing and so it's sort of like how much easier it is to be lost uh to give into disordered desires to to love our sin to reject grace to uh to to go along with the lives of the devil to go along with the uh brainwashing the culture i mean i'd say it's almost impossible for the average person to resist that without the explicit help of conversion without the explicit help of repentance and faith yeah amen so what is your advice to someone watching this who's considering becoming catholic but is like you guys are just as confused as everybody else i mean what would you say to them why should they be the catholic church is the only church really founded by christ christ has established the catholic church as his way of carrying forward his revelation in the world and it really is true the catholic church is the only church that on the books and this is important in the catechism of the catholic church is preserving the fullness of what's been revealed to us about how human beings can be saved and how they should live and how they can live this way every single church that separated themselves from the catholic church goes into era and and it endangers the salvation of their members but we go into era apparently we have people bowing down before pagan idols we have people who are unfaithful to the teaching of the church john paul ii during the year 2000 preparing for the new millennium said we need to repent for how as sons and daughters of the church we haven't lived according to the teaching how we've kind of you know contributed to the disunity of christians how we haven't honored the gifts of women how we've sometimes imposed the faith through force we need to repent for our sins as as sons and daughters of the church but the church doesn't teach those things the church teaches the right path and so it's our fault and it's the fault of leaders sometimes when we don't live it so uh you know where else can we go i mean you know as you know people were perplexed by what jesus was saying about the eucharist they said where else can we go and the apostle said only you have words of eternal life jesus is the mystery of the catholic church jesus his life his teaching his sacraments are the mystery of the catholic church and those are there no matter how worthy or unworthy her leaders are or her members are and we have access to the fullness of the means of salvation in the catholic church that doesn't exist anywhere else so i would absolutely encourage anybody who's thinking about the catholic church to do what benedict rochelle the founder of the friars of the renewal said come on in the water is terrible yeah yes we've got problems come on in kind of become part of the solution rather than the problem yeah not to downplay the confusion and problems we do have in our church but i also heard somebody say that if you're looking for the perfect church and so you leave the catholic church as soon as you find one which you won't but if you did it won't be perfect anymore because look at you yeah you're a mess yeah i i i love the uh the testimony of dion you know the uh the singer i don't know if you know him yeah yeah he you know he was a big a big singer in the uh 60s you know run around sue uh donna primadonna uh wanderer then he did abraham martin and john you know during that time and now he still does stuff he still has stuff you know blues and things like that but he he's a fallen away catholic who became an evangelical protestant was looking for the perfect church and decided uh anyway he came back to the catholic church it's a great story as a book out and things like that it doesn't happen yeah so let me ask you this ralph a miracle still taking place today or is that just something that ended uh with the sort of uh death of the apostles no there's been miracles throughout the entire history of the church what about today what about in the last month last year last five years uh and and and why aren't they happening if they're not and if they are tell us about them well they are happening i think they happen most frequently in mission context is an evangelization context at renewal ministries we work in about 30 40 different countries and i have seen with my own eyes blind people healed crippled people walk i've seen my own eyes demons cast out of obviously demon-possessed people i saw that happen in slovakia i saw that happen in ghana i i saw an old woman let around by her granddaughter who couldn't see get our sight back and you know respond to testing we got it on tape we got it on video type of thing and there's tons of i would say minor healings that happen all the time you know like i know you had dr mary healy as a recent gift and as a recent guest and a gift yeah i guess yeah and uh you know she's very involved in a renewal of healing ministry and called encounter ministries and they see like i'd say i would call them minor healings you know people getting their sore knees taken care of and maybe getting their hearing improved or you know getting over this or that type of thing now my concern with healing is i think we need more healing but then jesus did say that um if if the miracles done in his hometown had been done in sodom gomorrah they would have repented long ago but it's going to go worse than the day of judgment for these towns because the healings didn't accomplish their full purpose the purpose of healing is yes to show mercy and compassion to people but it's supposed to be in john's gospel all the miracles and the healings are signs they're supposed to be signs of who jesus is they're supposed to lead us into relationship with jesus that supposed to lead us into repentance and faith and discipleship and my concern is sometimes people are so fascinated with healings that they get their healing and go home and don't go into deeper relationship with jesus so i think a lot depends on the leadership and what guidance is given what context it all happens and type of thing so yeah healings definitely happen and they should happen and they're they're signs of jesus is alive and acting in the church but i am concerned sometimes that people uh focus on my healing and and don't like like out of the 10 lepers who got healed none of them ran off saying i got healed one that came back and said thank you you know one of them came back that's being true that's a fair point and i i agree with it what i'm concerned of is yeah what's your concern my concern is the opposite my concern is people are no longer praying for healings because they just they just figure prayer doesn't work and i'm one of these people people come up to me please pray for my daughter she's got cancer please i mean i'll pray for you i don't expect anything's actually going to happen yeah it doesn't really work so let's just pray and accept the will of god or something it's yeah so what's speak to that yeah well i think i think we should pray for whatever is going on but i think sometimes we need discernment whether the lord is leading us whether it's going to be healing here or not or whether the person needs to prepare for death and dr mary healy will say that too uh she says the more we pray for healing the more it's going to happen but you know my biggest problem with healing too isn't what i just said my biggest problem with healing is that more of it doesn't happen you know just like you said i mean friends of mary healy and friends of mine die you know friends of us have serious illnesses and they don't get healed sometimes the healer who has other people getting healed has illnesses that they don't get healed of so i say it's a it's a smaller number of people who actually get healed than than we would like yeah yeah one of the things i always love about my charismatically inclined friends is that they talk and act as if jesus is real yeah and i wanted to talk to you about imagine that and i'm not saying that those who aren't charismatic don't speak like that but it's just very palpable you know as if like the lord's aware of it now and he's going to work now um i want to talk to you just about the charismatic renewal are we going to see another one um it did feel like a sort of protestant as protestantising that's not a word of the catholic church in some respects uh maybe not in your experience but but and maybe it was happening alongside sort of liturgical abuses that made them look sort of protestant um but but what's the role for the charismatic renewal should we just throw that name out and just talk about christians living in the spirit because it has so much baggage yeah well i i don't know uh i i think the per you know one of the things that this is going to require is controversy to say this name one of the things that cardinal soonans used to say who is this i don't know who that is he was one of the four presidents of vatican ii uh and and he's become a target of people who are concerned about vatican ii yeah you know unjustly i think but anyway uh so um he used to pope john paul ii paul paul vi pope john paul ii asked him to guide the charismatic renewal into the heart of the church and make sure it's thoroughly catholic so what he used to say is that the purpose of the catholic charismatic renewal movement is not to get everybody into it but to be a sign in the church what belongs to the whole church now it's easy to accept that interpretation but then reduce our understanding about the content of the sign in terms of uh you know when you look at the new testament the apostles were very concerned every time a new group of christians came into the church and he asked the apostles whether it's the samaritans or the ephesians or cornelius in his household that they come into the same experience that this is the exact language they use as the apostles did on the day of pentecost so the apostles expected that what happened to them would be a part of christian initiation and when it didn't happen they they looked into it so when it happened in acts chapter 8 the samaritans had become christians but the fall the spirit had not yet fallen upon them peter and john went down to uh kind of see what was wrong and to kind of ask the spirit to fall on them type of thing yeah in acts chapter 10 uh cornelius in his household is hearing the gospel preached to them and the spirit falls on them the language of the spirit falling on them is a fairly strong language type of thing so peter gets into trouble because he says this isn't happening in the right order but we should baptize them you know type of thing so he gets into trouble back at headquarters acts chapter 11 and and people said you did what peter you baptized gentiles and peter in so many words said the holy spirit made me do it you know he said you know i saw it happening to them they spoke in tongues and they prophesy i saw happening to them the same thing that happened to us the day of pentecost so how could i refuse to baptize them and so that settled the argument and then in acts chapter 19 paul comes across some disciples and he feels he asks of a funny question he says you know did you receive the holy spirit when when you were baptized and they said we haven't even heard about the holy spirit now this used to be true for catholics you know when when eve congar was writing his two volume work on the holy spirit he said people people if you ask catholics what they believe they believe in the father son pope and mary you know type of thing you know so you know that's no longer the case partly because of the charismatic renewal partly because of biblical scholarship and things like that so he finds out that they're just baptized for repentance with the baptism of john the baptist so he says okay and this is a good model of evangelization find out where people are at you know find out where they're coming from find out what they know and what they don't know what to experience what they haven't experienced so paul says john the baptist wanted his disciples to follow jesus and once jesus is here and jesus has come and this is what jesus did you need to be now baptized in the name of jesus you know so he baptizes the name of jesus the holy spirit falls upon them and they begin to prophesy so the apostles expected each generation each new group of converts to come into a strong experience of the holy spirit just like they did because many catholics today are are living like the disciples did before pentecost they had disciples before pentecost had the best teaching anybody ever had they were in a bible study for three years with the guy who wrote the bible and he kept reminding them even to the last day this is how you interpret the scripture and the apostolic preaching we get in the acts of the apostles is what jesus told them how to interpret the scripture you know luke chapter 24 he went through the scriptures again and showed them how the scriptures all appointed to him now that's where they got their their material for preaching you know from jesus teaching them but they had the best spiritual direction anybody had they got corrected for their faults they said we're not going to call down fire you know the greatest is going to be the least you know type of thing they had the best apostolic supervision you know they came back from trying out things in ministry and jesus kind of kind of corrected them and said you know if they're not against us they're for us you know you know that type of thing or these things can only be cast out by prayer and fasting jesus was they had the best formation that anybody ever had and yet to the very hour where jesus was ascending to the father they say wait wait a second order we're going to take over jerusalem now like what's happening we're going to throw out the romans i mean like you know what what's going on you know and jesus said it's not for you to know the day or the hour uh stay in the city until you're baptized in the holy spirit just pay attention to what i'm asking you to do what you need right now is the holy spirit because the holy spirit's going to really bring to life everything i've taught you not only that the holy spirit's going to bring me into a communion with me and the father and the spirit that isn't possible unless i return to the father i'm gonna actually dwell in you now i'm gonna be with you to the end of the ages and you know and get into john 17 and just everything else you know and they ask the apostles is the story of the father son holy spirit moving with the apostles you know really leading them guiding them strengthening them giving them wisdom giving them the direction so i think a lot of catholics today are unfortunately like the apostles before pentecost they have correct doctrine they're living moral lives uh they believe what the church teaches but they're lacking fire they're lacking personal relationship no i won't say they're lacking entirely they're lacking the experience of the risen lord they're lacking the experience of the love of god being poured into their hearts they're they're lacking the living flame of love that john of the cross talks about you know they're they're they're just living the fire jesus i've come to cast fire on the earth what that would be you know and kindled you know so i just i just feel like what the charismatic renewal is a witness to is to our life as as pentecostal catholics where you know catholics are supposed to be pentecostal i mean they're supposed to be post pentecost not pre-pentecost you know they're supposed to be really full of the holy spirit and and that's what confirmation is supposed to be so the catechism of the catholic church says confirmation is the way that pentecost is perpetuated in the catholic church so we kind of put a focus on a sacramental way of receiving the holy spirit and restoring the holy spirit up in a new way but one of the greatest elephants in the living room right now in the catholic church is that our theology of confirmation is fabulous if you read in the catechism of the catholic church it makes people brave to be witnesses endure persecution just what we need you know be a public witness to christ just what we need but catholics are terrified to be a public witness for christ you know catholics are terrified about the possibility of persecution catholics are scared to death about uh evangelizing you know so what's happening in in confirmation so something's wrong wrong something's off something's not working we put so much stress on ex oprah operator the grace is given anyway we haven't put enough stress on what has to be forthcoming from the person who's receiving the sacrament their desire their faith their commitment type of thing so i've written a number of articles on the post-christendom sacramental crisis and the wisdom of thomas aquinas hey place with aquinas hey okay we've got to call us let's incorporate him in here yes yes and so in his teaching on the sacraments in part three of the summer he says people can have a validly conferred sacrament but not be fruitful in their life because of problems in the recipient and so he says and he's talking about adult baptism as the prototype he says if a person refuses to repent he'll receive the sacrament but he it won't be fruitful in their life if a person doesn't really desire the purpose of the sacrament to live a new life in the spirit they're not gonna it's not gonna be fruitful it's not gonna it's gonna be there in some form but it's not gonna be activated it's not going to be fruitful and he says depending on the desire with which the people approach the sacrament is good they're going to depend on the measure in which they receive the graces so lots of things so when people talk about being baptized in the holy spirit was that a sort of fanning of the coals that had were there but weren't in full flow yeah yes the the term is scriptural the term is used by john the baptist the term is used by jesus the term is used by the apostles so scriptural what is talking about is being plunged in the holy spirit and the church has come to understand being plunged in the holy spirit as something that's connected with christian initiation and in the early church you know kelly mcdonald george montague did this big study on sacramento christian initiation the early church they expected the holy spirit to fall on people and they expected charisms to be manifest when people were prepared for baptism and confirmation of eucharist all together as adults so um we we just need to um well there's just so many things we need to do but we need we need to prepare people better for confirmation but that means not everybody who's 14 years old receiving and not everybody in the eighth grade receiving it that means discerning individually and making sure people this is what they want this is what they're signing up for they're choosing to follow jesus my children my babies received it yeah in the eastern church yeah right yeah it's a little different there but yeah but that that means now that the validly conferred sacrament needs to be nurtured and those those graces need to be come alive in an appropriate way as they get older type of thing you know so that's where retreats comes in that's that's where alpha comes in and that's where uh you know nation exercises come in that's where life and spirit senators come in they're all trying to provide a mini catechumenate that would awaken the graces of the sacraments yeah that happened to me when i was 17. i went to world youth day in rome and came back just stunned that this thing was real i was like a man who discovered he had another sense like sight yeah but something that nobody around him seemed to have and i was confused as to why they didn't have it and they were just as confused at my joy yeah yeah and these things have mysteriously happened in the history of the church we we generally know about them through saints but the theology of the church says this is supposed to happen to everybody and that's why one of the things that vatican ii did is rediscover the theology of baptism that every single baptized person is called to the fullness of holiness and also call to mission and uh you know that that there's not supposed to be second class citizens in the catholic church we're all supposed to be on the front lines of pursuing holiness and being witnesses for christ type of thing so that's one of the huge contributions of vatican too that i'm afraid sometimes we're slipping back into a preconciliator passivity of the lay people and clericalism you know um we've talked about the persecution that's coming and is here we've talked about uh the bishops being divided um what can we say about the end of the world obviously the caveat is you know the son of man doesn't know the day of the hour but often that's all that's said you're like okay but can we have any idea because this is getting is this getting bad or is it or are we are we too influenced by say the our own situation within the united states that just makes it seem like it's bad you know remembering that saint augustine died while rome was collapsing and it may have seemed to him and his fellow christians that this in the year 1000 and y2k yeah exactly i mean i mean and there's been innumerable books by fundamentalist protestants you know trying to name the day or counting the weeks of daniel and adding it all up to a date that proved not to be the time well excuse me there are some specific signs that scripture teaches us and the catechism also teaches us that need to happen before the lord returns so one of them is the time of the gentiles coming to an end and the lord returning his attention to israel and a significant number of jews coming to faith in christ and then jesus jesus itself talks about until till jerusalem is no longer trampled down by the gentiles so we know that jerusalem has been trampled by the gentiles for thousands of years you know and for the first time in modern first time in thousands of years in 1947 48 when the jewish state came into existence and then the six day war in 1967 i guess uh jerusalem was taken back under jewish control and is under jewish control today so uh the jews as a nation have come back into existence in our lifetime the uh jerusalem has been liberated from a gentile trampling down so something's new on the scene that wasn't there before that could match up with this the second sign is jesus saying it directly again in matthew 24 i think where he says uh the end will not come until the gospel is preached to all nations but again this is a little hard to you know discern when if that's the case or when that would be the case and you know i would say that we're in a situation now where whole cultures are no longer no longer so sealed off from the gospel because of youtube the global the global vigil the internet yeah satellites uh and there are significant evangelization efforts being used uh directed to people in many languages in many cultures particularly protestants i mean some of the some of the protestant bible societies the wycliffe bible translators are they devote their whole lives to uh putting first of all the new testament into languages that maybe only two or three hundred people speak you know trying to give every single ethnic group the ethnos every every single ethnic group a chance to hear the gospel so tremendous efforts are being made you know some of them are saying that by 2030 they'll have accomplished that type of thing i remember mother angelica when she founded ewtn thought that she was founding it in light of the last days uh and the the name of the network eternal word television network comes from the book of revelation where there's an angel flying in heaven saying fear god and give him glory you know and his eternal word going forth so whether she's right or not whether she was hearing the lord right or not it's so easy to get a sense of urgency or special time and and attribute it to the final time we don't know uh we do know now she has satellites all over the world well not her personally anymore but the network and they they're covering the world you know with with their programming but the two signs that i think are most interesting right now are from 2nd thessalonians chapter 2 where paul says don't be upset by supposed prophecies that say that the lord has already returned because the lord will not return until these two things happen so the first thing is the great apostasy that's coming up a lot today as it is and and as you know apostasy isn't something that pagans do it's something that christians do and we're seeing a massive turning away from christ on the part of traditionally catholic and christian cultures like massive and and there's just a couple left hanging on by their their teeth so to speak and uh you know so so we're just seeing a tragic turning away from christ on the part of uh many many many people the statistics of church decline in all the traditionally christian and catholic countries it's just going down down down except maybe in africa uh africa still seems to be a bright spot for the church but the cultures the culture is coming for them i was just in uganda a couple of years ago and saw big billboards for contraception and but also being influenced by protestants and uh diluting the faith yeah and the uh the culture is coming for them uh you know this administration and previous administrations have tied foreign aid to accepting the lgbtq agenda accepting abortion pretty wicked pretty wicked what the united states is doing yeah pretty evil what the united states is doing sometimes in its governmental power you know and uh so we're seeing a great apostasies no question about it whether it's the final apostasy or not whether it's great enough or not only time will tell we'll only know whether the lord returns or not but then the next thing is also very significant paul says [Music] at a certain point a restrainer on evil is going to be removed a restrainer on lawlessness will be removed and then we're going to see unrestrained lawlessness and evil i think clearly we're nearing an end stage where all kinds of restraints on evil have been removed all kinds of protections of the unborn of the elderly of the handicapped all kinds of protections against the sacredness of male and female identity and openness to life and children and all kinds of protections on children have been removed you know and so we're just seeing we're seeing we're seeing the world's population becoming very vulnerable to this new totalitarian uh effort to recreate the human race uh apart from god apart from christ apart from the natural law apart from divine revelation but then it seems just when things seemed to couldn't get any worse the lord appears so this is sobering because it doesn't look like things are gradually going to be getting better as we approach the return of the lord but it looks like it's going to get worse much worse great apostasy that's a really great point because i i sometimes think you know we are just going to have another swing from this chaos and maybe things will get better but your point seems to be in the biblical point seems to even if they do they will then get worse again yes and and where to put in uh you know mary's promise of a time of peace i don't know where you put that in and you know when did you talk about that a time of peace well she says you know russia will be converted and there'll be a time of peace my immaculate heart will triumph type of thing and we don't know what counts as the triumph of immaculate heart is putin raising the alarm of the apostasy of the west you know part of the transit that was the time of pace we've done that yeah there's two minutes you know you know we don't we don't know how to interpret some of these things they're just going to say they fall out but we know for sure what the bible says and the catechism quotes it exactly it says the church is going to have to have to pass through a final trial where the antichrist is really at work and we're going to have to pass the test you know the church is going to have to pass the test now i'm very concerned that the church large parts of the church aren't ready to pass the test you know large parts of the church don't have an idea that there's a test going on yeah large parts of the world large parts of the church don't even know there's such a thing as spiritual warfare large large parts of the church think the devil is a joke you know large parts of the church the jesuit order and that said was it last year the year before yeah yeah father so-so less yeah yeah even worse than that he said uh you know when when the debate on divorce and marriage was going on um he said how do we know what jesus really said shame on him yeah yeah exactly you know chapter two in the book is yeah i want to point that out one more time a church in crisis we've got a link to in the description below i want to beg everybody watching this right now if you can rub a couple of dollars together to buy this book because one thing you did so well in this book is document everything yeah so often we hear bits and pieces but your footnotes are really excellent in there yeah well chapter two it's just is there a solid place to stand how can we keep our bearings in a time of confusion and division and the first thing i say is we need to recover our confidence in the inspiration and heresy of and i quote father sosa's remarks it's really evil to undermine people's confidence in sacred scripture yes you know what vatican ii says about sacred scripture this is another one of his contributions is on the constitution of sacred revelation section 11 it says everything asserted by the sacred authors should be considered to be asserted by the holy spirit yeah that's god by the way you know and to teach yeah really that's god you know and to teach faithfully firmly and without error those truths that god wished to consign to the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation so this is the word of god is precious you know the bible is precious you know like i feel so grateful every day i have a i have an icon of jesus in my office where i pray and i don't know just the last couple of years this icon is really becoming really helpful it just brings out the person of jesus like jesus is as a person you know and it just helps me relate to him but then i just feel like so blessed to be living in a time where the messiah has come to living in a time where the words become flesh and we can actually know who god is we can know what he's like and not only that we can know exactly what his mind and heart is about what he wills for human beings and so how precious it is that we have the sacred scriptures you know like you know every day in the liturgical readings i mean this stuff there that's really useful is really helpful that is reliable that is without error it's inspired by god you know helping us to uh to accomplish the purpose which we were created you know type of thing of course the the authentic interpretation of it we having a tradition of the church and most of the most the christian church didn't see a need to interpret the scripture very much you know every now and then on contrary points it did but it took it as as the saints and the doctors of the church have taken it and then we have attic we have the catechism from the catholic church so a lot of times you know i'll read a footnote and i'll say yeah i think that this is what scripture is taking it's taking or saying and then look at the footnote and says yeah that's what scripture's saying was it chesterton who said it's not the confusing parts of scripture that worry me it's the parts of scripture that i understand full well yeah i think that's what's terrifying yeah i think it was mark twain you know mark twain was yeah yeah so basically yeah there are there are hard parts to understand but so much of it is so clear and um yeah we don't treasure it we don't realize that this is an incredible gift that we live in a time where god is revealing himself to us and revealing the path to salvation revealing the purpose of us being human beings you know you mentioned the antichrist um i know in scripture it's mentioned in different senses in one sense the maybe the essential sense is that the antichrist is are those who deny christ come in the flesh but there's going to be a figure it seems an actual figure who is the antichrist capital yeah or the power of satan is concentrated in yeah uh and then ii thessalonians chapter two actually says some more helpful things it says during this time this man this lawless one the antichrist perhaps most interpreters consider it the antichrist if you don't uh this man of perdition this man of iniquity this man of wickedness will use every device available to him false signs and wonders that's why we need true signs and wonders that bring people to conversion repentance false signs and wonders titillate people fascinate people people to curiosity lead people to be infatuated with the healer that type of thing you know and a lot of times you know satanic power can be used or magic power or psychic power because you'll hear atheists say things like well i mean youtube's around just show us a healing and and we'll believe or if i could just see a limb kind of grove then i'd believe and there might be many who would but i think there would be just if not more who would still be unwilling to repent of their lifestyle or their sexual choices or their heresy yeah well look at the teaching of jesus i mean nobody had a nobody did a better job preaching teaching healing or delivering evil spirits what do they want to do they wanted to crucify him and jesus said they do this to me they're going to do that to you so there's a there's a whole theme of scripture where it goes back to simeon in the temple who who takes the baby jesus and prophesies over him this child is going to be the cause for the rise and the fall of many in israel he's going to reveal the secrets of hearts so that's what jesus is doing all through his earthly ministry he's revealing the secrets of hearts one of the secrets he reveals is some people are not men and women of good will their people have already made a commitment to evil to falsehood and they are hard-hearted so he's revealing hard hearts that refuse to repent we don't know if that ultimately is where they end up but many many times that's what he's revealing they go away they don't believe him from the light yeah okay yeah exactly exactly he says that's why some people love the darkness more than light so he's actually revealing pre-existing choices and decisions that people have made and and that's it's very very wicked but then also there's men and women of goodwill who maybe are those people who are sincerely seeking god or trying to live according to the conscience so when they encounter jesus they recognize something there because their heart is disposed towards truth or disposed towards god and jesus is so i mean talk about winning friends and influencing people he wasn't that wasn't his overriding concern you know in his encounter with the pharisees in john chapter 8 he'll say if you knew god you'd know me as a matter of fact you don't know god and they said what are you saying our father's abraham he says no no your father's the devil snap yeah you know and they kept they kept trying to figure out how to kill him how to do it with him because they have made a god out of their own interpretation of scripture they have made a god out of their own position they had made a god out of their political accommodation with the romans they didn't want to disturb their relationship with the secular culture because it would deprive them of their position everything is new under the sun yeah and that's what i'm most concerned about what's happening in the catholic church is that we fear men more than god we fear man more than god we our eyes aren't on the lord our eyes are on how is this politically going to go what's going to happen to me are we going to burn bridges is our tax funding going to be taken away are we going to lose our grants for catholic charities to hell with it all yeah accept our lord yeah it's so different from refusing to know anything about jesus christ then crucified honestly what we most need popes and bishops to do and archbishop gomez said this in his recent talk he says we need to boldly and joyfully proclaim jesus christ that's what we need to do but it's being suffocated by protocols being suffocated by political expediencies being suffocated by fear revealing division in our midst there is division and we can't be afraid of it anymore i don't know how god god's going to solve it it's a very serious problem to have division amongst our leaders but every bishop now has to have their eye on they're going to appear before the judgment seat of christ and they're going to have to give an answer how they took care of their flock they're going to have to hopefully say what saint paul said when he was saying goodbye to the ephesian elders he said your blood is not upon my hands because i have not held back from telling you the whole counsel of god bishops are going to have to give an account to god have i told my flock the whole council of god have i told them the truth have i told them really what sin is have i told them what repentance is have i told them who jesus is have i told them the kind of life they live to need to live in order to be saved was it chris system who said that the path the hell is paved with the skulls of bishops i'd like that to be like on a bishop's motto yeah yeah well i'm i don't want to bash the bishops i know a lot of you lot of them i think a lot of them are just really good men really good men who haven't been prepared for this who don't know how to interpret the science of the times who don't really tell us about some good bishops then yeah let's celebrate them let's let's praise them let's tweet yeah i've been talking about archbishop garcia gomez who's president of bishops conference he's he's stepping out you know and god and uh you know i i might do a youtube video on his recent recent speech i mean honestly part of why we need to shed a light on what good bishops are doing yeah is to even appeal to the pride of other bishops who think well maybe it's safe now to do this like we just want to kind of encourage well i'm hoping enough emerge that others who are timid and fearful feel like maybe i could do this yeah maybe i could tackle them now would be a good time yeah it sure would be yeah well now is the hour of salvation come on if you hear his voice today's hardening hard but archbishop aquila in denver uh he did a remarkable essay i did a youtube video on this uh that he he published in america magazine and you get on his website on the archbishop of denver archdiocese denver website and he said you know for for the last number of years i've been trying to uh not rock the boat and you know affirm the culture and everything i realized that i haven't been preaching the whole truth to people and i need to change truly i know i know it's really really significant bless him yeah what humility and courage yeah so i i i did a youtube video on that and uh strickland's great too yeah strickland he was in that chair uh i interviewed him and i would ask him questions about how do you think the bishops have failed in this sense or this and whenever i asked him a question like that he'd say well i can tell you how i failed yeah yeah real humble man who loves our lord yeah i think he's really good too i honestly i get a little uncomfortable when he brings in the vaccine and the masked stuff i think he i think he's i think this is one of the things i love about him and i'll let you finish your point i'll cut you off but he's a humble guy like i drove him here from the place we were at and and i had mentioned a few of those things and and it you got the impression that he was really willing to listen you know so when the cdf will say it's not it's not an evil thing to take the vaccine he he's it seems like he stopped talking about that yeah well i don't know i i i think i still see stuff you know but uh okay you know but again he he's he's brave he's courageous i admire him a great deal i i wish sometimes we wouldn't bring in at least in my opinion secondary issues that yeah the track from yeah the center but you know that's just yeah he has to do what he feels like the lord's asking him to do and you know no it it's it's true i mean we're looking for saints and and most of us aren't that we're just people who are trying to love jesus and who have our own stuff and baggage and things we like to hop on about and we need correction as well yeah but okay so you've mentioned three can we do that i think archbishop alone is stepping out good he's coming up to the very brink of doing what needs to be done but he hasn't pulled the trigger yet well he's he's now he's now asking for people to pray and fast and offer sacrifices for nancy pelosi's conversion which is a very charitable thing to do very powerful thing to do uh but i think he needs to excommunicate her yeah i think it's ridiculous it's beyond ridiculous yeah it's beyond ridiculous you know i think i think biden needs to be excommunicated i think just saying you shouldn't bring yourself to communion type of thing as like a half step you know i i think when somebody is publicly advocating killing babies and or like cardinal gregory says we need to dialogue with these people he's been dialogue with to the cows come home and what the dialogue has produced is more and more radical pro-abortion positions you know he he's obviously made his choice and he's doubled down and he's tripled down i'm concerned for saul i think he he violated his conscience what was still left of it regarding abortion in order to get elected in order to appeal to the radical left you know when he he gave up any limitations on abortion any any limitations on funding and he just kind of totally surrendered to the radical pro-abortion this this might be cynical or it might just be the way things are but i would suspect that if trump had been a catholic that many of our bishops would have been in favor of uh excommunicating him yeah but not not this joseph biden yeah yeah i mean building a wall is really terrible yeah yeah so anyway man alive yeah so you know artificial cooler archbishop shapu has been the lone voice for many years speaking clarity speaking truth sp speaking reason and even though he's retired and wants to get out of the fray and he deserves a rest you know when cardinal gregory said he's going to keep giving communion to president biden worshiper shapu out of his retirement said we can't do that can't do that if we believe what we say about the eucharist we can't do that bishop proprusique i don't know how to pronounce this name from pierre papraki uh same thing he says you know he says people who are holiest positions shouldn't present themselves to communion so here we have the bishops in a few weeks about ready to do a document on the eucharist is this real quick is this the who's the bishop cordelian cory alone san francisco is he on twitter i don't know if he is could everybody start tweeting him to excommunicate nancy pelosi that'd be great keep going yeah anyway so you know i think i think but bishops conference yeah well the bishops conference is going to do a document on the eucharist and they're embarking on a really good endeavor to try to re-energize catholics you know this eucharistic uh endeavor over the next several years they're going to teach on the eucharist they're going to have eucharistic conferences and eucharistic processions everything and that's really really good uh but they're they're probably going to avoid the issue yeah they will you know you know and um because they don't have unity so they can't as a bishops conference say anything but i i think even if that's the case which i think it probably will be uh and the scandal of catholic politicians advocating abortion uh will continue individual bishops need to step up and and and take action in their own dioceses because they they have to answer to the lord yeah yeah yeah that's it amen for those who are watching we'd love to take some questions so at us at pints with aquinas so neil can better see the comments coming through neil have we got anything yet or not that i've seen great i was really hoping you'd say yes to that but yeah one thing i've found really helpful lately is praying the magnificat um we tend to want to over complicate these things i think yeah how do i pray i think we're yeah we're asking that because we don't just want to sit in silence and do what we know we should do but scripture can be a difficult thing to enjoy and often my prayer is lord help me to want to want to read your word which is a shame but yeah there i am well you know um what i suggest to people when i do myself is i use that magnificat publication yeah that's what i used to yeah and so um i take my time with it yeah and one of the things i started to do is you know when a phrase in a song kind of strikes me saying you know the lord like psalm 16 the other day the lord puts a marvelous love for you know your fellow christians in your heart i i'll just stop there and like thank the lord for putting a marvelous of my heart asking put more love in my heart and praying for my brother so i kind of like interact yes in a prayerful way with with the scripture but when like paul says i pray that you know the riches and the heights and the depths of jesus christ and say lord help me to know those riches and heights and depth more you know type of thing or where you know when we talk about loving the lord of god with the whole heart mind soul and strength we'll say lord i want to love you more but i don't i don't think i could do it you know i don't i don't think i've got what it takes you know to love you more help me to love you more type of thing so i'll kind of interact with what's being revealed to us in scripture and asking the lord to do it more or to do it for the first time or help me understand something better or you know sometimes i'll have a question about something like how to understand something and the last person i think of asking is the lord you know and then i then i get reminded that you know what i should probably ask the lord about this because he probably knows about this you know that type of thing you know i'll ask the lord about something wondering about and very often i'll get an understanding maybe not right on the spot but over the course of next next period of time that type of thing so i think if people just take their time with magnificot and then when it gets to the intersessions you know we should be praying regularly for people you know and so i have a prayer list i don't pray for everybody on the list every day but periodically i do and then you have the saint of the day and uh i find that very inspiring no matter who the saint is he could be from our point of view a weird sixth century hermit or or anybody it's just very inspiring to me that people in every single century of of our history as a people they've loved god in a radical way and what's common to all the saints is they've they've totally given their life to god you know so i get inspired by even people that i can't relate to their life situation you know i'm married i've got children and grandchildren you know but i can relate to their love of god i can relate to uh their desire to give themselves totally to the lord you know so and then you know if if the meditation isn't written by a german theologian a lot of times those are very inspiring too you know and uh so i just kind of like um you know and then i'll just kind of put it down i'll just kind of be with the lord i might look at the icon and just just kind of be grateful for jesus or you know sometimes i'll experience this presence sometimes i won't you know sometimes prayer will be hard you know i try to stay there you know i have a set time that i would like to pray each day and i try to stay there even if it's getting harder that type of thing to kind of keep facing the lord you know and then i'll try to kind of like saint paul says pray always you know you know try not to restrict my relationship to the lord to my prayer time but try to remember him during the day you know type of thing uh i might take a walk and say the rosary i might say it in the car when i'm driving toward my office or something like that uh you know even praying in tongues like you know that's a it's a prayer gift and so sometimes i find it helpful just to pray in tongues and a lot of times that kind of releases like i feel like i feel like like like this joy down there under the surface and it starts coming out i remember one time i was driving to the airport i had to give an academic paper to some really high level catholic academics which is a little scary you know and uh and so i was a little nervous about it and i just began to pray in tongues and uh this spirit of joy just came out like this like whoa you know i got delivered from fear and i just got i just had like a peace like the lord was gonna you know be there with me so it's not praying in tongues isn't a cure-all for everything you know it doesn't take away all dryness and prayer but every now and then it's kind of like another dimension like paul says first corinthians 14 i pray in tongues more than any of you i want you all to pray in tongues you know he who prays in tongues praise mysteries to god so it's definitely biblical it's definitely definitely something let's pause there for a moment because i got to ask you about it i mean i think when thomas talks about tongues he's probably i don't think he i think he i mean i might be wrong actually but i'm pretty sure thomas says that this is this is maybe one of those things that's ended except except maybe an evangelistic sort of endeavors where you're actually speaking a language you're not just babbling yeah but what do you say yeah well there's three kinds of speaking in tongues you know that that are revealed in the scripture you know the first kind is like what happened on the day of pentecost where people are speaking out apparently in aramaic or their own language or greek and people are hearing them in their own language there's people there from all the nations you know there for the feast you know all the jewish people and so people don't know whether it was a miracle of the apostles speaking a language they didn't know it was a miracle of hearing yeah yeah you know what type of thing so that's where speaking in tongues happens and it's recognized as a particular language and i've been in situations where somebody's there like for example an expert in medieval french or something they hear somebody praying a medieval french you know or somebody praying in arabic or something like that you know people so every now and then that happens where you'll there'll be a recognized foreign language a second kind of praying in tongues is first corinthians 12 where it says uh it talks about the gift of tongues and the gift of interpretation along with the gift of healing the gift of prophecy the gift of miracles and things like that and it says does everybody pray in tongues does everybody you know prophesies every everybody do miracles and it says so tongues and interpretation is when somebody speaks out a word in like a prayer situation in tongues not knowing what they're saying in their mind and then somebody gets inspired by the holy spirit to give an interpretation of what was just said the third kind of speaking in tongues is speaking in tongues as a dimension of private prayer where paul says i pray in tongues more than any of you i want you all to pray in tongues and uh and then he who speaks tongue speaks mysteries unto god so it sort of like taps into another level of our being or consciousness where the holy spirit bypasses our rational restraints on the lord and i've heard it described as a sort of babbling like an infant might babble yeah um something like that but but uh you know so it's it's not a cure-all but what should i i mean someone's watching and they're like well is this a gift that i have to wait to overwhelm me is this something i can just implement today in my personal prayer what is this thing yeah well this is where like that catechumenate renewal comes in where like like in a life in a spirit seminars or an alpha or whatever still like an alpha they'll have a holy spirit weekend and life and spirit seminars people will be taken through a period of repentance renewing faith commitment to jesus renouncing evil spirits and then uh opening up for more of the holy spirit and an explanation of the gifts the spirit may give and the the only gift that paul says he wants everybody to have is is this gift of private prayer speaking in tongues so people are encouraged to you know what it says that they they spoke and the spirit gave utterance so people are encouraged to start speaking out in their prayer time i remember like i was quote baptized in the holy spirit way before i ever heard of the catholic charismatic renewal uh i i was a senior at notre dame yeah i was searching for the truth uh i was caught up in the confusion of the sixties were you a practicing catholic well sort of but not really you know uh i was changing my major from political science to english to philosophy because i was i did have this thirst for the absolute you know type of thing i was reading plato and nietzsche and uh did my senior essay on them i you know i was probably had been introduced enough to the lord as a boy that something was missing when i didn't have him i was looking for absolute truth absolute beauty absolute love you know and so uh but i was really getting confused and really caught up in the confusion of 60s wasn't living a good life i remember one day i was coming home from an off-campus party and i was late in the early in the morning and [Music] this this tow truck was going by you know in that part of indiana they called them wreckers and i really felt like a wrecker was coming for me you know i felt like it was like a little sign from the lord that the wrecker was coming for me it was like a warning and i think if i hadn't made that cursillo who knows if i'd still be alive today who knows whatever so a friend insisted i make a cursillo which is a renewal mover from spain it's like a you know anyway so um you know you know maybe 70 million catholics have gone through it's helped a lot of people meet the lord so i didn't want to do it but just because he harassed me so much so i'd like to say to anybody listening or watching don't be afraid to harass people and get them to make retreats and invite them to lectures by scott holland or invite them to uh life and spirit seminars or alpha courses or bible studies in the parish or ignatius harass people into salvation you know so anyway i'm on the cursillo and i think i'm a philosophy major i don't think i'm going to get anything out of this there's going to be group dynamics going on and people are going to have warm feelings and human relationships and they're going to call it god but i'm not going to acoustic guitars do that yeah i'll give you that warm fuzzy view yeah i'm not going to i'm not going to fall for that and you know so um uh but then i heard a beautiful explanation of the faith from a priest and then i heard catholic lay people talking about relationship with jesus and quite honestly the thing that was moving for me was when we made a bless a visit to the blessed sacrament and they passed around a cross just like this and each person got the cross and they had an opportunity to say something to jesus i had never seen that happen before i never heard people very personally talking to jesus and i don't i think i passed the cross on but uh that really struck me that there's something going on here either it's real and if it's real um there's something the lord has for me here and then another thing that really moved me was that at a certain point they read letters from people who are actually offering prayer and sacrifice for us who are on that cursillo so i'm saying wow you know there's like mexican migrants putting pebbles in their in their shoes as a penance during three days so that we may be open to the grace of god so the hang-up was um repentance and conversion you know uh i i knew that the only sensible response to make to jesus if he was lord if he was real and i felt like at a certain point like i think he's here i think he's here in this retreat house i think he's been raised from the dead i think he's here and i think he's expecting something from me he's inviting me i didn't hear any voice i didn't feel anything really personally directed to me other than that just him being there was an invitation to surrender and so i knew that the only sensible response to make to him is a total surrender because if he really is lord i mean you don't bargain with god you know you don't unless you're abraham yeah you don't you don't add them to your great books collection you know you know right you don't add them to your statuary you know type of thing yeah so i i i knew i needed to write him a blank check and so uh but i also knew he was going to write in on a blank check i knew he was going to write in everything forever but i also knew it wasn't because he was selfish just because he wanted all of me to be healed all of me to be redeemed all my sins to be forgiven and and to be all his you know and so um it it took it was hard it wasn't until sunday morning the last day of the cursillo that i swallowed my pride and humbled myself went to confession got reconciled with the lord in the church and i never would have thought about it in these terms then but since then i think that was a renewal of my baptism but then at the very end of the cursillo people came in who had made previous cursillos singing and you know mexican mariacha type stuff and celebrating and uh i just felt like the love of god being poured into my heart i just felt like literally just like it says in romans 5 the love of god poured into my heart by the holy spirit and something got born in me i think it was a renewal of confirmation to honestly tell you the truth i didn't think about that way at the time but uh this tremendous desire got born of me and at the end of the cursillo you could say what you got out of it type of thing and so i remember what i said i want to spend the rest of my life knowing and loving jesus and helping other people know and love him and that's basically it i don't have anything more profound to tell people than that that jesus is alive jesus is real jesus is the lord totally surrender that's beautiful thanks for sharing that i gotta share this story of a friend of mine who i grew up with uh because i think you'll find it fascinating and others will too she was the mother of my uh best friend her name's evie muldoon and uh she was just one of those parents who asked how you were and meant it yeah you know when you were a kid most parents were like just go out go somewhere else she was somebody who looked at you and saw you and i remember that being a real beautiful thing um but you know she wasn't perfect and and and after my conversion in the year 2000 as i spoke of jesus christ i remember making her feeling made her feel very uncomfortable and she said that we we're not in a place to say which religion's better that sort of thing so very much had bought into this religious and differentism yeah she was in her mid-50s then and you know a lot of these conversions that we hear about tend to take place when people are in their most formative years like i was 17. yeah well she came to our wedding she that's how close she was she flew to texas for my wedding in 2006 and even then wasn't uh really a christian may have been baptized but a couple of years after though she went to holy mass and she often wouldn't go but she went this time and somebody said well if there's there's these people who are going to be praying over people if you'd like after mass and you're welcome to come up and just share what you'd like prayers for and if i'm remembering the story correctly evie said well you know she had been feeling pretty stressed at work lately and so she'll ask them to pray so she does just that and and they laid hands on her and she said she encountered the person of jesus christ and her life radically changed and again mid 50s i'd say yeah late 50s so she goes home and she's smashing statues of buddha that she has around the house tearing down these new age symbols which he had everywhere throwing holy water up the walls and she went to a bible study the following week and was sharing this and somebody at the bible said study said well don't you think that's a little rather narrow-minded and she said i hope so it's a narrow path yeah yeah and the last i spoke to her she said she'll wake up in the morning and just spend an hour with the word and yeah glory to jesus christ no matter what you've done or where you've been or how old you are the lord wants to do as you said birth yeah you said he birthed something in you i think yeah that's how you do it but yeah that's what he wants to do with all of us yeah so i mean it doesn't cure all your problems it doesn't take away suffering you know doesn't take away tests and trials it doesn't take away disappointments it doesn't awake sin that you still need to repent from but i'll tell you what you know i what i what i can say is i'm a christian under construction and it's so much better to be a christian under construction than to be someone under destruction and if you're not in christ you're under destruction you're heading towards destruction you're on a broad way heading towards destruction you need to get on that narrow way that the lady talked about yeah and get under construction allow the lord to start remaking you and healing you and yeah cleansing you and i've never seen this woman so happy that's the other thing that everybody around her noticed like she lost a ton of weight she was very she's not not very overweight but she was she was somewhat overweight and she started eating well and like everything in her life just started clicking into gear yeah yeah what jesus says you know the unbelievers are worried about what they're gonna eat what they're gonna wear what the future's gonna bring but i say to you seek first the kingdom of god and his holiness and these other things will be added as well so if you put the first things in first place the secondary things are going to really take their rightful place yeah do we have any questions of the last 20 minutes all right and you'll put that on chat from says in the spirit of charity what aspects of uh bishop baron's ministry does dr martin view is laudable well i think he's very much trying to present catholicism is attractive jesus is attractive the christian life is attractive so i i really feel like his fundamental effort to evangelize is is just laudable i think one of the things that he's orthodox he doesn't really formally hold to anything yeah false teaching well i i would say too just to kind of add in there one of the things he does really well is he helps those who think christianity is intellectually bankrupt take a second look yeah and i can't i can't count how many times people have written to me and said i i listened to you i listened to bishop baron i listened to father mike schmitz and you know part because of this that i've come into the church so i'm sure he receives countless emails from people saying he's coming to the church because of his good work so that would be a few things yep there's another super chat from kyle whittington who says uh i once heard that our bishops will have the same ratio as the apostles one betrayed one denied the resurrection one to nine knowing christ and eight abandoned him only one stayed loyal in the end this is and he also says thanks for the wise phone smashing the iphone it's kind of game changing nice i get i keep getting people to smash their smartphones oh yeah yeah right so no i mean honestly we need to pray for the bishops like i said most of them maybe all of them are really good people trying to do what they think to be the right thing i just think that they they need to increase their fear of the lord and decrease their fear of men and uh encounter christ in even a deeper way and ask for the boldness to preach him and proclaim him and to guard their people from error that that the pastoral epistles and the bible tell shepherds they're supposed to do you know one of the things that's most missing is paul says admonish the sinner where's the admonishing you know i mean really for any kind of center us you know where are we being admonished for the things that people do you know um and and just to add to that i would say if you're listening right now and you've done more criticizing than praising of the bishops you might consider this today to to reach out publicly uh whether that be through social media or through a phone call or even a letter and thank that good bishop for whatever good decision you think he made so that we can encourage them because if you you know if we take the spiritual war seriously then it just stands to reason that our our shepherds are going to be you know being targeted yeah you know i can't leave out two other shepherds not because they're so good on the particular issue we're talking about but both bishop boye and my diocese of lansing and archbishop vigneron and detroit where i teach at the seminary are making a super serious effort to evangelize making a super serious effort the way archbishop vigorous has to change the dna into a dna of evangelization same in in lansing and so both those bishops are leading and evangelization in a really strong way you know i i'm thinking of uh the prayer in um you know blessed be the lord the god of israel this prayer he's come to his people and set them free but there's a line in there who says raised up a prophet uh to proclaim if you remember the word and let me know yeah the benedictus yeah yeah to proclaim his salvation and he says by the remission of their sins yeah and i've often thought that that's great we can proclaim salvation but you have to say how and if you want to change the dna of evangelization sin has to be one of the first things you say yeah and archbishop vagneron did this kind of solemn ceremony repentance where he tried to acknowledge ways in which we've gone off the track you know in the diocese you know with racism with not teaching what we should have taught and things like that it was a little awkward because he had the previous you know cardinal there and things like that you know but uh yeah yeah that's good i mean and we don't we don't have to wait for a bishop to be perfect to praise him right yeah a bishop can be wrong on certain things or ambivalent on certain things might be right on this or that yeah well praise him for this or that yeah the same thing with our parish priests right yeah exactly you know encourage them where they should be encouraged and encourage them to to be stronger in areas that they're not yeah anything else neil though uh we have another super chat from regina ponte super chat what's the super they bless the channel by their finances questions how much do they have to pay to ask a question i think they can put in five cents or a dollar they can do whatever they want oh really oh yeah thank you for that that's super nice how much did she put in this one this one was five dollars she's just going to say amazing we better give a good answer for that yeah and we'll get lunch after we'll thank her sorry so she's just saying amazing podcasts bless you guys so needed so another question have a question just throwing money at us to thank us well encouraging us thank you so much that's very kind of you yeah are we kind of wrapping up there with the questions should we um yeah there was a question about can we find it it was about ecumenism here it is uh rahwan's jason asks hey dr ralph martin how significant do you think a humanism is and how do you think it has improved in the last 20 years greetings from belgium patrick petra and jason could you repeat that so yeah the question of ecumenism and its role in the church has it been a blessing hasn't it yeah well you know one of the things that was confusing after vatican 2 is the decree on the christian unity of christian people where the church changed its pastoral strategy we we no longer mainly looked at what was wrong with the protestants and orthodox calling on heretics and systematics but we said you know what we all have a common baptism we all actually are theologically brothers and sisters in christ so we should stop only relating to what's wrong in our brothers and start relating also to what's right and we need to also start taking seriously jesus desire that to be mutual love and unity amongst his disciples so here we have disciples they're separated brothers but they're brothers and sisters in the lord so after vatican ii uh all the bilateral dialogues began you know catholic lutheran catholic methodist catholic anglican and so on so forth catholic orthodox and uh real progress was made in taking away stereotypes and misunderstandings about what each other's churches taught even to the point of getting a joint statement of justification between the lutherans that other protestant domination sent signed on to the catholics about were saved by grace through faith which is super significant you know really a real a real advance and so that's helped a lot uh on the other hand the average catholic was a little confused by all this saying uh gee maybe people don't need to become catholics you know maybe it's okay just to be a protestant you know so maybe i don't have to be concerned about protestant friends becoming catholics so that's not at all what vatican ii taught they they taught that the fullness of the means of salvation reside in the catholic church they said anybody actually who knew that refused to enter it could not be saved so there was a clear affirmation that the fullness of the means of salvation the catholic church and people were called to the fullness of the faith but it took a while for that to all get sorted out in people's minds it's still not completely sorted out in people's minds just like interreligious dialogue is not sorted out so the decree on non-christian religions kind of again emphasize what's positive and we have in common but didn't repeat the serious deficiencies and idolatries and errors and denials of christ that are in some of the major world religions and so it took a while to sort that all out and that's still being sorted out and that's what i'm trying to sort out in my book still oh yeah excellent is that pretty much it neil uh yeah there's a few more questions one thing i really want to ask you to do um we had you know sister miriam james yes yeah love her uh she's powerful i interviewed her recently and she led people in a prayer for inner healing yeah and i wonder if you might if i could put you on the spot and maybe invite you to lead somebody who's watching this right now in a prayer to surrender their lives to jesus christ no that would be great i don't whether they've done it before i mean i'll actually allow you to lead me in this prayer i'd like to surrender my life again to jesus christ and yeah it's because we encourage people to yeah yeah you know there's a phrase the scripture says if you hear his voice today hard not your heart uh if you've heard his voice somehow in our voices today uh hard not your heart i i believe the lord has something for anybody who's listening to this i don't i can't tell you what it is but if you've gotten something from the lord today something's become clearer uh if even you've been convicted of a compromise you made that's not in harmony with the truth if if you've been awakened from a lukewarmness that you didn't even know was there uh if if a half-hearted response to jesus has been characteristic of your life oh this would be a good time to uh read let that grace work in your soul and repent you know uh so i like to jesus i ask you to pour out your holy spirit and everybody listening and watching i i ask you to bring to people's minds and hearts what you have for them today whether it's a gift of love a gift of encouragement a gift of insight a gift to him to come up closer to come come closer to you and i also ask lord that you bless people with the gift of repentance to have the humility and honesty to recognize and ways in which they're holding back from you and uh they haven't committed them to for themselves the full obedience to you and to your word that they haven't loved your word enough haven't treasured your word enough haven't haven't paid attention enough to you lord in prayer haven't really put you as a priority in their life lord i ask you to help help inspire them to pick themselves up and try again to have a daily prayer time and and when they read the word to uh interact with it to talk to you about it to to ask that it come come true in their lives lord that precious word that you've given us lord i ask you to put into the souls of everybody listening or watching today a a tremendous concern for the salvation of friends or relatives family members that the there's only one thing necessary that people make a choice to be a friend of jesus christ and accept his mercy and love before they die the the people who die in friendship in jesus are their lives are tremendous success no matter what other failures they've had and no matter whatever wounds they bear that will be washed away by by the lord himself and the only the only tragedy in life is to die with hardness of heart rejecting the love and mercy of god and being separated by our own choice from his love forever lord continue to pour out your holy spirit everybody who watches everybody who listens and help them to choose for you in a deeper way help them to help them to resolve never to deny you before men deliver them from the fear of men and give them a holy and deep and godly fear of you that they out of love for you and of regard for your holiness and a regard for who you are that they would never want to freely choose to offend you lord we thank you for you love your mercy we thank you for the ability to communicate uh through podcasts like this with people who have open hearts we ask all this in the name of jesus amen i just felt cool to share too that if if there's somebody out there who desires to grow in prayer and doesn't know how and needs some direction i'd tell you to do this if again if you're looking for direction and that would be when you wake up get on your knees bow your forehead to the floor and say god i believe in you i adore you i hope in you and i love you and i ask pardon for those who do not believe in you do not adore you do not hope in you and do not love you we might put that prayer in the description below for people if you're looking for something you want to worship our lord as soon as uh you rise and you've been looking for somebody to tell you what to do well here i am i'm telling you what to do do that every day of your life until you die that's really great yeah i'm doing that too matt are you really yeah i am yeah you do that in the morning yeah i didn't even know that i do at the beginning of prayer time yeah wow yeah beautiful stuff um tell us about renewal ministries as we wrap up here yeah put some links in the description so people can see the good work you're doing yeah well you know uh people go to our website renewalministries.net and we have the longest running tv program on ewtn right now uh the choices we face uh it's excellent i really enjoy it yeah you can also access it on our website or it's a podcast too it's a podcast too yeah yeah they can go to our youtube channel and find it there just like us put in randolph's youtube channel or ralph martin or peter herbeck or something then we have two daily catholic radio programs uh one with sister and shields one with peter and then we do a lot of mission work around the world then we have an outreach to young adults called id which stands for intentional discipleship we have an outreach to high school middle school girls called beloved revolution we announced reached a high school boys called zion uh and we're just trying to do whatever we can to help people know and love jesus and help other people know and love him at every age whatever situation they're in excellent well uh ralph i love you i'm glad you exist i'm glad that you answered the lord's call back when you did on that crocio retreat thank you so much for all that you've done for the church and continue to do and let people know again to get that book and i'm not just plugging this for the sake of it i read the whole thing in a weekend and it was so such a blessing to my faith a church in crisis pathways forward we'll put a link in the description below um it's it's terrific so thanks matthew i thank you for what you're doing uh i'm so grateful to god that he got a hold of me that he got a hold of you but he didn't let us go our own ways but he's got us on the path that leads to eternal life amen it may hold on tight yeah absolutely thanks so much

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 121,599

Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: T79U_9c29ww

Length: 158min 2sec (9482 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021