Franciscan University Presents: The First Society

our culture is in crisis few people disagree about that but what if the solution to the complicated problems we faced was as simple as accepting the graces God offers us in the sacrament of holy matrimony today we'll discuss that question and more with dr. Scott Hahn who is a professor of theology here at Franciscan University and the author of the first society the sacrament of matrimony and the restoration of the social order I'm Michael Hernon vice president of strategic relations at Franciscan University in Steubenville Ohio and you're watching Franciscan University presents stay with us [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to Franciscan University presents I'll be your host Michael Hernon vice president of strategic relations here at Franciscan University in Steubenville Ohio I'm joined in our studio here with our regular panelist dr. regis martin systematic theology professor here at franciscan and dr. william newton who is a theology professor as well here at franciscan and our guest today is no no stranger dr. Scott Hahn who is both a normal panelist here on Franciscan University presents but you've got your your PhD from Marquette your masters in divinity from Gordon Commonwealth seminary and you are you hold here at Franciscan the Father Michael Scanlon chair biblical theology in the New Evangelization but you also are the founder and president of the st. Paul Center for biblical theology you've written dozens of books the book we're gonna be talking about today is the first society the sacrament of matrimony and the restoration is social order pretty lofty goal and an amazing vision that you have in this book but welcome to the program it's great to be with you and I didn't mention your family and your greatest successes as grandfather now is it 15 okay so we're talking about marriage so lay the foundation what is marriage well at one level everybody knows what marriage is but in law both civil and canon law it is a contract but it's also a covenant but Christ elevated it to a sacrament of the New Covenant personally it is a vocation a calling from God to enter into a communion of persons and that's what the Covenant of sacrament form but ever since obergefell and really going back even further marriage is really up for grabs these days because it just strikes me as being something that has been arbitrarily redefined right you know but it's like redefining gravity or repealing the law it doesn't change anything but it confuses everybody you know you have that phrase I identify yeah yeah you don't originate it thank God but you do say that until quite recently it would have been incomprehensible to most people I identify as I don't know a piano or a pizza or a boy or a girl right it's infinitely optional that really does confuse the issue of marriage what the hell is it it's whatever people say it is that's an invitation to anarchy and our our culture and our legal systems have muddied the waters so today at the legal system treats traditional morality as oppressive yeah and I think it's you know I heard one person say that you know traditional morality is weird you know and and we ought to be struck by how weird people think it is because that's what makes it so hard for us right now yeah it seems seems to me there's two elements that we have to always hold with marriage one is that the is ordered towards children because that makes it very different from other possible liaisons and the other is the indissolubility of it the actual permanency of it and those two seem to be characteristics which if you knew how important they were to this arrangement then other people wouldn't say well my arrangements of marriage because those arrangements aren't ordered towards children they're not order towards permanency and what William is pointing out is not some kind of Christian imposition I mean this is the natural moral law that marriage is by definition something that is permanent thus indissoluble its exclusive thus monogamous and opened a life you know the three goods of marriage were invented by a Gustin they were you know created by God that's right and I mean this is precisely where grace perfect nature you know this is where there's a sort of marriage between the supernatural and the natural because you know the supernatural order of grace that Jesus establishes is not Plan B you know it really is the fulfillment and consummation of that primordial marriage that is there at the very beginning so you the title your book the first society you talk about marriage as the first society both in order of importance as well as time right what does that mean well I mean in terms of time I think it's pretty obvious to go back to Genesis 1 and 2 and you see how God created man in his own image and likeness male and female he created them well he created the horses and the cows the dogs and the cats with gender distinctions but nothing is said about you know male and female because for them it's just biological but only for us is there already a mystery implanted within our nature is a theological imaging a likeness and so male and female the two become one flesh in Genesis 2 and that one flesh they become is so real I like to say that 9 months later you better come up with a name because that newborn infant is the incarnation of the oneness the two have become and so there is already a kind of foreshadowing of the Trinity in the three who are one in the human family it's not exactly the same it's it's a it's a weak analogy but it's also a profound one and that's the society that's the beginning of the first society that first that's right and first it's not just you know first in terms of time its first in terms of rank as well because every culture and indeed historians will tell you every civilization in so many ways can be understood in terms of marriage and how they viewed it you know professor Karl Zimmerman who I quote in his great book family and civilization he was the founder at Harvard of this department of family sociology and he points out that long before Imperial Rome you have marriage as a sacramental right you know and this is something again apart from Christian revelation apart from access to the Old Testament in Israel as well and so I think it's just one of those things that causes us to want to take stock and you know just how creative we want to be in reinventing redefine it suddenly occurs to me that three of the most portentous words we find in Scripture are in the beginning because in the beginning Genesis beginnings things start the dearest freshness deep down things as Hopkins puts it and in the beginning the issue of identity crystallizes round male and female there's no third option it's fixed its unalterable and yet implicit in a artificial contraception you have this sundering of love from life and then later sex from life with genetic engineering and so all of that is shattered all of that has come to grief we have overcome the beginning and we're now setting sail literally in darkness and who knows you know what strange port we're gonna sail into it's pretty scary yeah we have to see that as your book rightly shows all nicely shows that society's made out not of individuals but of families even I think Catholics can get confused about that they see the society being a conglomeration of individuals but what we understand is that it's not is first of all families who are grouped together I mean some some cultures is easier to see that always think for example in Scotland you think of Scotland is made up of the Mac this and the Mac that I mean there's families fan yeah and that's those groups come together to create the society but sometimes the cultures we come from we think it's Regis individuals and this is very problematic for understanding of society you know it could be argued that the individual really doesn't exist as an atomized unit because to be is always to be in relation I mean your last name triggers that connection of a father mother son daughter siblings cousins there's no end of the business the kinship I mean it that pattern is everywhere the family is something you're born into it's a condition you never really escape you can't take flight from it you're always a member of the family even if you despise it or denounce it you can't take leave from it and this is not a projection of our Christian faith or our Catholic personalism or whatever I mean it really is an empirical fact that we run from that nobody is born an individual the Enlightenment notwithstanding we are born a son or a daughter it might be a happy marriage it might be a broken marriage it might be in the backseat of a car the drive-in theater but I mean there is a mother and a father that you know that represent the instrument by which God forms persons who are in His image and likeness precisely as not strictly male or female but son and daughter and then brother sister husband wife and I it's it's the relational ontology this family matrix as I point out in the book it's a universal homolytic it's the way we come to know and be loved it's also a universal metaphysic it is an apt description of the whole fabric of reality Robert Robert Frost has a great line he says home is the place where when you get there they have to take you in threat and exclude you yeah even the black sheep belongs in that flock yeah when you look at the even the analogies you use of like just seen in science the atom you know as we talked about you can't separate and no an atom into itself it's always part of an element it's always because of a larger glue there's I mean everything in creation is pointing towards a larger community and we are not only no different we are actually the the pinnacle of what community is what God designed but he did that also too from the very beginning with himself the Trinitarian understanding what what does that look like as he as you kind of unpack how you've talked about that how the Trinity is seen in in marriage well I mean the Trinity is something unknown for ages until the fullness of time when God sends his son we didn't even know that God had a son and then we discover that God is an eternal father even more than he's a creator because however old creation is it's not eternal but God is and so the gift of the son reveals the mystery of the Trinity and and suddenly we realize this is more than a mathematical abstraction somehow God is 1 and 3 how can you have one and many well the the pagan philosophers were always debate what is ultimate the one or the many well God would say see both a and B know that unity is not diminished by three persons who love from all eternity if anything that unity is deep and perfected and then revealed to us as not just something that we ought to contemplate but as the only thing for which we were made and you know that's the only home and the the human family however sacred it is is really a Waystation a means to an end so the trinity becomes the thing the reality the the the ultimate goal of human existence as well as the ultimate template for human families so this this shows why I mean that family isn't just the kind of God's building block for societies also the way he's decided to reveal himself yes so this is another element which makes marriage what it is it stops us fiddling with it because he has from eternity decided to use the sexual essentially man and woman as the privileged way of revealing himself to us and jumbled the second you know pick this idea after he ran with it somewhere like Murray ITT tartan when he says what we got to reflect on is the decision the divine decision to create humans always as male or female why did he do that and he answers it he did it because they can form a community of human persons which mirrors the community of divine persons which is Lorenzi yeah it's his it's his portal into our world to reveal himself yeah there really is something curious and profound because angels are persons but not gender they're not capable of generating animals aren't persons but they can generate offspring and so here we are betwixt in between you know that the material and the spiritual converge and this is how God has chosen to reveal a psychosomatic unity yeah and that integrity is I think only upheld by the teaching of the church these these trinity images are everywhere in creation there's the lover there's the beloved and there's this mysterious current of love that springs forth from that exchange it's not exhausted by the exchange of pleasure something survives this openness to life and then the 3 ends of marriage its faithful it's it's fruitful it's forever right it's also I suppose free you can't coerce people into this but it's not surprising that if we're made in God's image and he is triune then why shouldn't we be try we might have to wait till eternity but eventually we're gonna realize this isn't just a universe it's a try universe that reflects the Trinity at every level you know like the crystalline structure of quartz no matter how low you know you shatter and all of the fragments still retain that structure you know but I think at the same time and we don't want to just kind of you know project this from on high we want to also draw it from below and recognize the practicality the difficulty you know why was it the case that God in the Old Testament accommodated himself to the weakness of the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve by allowing people me and eventually divorce and remarriage and even with the patriarchs who are the Paragons of faith like Abraham a concubine Jacob to concubines and two wives you know and so what we recognize is that Jesus launched a revolution in the history of world religion in human history by returning to the beginning by making monogamy more than an ideal but making it possible by making it a sacrament then that's changed everything you know that's that's the profound more than we realize that Scott that's not a fascinating distinction that it's not just an ideal towards which we try to move we aspire after this ideal this distant paradigm in the sky no it's written in to the very structure of our being so it's there already it's part of the identity the DNA it defines us I mean that's more comforting I think than saying oh here's this ideal that you're never gonna reach but try your best to close the gap that's frustrating but if the ideal is inscribed in in the exchange of vows between a man and a woman that's that's liberating so then it seems that we have to hold maybe three truths to actually understand marriage that it's created in the beginning there's a marriage and that mirrors somehow the Trinity then sin comes in and causes a fracture another destruction and then Christ comes and through the sacraments brings about the healing of that fracture and if we don't have either if we miss out one of those three elements we somehow going to misunderstand what marriage is either idolize it or we just think it's some kind of forever broken reality that we just sort of hobble along in stay with us for the next segment of Franciscan University presents a Franciscan University Steubenville you'll find faith and reason wisdom and grace mercy and truth you'll study under world-class scholars and seasoned practitioners who are committed to Christ in this church with over 40 majors and pre-professional programs you'll find the formation you need to succeed the Franciscan University you'll find more than just you'll find yourself in an educational experience as singular as you are [Music] welcome back to Franciscan University presents we've been talking to dr. Scott Hahn about his latest new book the the first society how the saccharine of matrimony in the about the sacrament of matrimony in the restoration of the social order so we kind of painted a beautiful picture a beautiful vision of how God created and first intended marriage to be and the ideal that is also imbued in our hearts and it's imbued in the very communal nature that we are as human beings but we look around today and that isn't the case insofar as our practical experience as married men here we know we have our own personal crisis or challenges in marriage but when you look at the society as a whole it's broken and you know there are secular forces there's legal forces as we talk cultural as we look at look at marriage why is it all confused why what is the blame I guess and and and where do we stand on this current crisis in marriage and it's a big question right I mean to to spin the yarn here I mean you could create so many meta-narratives to explain the crisis in marriage I mean you could go back to the 60s the sexual revolution you know you could go back five centuries and look at you know enlightenment and post enlightenment thought you could go back to the beginning and recognize that Satan's stratagem was not to target Adam or Eve and not just them together but their marriage and then in Genesis what is it for LA m'q you know succumbs to the temptation to polygamy and were off and falling you know it's and so very early in our history that's right but I one thing I try to try to resist in the book is this idea that if we could just kind of rewind the tape and turn back the clock and a kind of sacred nostalgia go back to the 50s when folt machine was winning Emmys on primary that's right father knows best and I believe at the beaver you know starlings when I was when I was born you know and they're now re running these shows all the time on various networks no I think the tempt the temptation is to just sit just a safe we could go back before the Supreme Court started monkeying around with all of those things and you know it you know as I point out in the book it didn't start with over two fell you know it didn't start with Griswold versus Connecticut or Rove Wade you know these things go back not only in American history and Western civilization but I mean they really point like signs to something that is you know like Chesterton's line what's wrong with the world I am you know and so I think we have to be honest with ourselves and recognize that you know on the one hand marriage is for me the most fulfilling relationship I've ever known almost four years with Kimberley more happiness deeper friendship than I could have imagined on the other hand no greater frustration I have heard her more than anybody else as in things that I said in my insensitive responses and all that kind of thing and she has hurt me and so you never experience more happiness and also more struggle and so you can you can understand why people give up yes you know why Jesus made it a sacrament cuz the sacrament doesn't make it easy it makes it possible as I try to show in the book if somebody once said I think anonymously that if it weren't for marriage men would go through life thinking everything is just fine right jack I did think I was a good holy person prior to having children and unfortunately many men go through marriage say short-term maritime effect but it is the element of sin that william mentioned in the last segment what bellick calls the worm in the Apple in the fruit that insinuates that poison deep down and and you have a great reminder in your book that and when you struggle with lust for example you shouldn't blame it on the culture blame it on the heart your own heart yeah get busy and try and purify the source right yeah so what well is is clear I mean you you rightly say we shouldn't be nostalgic for another era so not the 1950s but I guess we can sort of recognize certain kind of event horizons I mean the first one happened in the garden is the ultimate event horizon but also perhaps you know around the Reformation a loss of sense of the sacramentality of marriage Q gots it that's right of the inner power that's needed to live well and then I always think is also particularly important to think of something like leo xiii a carnem so this is the end of the 19th century where he's speaking against divorce and he's pointing out look if you allow divorce you really strike at one of those principal elements of marriage indissolubility you got it of any meaning yes if you got it of any meaning then all other pretenders can come in and say well I'm a marriage I'm a marriage right so same-sex marriages kind of make sense in that logic we've already by divorce denied the very essence of marriage made it into more or less an arrangement of a friendship that's breakable right well I mean this is at the endgame right yeah I think of Immanuel Kant's description of marriage it's simply a contract that allows for the mutual use of the sexual organs I mean that's reductionism but that's exactly accurate for where he was living in Germany at the time because as you point out once you deny the sacramentality of its right you reduce it to a covenant as Protestant but then in the Enlightenment you reduce it to contract it really is an exchange of goods and services writers and so on you know but once it's a contract you know leo xiii points this out to how the inner logic leads us downward because once it's dissolve all you know you deny the sacramentality you deny the covenant ality then you're going to not see that indissolubility you know and by 1930 Lambeth leads the Anglicans to say you know under certain circumstances contraception is fine so the fertility the fruitfulness of marriage is also undermined you know this is why when people point to the Supreme Court allowing gay marriage you know it seems to me that we can discuss same-sex attraction homosexuality you know gay marriage shot of me whatever you want to call it but the solution is not heterosexuality you know it is I mean there is a sense in which we can use that category but there's also a deeper need to recognize that being a heterosexual you know we still have to fight lust as you were pointing out as I try to explain in the book to it we're called to fidelity yeah you know we're called to intimacy we're also called to self-denial in the process and and learning how to apologize promptly and sincerely has always been hard for me I I always tended to weaponize my apologies really I'm sorry you didn't understand what I was saying again so you do that to your point about gay marriage I think is well-taken it applies a logic that has already been in place right right it's almost a natural fruition I mean illogical could go back to 1968 with you money Vijay if you break the connection between love and and life if sex doesn't really have to be about babies then why does it have to be about women why can't it just be two guys doing it right it's like it's like having a house in which you sort of slowly suck out all the air and cause a vacuum then you'd only probably have to flick the wall and the whole thing would go oh yeah yeah and this is the experience we've had with the redefinition of marriage to allow gay marriage it's there's there's nothing in it holding marriage the walls stable that's right just flick it and and so with all of this that's going on both today and throughout history has there ever been a time has there ever been a cultural understanding of what marriage really was is this is this a golden era that never existed you know on the one hand you can't identify any historical period as idyllic paradise achill on the other hand you can see you know Christendom as a civilization was a kind of civilization of love fundamentally flawed in countless ways you know but I'm fond of a work by a dear friend and colleague you know Andruw Jones before church and state he's looking at 12th and 13th century France but he could have looked at almost any part of Christmas at the time and again it was flawed there were failings but at the same time there was this sacramental foundation you know baptism wasn't just a kind of childhood event it was citizenship it was to be naturalized only super naturalized into something so much more than one nation it was this international family that you know extended from heaven to earth and defined who we are not only as Saints but as citizens and sinners and when you take those sacraments as building blocks you begin to recognize that only in the Catholic Church only with all seven Herrmann's do you have the civilization forming power and potential of the Christian faith unveiled not just in theory but in practice and again I don't want to point to it and pretend as though this was perfect but it shows us that if we look at the inner logic of the sacraments and realize this is powerful love at work we alone have the the means by which to restore the social order and then so yeah yeah no I I'm thinking about my old friend Brent Bozell uh who wrote extensively about this and and he had a great line he said a confessional state Christendom a Christian culture is not a judicial theory it's an act of love it's a gesture of love whereby the state tries to make it easier for men and women to be good to practice virtue so you outlaw things like pornography abortion divorce it makes it easier for people if divorce doesn't exist as an option then couples it seems to me really have to work hard to make their marriage survive yes let me digress for a minute I hope no more because a confessional state is not a bad thing but a good thing especially compared to a secularized State on the other hand what dr. Andrew Jones points out in before church and state was that long before you had confessional States you had societies like the one under King Louie the only French monarch to be canonized and under Saint Louie you you have historians today saying oh that's church and state but when Andrew went back and looked at the primary sources you never have that language of church and state you have clergy and laity you know they're all baptized and and so st. Louis did not think of himself as representing the state as King versus the church he was a layman who was baptized confirmed and married and as such his monarchical rule was under the clergy but it wasn't other than the church as a layman he was called to sanctify the temporal order and as the king that's what he was doing it was a sacramental organism and to me that's where the civilization forming potential of the of the Catholic faith in general and the Salomon's in particular have got to be rediscovered because their membership in the body of Christ is what defines citizens exactly belong to the church I belong to Christ if it doesn't matter that I'm French or German or English it doesn't matter what finally matters is I am a citizen of eternity I belonged and the best thing I can give to France or America is my Catholic faith lived out as well as I can but this this is just like it's such a revolution of thinking for us as Catholics yeah so in libertas Leo makes the analogy that the church and the society is like the soul and the body and they come together to benefit each other so only the church has the powers you send your book to get to the heart of the problem in society which is sin it's got the tools to heal society and as you were pointing out Regis society therefore should do certain things to make that easier Lourdes should be there to respect the position that the church has in God's plan as the particular vehicle for bringing salvation to mankind so and he says you know soul and body and if you separate soul and body what do you get you get something which is dead it's really an article and I think that's at that when I love this saying that that we so often fixate on the society on that the big macro issues and I spent a number of years in politics so I get that I understand that but breaking it down going from society is you talk about marriage church in society and that the marriage perfected is perfecting the church the church perfected is perfecting society but we so quickly jump to how do we fix right society I just turned 60 and so this is the book that represents the next stage in my life where I want to kind of come out take off the gloves though yeah and this is more subversive but it's more constructive because you know what leah was doing in Libertas with soul and body you know the church is the soul the Society's the body animates it drawn from the Epistle to diognetus as you know I think it's a beautiful vision but it's an analogy because the church is not a soul it's a body itself and as a visible body reaching from heaven to earth it is in a certain sense again what we could see it christened them a civilization of love and what we also aren't able to recognize is that the secular society that has grown up alongside of the church in so many ways has presented us with a disguised form of a counter religion and a kind of set of pseudo sacraments and a sort of public liturgy that you best come to comprehend when you realize that for the last several centuries it is an accidently contrary to the Catholic faith or Christianity it's deliberate I don't want to become a conspiratorial list but I also want to I don't want to be naive you know and so we want to sanctify the temporal order but we also want to recognize that we are a society and we have this capacity to form civilizations if we just live it out stay with us for the next segment of Franciscan University presents what it means that we have a sacramental grace of marriage is that through the power of Christ we really are empowered by Christ to be good spouses and to really live up to and live out fully God's plan for sex love and marriage specifically that means we're going to be able to love each other with a love that we may not have on our own but really the love of Christ we're going to be able to forgive each other we're going to be able to sacrifice when needed we really are going to take on the power of Christ and take on a christ-like character in marriage it's going to lead not only to being a good spouse of course but also to being a good person and then we get a kind of twofold relationship there as we're a better person in the life of the other person we make them a better person and they're a better spouse to us in return and this is ultimately what leads to the image as well that we have in the sacrament of marriage we are able to live up to the love of Christ not only towards the other but receive that love back and get a kind of model of the love of Christ for the church [Music] welcome back to Franciscan University presents this entire program springs forth from the very heart of Franciscan University in Steubenville Ohio right now we're taping this show in the studios at the Communication Arts department here and student ville Ohio the camera and equipment is being operated by our students here and our panelists are theology professors here at the University so it's got this is an excellent book the first society the sacrament of matrimony in the restoration of the social order what really was the driving force or what what really motivated you as you looked at this book because this is this is a seminal work in some ways yeah I mean nearly 40 years of marriage six kids 15 grandkids all of the above but I think it goes back to the event that the story that I described in the beginning of the book I was a doctoral student first semester at Marquette studying under a Jesuit theologian who was also professor at the law school at Marquette and a brilliant lawyer legal mind but also a theologian father Keefe was lecturing in this seminar on religion and society and this was the mid 80s so it was John Paul it was Reagan it was Jerry Falwell the moral majority Catholics and Protestants were sort of joining for the first time in a pro-life alliance so this was the topic of conversation and we were reading not only fouché del deck who launched the ancient city to see how religion historically always had a public face you know always was forming a social order we were reading richard john new houses naked public square and he was still a lutheran he hadn't become a catholic or a priest at that point but he was lecturing through all of these big ideas about how we can and how we shouldn't and then though he just interrupted himself he looked out the window for a couple of seconds and we were all like what's he seeing and he wasn't seeing anything he was thinking and he just kind of blurted out this sort of under you can tell it was on script he's like you know if Catholics simply lived out the sacrament of matrimony for one generation the result would be a Christian society but I digress and so he went back to the lecture notes and I'm like I never heard another word of that lecture I was like what did he just say he he didn't mean that that's hyperbole but the more I thought about it the more I realized he's exactly right it's not just that this one sacrament can save the world but the one sacrament is tied to the other sacraments because you can't administer marriage to your spouse unless you're both baptized but then baptism plus confirmation and to receive the body of Christ those sacraments of initiation don't just initiate church membership they unite you to this Corpus Christi a corporation like no other business in the world you know and as a result you have these sacraments of service and calling holy orders as well as holy matrimony and you know it's like one hand washing the other it is such a combination a coordination of that if we just thought through the inner logic of divine love and power that is already there as well as in the sacraments of healing penance the anointing of the sick I really would I really believe that we don't have to give in to anxiety about which politicians get elected so much is what we have to do is to live out the grace of the sacraments more fully more publicly more boldly especially confession yes but to all of them as well and I really do believe that Keefe was not exaggerated that this is how it happened in the first few centuries I mean this can be almost reduced to a sort of cliche bloom where you are planted become what you are or as Catherine of Siena of memorably puts it if you do what you're supposed to do you're gonna set the world on fire right I mean the transformative impact of that it's a chain reaction a catalyzing event the thing that I wanted to what to talk about and your phrase the public face of faith a sort of evoked this this this image Daniel Lou Jean Cardinal Daniel Oh in that little book of his which is a gem a masterpiece prayer as a political problem he makes the argument that it is unreal and dangerous for the civil and the religious orders to move in separate orbits they belong together they're not the same and it's not you but there is an analogical relation if you leave the civil order to develop itself without reference to God then you leave man incomplete tragically uh without those skills those resources that they're appiah grace on which he absolutely depends prayer becomes a political problem and then the state really has an obligation to help ensure access to God because left to our own devices most of us will not find God he's invisible he doesn't appear in the space-time continuum where we locate our material being so society has a role to play a kind of conspiracy to make it possible to make it attractive for men and women to practice virtue there are all kinds of things society could do like shore up the status of marriage and we have to understand here that we're saying something more than just religious liberty we're saying somehow a positive attitude from the side of the state towards religion and particularly towards the Catholic Church which again leo says if we're not prejudiced is the state's not prejudiced it will see some divine marks upon that particular religion there will allow it to give it a certain favor not a favor which forces others to convert to it so a gentleness there but really favorite why because the citizens that the political community is looking after our people destined for eternal life they cannot be properly looking after them if they don't have that as the horizon Pius the 12th says the same thing about Christian education he says look only Christian education is perfect education because only that sort of takes the holistic view of the human being yes all the human formation but those children have eternal life as their destiny Christian if you have a non-christian education it's it does something good but it's not perfect if you have a non-christian or non Catholic state it does something good but it falls short from really helping the citizens to reach their final goal because when you think about what you said it is it is this subversive revolution it's an affront to and has been an affront to the political state as the culture would have it and often days but it really is actually aimed at the renewal and the perfection of our our political order but as we look around and we do see something very different than this view that that that key proposed and that there would be this transformation what are the necessary steps how do we how do we start living this out what is what what can we do in order to make this sacramental world view this Sacramento society um a reality I went to Marquette the study under father Keith because he was working on his magnum opus covenant allah-allah G and two volumes and and he saw covenant as marriage I focused on covenants family but III was fixated on this because it's not only a theology that makes sense of the scriptures but it's you know it's something you can take home with you yes and it's what you encounter when you get home and you know it's family and so you know after all these years of marriage I think practically speaking you know I would say what Kimberly has found a hundred and one ways to say gently is stop complaining Scott I I really have a tendency to complain she is always positive you know stop complaining doesn't mean start you know stop diagnosing I I think we can stop complaining about the circumstances but start diagnosing the illness of our the social body in which we live if we do that again we could easily fall or fall into complaint but I think we can recognize then you know that marriage is so much more than what a lotta within what people think it is and we ought to live it out in a way that is joyful and humble and and honest you know that is not easy I also think that if we live out marriage in this way our children pick up on it and the neighbors do too you know Rodney Starks classic work the rise of Christianity points out that martyrs were not simply the cause of the expansion of Christianity families were pain the way women were treated especially in marriage as a sacrament and he was writing it as an agnostic sociologists of religion and history and he's eventually come around to the faith but the fact is the are there and they they point to how it is that we can live in a culture of death like the Roman Empire and live out the sacrament of matrimony and extend that grace you know on the one hand we don't want to fall into Shinto Catholicism as Virgil father Blum used to call it you know I'm Catholic because I was Irish or Italian or whatever we also don't want to fall into an Amish Catholicism where we just end up forming these closed communities you know I think we have to really have a public oh what's the word you know an outreach and miss change my mind yeah right and we're missionary apostles but at the same time we go back home and we have to live it out and that's what matters so much more than talking it up out there you know at the heart of Daniel Lou's analysis is the outrageous by our lights a statement that Constantine really did us a favor when he was baptized when he converted everything changed because he took account of the event of the Incarnation nothing could remain the same after God became man and so it really does become a sacred conspiracy to baptize everything in the blood of the Lamb I mean that's a tall order to convert Caesar and then get Caesar to somehow pronounce the church give her the primacy of place that she deserves in the order of not just redemption but in the order of time and space and let her do her work she ought to be the first citizen of the Commonwealth the family is the second citizen and the individual doesn't really exist in his atomized state he only exists as a member of a family and I think one thing that's so great about this book is I thinks what you bring out something which is perennial in the Catholic social teaching which sometimes gets missed because it comes at the end of the encyclicals and they're longer maybe you don't read all the way through but almost all of them end up by saying look the only solution to the problem is return to Christian virtue so rerum navara Mia there's a conflict between the capitalist and the labourer there may be practical things that can be done be says but at the end of the day there's got to be a change in the hearts of both parties and we have the power in the church to change the heart namely we have the sacraments we have the divine power that seems to be what you're saying roses exactly you know III heard a professor explain to me when I was becoming Catholic that in our tradition virtues are to the soul what muscles are to the body they make you strong and and strong to love and it's not just true for individual Souls and bodies it's true for the social body which is soul and body you know and I think if we recognize the need to grow in virtue through the grace of the sacrament we will recognize that the diagnosis of our social social ills is not again traceable back to obergefell or gay marriage that sort of thing but it's really traceable back to our hearts which need to be healed but it's always going to be gradual so this is personal this is practical this is concrete this is what I'm gonna be dealing with tonight at dinner with Kimberly right and at the same time it's radical it's counter revolutionary it's beyond ambitious and yet I have to believe God wants to do this more than we want implement and it really is what you're proposing and you said in the book is really impossible humans that yeah but but it is it is natural and sin born in us so it's inborn that we have to be dependent on that sacramental grace in order to fulfill this that's right it and so often in the in the past you see salvation history revealing this providential pattern that that God allows the deepest darkness before the light Dawn's you know exile where Israel is enslaved before the Messiah comes he doesn't just bring them out of political captivity but spiritual I mean every level of captivity is what Christ delivers us from but it's not just from captivity it is for family and not just humans sociological but divine family the church you know in the Old Testament you might say that the family was a reflection of the Trinity that wasn't even known yet but the Church of the new coven nothing less than the extension of the Trinity we really are the extended family of the Father Son and Holy Spirit and nothing less than that will really captured I mean if you have a poor family living on top of Fort Knox and they complain about these shiny bricks tell them that's gold you know there his wealth and power you're you're not tapping that you know I suppose if you wanted to put your book in a programmatic context what is it really about what is it exhorting everyone to do the answer is quite simple become a saint the witness of sanctity there's a great line in Balthasar book raising the bastions he says look you can you can shoot the Saint you can maybe suppress the practice of holy religion but what you can't do is refute sanctity its irrepressible it's there because it comes from God and and to become a saint know by your own power but by the fact that God has decided within the marriage itself to put a spring of divine life and we have to tap into that yes right so we got the power we just have to yield to it yeah and the chisel in the hand of the divine sculptor has a name in my case Kimberly that's how I'll be made escapes but isn't that great I stay with us for the final segment at Franciscan University presents one of the biggest reasons we have for being faithful to our marriages and fully living out the sacramentality of marriage is the way we see that it benefits those around us even as it's benefiting ourselves in marriage and what we mean by that is that when we live out the kind of love that God calls us to in marriage and when we're empowered by the grace that God gives us in marriage this is a great lesson across the board for the society around us that the greatest things in life the greatest challenges in life must be met not only by commitment by by availing ourselves of the grace that God gives us and it's going to show a kind of possibility that isn't there without factoring that grace in we're going to be able to strike people interest people and hopefully ultimately encourage people to think that they're capable of more than they realize that even the loftiest goals and the greatest challenges can be met and can be realized and overcome through the grace of God this is what we do in our sacrament this is what we do in marriage and when we do that on a small scale we're opening people's hearts to doing that across the board in all spheres of life explore the treasures of your Catholic heritage on a Franciscan University pilgrimage led by inspiring spiritual directors you'll walk in the footsteps of saints and martyrs in the Holy Land Poland France and Italy and you'll deepen your love for Jesus Christ through daily mass confession prayer and the joy of christian fellowship led Franciscan University lead you on a pilgrimage of faith find out more at Franciscan edu slash pilgrimages [Music] welcome back to Franciscan University presents we've been talking about marriage today and this is our final segment so Regis could you lead us off yeah what one thing it's sort of a commonplace but it does occur to me that people and societies they sort of get the problems they deserve but solving some problems can be more satisfying than others so when I muse about what age I would wish most to have been born in lived in and thrived in I think of the fourth century I'd love to have been at the Council of Nicaea and I would pop arias in the nose Athanasius and I would have stood together tall in the saddle because the issues were really exciting God Christ I mean that's exhilarating stuff a father Marie says that was the last great religious argument in in the West or the 16th century I mean I'd love to have been a trend you know talk about faith justification freedom grace the real presence but here we are in the 21st century and what are we talking about well in this degraded distracted age we're talking about life when does it begin and is the family the best place to welcome a new life and what exactly is a family and then we come back to that Shibboleth those three words my identity I identify as I mean what complete rubbish people should know who they are certainly our ancestors knew where they began where they left off Thomas More knew that he didn't have to worry about well am i a man today or maybe I'm just a monkey I think that this age is really a mess and that's why a book like yours is so wonderfully clarifying it clears the air the only question that remains is how do you get people to read it yeah so that's what you have to do you've got to promote this book because it's wonderful stuff thanks Regis yeah I totally concur it's really an important book I think it's getting us back to this program which leo xiii sort of so clearly laid out for us that the separation radical separation of church and state which somehow we think is the norm is just not good for either party and this analogy of solid body I think is is important and what you I think so wonderfully is okay well what do we do about that individual how do we start to bring about that interface and what we can do so if we're married at least is to bring it about again in through the marriages and it reminded me reading actually over of the film Jean de florette at O'Berry film and in the film he inherits a piece of land and he's never lived in the village he inherits it and his neighbors want to get hold of the land and there's a spring on the land and so the neighbors cover it up before he arrives to take possession of it and all his agricultural projects fail because when the Sun comes up it's Provence in the summer everything dies and it's just so tragic because he doesn't know that right on his land is the spring he's running off here and running off there to get water yeah and somehow I think we're like that with the sacrament of marriage God has put this spring of power and grace right in the marriage what you seem to be saying is look to clear away those breaks take that power change your own little society that you have control of that will bring about the change in society that we also so desperately want to see right thank you to restore all things in Christ alone reconstructing the social order I mean these are these are big big ticket items you know but I think the call is for us to go back home and to not look at our cell phones during dinner you know to really linger with family members we've always shared good things we're not done with dinner until everybody has shared a good thing for the day I think vacations family prayer the rosary especially vacations where you also go out of your way to stop at a shrine and to pray the rosary along the way playing ball in the backyard you know frisbee whatever can't really said don't just pray play and you know with the kids and the grandkids too and you know to open the doors to other families so that you can share in this sort of thing and rub off on one another you know I just mentioned before the show began and I came from my home where 40 or 50 kids were there for a skills day which we've been doing for 20 years and there are a lot of other families who are like that as well here and elsewhere but I think we need a whole lot more family life and a whole lot more families living this kind of thing together and sharing the burdens acknowledging the difficulties stop pretending that it's Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver we really did struggle I mean Kimberley considered divorce and me at one point and I didn't even know until afterwards you know and and it was the fear of Hell on the one hand and I think both discovered that it was the grace of the sacrament of matrimony that kept us together in spite of everything and then led us to a place where we experienced now a friendship that I never even imagined possible in a marriage but we still go through difficulties within the last week you know apologies and we have to forgive you know promptly and sincerely and you know I snored last night and so I had to leave I mean all of these are the things that you know if we become Saints this is why you know and I think we are called to one thing and that is sanctity and most of us are called to it in one way and that is marriage and Baptism and Confirmation and the Eucharist penance most especially I mean I've gone to confession weekly since I became a Catholic more than 30 years ago and Kimberly and the kids have never said I go too often and I think they're grateful for whatever natural effects as well as supernatural effects and so I think if we can stop complaining start diagnosing the problem but diagnosing it is so much easier than solving the problem but actually solving the problem is close at hand begin again and again and again apologize forgive you know and then make resolutions to do practical things because in the little nitty-gritty things of life that's where sanctity grows and you know again by putting down the paper by listening more carefully to my wife by making sure that I call my kids because they're raising families of their own we want to make it weekly I I really believe that especially intellectuals like me have we've got to be brought down to earth and identify practical ways every day and especially little things that we can't brag about or you know given to pride about I mean I could go on and on but I think as we're putting all of the bricks in the wall we should also take a step back and say that everything is Christ's you know there isn't a square inch of this planet that Jesus doesn't point to and say that's mine there isn't a soul on earth that he doesn't look at and say I bought you I redeemed you and so if we supernatural eyes this I think we really have a capacity to spread a joy that others will find irresistible as Pope Francis called it the joy of the gospel the joy of the Lord is our strength it is the means by which they converted the world back then and we'll do it again if we are faithful amen amen well Scott thank you for this book this is really great and it's definitely a great tool for us if you'd enjoy today's program we have a handout for you it's it's an excerpt from the book the first society the sacramental society so you'll want to get this at faith in reason dot-com or just for asking this book is is pointing away to a pretty revolutionary idea about how we change the world by first starting with ourselves and really our families because ultimately there is a war going on and you are in the midst of it and your marriage your your kids marriage your grandkids marriage those matter matter to us they matter to the church they matter to the future of our society so invest deeply in it and rely on God's grace to really transform you and then transform the world as part of our mission here at Franciscan University we believe we're called to educate to evangelize and send forth joyful disciples so as to restore all things in Christ and so we want to invite you to be a part of that mission this life-saving mission I may be coming here to Steubenville Ohio to take classes and earn your degree or through our online programs or come to our evangelistic conferences throughout our summers or join with us on pilgrimages to holy shrines around the world your life needs to be changed and you need to be equipped for the new evangelization so make sure you go to faith in reason calm for great talks information and inspiration for the work and until next time may the Lord bless you and keep you [Music] to download the free handout on today's topic go to faith and reason com email your request for the handout - presents at Franciscan ddu at faith in reason comm you can also purchase past episodes of Franciscan University presents or request today's free hand out and purchase past programs by calling 888 3 3 3 0 3 8 1 that's eight eight eight three three three zero three eight one or call seven four zero two eight three six three five seven [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Franciscan University of Steubenville

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Rating: 4.9545455 out of 5

Keywords: Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic, college, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Franciscan University of Steubenville (College / University), Franciscan University Presents, Presents, EWTN, Eternal Word Television Network, FaithAndReason.com, Faith And Reason, FaithAndReason, Michael Hernon, Dr. Regis Martin, Dr. William Newton, Dr. Scott Hahn, theology, The First Society: The Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order, First Society, marriage, family

Id: P7JkMa3jZTo

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018