EWTN Live - 2018-08-29 - Fr. Thomas J. White, O.p.

[Music] thank you thank you and welcome on father Mitch Pacwa welcome to EWTN live a program where we bring you guests from all over the world also wanna mention that today is the memorial of the passion of st. John the Baptist where Herod cut off his head because taken away with lust and with his own drinking too much he gave in to requests for the head of John the Baptist that was an act of revenge by his second wife who by the way was also happened to be his niece and the dancing girl was his grandniece another little set of problems st. John would have been critical of but he died a martyr for the truth of marriage and he prefigures Christ as his forerunner and we looked to both of those components what good could incite perhaps to be gained by reflecting on his commitment to the truth now tonight we are going to let the light of Christ shine with our guests father Thomas white a great Dominican priest I just want to get a quick update first from EWTN radios director of programming and production mr. Tom Price huh well see you could see it in what's going on with radio we're very excited about the the upcoming EWTN Catholic radio conference this is our 19th annual conference we have it here in Birmingham November 7th 8th and 9th it's a three-day affair Wednesday through Friday we begin that let me get back up a moment this is for our current affiliates and there's over 330 of them now in the United States but it's also for people who are discerning putting on a radio station in their neck of the woods so very exciting for them an opportunity to learn from people who already have Catholic radio stations on the air which are themselves late absolutely do any of them belong to a diocese very few it's mainly small groups groups of five ten stations but there are also a lot of Singleton's where it's just like one couple or one local group that wants to have Catholic radio right there in their community and of course EWTN charges nothing for our program we don't own those affiliates and we don't charge them but we want to support them with various kinds of help absolutely this is a that's why we make the radio signal free and put it out there for absolutely and this is a great way for people to learn the nuts and bolts of not only how to run a catholic radio station or how to run any station but also not to lose sight of why you're getting into catholic radio in the first place that's why we begin these with a one-day retreat in Hanceville at the shrine and begin with that get that grounding and then it is two days of learning about programming local programming how to how to do a local show how to do promotion of your station how to do fundraising so you can keep it on the air there's lots to learn in a short amount of time people come away from it very rejuvenated even people who have been in Catholic radio for many years yep you know I've been to some of them and when you mentioned the nuts and ult's I thought you including me is one of the speakers that'll be me I'm the dolt so again it's they either became Catholic radio conference November 7th to 9th right here in Birmingham Alabama and you can go to EWTN crc dot-com for more information we've got a great website and our keynote speaker is dr. Scott Hahn this year great looking forward to it yes very much so and we're gonna be back in a few minutes but I guess father Thomas white thank you Tom for being here with us thank you we'll see you in just a couple minutes [Applause] [Music] thank you welcome back and we have a guest tonight he is a theology professor at the Dominican House of studies in Washington DC great place right across the street from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception father converted to the Catholic faith at the age of 22 he acknowledges that some people in society today think of Catholic doctrine and dogma as kind of negative or boring or even insulting so he set out to enlighten them with a brand-new book called the light of Christ and introduction to Catholicism so please welcome father Thomas J white Opie is a Dominican father white and he got the white habit that's pretty cool yeah I wasn't playing that way but no no from what did you convert to Catholicism well you know I come from a pretty ecumenical family my mom's from a family of Presbyterian missionaries and my dad's from a Jewish background and I got interested in religious questions really more in college and started reading my way toward becoming Christian and then eventually became Catholic my senior year in college okay where'd you go to school I went to Brown University in Rhode Island very secular ethos and got interested in the kind of the history of religious questions early Christianity and also look at looking at other religions it wasn't a central preoccupation of my fellow students so it was a kind of an odd interest of mine but you know it's sort of I think that from the beginning to feel a little bit misunderstood tolerated but misunderstood you know kind of made me aware that making religious decisions can be a difficult thing and you just have to kind of accept that and I don't know it affected me that way sure move forward to Catholicism yeah and that was how long ago oh that was 25 years ago or something you know yeah so you know it's I think it's important to keep in mind that you know religious questions are not peripheral these these are about the core of meaning of life and about what's true and good and beautiful as Augusta and many others have said and to ignore those questions is not a healthy sign for an individual yet alone a culture so I feel really haunted by those questions and I feel like y'all work a lot on secular campuses today as part of the work of this thing called the two mystic Institute in Washington DC and it seems to me that the even when you don't have kind of traditional religious theological perspectives on secular campuses people remain haunted by those big questions they're really inscribed in us and so connecting people with the great intellectual tradition the church creates deep encounters between people and God and it's really a healthy kind of a wedding of the human spirits desire to know more about as you say you know deep truths about reality Beauty goodness and then what you find in like the Catholic intellectual tradition well it's I'm glad you brought up this question before we go into your book what is this that you do at college campuses would you call that well the two mystic Institute is an institute in DC that basically has started college chapters or you might call them college meeting groups that students can set up themselves on their campus and then we help them invite in speakers from the Catholic perspective in philosophy theology sometimes also literature and history and art and what it does is it allows people in in places like you know a Yale or a brown or of MIT to bring in high-level Catholic philosophers and theologians to speak to them about religious viewpoints and you know we find that sometimes there's completely secular students who come to the talks because they're curious and interested we gave a talk recently we had a dominican who's a physicist speak at MIT on does modern physics leave room for free will I think we're like a hundred and fifty students there most of them are not in that case religious people or they're not maybe sure that they want to be religious but they're genuinely haunted by the question they're studying science the highest level they're wondering what a human being is do we have free will so you know that kind of engagement what you start to see is how much the the how how real religious questions can be in people who aren't necessarily from the Catholic tradition and you know we have a lot to say to them if we if we do it well in at times there is there can be a certain political pressure to suppress those questions but the questions do come from within the depth of what it means to be a human being yeah and I think that that's one of the dangers is to see both mature CH but especially outside the church to see the church is primarily political of course I think Catholics should bring their moral views into the political life of the culture but of course the faith is much more and in a way much deeper than you know merely political stances and so what we do is we bring in you know people to talk about thinkers like Aquinas which nobody in the in the secular Academy can really contest is an important person and it's often not on subjects that are political there are more on deeper issues like what is a human being do we have free will can we no any moral objectively moral truth objective moral truths is it reasonable to believe in God what do Catholics believe about the nature of God the Holy Trinity is it even an intelligible thing and why is it so what are Catholics we've got Eucharist so we do real theology talks but they're not really you know III often say they have no political color or odor and so but what that does it invites the student to think about their like the meaning of their life on a much deeper level than just through a political filter and of course they can think about the political stuff too but it comes after you know that so we sort of invite them to a deeper engagement with the question of God you know here from some campus it's not Universal but you hear that sometimes debate is stifled because it something might be offensive and some people might be have hurt feelings do you find that going on oh yeah sure I mean I think it depends on the topic but on particular topics I'd say students and professors live in on elite campuses now secular campuses live a very intellectually regimented life super ascetical about what you can say or cannot say what you can talk about or cannot talk about well if using a compressor cannot express but then there's other domains where I mean things are really white wide-open and so for example what we find our students are absolutely fascinated by and really engaged with the question of the compatibility of Christianity and modern science science and religion I think that is a key question and that there debate is permitted and things are wide open and you can really engage people you can get also I mean topics about the rationality of the Bible belief in the Bible what it teaches historically to some extent especially students who are a Christian who are in the secular Academy really want to figure out how to explain the Bible to others or the mysteries of the faith you know sometimes you know often young people data is usually even did a devout Catholic and devout Catholics haven't really had that much theology formation or catechesis and so when you actually present them like kind of a real theological perspective they suddenly realize the church has this theological depth its intellectual depth I was the first time we gave a talk at Harvard it was to undergraduates and I was invited to speak on why God became human Aquinas on the Incarnation so all I did was I took you know two articles of the Summa Theologiae not very long and presented to these precocious Harvard students who are like 20 years old what Aquinas says as to why God became man and of course he gives all these different arguments so I kind of went through it with them and one of these young men looked at me at the end he said he's obviously practicing Catholics okay I think you were just basically presupposing Christianese true and then talking about like the deep wisdom in why God did the things he did is that what theology studies I'm like yes that's it you know and he went away thinking okay there's actually a lot of amazing content to theology as a sort of science or as a study of Revelation well I taught high school which of course is oftentimes not always but oftentimes populated with a bunch of little wise guys and they would say to those of us teaching theology well you can't flunk me I can't flunk God this is how you feel not my class it's not you know it's about or thinking through issues of the faith yeah so like the end I would now the emotivism is really present on the campuses like everything you know everything is subjective it depends on how you feel the important thing is not hurt someone else's feelings everybody's got a viewpoint they're all equally invalid or equally valid and I think you know most students realize that that's not that's that's kind of a unedible it's untenable yeah but but it's doable in a box of rocks is what it is yeah but how do you how do you articulate that you have an absolute absolute view or that you hold to absolutes are you you have convictions but you also take the human convictions of the other person seriously that listening to their emotions matters etc so it's a both/and strategy for us to show them that we want to we want to promote truth we want to also respect persons we want to love persons and see why they hold the convictions they do and so forth and you know it's really simple but I think that that kind of balance but the idea that you know if I don't agree with you am I trying to destroy you well of course not actually I could be disagreeing with you because I I think it's the truth it could be helpful to you but just articulating that that the promotion of moral truth is for the good the other person and can be done in an act of personal care it's very simple but I think it's a kind of message that's missing in the kind of politicized culture yeah I think to that it's something I've been talking a lot about over the years of teaching on this program and the other programs that if you have a relativistic point of view and that everybody has their own truth there's no basis for dialogue and what you're talking about is it's using reason as a way to establish a common discourse so we can engage each other truth is subjective everybody has to isolate yeah and I think that resonates with students really frankly I think us especially younger students they they actually realize it's it's it's almost like we've moved out of the age of relativism and towards the age of a new secular dogmatism and they're getting a lot of dogmas pressed down on them I mean they're they're not Catholic teachings there there's a secular list and I think a lot of them feel like well okay I think some of these things are true some of these things are maybe not true some of them are questionable but how do i how do I make judgments about it how do I begin to have a moral compass and there's there's often not a lot taught to them on on that level or it might be taught them like well here's one person's opinion another person's been in another first opinion well that's normal they have to compare opinions but they often find they don't find they don't have a sense of resolution yeah well they don't have the tools of logic by which they can analyze the different positions and see what makes more sense that's oftentimes missing and the other thing too I am concerned with with relativism is that the only resolution becomes might makes right if I can yell you into silence or intimidate you then you can't argue with me because I have the moral upper hand through my anger and outrage that's common enough and I'm very concerned about that and the other thing is that what's correct is very fluid it changes from one short period to another because it's not always acceptable it's based on cultural trends and you'll students see that and a lot of ads yeah fats and a lot of professors see it too to be fair I mean I they're they're a little worried about where the the you know how do they you know navigate what could be changing political winds you know I mean there's plenty of people in Academy in the secular Academy who are actually friendly interlocutors who care about the truth and we have found also there's a lot of Catholic professors or Christian professors who are often a little bit isolated very brilliant and they want I have conversations with like-minded colleagues and so we help create conferences and strategies for them to to engage with others and also for their students to maybe do programs with them that are more on the Catholic tradition the Catholic intellectual tradition so we've you know we've seen people convert to Catholicism we've seen people in a religious life or the priests see our seminary or inner women's religious life so I don't know there's been a lot of encouraging signs there you see that like even in places where we think we might not get a hearing actually there can be a pretty deep sympathy for the faith you know so one of the things I also like about this is you're going back to certain early roots of the Dominican Order y'all didn't start the University of Paris but you went in there like gangbusters with great thinkers like st. Thomas than others yeah yeah it's a great it's a great distinction actually to in Jesuits and and Dominicans because the Jesuits of famously often founded and run universities and you know created an amazing private university system but Dominicans always from the beginning setup priories next to existing universities and in you know twelve sixteen and so forth Dominic sent the the the men even when they were very congregation out to the major new universities so a preaching in the Universities trying to promote the out Theological wisdom in the in the university's engaging with the philosophy of the day and Thomas Aquinas was of course central to that but also I mean his thought remains I think central it's a he's a jeast he remains I think deeply insightful for understanding a lot a great deal about what we have the nature of reality what a human being is how we can know God so he's in a tremendous resource for us I think even right now to engage in in the university and when you look at the history of the church since Saint Osman just the other day we celebrated San Agustin he did dominate thought from the fourth century until st. Thomas and then st. Thomas developed a new synthesis based on Aristotle and Gustin and all the father's and when you look at the history since those periods when Thomas's thought is disregarded tend to be times of great Confucian that father is a great Jesuit he's speaking right to my Dominican heart here this is great yes well when your Dominican heart is that right yeah but you you see in the 14th century this decline into a very wheeze and moving away from Thomas rejecting Thomas by you know William of Ockham and others still except Ottawa and then the rediscovery in the 16th century which is key for the Jesuits Neverland key Spanish southern Spanish renewal I mean I think you know for Dominicans and I can hear fathers Jesuit training is lucidly describing a similar view you know there's two kind of great errors that are arise in modernity generally speaking and one is what we would call fede ISM where it's sort of the idea that to acknowledge the greatness of faith and supernatural gifts of knowledge of we have to deminish reason or show the the limits and frailty of reason so we diminish philosophy to augment theology or we diminish human reason to augment the authority of the church and the other side is a kind of rationalism that reacts that says no human reason can suffice to itself revelation diminishes us rationally right the more we depend on revelation and authority to church the more intellectually childlike we become and you know the less responsible we are intellectually so we need to question everything in fact throw out the faith if we want to be you know intellectual grownups intellectually responsible people and that's you know obviously kind of a trend in the Enlightenment deeply present so you know the the first Vatican Council in the 19th century recalls the balance which comes from Aquinas that and from the great tradition of the Scholastic's that our reason can reach out to God and see that God exists and acknowledge its own openness to revelation it's like reasonable to want to know God more perfectly than we know him just by natural reason if revelation exists if it's real it's reasonable to want to know God in himself revealing himself to me and at the same time revelation is a good to attest gift it's from beyond the scope of reason our natural reason and revelation is like a higher enlightenment so there's a deep complementarity between the natural rational search for God and understanding and revelation of God yeah I think that you know we need to see how faith in reason interplay and build work that they're not contradict I think that's why I like what you're doing with science in religion that's another the more that's the big lie that's the big story that's out there from the other side from the new atheist that the more you study science the more you see that religion is untenable the more you study science the more you see the Bible can't be inspired the more you study science the more you have to give up on religious understandings of reality it's false and it needs to be it needs to be encountered critically and so we bring in a lot of top-level scientists philosophers of science and theologians who are scientifically literate to talk about that in the heart of these campuses to students who are in the scientific guild at MIT or Harvard and whatnot to kind of present to them how to understand the compatibility so they can become agents of change in the in the culture itself of academic science and of philosophy I'm later on in the year going to have a priest who's written a wonderful book on the history of priests and religious who have been involved in tremendous science I mean our Jesuit forefathers and Dominican forefathers in the 17th century were the ones who came up with the concepts that are the basis of capitalism that Adam Smith just merely pulled together and put into English but it was the work of our earlier of Jesuit and Dominican fathers in Spain who came up with these basic concepts most people have no idea of that yet alone the big bang theory by Father Lemaitre and many others you know so this the church loves science and we have to see that we don't want to have dumb science or more importantly we don't want immoral science the church never contests scientific discovery she only contests the moral uses of science so the church's has reservations about the moral uses a science if anyone doesn't have problems with the use of the atomic bomb as a way of exterminating human life then they have a problem not the church it's the use of science that we need to be concerned about and that's different from being open to scientific discovery and exploration right right no I mean everybody I hope would agree that the pseudo scientific research of Joseph Mengele in the concentration camps was immoral inherently right there's ways of proceeding inside that are morally unacceptable and I mean any I think almost every scientists will concede that we want to have an engagement with the role of morality and faith in the pursuit of good experimentation that's all everyone doing I think that's a good thing that you're going to campus but there's another good thing going on you got to take a break we'll be back in about two minutes because one give you an opportunity to ask father about some of the work that he's doing in these issues that he has so please stay with us [Applause] [Music] [Applause] alright welcome back to all of you and father are you ready for some questions indeed that's great as what we expect from Dominicans quite that's st. Thomas he's scheduled he organized his book wrong question he was good at that and answers yeah he was especially good at that yes so let's start with John John how you doing very good father Mitch how are you fine thank you what's your question my question for father Thomas is you're very good you're just the right person to speak to college students for the enquiring students what do you what have you found to be the most important things that people that age need to know about Jesus Christ personally in his divinity and humanity thank you alright father it's a great question yeah well I'll tell you the I'll tell start by just briefly telling you the questions they typically have the most typical kind of questions you see in college students in the secular domain I think today are can we really trust the gospel portraits of Christ historically what we to think that the historical Jesus is someone different than the Christ of the church I mean they kind of you could call it to put it in a kind of crude terms The Da Vinci Code suspicion so we have a series of talks about that to kind of give people information for how to think about the fact that the Gospels do give us real historical vision of the of the actual historical Jesus another issue is I mean they're curious about what we really understand about the atonement I think people don't really understand what it means to say that Jesus died for our sins I mean just intellectually why is that saving that Christ should die and suffer for us and so it's like look at like what Anselm and Aquinas and other great thinkers seat teach about that is helpful and a third thing that's very much on their minds is that you might call it the problem of religious pluralism or diverse religions if Christ really is God made man and universal Savior what does that say about other religions or how do we understand partial truths of other religions Catholicism and other religions I mean how do I negotiate in a concrete way living with people who might be Muslim or Jewish or from other religious traditions if I've done religious or non-religious and and who don't acknowledge any kind of faith if I if I think Christ is somehow connected to them as Savior how is that not exclusive okay it's a normal contemporary concern I think on a kind of practical level what a lot of them need actually is to discover Christ in in a life of prayer you know the carest uh Dee's show that Catholics in particular but young Christians are our country in general often have no sense of a religious experience of Christ and so I think often what they need is to encounter Christ in the Eucharist in adoration to develop a prayer life a discipline a regimen of prayer life they'll they'll discipline themselves to study you know calculus or a difficult text of Shakespeare or Spenser or whatever but think what about spending like 20 minutes today in prayer and actually just our half an hour and learning to read the scriptures prayerfully you know so I think often they need to discover like the interior discipline of how to engage with Christ as a person and then to see that the dogmas have kind of a real kind of depth to them so it's kind of all that stuff at once and you sort of start where what the students interested in so I think certainly as a corollary to some of this I've heard students say well it's Jesus historically is there any evidence from outside the Gospels and things like those are they want to know if it's true I can best the underlying question is this true or if it's a myth I don't wanna thing to do with it that's right and how do you show it's not a myth which it isn't so you know we we have some we you know we send in people who are you know devout scripture scholars who are have heard all the objections and and thought about that wrestled with it written on it and getting give them presentations on that and I think it's very helpful to them to see again the compatibility of faith and reason historical analysis and rationale for historical analysis and and see natural faith I often point out that the word mythos usually in the plural McCoy is five times in the New Testament every time it's always something that's rejected that we don't want myths we want truth sir what can we do for you this fine evening well I have a question for father white yeah that perhaps he can elaborate a little bit on the relevance of tomé ISM today and evangelizing those outside the church and then maybe talk a little bit about tone ISM before the council with perhaps you know Pope Leo the 13th the manulis and then what you had after the council and then kind of what we have today and how that would be relevant for the church today okay thank you those are great questions I'm sorry the first one was of evangelizing those outside the church with I think you know Aquinas is well I like to say that we often think as Catholics the key battle is in the heart that the heart surrendered to God in His grace and of course the heart is really important but in our own II era a lot of the battle is also in the mind and people are genuinely confused about the nature of reality they're perplexed they're often I'd say somewhat innocently agnostic they're trying to figure out what the state of the world is and Aquinas gives you a lot there in terms of thinking about creation I'd say first and foremost most of us think if we think about creation we might instinctively think about creation as the first moment in which God gave the world existence or the big bang but Aquinas thinks the creation is something that's at the the roots of everything happening now that God is giving being to all that is now and that the the dependency of you and I and every other thing that exists our dependency on others for our very existence shows we're not first in reality and we depend on one who sustains us in being so quiet sense is really deep sort of you might call spirituality of the creation that the beauty of all things the goodness of all things the existence of all things points us towards a hidden mystery of God who's more intimate to us than we are to ourselves as Augustine says and Aquinas reflects on you know so this is a kind of deep sense of the presence of God just on a rational level sustaining things in being being closer to me than I am to myself and that's a kind of very great deep view that I hope I think helps a lot of people also Aquinas has a great vision of human freedom as freedom for happiness and moral excellence so when he talks about morality I mean Aquinas thinks laws and rules matter but they're more like the kind of guides to help you see what you should do and should never do to arrive at a state of life that's happy now it's ascetical maybe you know marital fidelity involves asceticism for example but it's also a kind of pathway toward happiness and so like the disciplines of the soul are meant to allow us to flourish to become people who have a happy inner life and joy of living with God so quasi got a great view of freedom and then Aquinas has a beautiful view of the sacraments that we need sensible signs of grace because we are rational animals we're not just animals we're also spiritual but we're not just spirits we're also animals and so we can't just be spiritual not religious we also need to be physically religious because we need rites and rituals and a sense of mystery enshrined in ceremonies and God has given us the sacraments fittingly so that as these sense8 animals we can engage with the mystery of God in a tangible visible sensible way and so Aquinas talks about each of the sacraments in very deep beautiful ways so those are just some ideas you know the mystery of creation this or spirituality of creation the mystery of human freedom and flourishing through you know moral a moral project of excellence and kind of the spirituality the sacrament so they're just some examples now your second question is a more historical question about totemism before the council after the council and today this could be said I think kind of in a sort of succinct way this way okay leo xiii Pope in the end of the 19th century he's seeing the great rise of secularism and he calls on theologians and philosophers to make use of Saint Thomas to respond to the great crisis of secularism in our modern era return to Aquinas look at reality as Aquinas sees in its depths as a reality open to God see how good philosophy and theology lead us to acknowledge God and we can do that in the modern world without any kind of anti modern complexes we can be happy modern Catholic people and that project went on for a long time and they were great strides made in modern research and Aquinas and Catholic philosophy before the council after the second baton council there was a kind of counter movement where the the fear was that tomé ISM and scholasticism have made us too narrow they've given us too many rote answers ready-made answers and we need to open things up and have a broader philosophy greater freedom of exploration the problem was I mean of course open-mindedness and exploration are necessary but the problem was often there wasn't enough formation in the 70s and 80s in a solid philosophical foundation in like the great tradition and so what you got was a kind of intellectual dilettantism or kind of superficial formation in the seminaries and in theology faculties were people they studied this they studied that they study what was a you know trendy but they didn't say get deep roots and of course you know things didn't change yeah I lived that yeah you know very much when I was I started theology in 74 in the Canon of acceptability you know the terms of the books that were acceptable for us to read were books written after the council you know that was you know nine years earlier now that wasn't healthy and the rejection of things before that comes as if there was this break I think effect not just were the guys I studied with but seminaries around the country oh yeah and it wasn't healthy sure it led to a great crisis now I think the irony is actually today with the kind of post-modernism where everything seems relative and students are kind of trying to figure out how to get a grasp of the whole they're often going through university to take a class in Spanish literature and archaeology and modern you know science and calculus and maybe you know the philosophy of the Enlightenment it's all jumbled up they don't have a synthesis though the school doesn't provide a synthesis it provides maybe many excellent courses and many excellent professors but no unifying view and so when they actually study Aquinas and they see that he has this kind of unified understanding of learning in light of a deep philosophy about being about human nature about the nature of natural realities etc and they see that science is compatible philosophy and philosophy is compatible with theology there's a kind of healing of the mind because they start to see things there's a kind of unity and so I think actually a quiet says this kind of really apropos he's like he's coming back into style among young people yeah it's really great and we have another question look who do for you know yes Father you wrote an article in first things called Catholicism and age of discontent in 2016 and then this book came out afterwards called the light of Christ and ended up to the Catholicism one can't help but notice it seems to be calling to mind the one rats in a road in 1968 called introduction to Catholicism how does this book a response to your article and how does it reflect rat sing or another great mind dealing with our times well thank you that's a very perceptive question the article was actually kind of sketch of the book so you're right on the mark there and it was a the book is an attempt to explain the fundamentals of the Catholic faith both in its doctrine and its moral teachings to kind of a contemporary audience of you might say non-specialists I wrote it for like 20 something-year-old lawyers who often come see me in Washington DC maybe they grew up in the Protestant tradition maybe there are a lapsed Catholic maybe they're just a seeker and they're kind of looking for perspective how to understand Catholicism and so the book is written to kind of interest in traditional Catholicism to people at an intellectual but accessible level and it does have a little echo a little tip of the hat to Joseph Ratzinger's book introduction Christianity it's a it's a less technical or maybe a less sophisticated book purposefully written at a lower level than Joseph Ratzinger's book that book he wrote in 1968 I believe comes from a course of theology which was really an introduction to Catholic theology and it says it's an introduction it should be read by everybody it's a it's a fascinating book but it's also a very difficult book and I was trying to write something that was a little bit more on the level of something like Frank she's theology insanity that sort of written to give a philosophical theological overview of Catholicism that's more accessible in kind of an introduction yeah I'd updated you know I take on the questions of like the story of Jesus and you know science and religion sort of things that people ask about today the controversial all the controversial moral teachings the Catholic Church so how do you talk to people about those things and what we believe I'm happy to say the book has seemed to help a lot of people who are preparing to enter the church so you have another caller hello Tony hi father we need caller some thank you for the wonderful conversation that you're having that the show is terrific over the years great people and great conversations my question is with many of the colleges and universities being left-leaning law in everything that goes on there what can he suggest for us as parents or grandparents to keep our kids grounded in the faith so that they don't lose their faith coming out of school excellent question I think a lot of parents agonize over this question I had a conversation with people all the time and I don't think there's any silver bullet so to speak about how to encourage your own son or daughter to practice the faith avidly and grow in their faith intellectually however there are resources so one of the resources is to look carefully at the state of the chaplaincy at a college campus if the student does want to go to Mass there or engage with the chaplain see you can't do very much about that but they want to go to the chaplain see and the chaplain see is healthy and there's a real life of faith and adoration and hopefully an intellectual program then you're also going to you have a very good chance of them making it through and started actually growing in their faith focus missionaries provide a tremendous resource at many campuses the two mystic Institute's now and I think about 40 campuses and growing and we're actually interested in being at new campuses so people should contact with two mystic Institute in Washington DC a lot of times when undergraduates themselves found a chapter at their school they help other people but they also grow in their own kind of commitment intellectually to the faith there's also more online resources now intellectually for people we put up all all our talks are on on podcasts SoundCloud if you if you google SoundCloud into mystic Institute you'll find all our podcasts I think those are widely shared and I think a lot of students listen to them so there's kind of you might call it para institutional intellectual resources so I think those things are all significant but there's no pure substitute for having professors on campus who have deep Catholic convictions and can help the students grow in their Catholic intellectualize so you know the best thing is to find where are they're not necessarily just chaplains but professors who are convicted and to help develop you know help support those schools I think it's important and I think also to work with your children while they're still in high school by sophomore junior especially junior year to let them know they will be challenged about their faith and they need to be able to have a response again it's not a silver bullet there are lots of issues that go on but it's something that we have to take a look at you know preparing them for that as a battle and ask them when your faith is tell not if but when your faith is challenged are you gonna wimp out or you're gonna do something about it and I'd like to use that in that kind of way just because some kids need bit of a challenge you know just if the any of the parents are studying the faith that the parents are doing stuff with their minds and studying the faith and talking about at the dinner table it influences the child you're in high school is pretty important if the student really gets in sophomore junior year a kind of intellectual habit of kind of questioning and finding answers intellectually they're gonna do a lot better in college if they think their father and their mother I would say their father and their mother but maybe especially their father it really believes the faith intellectually and it's sort of engaged in it they're a lot more likely to basically imitate them right we have Mike like were you calling from Chicago Louis Eyer Southside outside god bless you and what can we do for you this evening well father's father white mentioned that he was involved in a discussion about free will so my question is how can those that hold that there is no free will how could they hold that position when they don't have a free will to come to that conclusion yeah well there's perform that's what we know the performative contradiction right I mean the guy argues that there's no free will and he goes right out to the grocery store and he buys orange juice so he chooses that rather than apple juice so the thing is on a performative level I think a lot of people who are skeptics about free will recognize that there's a practical level on which in your practical intellect you're always using it but what we call freewill they might call a folklore concept and that deep down when you examine the structures of the brain and the material causality the material Constitution human being you're going to see if we know enough about the brain about modern physics we'll be able to dissolve all that down to you know the firing off of the atoms and in in the in the frontal lobe and so forth so they're materialists so you have to go I mean typically not always but usually that's where the the worry is on people who think free with freewill is a kind of a you know word we use for some process of desires that really come from our animality that really come from our materiality that really come from laws of physics so you have to really question whether that we can know things outside of the world of modern science you know I mean okay we have knowledge of the human body through physics biology chemistry but are there other ways of knowing okay so are we positivists who just believe in the sciences is the only way of knowing are there real philosophical and common-sense venues ways of knowing the human being and then from those can we begin to see that human beings have features that are not merely explicable by our material processes can we think about human knowledge Universal knowledge human abstraction the way we use language the way we can create art numbers numbers yeah numeric abstraction and therefore also science itself is a sign of something else in us that's not material and free will and the way that free will actually presupposes a universal deliverer of knowledge that's Thomas Aquinas there that because we can think in universal abstract terms we can make free decisions we're not bound just by the desires of our senses or the movements of our animal psychology but we can actually rise above that and reflect and think rationally and universal terms and choose and universal terms okay that's a big philosophical argument it's not easy to make you have to have somebody's patient who's willing to engage honestly and some people use the kind of science appeal more as a defense of skepticism so they don't really have to engage with the truth some of them actually are honestly materialistic and they might engage with this and be open to a real discussion I think there's more to the human being than just matter in physics yeah a new quick question that we had is there a manual to Thomas or some sort of a introduction to Thomas that would help the layperson who's just trying to get started all what Thomas I think well my good friend Edward phase is gonna be thankful to me that I'm giving him a plug on the television but I think Edie phasor it's Fe s er here's Aquinas his book Aquinas for beginners is a really great place to start and been a guest on the show yeah okay so Edward is very helpful yep I would concur with that so yeah every phasor and again father Thomas White's book is called the light of Christ and introduction to Catholicism this is a bit but EWTN are c.com and it is number 29 once or 7:13 the 27 third day I think it is but it's the light of Christ and introduction to Catholicism urge you to get that well father you know this goes by much too quickly but we've got a lot covered I appreciate you coming all the way from Washington over here thank you very much father Mitch I'm very honored to be here it's great and thank you for all the great work you all do love we love doing it that's for sure if you would join me and given the blessing to our audience bill money god bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon you and lead you in all of your ways by his peace may God bless you the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit amen and just to remind you that we can bring father here and all of our other guests on our other programs only because the network is brought to you by you mother was inspired to have you be the ones who make this network keep going by your donations so keep us in between your gas bill your electric bill and your cable bill and we'll pay our bills too thank you god bless [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: EWTN

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Length: 54min 33sec (3273 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018