Is America Collapsing? - Dr. Scott Hahn

praise be jesus christ so honored to have with me today uh dr scott hahn dr han welcome i am grateful for the invitation father mark uh most of you everyone knows uh dr scott hahn i would describe you as i guess the most well-known scripture scholar in the english-speaking world if there's someone who's more well-known i don't know who it is but uh you you've touched the hearts of so many with your teaching on sacred scripture and you're teaching at steubenville right now that's right for the last 31 years wow now i listen to your conversion story on cassette right after i'm very grateful for for all your scripture teaching and uh you've done a lot to form my own understanding of scripture so thank you very much for that you're welcome and just one one more thing about you how many grandchildren do you have all right so we have six children five sons and one daughter and 20 grandchildren so the first three are all married and from them we've got the 20 grandchildren and then the next two jeremiah is now a transitional deacon for the diocese of steubenville and joseph is also a seminarian for and getting priestly formation for the stupid diocese too and then our youngest son david is just getting ready to graduate from the franciscan university here in steubenville oh you're you're a blessed man yes god is good he's good and that means you're not allowed to complain when you're as blessed as you are no complaining allowed indeed so we're speaking today about your book it is right and just that came out not too long ago excellent book and um i have i have 13 quotes i want to ask you to comment on if we can get through them if not that's fine um and maybe we'll just dive right into it the first one is actually in your last chapter you write the for the average roman rome being sacked was a category error like the oceans being emptied or the moon being purchased it didn't make sense after all it had been nearly eight centuries since the last time an invading force had entered the city and i read this just just a little before the events at the capitol hill in the capitol building and when i saw what happened at the capitol hill i thought of this and i thought america america has its challenges do you want do you want to comment what you were thinking when you when you wrote this well you know first of all let me just contextualize this book because we sort of figured that it would be coming out around the time of the presidential election but little did we know what kind of election we would be facing both before and the aftermath of this election so the united states has not yet reached its um 250th anniversary that will be in short order in in just five years but i think we have to step back and look at things from a historical vantage point and recognize that just as individuals have differing longevities some die in their 50s or 60s others make it to their 80s or 90s and every once in a while there you reach the century mark there is a natural cycle for civilizations but it isn't firmly fixed as an iron law but it is generally a tendency that the moral fiber is what either sustains or when that collapses the civilization falls into decrepitude and begins to disintegrate and it can be over you know it can basically reach its end either by external attack or just simply internal disintegration and rome was of course the civilization not only from a political standpoint but also from a biblical standpoint all the early church fathers understood that the fourth beast in daniel 2 i'm sorry in daniel 7 the fourth medal in daniel 2 was the in in the succession of empires it would be babylon and then medo persia greece and finally rome when the son of man would come and so it was the end of an era but it took a you know it took a long time for rome to collapse i won't go into the details but santa guston in the at the end of the fourth century has to address the question you know is rome collapsing because it assimilated the christian faith which alienated from us are from our gods and he writes the famous work the city of god precisely to show that no uh it was precisely the the moral fiber that collapsed and it was also the gods that the romans worshiped all of these things bring the downfall of rome about if anything christianity renews it it transforms it it converts it and so saint augustine gives us a biblical theology of universal history the first of its kind and i think we would do well to study that in order to understand not only the rise and fall of cultures and societies and civilizations but why the christian faith has the power to resurrect not only bodies like lazarus and jesus but also cultures societies and civilizations and so why the future of civilization depends upon true religion is pointing not only backwards to rome but also forwards that each and every society has a future it has hope but only if it turns to the god who gives life and so you know this is not primarily about politics it really is primarily about the virtue of hope and it's good i think for catholics to recognize that to understand how hope works we've got to understand that this world is not our home as paul reminds the philippians in philippians 3 20 our citizenship is in heaven well we have dual citizenship as canadians or in my case as an american but my first allegiance is to the king of kings and not just to the recently elected president and i think this this might seem backwards to people who have been so radically secularized they can't even imagine how religion is relevant to modern justice it seems to many that it's dangerous you know to the kind of freedom that we have redefined and so looking at rome we can see hope and at the same time we can recognize the fact that we are facing a rather bleak future unless we turn to our lord and repent when i saw your book when it first came out my my first thought was in in the charismatic world we call it a now word and i thought oh i bet you dr han has a real now word not just for the church but but for the world you know and and when i read the book it was especially when i got to the end when you described saint augustine and how he wrote in response to the criticisms after the fall of rome and i thought to myself this is this is happening right before our eyes like things are falling apart and and you you mentioned the moral fabric i mean when you look at what is being not only suggested or introduced but almost forced upon us like don't you dare disagree with this it's uh it's mind-blowing the expression i use dr han as i say the world is going bonkers yes well it is you know and and we have to raise our families you have to pastor the flock under these circumstances and we don't get to choose the circumstances but we do get to choose how to respond to them and you know i like to point out that we have to live in the present but with a future orientation you know because ultimately our hope is not just to get to heaven our hope is to become saints because without holiness no one will see god and so the object of the christian's hope is not simply difficult but humanly speaking it's impossible apart from god you know but with god all things are possible so living in the present as an american or a canadian means planting next winters you know planting the fall crop in order to harvest the food that we need to get through the winter but being a catholic means also thinking not just in terms of election cycles but also in terms of generations centuries like our mother church has taught her children and if we do that we won't just plant the fall crop we're also going to be planting forests we may never live to see so that in 40 50 100 years our grandchildren our great-grandchildren will have wood to build their houses their furniture to put their fireplace to stay warm in the winter and to enjoy the fall crop that they harvested you know and so it's it's never either or uh even if we're apocalyptic about the near future it might be the end of the world as we've known it you know to allude to rem but at the same time it's not the end of the world people the people of god have gone through things much worse than what we're going through i'm reminded of a dear friend chris who comes from not only our armenian background but the his line of armenian descent goes back to the the most devout christian and fiercest warriors in armenia even some officers and so when i read about the armenian genocide you know i i think of what america is going through as very serious um dire but still it's like a a bad storm it's not like a volcano yet yeah yeah um you you wrote on on page nine you actually quote so i i how do you pronounce his name alexander solzhenitsyn yes yeah you have a number of beautiful quotes from but one very simple you say men have and that's in reference to the devastation of soviet russia i mean it seems like the bottom line reality is hey if we kick god out things will fall apart do you want to comment on that yeah that's a quotation that i added near the very end uh brandon mcginley my co-author and i a good friend we were discussing you know america's near future and all of that and i was reminded of one of my favorite writers one of my favorite thinkers one of my favorite figures and that is um alexander solzhenitsyn who spent years and years in the the gulag you know siberia in what really was a kind of death camp for hundreds of thousands if not millions we just don't know when he was released it you know he came out with large tomes that he'd written on tissue paper you know and so he wins the nobel the harvard honorary doctorate the templeton award this was the address that he gave when he received the templeton award he had been reflecting in his late life as a a senior on what happened to russia because it was profoundly religious mother russia russian orthodoxy you know inseparable until suddenly it's really the first secular atheist state and so marxism took hold but how how could the russian people let that happen and he's looking back on his years as a young child listening to the russian elders who were in his own village and they were aware of the conflagration that came upon them uh with the bolsheviks and the the communists trotsky lenin and so on and they really reduced it to a simple insight a profound point men have forgotten god that's why all of this has happened and it wasn't cultural amnesia it really was a willful and intentional decision to live life without god oh if you want god you can live religion but privately personally because religion now is reduced to something just like you know you and i might differ on what toppings we want on our pizza we might differ on religion but it's certainly not about to enter the public square and be a you know play any significant role in our public discourse and you know it might seem overly simplified you know but i don't think it is i think that when we forget that justice is multifaceted you know and that religion is an essential part of justice and not just because we're catholic christians you go back to pre-christian greece and rome you can see it already in plato in aristotle but more specifically explicitly in cicero cicero describes the different kinds of justice we think of justice at its lowest level as transactional commercial exchange you pay for your groceries before you leave the market then there's a higher form of justice that we often speak of as distributive or social justice which has to do with equity and fairness but there's a higher form of justice that we basically cut off and that is a transcendent justice rooted in okay okay if justice is giving to others what we owe them what is what do you do with your parents will you honor them why because you can't give them life food clothing shelter nurture and love so you give them honor and gratitude and respect well even more the common good of your culture your city your country patriotism is the form of justice but in a certain sense it's disproportionate because you can't give back to your country as much as they've given to you and so patriotism calls is basically the root the fruit of justice but the highest form for seneca who was not a profoundly spiritual person was religio so if aquinas is right that justice is the chief moral virtue then aquinas says the highest form of justice is religio drawing from cicero and seneca and augustine especially and so it is right and just to give him thanks and praise our duty and our salvation and yet implicitly we can infer that it would be wrong and unjust for him for us to not give him thanks and praise and the catechism is remarkably clear here in 2104 and article 2105 all men are bound to seek the truth especially in what concerns god and his church and to embrace it and hold on to it as they come to know it and then it goes on to say the duty of offering god genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially this is the traditional catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion the one church of christ and then it quotes vatican 2 by constantly evangelizing men the church works toward enabling them to infuse the christian spirit into the mentality and maurice laws and structures of the communities in which they live the social duty of christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love of the one and the true and the good it requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the catholic and apostolic church and then it goes on to refer to the kingship of christ which is not just spiritual but social so it is private and interior first and foremost but it's also public and external and it was in greece it was in rome when aristotle wrote a commentary on the athenian constitution he defended the need to have these public orders public sacrifices on which we ratify the oaths that you know put people into office naturalize citizens who are immigrants and that sort of thing and you know i think we don't know what we're doing anymore because as chesterton said we don't know what we're undoing and this is a kind of wake-up call not just for catholics but all christians not just for christians but all men and women to recognize that it is right and just it is our duty but it is also our salvation god doesn't command worship for his sake but for our sake he gets nothing out of it that he was lacking beforehand but we he knows that we get everything out of it because when we worship him it's like a little baby bird that opens its beak wider and wider and gets bigger and bigger worms from his mother and so god wants to fill us with his own life and that happens most especially when we express love through sacrifice in religion in worship when i was reading your book there was such a an experience of clear like something that was kind of blurry to me before becoming clear and one of the things i thought is you know we know that the liturgy of the church isn't just something we kind of come up or you know uh innovate or credit create ourselves no it's it's according to the pattern of heaven just like in in the old testament moses was told do everything according to the pattern and when i was reading your book it it became clear to me that even how we run society it's not meant to be random or or completely subjective it's like no we're created by god and like you're saying in natural law we honor we love our parents or certain things we should all agree on and so too the structuring of society like a liberal secularism that's not according to the pattern like that that's that's not going to work you call it idolatry ultimately do you want to comment on that well you know we often refer to it as secularism and there's nothing wrong with secularity there's nothing wrong with working for six days hard work with other people striving for excellence that's part of what it means to bear the image and likeness of god but work is ordered to worship our labor is consecrated by the liturgy through sacrifice and so i would like what a po what i want to point out is that religion has to be rethought and as we go back to scripture or as we go back to cicero and seneca and others we recognize that it's personal but it's social it's private and it's public it always is that that man is by nature religious we're going to have an ultimate concern that unites all of the activities of our life as paul tillich once put it and i'm not typically quoting paul tillich but once you identify an ultimate concern it might be sports it might be politics you know but when you go back to the ancient israelite prophets they recognized that you could shift your heart's love and passion the ultimate concern can be political power economic wealth they had a word for that it was idolatry because you end up replacing the one true god with false gods and behind these false gods it might be money mammon as jesus calls it but behind the visible there's an invisible force that draws people and deceives people and and this is what's happening today if the ancient israelite prophets were brought back from antiquity isaiah jeremiah ezekiel would say yeah this is idolatry this is not really driving religion into private sectors you know it really is making a new religion in the public square and that is secularism it is a form of liberalism which promises it will liberate but on the basis of a freedom that is cut off from truth and so we all want to be free but we're not ultimately in a position to redefine what is true so when you quote you know exodus 25 which is also cited in the book of hebrews build this according to the pa the pattern the paradigm you know that is not like wow god wants to just constrain us and make us slaves well by nature as creatures we're his servants but what he made us to be is more than servants and slaves it is to be sons and daughters children and saints so if we exert if we exercise our freedom contrary to the truth you know we have the power the free will to do that but ultimately it will end up being something like the fish in the tank exercising his freedom by jumping out of the tank and landing you know on the rug where he is now free to die from his own misuse of what limited freedom he had or a train that jumps its tracks you know freedom and truth are inseparably united and when you recognize that you realize it's like a husband and wife there is a fruitful marriage and the fruit that is born is a deeper kind of freedom than just simply the power of contrary choice and so what we want to do in this book is to not complicate not obfuscate the way so many academics do because they want to kind of hide their agenda you know on the other hand we don't want to just simply be in your face but we want to make something clear profound accessible readable a gentle but firm manifesto to kind of reawaken christians catholics in particular to the great commission jesus says all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me he doesn't say it will be at the end of time well what do we draw from that well he goes on to say therefore go and make disciples of all nations he didn't say make disciples in all of the nations the word for nation ethnic in the greek is where we get the word ethnicity or ethnic group so it isn't just tackling the the roman empire by confronting the caesar although paul had his plans for that in the book of acts it really is working in your neighborhood with other families working in your town with other neighborhoods working in your state with other cities and then working in your nation with other states it makes no sense for me to say look i have been created and redeemed to become a saint but that's for me not my wife no of course it's for her well it's for us but not our kids that's absurd it's for my children but not the neighbors no it's for the neighbors but not the town it's for the town but not ohio no it's for the state but not the country not other states you know there's just a centrifugal force that is implicit in the great commission and so jesus is then going on to say baptizing them in the name of the father the son of the holy spirit because the sacraments enable us to do what would be humanly impossible the sacraments are not religious rituals that we perform to manipulate god and to get them to do our will the sacraments empower us to do god's will and to become saints and not just good citizens and we discover this is not plan b this is the only purpose for which we were made and everybody else as well and so this book is just a gentle reminder that you know jesus is the lord of lords he's the king of kings whoever apparently won the last election he's also the president of presidents and the prime minister of prime ministers whether they know it or not but as paul reminds the authorities in romans 13 verse 4 and he's writing to the romans you civil authorities are god's servants the word in the greek is diaconas where we get deacon you're god's deacons whether you know it or not but you're going to be subjected to his power and judgment just because he had delegated his power and judgment to you and i mean i just feel as though when you line up all of these truths that we profess we discover that a much bigger truth was hiding in plain view we've just got to gather up all of the truths and look at the sum of them and say wow and in the process we we actually grow in our hope our our supernatural hope and that to me is the most exciting part of the book you know john paul spoke of eucharistic amazement well incarnational amazement trinitarian amazement we just celebrated christmas god our creator decided to become a redeemer he could have waved a wand and forgiven us of our sins but he wanted us to be more than acquitted pardoned criminals he wanted to adopt us as sons and daughters so god becomes man and he starts off as a zygote an embryo a newborn in a manger where the cattle had been feeding come on you expect reasonable men and women to believe this well not by reason alone but not apart from reason faith elevates reason for us to reason about sacred mysteries that are like too good to be true unless they are and they are and so that amazement with the incarnation you trace it back to god the force be with you no the father who is a father from all eternity apart from creating he's fathering a son and the love that they share is the holy spirit not just the power but the third person it's like we've got to blow off the dust of these stones that we call doctrines and realize these are diamonds these are emeralds these are rubies you know and it seems to me that kind of amazement will bring us hope and joy and the holy spirit can do the rest amen now what you write i mean it is a challenge to liberalism you write on page 85 the church off the only complete account of reality that can compete with liberalism more threatening still the account the church offers is more ancient more solid and more deeply and simply human than anything liberalism can muster and then before that you you commented the catholic church has always been liberalism's foil it's essential counterpart and then previously on page 84 you wrote the idea of the church as the perfect society participating in the glory of heaven through the grace of the sacraments i mean anyone who is not catholic would read this and they would say whoa whoa are you catholics trying to take over the world what would be your response well we are not trying to take over the world but christ has already purchased it you know and so when we recognize that with his own blood through his passion death and resurrection he has become the king of kings and the lord of lords there isn't a single man woman or child jesus doesn't point to from heaven and say they're mine i purchase them i love them more than they love themselves secularism is a unique form of cultural values it would almost be impossible or inconceivable apart from christianity because it really is a secularized version of christianity you know where you have liberty and love being touted in order to justify you know uh every alternative lifestyle you know the the right of women to abort their babies up until the very moment that they are delivered you know you have to recognize you know what the ancients would call a palimpsest something that is written over top of something else secularism is written over top of christianity and catholic christianity in particular bishop baron recently pointed out that when john lennon and the beatles were at abbey road studios singing all you need is love and they were filming that with hundreds of people just swaying you know caesar augustus would never have said let's build our empire on love genghis khan would not have done that no rulers ever established their governments or empires on the basis of freedom for all and love and so what you see is a secularized and i might add bastardized because there's a divorce previously christianity had this wonderful marriage between liberty and truth you know you shall know the truth and it shall set you free but when you basically say liberty apart from truth that's a divorce settlement that will not make the kids any happier or better off because there is no freedom apart from the truth of our very nature but it's it's essential to liberalism to secularism to deny the fact that there is a human nature shared by all much less a natural moral law that we can find by natural reason but i don't think we're going to be saved socially by reason and natural law alone it is grace building on nature grace healing nature but also the grace of christ illuminating what was there in the natural law for natural society to really reach its natural potential but you know as jesus said seek first the kingdom of heaven and all those things will be added but we would say well let's seek first those things and then maybe jesus will be kind enough to add the kingdom of heaven as well no the tail doesn't lag the dog and so these things on earth that are so good will be ours but only if we seek first the kingdom and maybe one of those 13 quotes is the address that pope benedict gave to the french academy back around 2005 when he's addressing how much european civilization is dependent not just historically but essentially upon the catholic faith in general but especially benedictines the mona the the monasteries the monastic ethos of clooney and the cluniac reform that's what brought us out of the dark ages as it were but they weren't trying to build catholic culture they were trying to give thanks and praise to god because it's right and just their duty and their salvation and ours as well but the unintended consequence was in fact a form of civilization that even atheist historians would call christendom so even before they were calling them themselves europeans they were calling themselves fellow christians and so the nation states as we know them now we're really brother states in a much much larger family mm-hmm yeah that uh little time in the mass when i say uh let us give thank give them thanks and it is right and justin i'll i'll it'll never be the same again for me i really have a new appreciation of that you you wrote on page 82 we might look at america liberal american liberalism through rose-colored glasses and argue that there was a possibility for a rightly ordered society one permeated with the spirit of true religion that would bring it into order with god's cosmic order to emerge and to endure under its terms and i think i think some of us when when we're reading the book you know i have to confess the liberal secular world you know as long as i can go to church and worship god and we just all love one another and what's wrong with that especially since you get into the whole religious wars and you know what what that it's actually all about but here's my question for you dr hung okay you're on a cruise ship you're the you're the you're the speaker and the whole cruise ship is develop catholics there's a there's an apocalypse the whole world ends except for people on the cruise ship you get to an island you have to establish a new government a new society and everyone by popular acclaim you're declared the leader even the captain of the ship is one of your biggest fans he says nope it has to be dr scott hahn he's going to set us up with a perfect society what kind of society would you establish on an island if everyone was 100 catholic and they appointed you in charge well besides abdicating not allowed okay i would say okay we're toast you know if you're under me we're toast but if we're under christ who is the king of kings then we might just possibly make it you know but i would say that the sacraments have social and political implications if we're going to celebrate the sacraments if we're going to live them out in a way that is eschatologically safe then what we've got to do is make sure we're not looking at any political leader as a messiah as a deliverer but would you have a political leader would you elect a president or a prime minister would it be a democracy well it would be a familial order right so that i would say to all of the parents because when you look at the notion of covenant it's not just a personal relationship with jesus christ as lord and savior it really is a family bond that unites me and the eternal son but also you and everybody else under the father so if we see the prime analogout for family is not human but divine then we recognize that the family is not primarily biological or sociological but theological and so aboard that ship there had better be bishops to ordain men to be priests but family is matriarchal as much as it is patriarchal and even if it took years for abraham to recognize that after taking as mistress hagar that's sarah's suggestion i think what we've got to recognize is that empowering men and women to image god by becoming fathers having sons but also mothers and daughters then we recognize that we've got a kind of earthly template or paradigm but on the other hand the holy family reminds us that this was done perfectly only when it was done virginally supernaturally when the power of the most high overshadowed her and enabled him to say yes and then to say jesus will be his name you know and so on the way up in our worship where we lift up our hearts and recognize that it's not only right and just our duty and our salvation always and everywhere we recognize that what will become of our culture on this island is really dependent upon he who is the lord of lords the king of kings but the firstborn among many brothers and sisters and so what would it be a monarchy then well you know john locke was the one no it was thomas hobbes who pointed out that the family is a little monarchy and a monarchy is an extended family so david and bathsheba the queen mother of the son of david you know but i would also say study history and you'll discover that monarchies have not only served the church well in advancing the faith they've also become in history at least some of the church's worst enemies and so there is no political cure there is instead christ and through baptism our union with him this is not utopian the sacraments don't make it easy to become saints they're the only things that make it possible because of the holy spirit so the father sends the son to give us the spirit that's what makes holiness possible that's what makes social order social virtue social unity possible but but if there was if there was tension on this island and people regulate the water would there be an election for a president would there be like again if they put the pressure on you it's like hey we have to get organized now otherwise little wars are going to break out what would you do well little wars will break out i mean that's just human nature in its fallen condition i mean if you just look at a household we recognized not only fraternal disputes but in the very first family we had fratricide when cain kills abel so again this is not a blueprint for a utopia because there is no blueprint given except what is descending and that is the new jerusalem as the bride so if people just want all these things and they're willing to go along with the kingdom of having to get them yeah you're gonna have to say get ready for profound disappointment and social disaster because yeah yeah unless you seek first the kingdom these things yeah but what if everyone on this ship they're like no we love one another we get along it's just again there's some little tensions and we not we need to get moving in terms of organizing ourselves would would it be setting up a monarchy or or a democracy or some combination like or is there even an answer to that like i mean someone must have asked this question before like what is the ideal form of government what many people have and i think thomas aquinas came up with the best answer and that is a mixed order so if you look at the family as the paradigm you can see it is a monarchy but it's matriarchal as well as patriarchal like the davidic kingdom was in its origins but it's also aristocratic because the uh the younger children are going to be modeled and they're going to be following the older siblings the older brothers and sisters and so it's representative in that sense it's therefore also going to be democratic because you're going to have to entrust great power to those sons and daughters as they themselves become husbands and wives fathers and mothers and so i think we look at the family and write it off because we're so sophisticated you know it can't possibly be that easy we need people with doctorates no what we need are priests and along confessional lines because on that island they're going to be venial and mortal sins and there's going to have to have to be resurrections and so i would say that there's going to be a family from the ground up but also a family from the top down what we would call that is a diary but just as every father and mother is a royal priest so likewise every member of the clergy will be a priestly king this was the medieval vision you know in the 12th and 13th centuries this is how there's only one louis on the in the dynasty of france that is saint louis st louis and you know he loved poverty and humility he wanted to be like christ he didn't want to be rich famous and powerful and you know i would say a diarchy is both priestly clerical and kingly but i would say the laity you know have got to recognize that they are an essential part of the church you know we often speak of church and state to me that is a massive category error when you go back to saint louis france in the 12th and 13th century nowhere in the primary sources do you find this saint the king speaking of the church as clergy and the state as the laity because as a baptized confirmed sacramentally married king he knew that he was an essential part of the church and so it really is a sacramental organism that's what society ought to be and so if it's patterning itself after the paradigm that is revealed in the trinity through the holy family and then the holy father but then also father mark father jim father steve we're going to recognize that i can be a breadwinner for my kids but i can't confect the eucharist the bread of life and so this diet is going to be monarchical republican democratic in whatever ways the lord of lords allows it to develop but i would say the idea of finding the one size that will fit all and the one king who will save all forget it yeah yeah okay okay now what if you're what if the the ship crashes on an island the whole world's destroyed you're starting a new society but now you have um you do have the different religions but very good people like just very good muslims very good jewish people very good protestants very good catholics even some very good atheists and they all love you professor scott they just they they trust you they know you're a good man they know that you you have everyone's best interest in mind and they say dr han things are getting tense you know we we all love one another but we need to organize ourselves here again there's there's fresh water there's you know food out like dr han you need to set us up with some system so that we we we get along how would you set up that society i'm not sure i mean first of all that's a great question second of all i really enjoy thought experiments like this third of all i also appreciate opportunities to grow in humility by acknowledging i don't have the answer but i would say that we are backing ourselves into the illusion of secularism and liberalism that is to say promises that are made but can't be kept because liberalism has promised us live and let live but what we're discovering now is that the promise of liberalism live and let live was never entirely sincere or logically consistent and the the gloves are off and now liberalism is exposing its own illiberalism a liberal foundation because it tolerated us but even tolerance was itself part of the christian inheritance where catholics were tolerating protestants or vice versa it was an uneasy alliance even back you know in in in 1648 with the treaty of westphalia cool use reggio a youth religion whoever is your king he'll decide your religion you know and so i would say what you would have to do in a situation like that is go along to get along and function according to the natural moral law but if our faith is even half true the higher road would be to evangelize your heart out and to proclaim the good news because apart from christ we can do nothing that isn't rhetorical hyperbole that is metaphysical truth with precision a laser beam and so what i would do is to remind everybody on the island that we're only going to be here a short while and we're only here to get out of here and so whatever you conceptualize heaven to be i suspect you'll be striving for that along with your families but i would say this that christ is the king of kings he it wants to not just forgive us he wants to draw us into an eternal family and so live for that and then let the chips fall like my dream is is that everyone does come to know that jesus is the savior of the world that god so loved the world that he gave his son that he's the way the truth mexico for example like when the image of our lady guadalupe appeared there was just a massive conversion jesus is the savior he's the lord god loves us we're his children mary's our mother and all of that and i know right now there's wonderful eucharistic miracles there's there's kind of phenomenal marion apparitions like our lady of kibejo and rwanda that have been approved by the church and i like my dream is why can't everyone you know just recognize that god loves you and he loves everyone he loves the world so much that he gave his son and then we could have um a society that does have that that marriage i guess between the church and you know the bishops and the priests and the parishes and loving one another and feeding the poor and sacrificial love and you know so you have the church side i just i guess i'm not sure okay how like you have to have a secular leadership and and you know how to how to do that and i mean i i guess see i guess one of my things reading your book um which by the way what yeah i'll just make my point and i'll i want you to let people know how to get this book but one of my things is that we have to have that dream as as catholics who do believe in the fullness of the truth like even if it seems not even remotely close to say you know what the day will come perhaps when all of creation will want to you know give god what is due to do what is it is right and just and and where the world will have true religion god will be given his rightful place and uh like i said the way the u.s has gone right now and the world is going it's like oh it looks like there might be a crash and who knows if that's the thing dr hunt maybe maybe this is coming sooner than we realize maybe the lord is because because you know how in the old testament in the historical books they would elect a judge he'd be a good judge that people would return to the lord there'd be prosperity and then they would turn away from god and they would go into a nosedive they would hit rock bottom repent get new good good leadership things would be and it's like a sign curve you know and i remember reading that as a teenager thinking why can't people just be faithful to god and but anyways but before you respond tell people how to they can get this book okay well first of all it is right and just why the future of civilization depends on true religion is published by emmaus road publishing that is the publishing arm of the saint paul center for biblical theology kimberlyn i founded the saint paul center 20 years ago and you can find out more just by going to st paul center paulcenter.com saint paul center but i am grateful for the opportunity to share with you but also grateful for the question that you raised especially about the blessed virgin mary she really is the source of the deeper unity that goes beyond the political and even the moral or ethical it goes to the heart in even the word adelphos in greek where we get brother philadelphia is brotherly love but that comes from an etymology which means the same womb we all come from god but through christ and his mother who becomes ours this i think is the path amen well thank you so much dr han for taking the time and listen on behalf of the countless not just catholics but christians and others throughout the world who've been touched by your teaching of sacred scripture you know just a huge thank you for um when i listened to your talks in my pickup truck many times my heart was burning within me you know and so you've done so much good and may the lord grant you the grace to continue to do so uh wonderful work and please please keep me in my little ministry and your prayers and i'll i'll certainly pray for you as well well thank you for your prayers father and also for your hospitality during this hour god bless you and take care thank you viva christopher christopher

Channel: Fr. Mark Goring

Views: 236,992

Rating: 4.9301624 out of 5

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Id: _N2fWPoUzJw

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/parsonpilgrim]

Wow. Thanks for sharing this. Spot on.

[u/[deleted]]

He that giveth testimony of these things, saith, Surely I come quickly: Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen. Revelation 22:20,21

[u/BrianW1983]

Can anyone give a summary?

[u/vivek_david_law]

Interviewer is father mark goring who is one of my favourite priests in Canada. He has lots of short videos on youtube that are very informative

[u/FretensisX]

If Bai-den or the ho becomes the President, the Republic is effectively dead, our votes don't matter, elections don't matter, and the US is essentially a vassal of the Chinese Communists via their proxies the 'deep state' pedosatanists. What the CCP does to their Christians is what their puppets will do to us.