Journey Home - 2018-06-18 - Marshall Fightlin

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program and in this program I have this weekly privilege to sit with you and hear the stories of men and women whose were drawn to have a faith in Jesus Christ in His Church in fact I was just recently reading one of the the readings in Mass from the book of Acts about Paul going to flip I and meeting with this lady Lydia who happened to be a believer in God but she wasn't a Christian yet but Paul meets with her she would have been Jewish and Paul meets with her or maybe she was a pagan believer in God but it says in Scripture that the Lord opened her heart to receive what Paul had said and in a way that expresses that the conversions that we hear are both our own response but there's a work of grace there and how we respond to that is very important which is when when we think about people in our life that we would love to be open to the faith our job is is to tell and to love and to pray for but recognizing that we're hoping that we're planting seeds in the grace that's in someone's heart that may be receptive so our guest tonight is marshal fight 'ln a convert from Judaism and Marsh it's great to have you on the program it's great to be here Marcus I'm anxious to hear your story but also about the relationship of your faith to your work as a psychologist you and I talked just briefly the good Catholic psychologists are few and far and hard to find and maybe that's why as I'm sure we'll hear about you've got your website right that's correct that helps well let me back out first and invite you to tell us your story okay well it starts with my grandparents both sides my Jewish grandparents came from Bab brusque in Belarus at the time they came over it was part of Russia and they didn't live too far from the scene of Fiddler on the Roof and in fact they came over to this country about the same time the characters in Fiddler on the Roof came over Oh fascinating yeah what they would have gone through yeah and my mother's side her family came from northern Italy from Asti they were called piu Mantes z and st is famous for its wine Asti Spumante my Jewish grandparents came over here with their children around 1906 and my mother's people came over around nineteen nine something like that fast-forward my mother grew up in Connecticut my father grew up in Connecticut and they met in New Britain Connecticut a factory town in the middle of the state and then the big question was where are we going to get married because my mother was Catholic my father was Jewish and so there was this conflict this was back in the early 30s so that kind of a marriage was absolutely shocking and unheard of and my mother made efforts at getting the marriage in the church about my my father was quite willing to go through a Catholic ceremony he wasn't very religious but he didn't want to raise his children Catholic and so that was the snag so they went back and forth about this and finally my mother gave in and they ran off to Atlantic City New Jersey and got married by a justice of the peace and they lived there for three months by then my mother became pregnant with me they came back to Connecticut and they lived with my father's mother and father bubbie and Zayde II and they put great pressure on my mother to become Jewish and she was 20 years old pregnant and away from her own family so she agreed and so she became Jewish and then she and my father settled down and started to raise me in the Jewish faith so I was circumcised I had the opinion have been when forty days after I was born and went to Hebrew sunday-school and so forth and attended Passover at bubbie and Zayde EES house every year we would go to Passover and I have to laugh when I see Christians doing Passover services because they're so restrained and dignified a real Jewish Passover was nothing like that it's chaotic the children are screaming a parents are shushing their kids the women are calling for help in the kitchen and Zaidi and the men would be sitting at the OP at the far end of the table with the Haggadah at the prayer book and it's a very long recital of the Exodus very long and it was late in the evening you have to wait until sundown and this is usually in April and everybody's hungry but now Bubbe was a stickler for doing things by the book but Zadie hmm not so much and so when Bubbe wouldn't disappear into the kitchen to get the next dish zadie would take the Hagaddah and go a few pages to kinda how did short a little bit we just wanted to think that we the Catholic Church continuing and have the huge Easter Vigil with all the reading he carried the tradition I mean we do and sometimes well that was the way it went and then after the whole thing was over and the meal was done the women went into the kitchen and did the dishes and talked and the men went into the living room and told jokes in Yiddish and they would so the kids will just be sitting there listening to these jokes and not understanding a word but we would be laughing because the men would be laughing at the jokes and I would say to my father What did he say you know what's the joke my father was saying you can't translate it into English so that was my experience of Passover I did experience anti-christian things and growing up in my Jewish family one thing of course is that it's kind of paradoxical and the name of Jesus was never pronounced and the only other name that's never pronounced is the name of God and so it seems interesting vacinated the name of Jesus was treated the same way as the name of God but it was he was the forbidden fruit nobody ever said anything bad about him but he was over there with them but we don't do that and there was a certain way of talking about Gentiles that was demeaning there's a term shiksa which means a Gentile woman but it's a derisive term and people would use that term in front of me who have a Gentile mother and not even realizing that I was offended by that so it's been a time when you're Jewish yes family would have also been persecuted at least to some extent in the community yes there was there was anti-semitism - yeah and they were that was going back and forth right you know they were responding to that when I was about 13 or 12 I was going to Hebrew school and learning Hebrew and my grandmother Bubbe approached my mother and said Marshall is becoming a teenager now and he's going to start dating and it wouldn't be appropriate and for him to date Christian girls so he should only date Jewish girls and I was at that time not particularly interested in Hebrew school and my mother had had it at that point and she said that's it and so if I had been saying you know I don't want to go to Hebrew school anymore so finally but after this conversation with Bubbe she said you don't have to do so I withdrew from Hebrew school did not get bar Mitzvahed and that kind of ended my Jewish experience I did experience among my Catholic friends anti-semitism the term you know would come up a lot and and i thought you know how can i be guilty of something that i never did and but this was how a lot of people thought and i didn't experience that very painfully in a camp run by the YMCA in those days they couldn't be too particular about who the counselors were and the kids were really kind of shunning me because I was Jewish and I was sitting down dejected one day and a young man came over he spoke with a European accent I didn't know then what it was I was about 10 and he asked me what was the matter and Ike his name was Kurt I'll never forget that and he befriended me and he was probably I thought he was a grown man he was probably 18 at the time and he befriended me and he told me how wrong it was that other people should treat me that way and when there was a program that was put on for all the campers he got up and spoke and he spoke about that he didn't mention my name but he spoke about anti-semitism and Howell was wrong so there was that in the Catholic in my Catholic experience now backing up to get the Catholic thing my first contact with the church was at the age of three when I was baptized my mother clandestine yes my mother and my aunt my mother just might well my grandmother this is now my mother's mother grandma she was lamenting to my mother more or less forcefully that if she was sad that her grandson this is the only grandson she has it isn't baptized and a parent and she did this repeatedly and finally my mother said that's it and so she got my aunt her sister who was a teenager at the time they put me in a stroller I was three they wheeled me down to st. Joseph's Church in South Main Street in New Britain Connecticut and had me baptized and after the ceremony the priest said to my mother I probably shouldn't have done this and then she wheeled me back and she told my grandmother and nobody else knew about it including me but I think that's kind of an argument for infant baptism because I think the Holy Spirit was whispering every now and then to me as I was growing up and for example when the big thing was when I was five and it was around Christmastime and all the lights were on and all the homes and people were singing these beautiful Christmas carols and I was just entranced by the beauty of it all the sound and the sights and I said to my mother and again I can remember exactly where it was it was on the corner of Brooklyn Street and shuttle meadow Avenue and uber in Connecticut and my mother was taking me for a sled ride and my Jewish aunt was with us with my cousin and I said to my mother what is Christmas and my mother said Christmas celebrates when God became man and I thought that's exactly what I need now looking back at it I I wasn't aware of my thinking but looking back at it that's what I was thinking that it was hard to pray to a god that was formless and that was so different from us and I found that hard to do and and I used to think wouldn't it be nice if God became a man so I could talk to him face to face and then when my mother said that I was thinking that's exactly what I need and that's and he did exactly what I needed what condescension now he wouldn't have used those words of the age of five but I had that really intense experience of that it was an experience of the beauty of it and then I forgot about it afterwards then we had a babysitter and every now and then she would sleep over with her younger sister and she was Catholic and one Saturday she slept over and she and her sister Sunday morning it wasn't even light out and I was about six maybe they got up into a mess and I just sat there my bed and watched them getting dressed and going out to mass and I thought wow this is important these people really take this seriously and it really impressed me with the seriousness of it then another time a few years later another sitter her name was Aurelia and she was Lithuanian by descent and she used to babysit for me one time she was over during the day and my mother's served her lunch and it was on a Friday and my mother's served her a ham sandwich and already took the sandwich and she started eating it and my mother said oh really I'm sorry it's Friday and I really spat out what she had on her mouth and I thought boy these people take this stuff seriously and I was really impressed by the seriousness that Catholics take their faith especially because it's a Jewish family you're having a ham sandwich listening on the radio martial fight is what fascinated me these little seeds mmm that the Lord is planting in our heart as you said and with hindsight in response to your baptismal graces yeah yeah yeah so then during the Second World War everybody was planting planting Victory Gardens and my friend his name was George Kuhn he was his family had plans with one and I was helping him harvest and eat the tomatoes and one day he said I'm going to go to confession and would you accompany me and I said sugar so I was ten maybe so was the first time I'd ever been that I remember ever been in a Catholic Church and I went into the church it was st. Joseph's Church the same one that I was baptized in and I noticed the candles and they were in these blue cups and there was something fascinating and beautiful about it and and then I just sat in the back just taking that all in and realizing there's something awesome and bigger than me about this place and I still remember that so so that was another experience that I had that kind of you know made me think had you been as a family attending the the Jewish no although my grandmother and grandfather were strictly Orthodox most of their children were not and my father told me he was an atheist he didn't believe in God so he only observed things for the sake of the families and so since we lived quite a distance from my grandmother he observed none of that so we didn't attend Sabbath services we didn't observe kosher I was wondering in comparison to what you were experiencing there is a young man and the beauty of that sanctuary out of the candles what you were comparing it to you really didn't have a much of an experience no no I had gone to the synagogue services but I'm not monitoring like that yeah so so that was part of my experience of Catholicism then also my grandmother did you the Italian grandmother she lived in the same town we did and we used to go to her home every Saturday for a spaghetti dinner and my mother and I would go and my haunt the same on that was my sponsor at baptism never said a word to me about it afterward and I noticed my grandmother had a crucifix on the wall over her bed and I looked at it and I wondered what's he doing up there and and I didn't make the connection with God became and and my mother had told me but I was just looking at it and just wondering what is that and and it had a certain fascination and then she had a picture of the Pope and I'm thinking it was st. Pius the tenth because that would have been the Pope that was in with raining when she was living in Italy and he looked like a kindly man he was all in white with the white hat on smiling and that was on her Bureau and then she had a beautiful crystal rosary in her jewelry box and I thought isn't that beautiful and I admired it just as a piece of jewelry it was just something beautiful I knew it was religious in some way I didn't know quite how so that was that was my experience of Catholicism and then my grandmother my Italian grandmother died she passed away she was very ill with cancer and she died and then I went through with a crisis of faith and I thought I couldn't handle that the only religious instruction my mother had given me basically was that God exists he wants you to be good he sees everything you do and and he rewards goodness and punishes evil and that was basically all I knew I didn't know anything about heaven or hell and so when my grandmother died I couldn't fit that into anything larger and I said to my mother God isn't nice to her God is cruel I forgot how I worded it to let grandma die like that and I lost my faith in God and so for a while I was kind of a atheist I guess you could say or at least angry at God and then we come to my friend Barton White House by now I was 15 14 or 15 and I was a caddied in the summertime I would go caddying at the golf course and so did my friend Barton and Barton was a Baptist and he heard me talking with some of the other caddies about something and I don't know what it was but he'd befriended me and then he didn't live too far from me and we used to walk home together after school and one day he said to me do you believe in Jesus and I said well I'm sort of undecided I said I'm on the fence he said you've got to be either for him or against him you can't be on the fence and this is where I think the baptismal grace came and again and I the thought for a moment said I couldn't bring myself to say I'm against him so I have to if I have to choose then I have to say I'm for him so that was my faith with absolutely no catechism out leading up to it that I'm not going to say no and if yes is the only option then I'll say yes he said well then you have to come forward you have to accept the Lord you have to join the church and I said well I guess I'll become a Catholic like my mother was he said oh you don't want to do that and he told me all these awful things about Catholics and so I listened and then I thought well maybe I should be a Baptist well then summer came and I went to work at the tobacco farm so I wasn't caddying anymore now I was working at the tobacco farm speaking tobacco and by the grace of God there were three or four seminarians who were also picking tobacco and they got me talking about faith issues and I said well I'm going to become a Baptist and they said well why don't you want to become a Catholic and so then I told them the things that Barton told me all they said that isn't true or we have an answer for that and they started to give me their answers then I would go back to Barton and say this is what the seminarians told me in Barton would say oh no no no no and then I was back and forth and back and forth all summer long between Barton and the Baptist Barton and the seminarians and then it was in August of that year we I was we were on the tobacco farm and I said to the seminarians well I think I'm pretty made up my mind that I'm going to become a Baptist and they said why and I said well the Catholic Church has added so much stuff to the simplicity of the gospel that I don't want all that I just want the simple gospel and they said like what stuff and I said well the Pope and then they started explaining Matthew 16:18 and they said you know Jesus said thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and I said so and they said well Peter means Rock and at that moment I didn't hear anything or see anything but it was like a thunderclap and I just became absolutely convinced Peter is the first Pope Pius the 12th is now the Pope then I have to become a Catholic boom that said Christ wants me to do this and it all happened in an instant and so I said to them well then I'll become a Catholic and they said what because this all happened in two seconds and I said yes and I repeated my thinking if Peter is the first pope if Christ said that to Peter essentially he's making him the first pole then the Pius the 12th is his successor that makes sense therefore I have to become a Catholic so they said well then you need to see a priest you need to see a priest and get instructed I felt because I never met a priest in my life and I was really scared so they made an appointment for me to see father bumble in ski and I went to the rectory and I stood there at the door and knocked on it and I was just shaking I expected Bela Lugosi in a Roman collar and father paw Malinsky was wonderful he opened the door made me feel right at home sat me down and since I already catechizing me and I would go there every week he gave me the faith of millions by Cardinal Gibbons and the question box by father Conroy and I bought the Knox version of the Bible and I was poring over those books and I knew it was wrong to lie and I didn't want to tell my folks that I was going to what catechism to become a Catholic so I said I'm going to these were in the days when everybody didn't have television I said I'm going to the why to watch television so then I would take the bus downtown I would go to the Y I would watch television for 10 minutes then I would take the bus over the father bumbling ski and I would do my catechism playa a mental reservation you know so so I did that with father bumble Minsky and eventually he said you might want to see it freeze closer to where you live so he switched me over to father Fenton father Fenton did instructed me on the council's all the ecumenical councils we went through the Catechism he took me into the sacristy and showed me all the vestments that the priests use explained the color system of the liturgy and everything and it was then that I got introduced was not typical for those days I got interested in following the mass with a missile in which we think well everybody does that now but in those days very few people did most people would kind of say the Rosary during mass sing it was Latin yeah it was all and everything's Latin and you probably didn't know very much Latin no and so I had my in my missile and I could follow along so I started using the missile right from the get-go and then father Fenton said well you're ready for baptism so then he switched me over to father Mullins who was accurate at the very church had been baptized at st. Joseph's and father father Mullins task was to get my mother to agree to baptize me and I was thinking this is gonna be wonderful all my teenage sins we washed away silently in baptism so father Mullins went to see my mother and he said you know Marshall wants to become a Catholic and would you be willing to agree to have him baptized so she said well actually he is baptized and that she told him so Father moans went back to the church checked the records and sure enough you know I was so he told me that I thought oh no I have to confess all my sins to a priest so but anyway we got the permission and so he said but then what the next thing for you to do is go to confession start receiving Communion so I went so I told my mother what I was gonna do when I went to confession and the priest was very I was scared again scared to death and the pre I said this is my first confession ah nice he said wait a minute you know and then he wanted to make sure I was prepared for that and then went to confession and then he spoke to me and he told me that you're going to see a lot of Catholics who don't practice their faith and are very half-hearted and you can't let that scandalize you we didn't use that word but that's what he meant and you have to stay faithful even when you see people around you doing things they shouldn't be doing and he was very very kind and I have to say that my experience of confession ever since has been relief and receiving understanding and compassion and it's really been a very beautiful thing for me so that was my first confession and then I went to communion the next day and started becoming a Catholic and right after I went to communion the first time there was a retreat for high school kids so I went to the retreat with some Catholic friends for mine and then in class the next day at public high school we were chatting about it and one of my cousin's Jewish cousins was in class with us and she heard that she said Marshall what are you doing going to a Catholic retreat and I said well I become a Catholic and so then this started a conflict between me and one cousin and then another cousin and the second cousin both girls they would argue with me about this and how I shouldn't have done this and one of my cousin's said well after all in Jesus was a Jew and I said I think that's a point for our side and so we would argue back and forth like that and my grandmother never knew about it and then the next Passover came along and the question was can I go to the Passover and what should I do there and so forth and so I asked the priest and he said well yes you can go but you just can't participate in the formal prayers which I didn't do anyway so I went well as luck would have it it was on a Friday and so I was thinking how am I going to maneuver this eating this food without eating any meat because they had chicken so the first course was to fill two fish which I really didn't like and so I just filled up on cattle to fish and then my aunt was commenting to my mother look how Marshall loves this go filter fish and my mother was saying yeah she knew why I was doing it and so that was kind of how I can cut through the Passover I said I was too full for the key chicken and I kind of passed it up well then I graduated high school and I decided this was back in the day when you had to go into the service either before or after college and if you went in before then you got the GI Bill to pay for your college so I thought that makes sense so I decided to join the Air Force well I told that to father Mullins the priest who had arranged for my baptism and he said you'll lose your faith in three weeks don't do it well I didn't listen to him and I joined the Air Force but I was scared to death I was going to lose my faith so what I did was to go to daily Mass and observe who the guys were who went to daily Mass and then hang out with them and so we got a little clique going there and we just escaped all the nonsense going on in the barracks and and so forth that's sounds like a good strategy to pass around a folk you know they come to a new community and they wonder how to find friends we'll go to daily Mass janna me I'm going to pause there Marsh because it's a good time for to take a break and we'll come back and we'll pick up right and your story you're in the Air Force right no don't you see it [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program and before we go to Marsh and pick up on his story I just wanted to remind you of the book which I had the privilege of writing the foreword for Brandon McKinley the editor took nine of the journey home guests who journeys were from atheism to Catholicism and he did a wonderful job of editing the stories and put them together in this fine collection called from atheism to Catholicism that's published by ewtn and if you were to look at the names of the lists around the Sherman Joseph Pierce John Barger a number of guests that Kevin vows that you would recognize from journey home episodes so encourage you to consider picking up this book you can get it from the EWTN religious catalogue again that's from atheism to Catholicism all right Marsh let me step back a little continuing your journey okay well after the military I just thought that I had a vocation to the priesthood and to the religious life so I joined a religious order of the Benedict ins and they sent me to study for the priesthood at in Ottawa st. Paul Seminary in Ottawa and a year before I would have been ordained a deacon diocese I didn't know God is not calling me to this and I left and I went back to st. Paul's as a layman and got a degree in theology taught theology for a couple of years got married and then I decided I can't stay teaching theology because it was drying up lay theologians weren't in demand anymore and I need to get into another field and I noticed that when I was teaching students would come to me and with their problems and want to talk about problems and so forth and I thought maybe I'm cut out to be a counselor or a psychologist so I went back to graduate school and now this was the first time in my life that I had been in a secular graduate school graduate program I've been in secular great schools and high schools but from college on it had always been Catholic and I didn't realize how different a secular environment was and one example of that well a couple of examples one is I was to help me through graduate school because now I was married and had a daughter I accepted a job as a head resident of a dorm and so this was Oxford Hall in the University of Maine at Orono and I was the head resident there and it was an all-male dorm to start with and then a year later it became a coed dorm it was that the thinking back then it was good for the couples to mix and so forth and there were all kinds of debates about parietal hours and all of this and the RAS were given instructions to kind of instruct these students about contraception and which ones to pick and so forth and so I would have meetings with the RAS and I would gently explain to them that there's also an option called abstinence and there's a lot going forward and so I would try to push some more sensible notions with the RAS because they were getting this crazy stuff from the administration but then it might actual my graduate program one of the funniest things was of course I was taking on human sexuality and the professor gave us a book to read loved this body by Norman old brown I'll never forget it and Norman old Browns theory was that if you thought that heterosexual intercourse was better than the alternatives that was heterosexual tyranny and what you needed to think instead was what he called polymorphous perverse in other words that any what people think is perverse any form of sex is equal to any other form of sex and so we we were supposed to read the book so I read the book and then we came to class and he wanted to know what we thought it but there may be like six students in the class it's more like a seminar when it came my turn I said well I thought for the first half of the book that he was joking I thought it was a put-on I said because it's obvious to me that that form of sexual expression that put me in being I have to consider better than the alternatives and the whole class got angry and the professor got annoyed and I couldn't figure out what was going on again I hadn't realized how different the secular schools were from what I was used to and so I said yes I I don't think that these other forms of sexual expression should be considered as equal to normal to license use the word normal but a heterosexual expression because that's that's how I came into being and I have to honor that as part of my self-esteem we were always talking about self-esteem well there is and one of the students a girl she said to me well then Marshall that's your opinion then then what about birth control and I said well that's a problem and in the class went on like that but that was one of my experiences in graduate school where I realized maybe it's I'm talking too much and maybe I need to kind of keep a lower profile because I don't want to get what time period was that 1970s early sense early 70s and this publisher in this book as an author of this book it's in turn to see where we are today yeah yeah that at the time I'm gonna actually a little surprised that your class was so all ready for it but it was there was a 60 70s yeah but the general public wasn't there not at all this is all going on in the universities yeah yeah here we are the result of exactly and it hadn't hadn't trickled down so yeah that was one experience that I had then after graduate school I was applying for jobs and I got into trouble three or four times I would apply for the job everything the interview would be going very well and then it was almost like it was scripted because every single one of them did it exactly the same way they would say marshal we serve a very diverse community here what if young woman came to you who was very upset about being pregnant and so I was playing Thomas Moore I was not going to reveal my hand unless I absolutely had to so I said well I would be compassionate and I would listen to her story and try to reach a suitable conclusion and then the next question was what if she opted to get an abortion and I said well then I suppose she would get it meaning I'm not going to throw myself in front of the door not let her leave until she has the baby and then the question came would you make the referral in other words will I not do it and then that's my Thomas More moment then I said no I would not make the referral and then it was thank you very much we'll get back to you for still interested they would come to a close and that would be it and it happened to me three or four times so you so there was a price to pay I mean it I came her if I said on the program or we were talking beforehand but the the dearth of Catholic psychologists out there available for people and what you're saying is this is the part of the reason is that there's a screening process that prevents them from going all the way into practice yes I think that's true I think that's true I I saw that in graduate school with other people not just with me but other people who were scolded and for their favor that I'm thinking of one an evangelical woman in particular with scolded for her thing but so I moved out and went into private practice and then I joined a clinic where I work now which is an ecumenical clinic and at our clinic we're asked every year I don't know other clinics do this but we're asked every year what kinds of cases do you like to see and what kinds of cases do you not like to see and there's a whole list and one of them says gay issues LGBT issues same-sex marriage and so forth and by not checking those you never will have those couples or people referred to you the reason why I don't do gay issues is because if I tell them what I'm honestly thinking about the situation and what will actually help them the vast majority of people with same-sex attraction become angry and sometimes more recently they may leave and initiate a lawsuit so rather than go through that I just say I won't I won't see them transgender that's another one and that I don't see it's it's like the inmates have taken over the asylum where if a young person has a young man feels like he's a woman that instead of treating his feeling you treated its body and performed the acts on his body to make him appear like a woman and so forth so so that's those are some of the things that that I think have where my faith has had an impact on your life on that but when I look at people you seem on TV in movies read about in the newspaper doing horrendous things buying in the lifestyles that you know our grandparents would but I've never even conceived of right you know when when Huxley and Orwell wrote their futuristic novels that they didn't even dream in their visions of a future that be anything like the the changes we've seen especially in views of sexuality and lifestyle you try to understand from a psychological standpoint people could be thinking that way was there a hardening of conscience in their lives starting orally you know I'm saying that the point where that that's that inner feeling that this is wrong is just hardened or covered or pushed aside what do you think well I think that it's they're getting it probably from their families and also from their culture that they had the idea of absolute freedom which means I ought to be able to decide whatever I want to decide and to do whatever I want to do and what makes something right is that I freely chose it it doesn't matter what it was it's just that I freely chose it and so parents are starting to reach children to feel that way to feel that if you want something if you want to do something then you should simply do it and if and if there's a voice within our conscience Pascal's idea that that inner void or that voice or you know Augustine talking about that heart need that if if they're inundated with the idea of freedom is really what defines it then they can quit just telling that voice of shut up or ignored or that preacher it's gone yeah the voice is not a nag and if you ignore it it speaks softer and softer and softer and finally you can't hear it anymore so yeah so when you're consoling work what kind of what are you encountering today in terms of your your clientele compared to 30 40 50 years ago well I'm one of the type of clientele that I'm seeing is young women it's very sad young women about 30 unmarried they have three or four children by two or three different men they're on welfare they perhaps have a year of college and then they opted out and they're depressed yeah I mean and then they come to see me and there may be presently living with a boyfriend and so it's very difficult to deal with what I tell young women like that is you are selling yourself short you need to be much more demanding than you are of this man and and I tell them they need to stop having sex with them and they either will stop coming to see me or they will say this is more common sense that I've heard and on my whole life you know it depends it against the grace of God it's like you know the program with Paul meeting Lydia and it's you know here she is that the the Lord awakened her by grace and that's what we hope happens to these ladies reminds you of the Jesus meeting the woman at the well was that all those husbands right I mean I mean I mean it's you know trying to put ourselves in the shoes of of women like that and what would be an answer for them you know hopefully that their hearts would be awaken to faith and grace and they would turn to trust God and then but that doesn't answer all their problems but against open gets them started to us to a solution we have an email Sam for more lando Wright's most faithful Catholics would agree that marriage is undergoing a crisis today what are some of the things that have caused this crisis and how can we work to help foster a culture and faith life that promotes authentic Christian ideals for marriage and family life well I think that one of the things that has caused a conflict or crisis in marriage is the acceptance of contraception because it separates love from children and also the idea of a no-fault divorce I think that's another thing that has weakened marriage and then I think also a Hollywood has done a great deal to weaken marriage it presents marriage as a romantic thing in many cases the story ends with a couple getting married but it doesn't show them going on to have children and to resolve conflicts and so forth it sells people the idea that marriage is basically a consumption it's a getting something rather than an investment that you're giving something and I think those are some of the that I would hit on right away as things that are weakening marriage I think also the idea that was very common in the 80s and more so now is I have a right to be happy and and I also have a right to make sure that my needs are met and if your needs interfere with my needs then I have a duty to myself to make sure that my needs predominate and when you enter marriage with that mindset it isn't going to work boy yeah I remember back that same time period 80s remember what's turning on TV and there was a Love Boat remember the older adult and this episode happened to be a cruise that was full of engaged couples and then the captain did the mass marriage and they told him to fill in the blank I everybody said their name take the everybody filmed to be my lawful wedded spouse for as long as we both shall love yeah I mean there we go I mean especially of Hollywood says that that love is not an act but it's a feeling yeah then I can be gone to five minutes another thing that I think is is the the separation of children from the consideration of marriage that when couples divorce are deciding whether to divorce or not they will just consider what's in it for me what will happen if I stay what will happen if I leave they and they all too frequently don't consider what about the impact on the children you know we used to think back in the 80s again that couples could divorce if they did it civilly and in a polite way the children would be upset maybe for a month you know going to a new school living in a new home maybe but they would soon settle down and they would you just find and but more evidence has been coming through to us especially longitudinal studies that have been done on children of divorce and these studies don't ask the parents how they think the children are doing they ask the children who are now adults what was it like and we're getting a totally different picture it devastates the children very often they feel like they're just torn up the middle and it makes them cautious about commitment because they say look at what happened to them so they're cautious to get into commitment so you're going to see a lot of cohabiting they are very hesitant about having children because they think I wouldn't want to do to my kids what was done to me and they don't know how to deal with anger because look what they did and so they tend to sit on their anger because they were afraid if I express my anger to my spouse and tell my spouse how I'm really feeling he'll leave or she'll leave so there's that and then they have an uneasy feeling and they come to counseling about this very often of impending doom it's like when it's the others I'm happy now but when there's the other shoe gonna drop and something awful happen and that kind of goes back to when they were kids everything seemed fine and then all of a sudden mommy and daddy call them in and said we have to talk to you about something and it wasn't fine so what you see that all you've described is a lack of those three theological virtues there's no faith there's no hope you just talk about that and then there's no love understanding that I mean that the three cores yeah to build a marriage on are all lacking as something to begin that with we got we've got another five minutes let's take an email Justin from California my family is considering becoming Catholic one roadblock we have come up against though is the Catholic teaching on the immortality of art of immorality scuse me of artificial birth control my wife is afraid that we will become Catholics and have 17 kids we only have two now how can I reassure her and help her to be more open to life well I would start by saying going back and discussing with her what is marriage and what should we do when we got married because marriage healthy or sexual intimacy is an expression of that and when you got married you said to one another and all that I am all that I have I make a gift to you and all that you are and all that you have I receive as your gift to me so when a couple are engaged in sexual intimacy they are supposed to supposed to be saying the same thing but if you introduce contraception into it you've got a contrary language that's saying the opposite okay if the sexual act is saying this contraception is saying this it's saying there's part of you I do not wish to receive there's something about you that I reject or there's something about me I do not wish to give you part of who we are is fertile and so that part has to be made available to you to your spouse by using contraception you're withdrawing that from from the gift now that doesn't mean you have to have 17 children because you know God has arranged so that women can only become pregnant a few days out of each month and nowadays we can determine what those days are with near perfect precision so couples then are free to make decisions about when to engage in sexual intimacy and when to abstain from it based on whether they have a good reason to avoid pregnancy or not yeah yeah and I as you explaining that I'm just reflecting on the great blessings I've had as a father and a husband by the grace of God he opened my heart to my wife Marilyn so that we would be married and that we would be fertile and that we would have three wonderful sons ones becoming a priest ones helping run the coming home network who's given us four grandchildren to my third son is a knight of Columbus and usher at the church I mean God the the grace and the blessings flow when you're open to life they flow with that's true if that's the beauty of that and I think that looking again at contraception sometimes the very language of it betrays it I mean they use words like protection and precautions and barrier and sperm killer those aren't words of love and intimacy those are all words of it's almost like you're getting suited up for warfare so that's and that should tell them tell him something you know I think yeah and it's that and it's always basically by not using contraception he's respecting his wife and respecting who she is and her total for totality including her menstrual cycle we got one minute to go I want you to tell the audience about your website Catholics like console comm okay I a lot of Catholics have difficulty getting a local counselor or psychologists to go to when they need psychological help and so I instituted a telephone counseling service where people can get on my website and see how to get ahold of me and then we set up an appointment and they call me up and we talk for an hour about whatever they want to talk about and they get an advice from a Catholic psychologist oh that's what again that's Catholic psych consult calm right and it's on the on the website March thank you very much for sharing your journey with us and god bless you and your continued work and your family and well thank you very much thank you so much for your work too I mean it is it's hard to find places where Catholics will be able to put up a shingle to offer their server for consulting so it's good to know also about your service and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home I do pray that Marcia's journey is an encouragement to you god bless you see you next week [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 12,330

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Keywords: ytsync-en, jht, jht01617

Id: Ixo1_5C4YcY

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018